@skew said in skew's Playlist:

Arx: Cassius

Heya, cuz! (Aislin's player here.)

Aw. I'm sad we didn't get a chance to play together again a bit more. But good luck with whatever you find next!

@Thenomain said in Coming Soon: Arx, After the Reckoning:

I looked for on the Arx and unofficial page, could've sworn all the help files were there, but couldn't find it. It might help the discussion if someone linked to the '+firstimpression' help file.

There is a page with all command helpfiles, from which +firstimpression is linked.

@surreality That's an interesting idea. I suspect it might only lessen the number of disputes that require staff being called in, not eliminate them, but I agree it's a potentially decent way to codify point #3.

See, I think there are several different things that are starting to get conflated a bit in the thread.

1. The fact that while physical combat is rarely resolved by a single roll, social combat often has been boiled down to a single 'lie' or 'manipulate' or 'seduce' type roll. (And yes, you can argue that those rolls should be backed by RP, but it still often leads to more bitterness if it's a single roll.)
2. Social stats are often harder to justify buying, because people will just RP being a really good liar, or RP being charming, and spend their XP on physical combat. It would be nice to make social stats actually have value. And you can do this (as Arx has) by making social stats reduce the cost of other things, but they're then just supplementary stats to other systems.
3. The fact that some players will resist changes they think are wildly uncharacteristic. (I.e., "I won't give up the secret that gets my brother killed.")
4. The fact that some players will resist any change to their character's status that they didn't plan, classifying it as #3.

The proposed 'make a social combat system akin to physical combat' thing only addresses point #1 and #2.

I don't know that point #3 needs to be addressed; I think there are scenarios where it's utterly unreasonable for social combat to completely deviate a character from their norm. If someone holds a secret close even from those they care deeply about, I don't think a total stranger should be able to worm it out of them... or at least not without significant effort.

I don't think there's any system that can address #4. Systems can make it easier for players to RP among themselves without involving staff, but they can't change player behavior entirely.

@HelloProject said in Hello!Project's MUSHing Plans 2017!!! #airhorns:

Still waiting for the DICE guy to say if I can use/modify his system at all. (or her)

1. I don't mind; it's not like the DICE 1.0 concept hasn't been floating around since I did Lost Stars (the original-theme SF game 1.0 was designed and written for) umpty jillion years ago; I'm morally certain other people have made systems inspired by now. However, if you do use the design directly as a basis, I would love it if you credited either 'Sparks' or 'Packetdancer' for the original design.
2. Her.

That said, you say you're using Python? I do plan to finish up DICE 2.0 as a generic Evennia module others can use. If you're using Evennia, you're also welcome to just wait until it's in the contrib directory, though that could be a bit before I get there.

Yeah, my example assumed the xenolinguists already knew the language and the actual treaty signing scene was the interesting part of the plot; it's like how you wouldn't want to necessarily play out five hours of "and then I translate it into this other language" over business contracts in a modern-day game, even if they had to be JUST RIGHT and not taking the time would cause some plot-derailing huge issue.

Figuring out a language in the first place, with real aliens, in a first contact scenario? That'd 100% be a GM'd scene, no question.

Sure, and I think a simple 'lie' or 'manipulate' command has its place. Just like I can check my combat stats for a quick "Yeah I just want to see who rolls higher" sort of contest. But there are places for actual coded physical combat, too.

And the same way, if I hold a secret that can get you killed, I don't want someone rolling 'lie' and saying, "Oh, Arkandel said you had some information of his he wanted you to share with me" and then I blurt out your secret on the basis of a single roll and pose. I'm guessing you probably don't want me to do that either.

Those are the scenarios that result in "Hey, is there a staffer available?" and potential bitterness.

@Ganymede said in Progression: Time/Resource rather than XP:

I like the concept, @Sparks. I am developing something similar for my own system.

One thing I'm not sure of is whether you ought to permit Blocks to be devoted towards what appears to me to be an important event: negotiating a treaty with an alien race. That sounds like something that ought to be handled as a RP Plot. Passing Blocks to other characters is an interesting concept, which I might adopt.

The idea is that a lot of things would be handled as plots; blocks are more the 'you have advanced to this point' part of a plot.

