@HelloProject How so?
You're literally the only person I know who's talking about this right now, and I already thought you were who you seem to be!
It's all elementary!
@HelloProject How so?
You're literally the only person I know who's talking about this right now, and I already thought you were who you seem to be!
It's all elementary!
Netflix has cancelled Sense8.
I haven't been this bummed since Firefly.
Well, this confirms my suspicions about your identity.
@Thenomain said in How Do I Headwiz?:
@HelloProject
Everything is a remix:
http://everythingisaremix.info
AVG is being a helicopter parent about this site.
@Salty-Secrets I wouldn't actually steal ideas, especially given my experience with Paulus. It feels super shitty to just have an idea wholesale stolen from you and then have someone straight up try to say "This idea where I just renamed everything was actually something I had planned for years".
Also yeah, I'm somewhat building the game on a foundation of people being heavily empowered to run shit. I'm trying to introduce what I assume are some fairly unique things (I should have a document draft up today). A part of my goal is to create an environment where people have the creative freedom I had years ago on MCM, where you just ask staff "Hey can I do this thing?" and after a brief exchange they just go do it.
@Ganymede I feel like I've witnessed the frustration of no one being in a position to make executive decisions, which I feel is important for the long-term health of a game.
@Z-01 I'll definitely have to work on that background stuff. I feel like I'm nearing the end of my draft. I thought it'd need to be longer, but a lot of the extra stuff I wanna add to it are really not possible right now (like stuff that requires me knowing how I'm gonna code the combat system). This is a very good thing for me to consider.
I've also considered later integration. I in fact even made the world in such a way that One Piece could exist. The problem is that I haven't actually seen One Piece beyond a single episode (I will, it's on my list, I will tackle this beast), so it's just something I plan to do down the line.
I don't plan to add anything without thinking it through very, very carefully, for a number of reasons. But for the time being I enjoy the focus of these four themes, because it's less to think about tonally while I get the game off the ground, and I feel confident enough to make them all fit into the same world. My reasons for not including Bleach are kind of complicated, but can be summed up as: It feels tonally "off".
However, yeah, I'm gonna follow all of this advice. I actually got a ton done today and did a lot of rewriting. Once I write a general background for the theme itself, I'm gonna post up the document draft here for people to tear apart.
@Rusalka I actually have experienced similar situations, so I definitely will avoid this.
@Z-01 I think I've been doing a form of Total Theme Control, but I think to a much lesser extent.
This actually is very inspiring, because I don't think I went all in with my current theme concept drafts, I think I could go a lot further in a way that makes things feel more cohesive. So yeah, this was definitely extremely helpful advice. I can do much better than I have so far, so I'm gonna go back and do some rewriting.
As far as transformations go, I think they're an exciting and awesome part of any of these themes, so I don't want to remove them. But you're right in that everyone needs something cool. What's great is that Dragon Ball Z itself actually gives us a lot of cool shit to build on, and my earliest MUing background was in MUDs. MUDs addressed this by simply taking stuff from canon and expanding on it to create unique but still thematic transformations.
For example, a common human transformation in DBZ MUDs was the Mystic form, which was based on I believe Gohan getting that sword in the Buu saga. It was equivalent to Super Saiyan in those places. I obviously won't use these exact things, but I'm going to go in this general direction with transformations.
But yeah, I 100% agree with all of this and I'm going to go forward with this. I believe my vision of what I'm doing is much more clear now.
I rarely go to the movies unless I'm invited and someone's like "My treat", because I don't really have money to spend on movies right now.
Though occasionally there's something really big where I try to go out of my way to see it, like the upcoming Spider-Man and Black Panther.
I should also stop saying villain NPCs. Villains are more of a category that anyone can app into, but again will in general be the strongest things in the game.
Oh yeah, I definitely am making sure that I figure this shit out first. That's why I'm writing a design document and not in a MU* digging out rooms and writing files. It's also why I'm having discussions.
I like these ideas. With my four themes, there's equipment, techniques, transformations, and other things to gain.
Maybe the trick is to do a more advanced form of what MCM does, with having a baseline pool of stats that makes sense for a particular character.
Meanwhile, maybe power level can be a pool of points that aren't necessarily used like XP, but having more determines what attacks and transformations and stuff you can learn, and I guess can serve as some sort of e-peen, as is a thing that people enjoy. Power level could be this sort of thing where you can get it like a drop, like gold or something, or from doing other things. Then you start to qualify to learn things, and unlock secret transformations at certain levels, etc. The transformations and techniques could be what sets you apart as tougher, but not like, to some unstoppable degree like an EFC (I definitely remember EFCs) where you can plow through a bunch of other PCs at once.
Overall, I want to stick to villain NPCs being the toughest thing, but I don't want any one PC to be able to beat the shit out of an entire room of other PCs.
