Posts made by surreality

@nemesis said in Skills and Fluff in WoD:

@surreality said in Skills and Fluff in WoD:

WoD is the example I know we're discussing here, but... damn, it's such a bad example in some ways.

This is a company that basically went, "Game balance? ...is that like, weighing the book on a scale? How do you do that with pixels?" years ago, and I'm not talking about 'decided to switch primarily to pdf'.

I don't think that's really fair.

The oWoD (not nWoD 1.0 but the really really old thing with V:tM and WW:tA etc) started out in the late 80s, before public internet was even a thing.

VtM1 came out in 1991. I know this because I bought the first edition V:tM sourcebook the moment it hit the shelves, and I had just graduated high school at the time. I read the fucker on the plane to college (which I started that summer).

About the rest: they have said they really don't give a crap about balance -- one game line being more powerful than another, or one clan being more powerful than another. This is not random guesswork and it isn't just a factor of crossing the streams. It's really just not so much a concern to the creators; they're not even especially trying for it. It may be a consideration, but it's not a primary one.

In part, yes, because you can go back to 'if you don't like the way this balances/works/whatever else, tweak it' is rule 0 (aka 'rule "Duh!"', because no tabletop GM with any experience doesn't know this already). Also in part because it really isn't one of their primary objectives and they've said as much. If they're saying it about themselves, it's far from being an unfair analysis on the part of someone else.

WoD is the example I know we're discussing here, but... damn, it's such a bad example in some ways.

This is a company that tucks additional powers (usually merits) as footnotes in sidebar fluff text on the regular.

This is a company that basically went, "Game balance? ...is that like, weighing the book on a scale? How do you do that with pixels?" years ago, and I'm not talking about 'decided to switch primarily to pdf'.

@templari Oh, I would.

If you think I'm kidding, the beach we normally go to for pebbles, we don't just go for pebbles. We go for 'random debris'. Because the town used to extend two more street blocks further out into what is now ocean (complete with the wreck of a concrete ship -- ah, the things you couldn't make up if you tried!) and it's a good day when we find something that looks like it was part of a ship, or a weirdly ocean-pebble-smoothed 'this was part of the brick of somebody's house once or piece of weird old Victorian bathroom tile or whatever.

It's a really good day if we find a piece of rusting concrete ship hulk debris or a weird chunk of furnace slag or shiny hunks of coal from some submerged house's now horseshoe-crab-filled coal cellar.

Otherwise, mostly rocks, because nifty fossil coral and other weird little fossil bits and whatnots turn up sometimes.

We are very weird people. Very weird.

...and we loop back to that whole 'systems designed for tabletop are designed with the understanding that someone at the table will inflict common sense upon the rules as written when and however necessary, typically have a rule that insists this should occur whenever necessary, and people who don't like the interpretation or definition of common sense that table takes won't return to it' thing.

Now I really wanna go to Maine 'cause I collect beach pebbles. I hate you all now.

The power is still out, with no ETA on restoration.

Look, fuckers, we are still in the zone of the super sekrit DuPont weather satellite you will never convince me doesn’t exist at this juncture because we have nothing but a magical sparkly frost coating on the landscape here and thar despite a blizzard pounding down on us yesterday. We were just outside without winter coats on to seek food. Power? Never on this half of the block.

P.S. I think my neighbor across the road is John McClane. Mid-ice blizzard, in 40-50mph winds, he was chainsawing his downed trees in half to get them out of the road. (No, this is not what took down the power lines.)

ETA: well, “maybe by 11pm Monday”. You GTFO with that.

@botulism Am glad to see this happening. I would love to see more people doing this for every system every so often.

@munsell Quick -- maybe dumb -- question: was the wiki you were attempting to install 'Semantic Mediawiki'? That isn't a full wiki installation; it's an extension to install over top of an existing normal wiki installation. (It's confusing because initially it sounds like a drop-in replacement if it's the first time you're doing it... and I know it tells you to install it through composer, so that's why I'm asking.)

I'm not entirely sure how to fix it, but if that's what happened, one of the more server-savvy folks around may be able to help you resolve it.

@the-sands Though we speak very different languages (I am Not A Coder so 90% of what you're talking about sails right over my head -- half the time I would likely grok the principles but don't know the terms) a lot of what you're talking about is likely very similar to a lot of the stuff I'm looking at trying to do through mediawiki integration whatnots; it just uses a wiki-family as the means of integration and web forms instead of having people run any server-side scripts. (Though it's a bit of a tangent, please don't underestimate how intimidating command line fu is to anybody who doesn't do it on the daily. It isn't that people can't or aren't willing to learn some basics, it's that The Fear of Breaking Things You Don't Know How To Fix Again is very real, and is a real hurdle to a lot of folks.)