Let's take that treaty. I say, "Okay, to write a treaty and make CERTAIN it's translated properly, you're going to need these prerequisites" and create blocks for them. They can RP about those prerequisites, but they also have to put in the time/effort to do the diplomacy and xenolinguistics.

So let's say Meg chooses to work on drafting the treaty; she gets a block that has diplomacy rolls, and advances a progress bar. She can invite other people to help with that block, and so they sit down and RP about writing out the treaty, etc., and slowly that bar fills. When it's filled, hey, they've put in the time and diplomatic research efforts to write a good solid treaty; that block concludes.

Now it passes on to the xenolinguistics crew to make sure they've translated it right. Another block is handed out, and they work to advance its progress bar. It's important, the clock is ticking, so you put 80% of your time into that task, and so do two others you find. You finish quickly.

Now staff's automatically informed "these blocks have both finished", and we can schedule the actual treaty scene, where it's presented to the alien race, as a real GM'd scene with alien NPCs, etc.,and the plot continues from there.

It gives players a way to advance a plot between 'beats', staff a way to track the progression ("Oh man they're almost done, we'd better be ready to run that thing"), without staff having to constantly oversee a bunch of rolls.

I'm with Meg here.

While I think games should allow character progression and such, I also think there's few things more discouraging than taking a week and doing a scene every single evening after work, sometimes twice, only to see that you don't even crack the bottom of the 'Most voted RPers' that week, and thus know your progression is still that far behind the folks who are on all day.

I think the reward for being around a lot is more that you are aware of and potentially involved in a lot of things, you're a "familiar face" people will go to. I don't know that the reward should necessarily be "you advance faster than everyone else", even if 'faster' is somehow capped/bottlenecked.

This isn't to say there's not a place for games like that, or that they're bad in any way. Just that it wasn't the particular problem I was trying to solve with DICE.

@SunnyJ I agree, but I think the best way to handle social combat isn't by dumbing it down to a single roll or two, but to actually write coded combat for it, the same way many games have coded combat (FS3, for instance) rather than having a simple "we fight, my dice rolled higher once, I win".

I think that would invest and engage people in it more.

I feel that social combat should be treated on an equal footing with physical combat.

@Lisse24 said in Coming Soon: Arx, After the Reckoning:

However, if your point is that social combat is not something that was included in the original vision of the game, I think you're mistaken. If I recall correctly, Hellfrog has spoken multiple times about getting a social combat system in. There's even been talk of finding ways to weave fashion into it as a way to give bonuses and such. I know the game was advertised as a PvE game and this seems against the spirit of such, but I thought we'd concluded a while ago that it really is PvP.

She has, and rightly so.

PvE games can benefit from physical combat systems too, after all: fighting NPCs, for instance, or practicing your skills with a friendly sparring match.

You don't have to be an RL great swordfighter to play a really good combatant; it should be at least possible to potentially do diplomatic or manipulative work with dice too. Even without debates and such, you could let players try to sway an NPC with arguments rather than fighting with them. If you let the systems share 'rounds' of action, you could even have, while one player is fighting the NPC, another arguing passionately that the NPC should stop, please, we don't want to kill you.

I think a social combat system on Arx could really benefit a lot of PRP GMs, and even staff GM'ing too, and make those manipulation dice just as potentially useful as medium wpn is.

@HelloProject said in Progression: Time/Resource rather than XP:

Presumably, couldn't this system essentially be used with any sort of attribute or skill system 0_o? It seems like you can easily plug it into whatever you damned well please, even really exotic stuff.

That was the idea, yeah. On Lost Stars it was built too heavily into the codebase to be extricated as a separate chunk; for 2.0, I'm building it as a more general toolset.

Since several folks asked for this a while ago, and I keep getting periodic prods on this, here's the very beginnings of codifying DICE 2.0 in a simplified system. I thought I'd share a little of it for feedback. (Mostly, so far, 2.0 is functionally identical to 1.0 save with me slowly building it for Evennia in Python as part of a toolset, rather than PennMUSH in MUSHcode.)

---

DICE 2.0

Dynamic Interactive Character Events

Overview

DICE is a framework on which other systems can be built. At heart, it is simply a glorified flowchart made up of blocks; each block has inputs (time, money, and/or resources), a formula, and outputs (money, resources, or progression that fills a 'meter' towards a trigger).