Actually, my vision of how power level could work is similar to how Super Robot Taisen used their version of cookies (I forgot what they called them). Every 100 cookies you'd unlock less common mass production units for a given faction. I would love to expand on that concept.
@Arkandel said in How Do I Headwiz?:
@HelloProject Try this 20-page thread about an XP-less system instead then.
But all I meant is whatever you do has consequences, good and bad. For example you can also consider 'open' systems to be XP-less - they can be stat-less, or everyone gets a certain amount of points and they distribute them, or anything else. It's easier, it involves less work from staff, you're probably reducing CGen to nearly nothing so people can get on the grid faster... but you eliminate the carrot of progression. Is that better ? For some games, maybe? For others not so much? You're the judge, headwiz person!
Wait I'm stupid I didn't know you linked to the DICE system thread, derp.
But I was told that it's not supposed to be an alternative to XP.
Wait, nevermind, I get it. It's an XP-less system, it's just not supposed to be an alternative to progression in the way that I'm thinking.
@Coin I admit that my original vision was people training up and it being kind of RPG-like in some ways (which I know is counterintuitive to getting rid of XP). I really wanted there to be a way for people to be on relatively equal footing and then like, you can end up with a situation where Krillin, in this universe, ends up training and becoming even more powerful than Goku or something. In general, I was trying to avoid characters just being more powerful than other characters by default.
The thing is, the more I think about and deconstruct this, the more this starts to seem overly complicated, and I'm not totally sure how to achieve what I want in a simple way. So I start thinking, alright, maybe I should just do power more traditionally, give people their canon tiers, and not worry too much about evenness. It overall just seems simpler and funner, because it just seems more and more like doing it RPG style doesn't add much to the game other than complication.
That said, it brings up the new complication of: How the fuck do I determine when people are ready to get new techniques, new transformations, etc, in a way that is fair. Is there a fair way without XP, or is XP just sort of the ultimate bullet that one has to bite for making it fair?
@Arkandel That's for that thread! I'll give that a good, thorough read.
I do like the idea of progression. And this thread is really helping me a lot in making some decisions that have been bothering me. XPless progression seems so goddamned esoteric that it's why I was stuck for a while. So I'm gonna check this thread out too.
@Arkandel My problem has frequently been that I've literally been unable to really find alternatives to XP. Like, I guess I'm just not searching correctly, but I really have not really been coming up with anything. It's been difficult to make an informed decision, because I can't, like, just find a straight up list of systems to check out and stuff.
@Ganymede said in How Do I Headwiz?:
@HelloProject said in How Do I Headwiz?:
I basically went into this project with zero intention of using XP at all. My intent was always to entirely replace XP with something else. I highly recommend reading the DICE system and seeing how what you want to do would apply to that.
The DICE System doesn't really eliminate XP at all, from what I read. It simply eliminates the idea of advancement without doing anything. Instead, the DICE System seems to permit improvement when you spend Time to do so, which is sort of how I envision handling XP in my system. (To wit: spend X Time, get 1 XP.) And I like how the DICE System makes you choose between character advancement and developing character assets.
Then that does kind of bring up a good question.
Is there a way to eliminate XP? Should I even try? People have seen my game thread and my concept, is the elimination of XP an endeavour worth pursuing, or should I just try to refine XP to work in a way that's not shitty?
@dontpanda said in RL Anger:
If Sharon refused to sell clothes to men (contra "I sell women's clothing"), would she be in violation of human rights laws? If Amir refuses to bake a cake for a bar mitzvah, is that a violation? I'm not trying to ignore context, I'm trying to find the underlying true principle.
I would actually like to focus on this, since this seems like the heart of what you're asking.
What you're saying seems to be "where do we draw the line", and/or that it's possibly a slippery slope. However, I think the line is pretty clear when you compare contexts against each other.
If Sharon specifically sells a particular type of clothing, that's not the same as refusing to sell clothes to men. There are also men's outlets that only sell men's clothing, but that isn't a refusal to sell clothes to women. I know that it was only an example, but I just wanted to note that specializing in something is not the same as rejecting something.
No business is necessarily obligated to provide a product or service that they do not have.
That said, if Sharon is selling women's clothing and someone off-handedly says "Oh, I'm buying this for a bar mitzvah", and then Sharon goes, "Oh, I can't sell you those clothes then", that's discrimination.
I know that you think people should have the right to decide anything that they want, and then go onto another business, but this ignores historical contexts. You know, like when a ridiculous number of stores start discriminating against people and, considering that most businesses are owned by a particular demographic, you leave large portions of the population at the mercy of something that they have no control over.
Are you aware that there are many, many areas in America where people have no access to buying basic food, and have a ton of difficulty actually acquiring their food? And they are definitely not even remotely in a position to open their own business or save up to open a business. Hell, in these areas, there are often literally no jobs, not jobs they don't want, but literally none. This is not a special case or a minority of places, this is a huge problem in the country.