Basically, my one bit of generic advice would be this: what you're talking about probably sounds like the user (game runner, not player in this instance) interface is easier than what we have now (and it is), but it's still probably going to be a little more daunting to non-coders than you realize. In part, because just talking in code terms that people aren't familiar with is going to leave a lot of folks feeling lost from the jump.

This, too, gets daunting as fuck. Let's not even collectively pretend otherwise.

Writing documentation is a skill. Most documentation is written for people who already have some notion of what they're doing; I'm slogging through a few hundred lines of that kind of thing a day and googling my ass off because I'm a determined bitch, but I still get the throat-catch of 'I have no idea what they're talking about and even less idea what I'm doing, I'mma break shit'.

Writing documentation for a novice anything is a lot more like teaching than just taking notes, and that's a skill, too. (A fairly advanced one, too, because it involves a lot of examining internal assumptions and externalizing them as simple explanations without overloading someone with extraneous details. I think the entire forum is well aware of how bad at this I am personally, ahem. <cough> This is partly why I'm doing a web-interface for things: it helps cut down my novel-length treatises on why we won't be creating pages in the main namespace in surrwikiworld and so on, or at least set those aside as 'extended notation' that people don't need to slog through, and goes with something that's relatively intuitive for most modern internet users -- filling out a web form with drop down menus and whatnot.)

This is hard, so please don't take what I'm saying as mean-spirited or meant to be harsh in any way. Just... be prepared to provide simple explanations for folks of what all the code terms mean -- and I mean down to 'what is a php script' because not everyone who wants to start a game knows that or has someone handy and willing to help who knows that.

@seraphim73 said in Game Design: Avoiding Min-Maxing:

@surreality said in Game Design: Avoiding Min-Maxing:

@seraphim73 Yup. (And at some point I am going to try to borrow you and @faraday or something because y'all and math are friends and math's mean to me, she won't let me sit at the cool kids' table. )

Any time, I'm happy to talk game design, even if most of what I do is by feel and brute force, rather than crunching the numbers super-hard.

"Oh, honey. That's why you don't play with people that stupid, it's not good for you."

Observe the complete lack of any actual clarification in this answer, and... <clink> ...cheers.

Yeah, that's not just a bad game designer, that's a bad listener and a bad person. Cheers. And yes, bottoms up.

The funny thing is -- from a totally different perspective -- it's one of those 'differences between tabletop and online' examples that's huge. Like, he's not actually wrong? 'Don't play with utter wankers' is definitely good advice, and it's advice that works at a table, but we're really only coming back around to 'ousting the wankers from a game is not a sign of a psychotic dictator PHB' mentality in MUville.

It was just so not helpful. (It does show just how much oWoD was designed for tabletop, though, as that was a stock answer for many issues: "don't invite that person back," etc. There's a reason I've been saying that for like... ever.)

@sonder said in Visit Fallcoast, sponsored by the Fallcoast Chamber of Commerce:

@mietze said in Visit Fallcoast, sponsored by the Fallcoast Chamber of Commerce:

Considering how many paragraphs of orgasm descriptions and poor-to-pretty-decent smut I had to read and/or skim during my tenure as app staff with two spheres on TR, just sayin’...

I was always the most uncomfortable with the decent smut. Luckily on FC people seem to have run out of smutty background ideas but I'm sure I'll be rewarded tomorrow with a pornographic Changeling durance.

I will app something just for you then (and then probably never play, but... ), my smut-writing skills have over a year and a half of rust on them.

I have completely lost track of whether this will make me a better person or a truly horrible one.

I am also unfamiliar with FUDGE, so. Uhm. I do appreciate the attempt at help, though?

@thenomain said in Repurposing a Tabletop RPG for MU* Play:

The problem with "adapt to the players", while perhaps the most spot-on advice, is a lot of a Catch-22. Most people designing games aren't game designers, and by the time a game is up and running you can only hope you've set it up right, or that the systems you didn't create yet—or systems that you alter mid-gameplay—will be accepted by the players.

Double-post to add: I think you see more of this than you might think. It just isn't happening in the game once it's up and running as much.

That's another change in itself; a LARP that runs every 2-3 months has lots of downtime to make changes in a way a MUX can't, and even a weekly or biweekly is somewhat limited in that respect.

