Best posts made by Sovereign

@tragedyjones

Cool to see progress. Hope it all goes smoothly and y'all have plenty of fun with it.

@Cirno

That's not my intention. I am all for revolution and radical forays into largely unexplored territory.. but I'm not so much wed to doing so blindly, or to the idea that different is good simply because it's different. It's far more effective to clearly establish hopes and intentions and then tailor responses to that.

I like primal games. Ones set before man tamed the world. I enjoy games where the primary conflicts are nature, disease, and disaster. And monsters or serpent-men with dark magics. Bronze Age or Stone Age preferred.

Something like Conan meets Far Cry: Primal. With an RP focus.

@ThatGuyThere

No two people have the same idea of what being a dick constitutes.

See, I don't think that's true. Rather, I think it's more untrue than it is true. All my experience tells me that, barring a great cultural gulf (say, Americans vs Syrians), everyone has an approximation of what's rude, assholish, acceptable, etc., etc., that's close enough. Is it perfectly identical? No. But their individual outlooks are far more similar than different.

Now, people often say they didn't think they were being a dick! Those people are lying. They knew. But playing dumb can get people to let you off.

Never trust someone who just up and shit-talks someone else behind their back to you. They're shit-talking about you behind yours, too.

@Cirno

I prefer the people who bitch about the racism and misogyny. The number of SJWs I've seen rage about white people and men while unironically calling others racist and sexist is so very high. Reddit's great for mocking people you hate.

@TNP said:

I've always found it depends on the game's genre. Certain games have way more women than men, and it flips the usual assumptions we have re: nerdy gaming spaces on its head. World of Darkness, for instance, is for some reason White Wolf's lady RPG.

I've never read Kushiel's Legacy and only just googled it, but my first impression would definitely go with "yeah, this is probably more popular with women".

edit: okay I read more summaries. My takeaway is "it's France, but the nobility have the blood of angels and everyone fucks. yay hookers".

This is definitely a chick setting.

@Arkandel

My initial thoughts.

*( 3, 4, 5 ) Being staff is a role, not a privilege. All staff must contribute and their number should be small. Since the importance of handling +jobs is minimized the main duty is handling interpersonal issues, auditing potential cases of system abuse, but mainly running and coordinating running plot. Staff never decides on character positions or non-mechanical eligibility for ability or power purchases.

This works fine and is, broadly speaking, what most games should aim for. A small staff is more efficient and has fewer points of contention. That said, it's a privilege, no matter what you say. Those on staff are marked as different and have authority others do not, even if it's slight. This is avoided solely with staff anonymity or nonexistence.

*( 3, 6, 8 ) Characters decide their own groups' composition. Status-weighted votes determine ranks, positions and membership. To facilitate early game launches NPCs are set in place who can be voted out or competed with as normal by PCs. Conversely that means there are no protections for IC actions; highly ranked characters are bigger targets who may be eliminated in the same way as NPCs. Staff only audits this process to ensure OOC behavior remains civil and, to the extent it is possible for them to establish, that no OOC means or information were employed.

This immediately makes your game slave to the most aggressively pernicious cliques. The most damaging of OOC behavior breaks no rules and isn't even uncivil on the face of it, but rather is a competitive volley of status-game posturing and passive-aggressive smack talk. The MU* community is, on the whole, socially maladjusted and loathe to indulge any sort of direct confrontation, leaving the environments to be led by the heavy hand of staff or the sly remarks of queen bees.

I don't mean that cruelly, but there's really no nice way to phrase it. These games are filled with people who don't interact with others so well in an astonishing variety of ways. You will want checks and balances in play to counter this.

*( 2, 3, 8 ) Plot is the game's lifeblood. The game comes with its own metaplot which is written to be modular and altered by characters. Staff's primary concern is to coordinate players and either run plots contributing to the overall story themselves or support players in running their own. This takes precedence over all other staff concerns save ones which make the game actually unplayable, staff should never feel they can't run an event because they're busy dealing with a troublesome player. Move the distraction in whatever manner is most appropriate and run the event.

Running events is good. Showing the world has consequences and tying players together through their (in)action is superior. No amount of activity helps when that activity fundamentally feels like pointless fluff.