Players can thus assemble 'blocks' to be executed on a weekly basis, and things will flow through the system.

Goals

The basic purpose of the original DICE system was to allow some balance in an online gaming environment. It was meant to solve three specific problems:

1. The players who can be around constantly (work from home, between jobs, etc.) should not have a material advantage—either in economic resources or skills—over those who have other obligations that keep them on the game more rarely.
2. A player should not be able to do all the things at once. They should not be able to be the best gunfighter and the richest merchant and the person who is doing all the off-screen research into xenolinguistics and everything else. They need to pick a focus, and they cannot control all the plotlines.
3. For the sake of staff's sanity, there needs to be a sort of tunable bottleneck on how quickly a plot can be advanced by the players.

On Lost Stars, the game DICE was originally designed for, there were only two staffers; on a game with a rather larger staff, point 3 may be slightly less important. Still, having the option would be nice. (Examples in this document are still taken from Lost Stars, however, rather than made more general. In case you wonder why things list Xenolinguistics as a sample skill.)

DICE 2.0 is meant to be an extension of the DICE ideals to a more generic system, while also doing away with the 'employment' mechanic which ended up unbalancing DICE 1.0 in various ways.

Basic Components

Time

At the heart of DICE is the concept of Time. Every player has an allocation of 100 units of time, representing 100% of their available time for that week. Time is the currency you spend in DICE in order to do things.

Resources

The next major portion of DICE is the concept of 'resources', which can be generated by various methods, and spent for others. A player can have a given quantity of a resource; by default, there's always at least 'money', but there could be other types of resource as the game requires. Influence, for instance, might represent favors owed to a player.

Blocks

The central concept of DICE is 'blocks'. Players will have a 'library' of blocks available to them. Some are standardized ('practice a skill'), some are specific to their skills ('work as a technician'), some will be ones custom to them added by staff ('work on translating that alien tablet').

A given block has three components.

Inputs

A block has one or more inputs; a handful of system blocks will have zero inputs (potentially such as income generation). Each Input has a defined type, and players can define how much of that type they will put in per action round. Almost all blocks take Time as an input, but some may also take Resources (Money, Influence, etc.). When DICE executes an action round, the quantities a player has put in will be taken from the player and passed into the formula.

Outputs

A block generally has one or more outputs; a handful of system blocks will have zero outputs (potentially such as resource drains). An output can be a resource such as money or influence, or it can fill a 'progress bar' which leads towards some other coded effect. Examples of progress bars might be the amount of work needed to complete a research project, or the amount of time/effort put towards learning a new skill.

The progress bar output is a special case, given how it is potentially backed by things other than a player. For instance, it would be possible to create a 'plot' system, and have several progressions on a given plot; how far have you gotten in translating this tablet (Xenolinguistics), and meanwhile how far have you gotten in negotiating right of travel through alien territory (Diplomacy) to get to the place you need to take the ancient alien tablet? Every player on the plot could use a block to progress one or the other of those metrics, but the resulting progress bar would be shared by all.

Formula

A block has a single 'formula': something which, given the input values and a player, will generate the actual output values.

A formula might be as straightforward as "given an input of X time, output X towards the progress bar" to practice a skill, where the amount needed to fill the bar is determined by the targeted level of the skill. (A progress bar value of 150 for level 1 of a skill, 300 for level 2, and so on.)

A formula could be more complicated and draw on player stats, such as "given an input of X time, output an amount of money equal to X * the player's career skill" in order to have a 'do your job' block which generates baseline income.

A formula could involve dice rolls, such as "given an input of X time, output an amount towards the progress bar equal to the result of a Mental + Xenolinguistics roll, multiplied by (X / 2)", in order to slowly progress towards completion of translating an alien language.

Blocks for Plots

Sharing Blocks

Instances of some blocks can be shared between players. This allows for a plot to involve multiple people; if Bruce asks to translate some ancient alien writings, the staff can quickly create a block which tracks how close he is to completing it, with a formula that rolls his xenolinguistics each time.

As Bruce puts time into the block, of course, the progress bar slowly fills. But maybe it's going too slow, or Bruce needs to do other things; he can run a command to share the block with other players, allowing them to join in as well. If they don't have xenolinguistics, that might be a problem, but those who do can put their time and dice towards filling the progress bar as well.