Some changes can be implemented mid-stream on a MUX, but it often doesn't go well. What we're more likely to see -- and I think we genuinely do see -- is people trying new approaches and new systems in limited fashion on various games, and the ones that work or work well, others will try to pick up and adapt and use as well on the games that follow them.

Even just looking at the stuff I know we were all working on off and on here and there over time, Reno1 had lessons for Eldrich; Eldrich had lessons for BITN; BITN will have lessons for their next projects, and so on. Each and every one of those games tried some new things, and we learned from them. People are keeping the ones that worked and trying to find solutions for the problems that weren't resolved, and dropping the things that didn't work.

It's similar to the LARP process, but the progress is harder to see because it occurs on a longer timeline and more cross-hobby than within the context of a single game.

For instance, there's stuff I want to use that are similar to WoD. There's stuff I want to borrow from @faraday's setup. There's probably other similarities to things I've read or heard about here about other systems, too, whether I realize it or not. There's concepts I want to steal from Shang in a preference-style setup. There's totally out there different stuff that I have yammered about for years that I think will work nicely -- but I will be the first one to tell you that I sure as heck don't know. The current project is, in part, a crash test of some of those ideas, and I make no bones about it. I got to crash test some of the ideas I had while on BITN, and some of them worked, some needed refinement to work properly, others seemed to be completely ignored, and that's all useful information for development going forward. (None of the stuff that was stuff I tossed into that mix failed spectacularly, but that would have been incredibly useful information, too; I was just the wiki witch, though.)

Basically, I think we're going through that same process -- it's just not as obvious or visible unless you step back to take a really long view. (Seeing that isn't easy because so many people want things now now now now now and too many people rush, or try to rush other people, but that's life in general.)

@thenomain said in Repurposing a Tabletop RPG for MU* Play:

And yet, we do. We love it. We want more of it. People over and over say, "I would love to play <rpg system> online!" that we should identify the challenges and methods of overcoming them so we don't end up with more WoD Tabletop Shoehorn Madness.

I'm going to say the dreaded words, Theno. I'm sorry. But I gotta, because... it depends.

I sincerely believe that sometimes it's not the system people want, but the game world. Again, WoD proves this in its own case: the tabletop system and the LARP system are very different; people enjoy both and many times the same people enjoy both.

That isn't actually about the system at that point -- it's about the world and it's general vibe that was made, because the system isn't the actual draw, as it's different in both.

You can even narrow this down further, because it isn't just setting and flavor (even if these things are bigger than I think they're given credit for in many cases). Look at what the game allows players to do. Not the mechanics of how they do it, but what it allows them to do. This is also a major draw for many.

For example, again, take the WoD setting. "I get to be a monster that eats people" is a draw for some folks. "I get to turn into a <something else>!" and "I can do magic!" and "I can be that human that discovers all of this stuff is real!" are the draws. If you set up a game that doesn't allow for their specific personal draw, those people are going to lose interest.

For plenty of us, "Be someone who has to contend with the realities of that different world and the challenges in it" is what we genuinely believe and what we'd intuitively answer. This makes it sound like that means everything is fine as it is on its face -- and it's true to a point, but what those challenges are and which people are interested in splits dramatically, and it's essentially the same as the '...but not... ' or '...but not without... ' elephants in the room that are being overlooked, and shouldn't be.

(Also, glad you didn't delete this post. It's a conversation I know I've tried to have here before and it's one I think is valuable for all of us to consider.)

@jennkryst said in Social 'Combat': the hill I will die on (because I took 0 things for physical combat):

@surreality said in Social 'Combat': the hill I will die on (because I took 0 things for physical combat):

@kitteh said in Social 'Combat': the hill I will die on (because I took 0 things for physical combat):

So if people want games with social rolls, game designers need to go back to the drawing board and 2.0 their whole concept of these game systems. Nearly everything we play is a WoD-clone, with the same stat-skill conventions and minimal focus on social stuff beyond 'maybe you can put one virtue and vice.' These arguments will always go back and forth fruitlessly under these conditions.

It does work both ways, though, in some respects: while there's some stat things that give you what are 'core ideals/drives/haven't decided quite what to call them yet', they can work 'against' someone, too. If someone took something like "I will not allow my children to come to harm," they get a big bonus to resist anything that'd make them do harm to their children.

Sorta like FATE?

I couldn't tell you; I don't know the FATE system. Enough people talk about it, but for some reason it bounces off my brain in full.

Possibly? Maybe?