So, let's say that someone in one of these areas has to walk like ten miles just to buy groceries, and the one store within walking distance of them, because of the neighborhood it's in, is like, "Oh, sorry, we don't sell to you". Discrimination laws are more than just "personal preference", a lot of ideologies try to dismiss things as personal preference so that they don't have to think about how fucked up the country actually is, due to a lot of people living in bubbles where they can blissfully ignore these problems.
There is also a huge difference between "I don't want to make you a Nazi cake", and "I refuse to make a gay marriage cake". I feel like I don't need to go into detail about why these are two wildly different things, and that the reason the law differentiates between them is because we somehow have avoided becoming a Judge Dredd-like dystopia in which the law works soullessly and mindlessly, without rhyme or reason. I like to think that most people use the law in a critically thought manner, which is why it isn't applied equally, and never will be. People are not machines and we as a society are capable of applying critical thought and basic empathy to figure out why one similar situation is different from another, without worrying about highly unlikely slippery slopes.
If anything, I find that a lot of the law hinges on not being a dick. If you look at situations and can't figure out why one thing seems reasonable to the law, and the other one doesn't, then ask yourself "Which of these people was being a dick?"
And I'm sure you might be asking yourself, "Who decides who is being a dick?" Look at all the fiction we've had throughout history. I think we as a species are capable of deciding who is being a dick. If we side with the dick then it probably means we're also being a bit of a dick.
@Coin I very much believe that "Nazi" is a power word. Once you start calling someone a Nazi, you've put them and their entire movement onto a pedestal that is considered one of the greatest historical evils in modern history. So, yeah, calling someone a Nazi is definitely a thing that has an impact. I also understand the nuances and what people mean when they call someone a Nazi in a non-literal way, but I don't believe that erases the actual impact.
I just personally believe that these entitled motherfuckers Nazis, we conflate their dumb bullshit with being as literally bad as all the shit actual Nazis did. Then the next thing you know we're taken totally off-guard when Neo Nazis are fucking curb stomping us and shit, because we got used to a certain level of civilty from these assholes we decided to call Nazis but weren't.
Maybe I'm wrong, I don't know, but I just am very careful about how much power I give something. Putting anyone or anything onto a pedestal is always dangerous, even if it's a negative pedestal. Making people seem less human empowers them in our eyes, because then we become unable to see them as a solvable problem. That's how we end up resorting to violence first and they just end up seeming more sympathetic as a result, which reaffirms our beliefs that they're unstoppable when more people sympathize with or join them, even if it was our actions that triggered it. We just say things like "it was inevitable and there was nothing we could do about it".
I try not to apply the term "Nazi" too liberally, because I think it lowers the impact. I also think that a lot of people are kind of new to the levels of racism that are currently in the media (even though most of it isn't particularly new). So it's easy to freak out and go "The Nazis are back". This kind of shit has never been particularly abstract to me.
I remember when I was about nine, and I was homeless with my mother and stepdad. We stayed in a shelter in a small town, except it was a town with KKK activity. So I was literally not allowed to go anywhere or play on my own, despite being used to that in the big city I grew up in (Philadelphia). A lot of people in the news, like Richard Spencer, are so fucking many layers removed from the kinds of groups I'm actually afraid of, that to me calling that guy a Nazi mostly shows that, despite everything, the country at large doesn't truly understand how bad things have always been.
People are so new to this kind of shit that what is essentially a rather meh level of racism compared to a lot of the racism in this country, seems as bad as literal Nazis. That's my whole perspective on this.
Now, if you punched Neo Nazis or the KKK, I might think you're onto something. But when you punch actual fucking terrifying groups like that, not some fucking nerd-ass "White Nationalists", you're straight up risking your life. That's why these "White Nationalists" are starting to clash with legitimate fucking white supremacist groups and are getting their asses kicked. These "White Nationalists" themselves don't even realize how racist this country can be, so they think that actual fucking Neo Nazis and KKK aren't going to kick their teeth in when they try to go "Wait we don't want anyone to think we're evil, let's calm down and be reasonable!"
"White Nationalists" and the alt-right are basically internet tough guys and entitled gentrifiers who are now entering into a world they didn't know existed, and I'll be damned if I use a power word like "Nazi" for them. The actual Nazis are kicking their ass.
@surreality I basically went into this project with zero intention of using XP at all. My intent was always to entirely replace XP with something else. I highly recommend reading the DICE system and seeing how what you want to do would apply to that.
@Coin Look at the DICE system thread. There are points but it's very possible that it can't be applied in the way that you're saying, so it very well could be too alien, despite using points. We'll see, though.
@surreality said in How Do I Headwiz?:
I
it when the ideas I want to run with that everyone initially decries as totally the end of the world and clearly I am just a stupid idiot person get more than me behind being willing to try them.
I am all about being progressive and trying new things. I've always been resistant to some of the regressive perspectives that people have, even back on WORA.