Involving others in your plot is good!

Linked Blocks

Another useful concept is linked blocks, which share an output. For instance, for a larger plot, one might have a progress bar of "how prepared are we for this planetary siege?" You could define a couple buckets (progress bars) which represent defensive measures, offensive measures, and so on. You could then define multiple different blocks that pointed to these same buckets; one block might be rolling command+leadership to add to the buckets, and represent people trying to leadership things, while another might be intellect+war to add to the offensive bucket, and so on. These buckets would all add to the same shared buckets for a given plot, allowing you to share a single metric across many buckets.

Similarly, if you had an opposed action, you could have a bucket with one block that added to the value and another subtracted from it, and in the end you could see who ends up with more influence over the result.

I did not mean to derail the advertisement (sorry!) with brainstorming, and Social Combat is relevant to more than Arx anyway, so I made a different thread for that.

Posting this here because I was an unintentional jerk and accidentally kind of participated in derailing an advertisement thread with this... and besides, it's relevant to far more than just one game.

Social combat is one of those things that has always been a huge headache for games, and I've been looking more and more seriously at trying to design a solution for that.

In particular, physical combat is easy. There's no "I found your sword-strike unconvincing"; you got hit, you got hit. Social combat, though? That's harder to define.

Let's say you're holding a secret that could get someone you care about killed; a mother, an uncle, a lover, whatever. I suspect you're hiding something, so I +check a given stat and succeed highly, and go "Are you hiding something?" Let's say you say yes, so I immediately roll a 'manipulation' check and then say "Great, I convinced you: tell me the secret." At which point you go, "I don't want my character to die just because you rolled high manipulation", and call staff in.

This is a giant headache for staff, and often leads to bitterness. Either the person who suddenly had to give up their secret is bitter, or the person who has amazing manipulation dice and yet didn't get to use them to learn a useful secret is bitter.

Moreover, while physical combat usually only needs to encapsulate ranged and melee combat, social combat needs to cover a variety of things. The ones I see are:

• Logical arguments (debate, from the head)
• Manipulative arguments
• Insulting/satirical arguments
• Maybe also passionate arguments ('how can you stand by and allow...')?

Given that, what I keep meaning to do somewhere someday is actual combat, but with various 'methods' as weapons. So just like you have big weapons that use 'huge wpn' as the skill, daggers that use 'small wpn', etc., you would have satire, logic, manipulation, etc.

When you started a 'social combat', you'd set some sort of goal from a list of 3 or 4 'types' of combat, and the 'hitpoints' would be based off things accordingly. Are you trying to convince your opponent? Base it off willpower+perception. Or maybe you are trying to humilate them, in which case you base it off of reputation.

Then you'd get to wield 'manipulation' (works off of charm + manipulation, countered by the higher of willpower for resistance or perception for "I see through you"), 'logic' (works off of intellect and whatever, countered by intellect), 'satire' (works off of charm and entertainment/riddles/whatever, countered by... I don't know, but something), etc.

And you'd do 'damage' to the hitpoints—the resistance—of the other person. When someone is 'knocked out', your argument has convinced them.

It has the benefit of reusing a lot of a given game's combat code, so social and physical combat can share a lot of functionality. Not to mention you have the fun of trying to figure out someone's weak points. High intellect, but low willpower? You want manipulation rather than logic to try to win them to your opposing viewpoint, clearly.

And while you might STILL run into the problem of "I don't want to give up the secret that will get my loved one killed", it's less likely to be a bitter point than it is off of a single set of rolls.

Plus, I think those sort of social combats would just be FUN to watch and to play.

I don't know what others think, though. Since I am kind of trying to build a toolkit for stuff like this, I'm curious whether others think this would be fun...

@Thenomain said in Coming Soon: Arx, After the Reckoning:

@Sparks said in Coming Soon: Arx, After the Reckoning:

Physical combat is easy. There's no "I found your sword-strike unconvincing"; you got hit, you got hit. Social combat, though? That's harder to define.

Fate does this incredibly elegantly, mostly that social combat isn't about social situations, but your ability to maneuver in them. To Fate, social grace is a mental trait.

Fate also requires an active storyteller for many things; it's not particularly great, in my experience, at automated resolution between players.