*( 3, 6 ) There are no feature characters, restricted features or application-only concepts. Anything up for grabs is available to all players. Characters are elevated based on the merit of their own ability to roleplay.

This suffers the same problem noted earlier: "ability to roleplay" translates to "ability to schmooze and direct friends OOC".

*( 1, 2, 4 ) CGen has no non-automated approval conditions and there are no 'special' cases; roll what you will. It will check if you have a description and that your numbers check out, then you're on your way. If (due to code limitations) staff has to set things by hand it can happen after characters hit the grid with the understanding you can't use any missing attributes or resources in the meantime, in order to prevent mistakes or misunderstandings about mechanics ('oh, sorry, I thought I could buy Sleepwalker merits as a ghoul' -- which would be an example of one of the 'good, thematic reasons' to say no, as described above).

This is largely fine. The problems that ruin games are never mechanical; there's no such thing as a character so overpowered they cannot be challenged within the system, even if the only thing that can challenge them is one that cloned their sheet. You run the risk of concepts and characters anathema to the theme crowding in, but this is a matter your staff ought to be able to handle promptly. It is trivial to address on a case-by-case basis.

*( 4, 6, 7 ) All automated XP are handed on a weekly basis to characters who were in at least two scenes (detected automagically by the code) in that period. Characters also receive a smaller portion of their XP based on incentives - Beats, PrPs ran, etc. Beats are earned on request, audited after the fact if needed to prevent abuse, up to a modest cap per week. New characters receive more automatic XP than older ones until that portion of their XP is equal, although incentive-based XP remain on the characters who earned them without catching up mechanisms. On character death or permanent retirement the majority of all their XP may be transfered to a new PC.

This will lead to dinosaurs if the game lasts long enough and that can be incredibly demotivating to bump into as a newcomer. I prefer experience caps that can, perhaps, be slightly overcome with tremendous contribution to the game's health and enjoyability.

*( 4, 6, 7 ) There is no justification requirement for any XP expenditure. If you have the XP you can purchase anything you wish that's mechanically available to your PC. There are time delays to preserve a believable progression in raising skills, attributes and abilities. However justifications are still optional and, on staff's discretion and subject to incentive-based caps, may be rewarded Beats by staff.

Perfectly fine. Characters never make any sense. Policing expenditures is unnecessarily antagonistic. Yes, going from waitress to Wonder Woman in two weeks is impossible. It's also impossible to do that in two years. Ultimately, you're arguing degrees of absurdity. Focus on player enjoyment.

( 4, 5 ) Cut down on building delays; in most MU this is time consuming, requiring checks on behalf of staff, setting exit/entrance messages, etc. It's cool to see 'Bob gets in from the street' but it doesn't provide enough to the game - "Bob has arrived" is sufficient if it cuts down on time. Let players make their own rooms on the grid, even businesses, and simply have a periodic auditing process to make sure they comply with writing regulations (tabs, linefeeds between paragraphs) so the game maintains a consistent style.

This ought to be fine.

It's amazing that some people are so burned when it comes to simple human interactions that "how would you deal with someone being unhappy" is a serious question.

It's like, "But Sovereign! What do you do when a player is a total asshole? There are literally no countermeasures in place for this, we're all doomed!" and I'm just staring going "can't you just tell them to quit being an asshole and then ban them later?"

EDIT: And yes, after currentGirl and anonymousGirl vetted that I wasn't lying about not being EvilBobRPer, they both paged me in unison to apologize for the deception, but that everything was great now and they really liked me!

This is the point where you smile, thank them, and then make every effort to never engage with the two psycho ladies again in any capacity.

@Cirno

I somehow don't think either of those situations are going to come up within my life.

@surreality

That's all very thoughtful. But I don't think it's right in the majority of cases. These are games where you pretend to be an elf or a vampire or in spaaaace, they're really not complicated in terms of what's being offered. I'm going to blame people, here, not expectations- if you feel unwelcome, it's because you are unwelcome, usually due to the chilling effect of offending one clique or another.

@Ghost

This is one of many reasons you should never have a game where splats hostile to one another intrinsically play together. Hunters do not belong on any sort of supernatural game, and supernaturals have no place on a game of hunters.