@Thenomain said in Coming Soon: Arx, After the Reckoning:

I understand someone started their own wiki to solve this problem; you may want to ask around.

Roz and Glitch set up an unofficial wiki some time back with staff permission, and it looks like there is a very useful and simple quick start introduction on there. (I tend to forget about the wiki, which is a real failing on my part.)

@nyctophiliac said in Coming Soon: Arx, After the Reckoning:

That being said, I think the most frustrating things for me have been the lack of social combat system (which means everyone settles everything by duels lending to a "Euro L5R" feel - not necessarily bad, but frustrating for the social types)

Social combat is one of those things that has always been a huge headache for games.

Physical combat is easy. There's no "I found your sword-strike unconvincing"; you got hit, you got hit. Social combat, though? That's harder to define.

Let's say you're holding a secret that could get someone you care about killed; a mother, an uncle, a lover, whatever. I suspect you're hiding something, so I +check a given stat and succeed highly, and go "Are you hiding something?" Let's say you say yes, so I immediately roll a 'manipulation' check and then say "Great, I convinced you: tell me the secret." At which point you go, "I don't want my character to die just because you rolled high manipulation", and call staff in.

What I keep meaning to do somewhere someday is actual combat, but with various 'methods' as weapons. So just like you have big weapons that use 'huge wpn' as the skill, daggers that use 'small wpn', etc., you would have satire, logic, manipulation, etc.

When you started a 'social combat', you'd set some sort of goal from a list of 3 or 4 'types' of combat, and the 'hitpoints' would be based off things accordingly. Are you trying to convince your opponent? Base it off willpower+perception. Are you trying to humilate them, in which case you base it off of reputation.

Then you'd get to wield 'manipulation' (works off of charm + manipulation, countered by the higher of willpower for resistance or perception for "I see through you"), 'logic' (works off of intellect and whatever, countered by intellect), 'satire' (works off of charm and entertainment/riddles/whatever, countered by... I don't know, but something), etc.

And you'd do 'damage' to the hitpoints—the resistance—of the other person. When someone is 'knocked out', your argument has convinced them.

It has the benefit of reusing a lot of a given game's combat code, so social and physical combat can share a lot of functionality. Not to mention you have the fun of trying to figure out someone's weak points. High intellect, but low willpower? You want manipulation rather than logic to try to win them to your opposing viewpoint, clearly.

And while you might STILL run into the problem of "I don't want to give up the secret that will get my loved one killed", it's less likely to be a bitter point than it is off of a single set of rolls.

Plus, I think those sort of social combats would just be FUN to watch and to play.

And I shouldn't be theorizing system design in an advertisement thread but ANYWAY.

@nyctophiliac said in Coming Soon: Arx, After the Reckoning:

...and lack of information/wiki type stuff (They are really good about answering your setting questions, but honestly I would love to dig my teeth into some reading about the place). I know these things are on the way though and the place is still in Beta.

To be fair, some of this is purely IC and can be sought out ICly. There are Reasons that a lot of the theme—at least the historical components of it—are sort of obscured and hazy even to the characters themselves.

However, I do completely get what you mean; it took me a while to get my feet under me at first, too. People would mention "the Tragedy" and it took me a while to realize both that they could mean the Tragedy of Sanctum (when most of the main royal branch inherit-the-throne Valardin were killed) or the Tragedy (an orphanage in the Lower Boroughs), and a bit longer still to figure out if the Tragedy was something that had happened a few years ago (yes), a decade or more ago (no), or in the distant mists of time (also no).

So I do wish there was a more immediately clear "Quickstart Guide to Theme". Maybe it's worth making a little Player's Handbook to Arx to put up somewhere.

@Tinuviel said in RL Anger:

@coin IIRC the majority of Russia's landmass would be considered Asian as well. Depending on where you draw the arbitrary lines.

The vast majority of Turkey, too. Hell, half of just Istanbul (one of the westernmost cities of Turkey) is in Asia, because it spans the Bosphorus.

@Auspice said in Coming Soon: Arx, After the Reckoning:

@Sparks

Would people like to see me return to Lou? Because I could give it a go. See if I could ease in. Esp. with adventuring happening (as that was her schtick).

Speaking only for myself, I would love my Grayson Fealty Adventure Ladies buddy back if you were willing to give it a try.