More or less the sum total of what I have absorbed about FATE:

"I think you should use FATE but I know you won't because everybody hates FATE for no good reason." - <lots of people>

I ultimately have no idea why I should be inclined toward using it, or why everybody hates it, but that's the statement that pops into my brain more or less any time somebody mentions it as the most oft-repeated thing about FATE on the forum. It has unfortunately stuck and wedged itself in there pretty good re:

'Self, what is FATE?'
'FATE is what some people think should be used but everybody hates it.'
'Why, Self?'
'I'unno. <mental shrug, meanders off to play with navel lint>'

The big two: scale and anonymity vs. face-to-face interaction. These two battle for #1, because of the bastard child that exists as their love-child and is #0: who shows up to play.

The third is about on par: how does the game function without GM/ST/authority oversight, namely, how easy is it for people to manage the rules themselves?

These sound like small things, but they're not. Every one of them is enormous, and all of them have many moving parts.

People like to behave as though tabletop rules are somehow perfect for M* or sacrosanct while pretending not to notice how many house rules are required for their favorite game, and the number of 'well except for... 's and 'well everybody knows you can't use X online... 's they could rattle off for you that are the elephant in the room they're pretending isn't there.

WoD is in fact the perfect proof of this, and all of it's canon, formally published material: because the LARP rules and the tabletop rules are different. The developers realized this: not everything works just as well when played in different environments/ways/with different quantities of people/etc..

The first Night Owl games LARP in 1992, don't think we weren't walking around with printout character sheets with STs running all over the hotel like madmen trying to roll dice on neon plastic clipboards teetering on top of a stack of sourcebooks while something like 2/3 of the White Wolf staff squinted at how awkward and impractical this all was, because that is exactly what happened•.

And it's how a lot of people act re: M*, too. "Allow us to observe how this doesn't work, and squint at it with a combination of amusement and sheer boggle."

Later they tried cards. They tried a bunch of things. They adapted things over and over and over; there were new 'different from tabletop' things almost every time -- and it was for a reason. There are real reasons the LARP rules are different from the tabletop rules. (Most of those have to do with rule #2, the scale factor of #1, and definitely #0.) I couldn't tell you what all of them are (in part because I haven't played in well over a decade) but they observed what did and didn't work, and adapted, because adaptation was needed.

• With all the dice rolling off and away forever under hotel lobby couches and random con hookups having people wander off out of play and people awake for 72+ hour stretches STing fueled by a combination of Jolt cola and giddy geeky glee you might imagine. Now imagine like, three times as much of all of that as you just imagined, because that's at least how much there was.

@seraphim73 Yup. (And at some point I am going to try to borrow you and @faraday or something because y'all and math are friends and math's mean to me, she won't let me sit at the cool kids' table. )

That really is about the size of it, re: the answer.

And the truth is, his answer was a good answer -- for a table, or a place where you have some say in who is or isn't there.

The issue: oWoD, in it's 2E days. So we're talking early-mid 90s.

Celerity would, when you spent blood, be able to take additional actions in a round because you could physically move faster than other people.

Makes sense, right? Simple?

Well, sane people understood this was intended for use with physical actions.

But the text did not say that.

The text just said actions.

Cue every rules-lawyering wanker from the early-mid 90s insisting that because it did not specify physical actions, of course you could cause chemical reactions [Celerity] times as fast, learn things [Celerity] as fast, perform spiritual/magical rituals intended to last X number of rounds in X number/[Celerity] rounds instead, fire off Dominate [Celerity] times per round... (none of which were typically physical actions).

His answer was the right answer. It just was no help.

<takes the shot>

"Oh, honey. That's why you don't play with people that stupid, it's not good for you."

Observe the complete lack of any actual clarification in this answer, and... <clink> ...cheers.

@thenomain I half recall a few instances of that as well from there. Like... how the heck am I supposed to know that <blah blah blah blah> unless it's written down somewhere on the game if it's not something from the books?!

Obligatory psychic talent: required of oWoD players, apparently.

@roz Yeah, that's.... nngh. Again, another reason I'm into systems that are OT/OS and everything can be on the wiki, so everyone has equal access to all the info available.

@roz I have seen more arguments (tabletop and online) over WoD than everything else combined, truth be told.

They contradict themselves... a lot. And are vague. CoD is slightly less WTF on this front than oWoD, but not enough that it isn't an issue.

I am sadly entirely sober, or I would tell the story about what happened when I asked one of the old school devs about something only the most painfully obstinate amongst the deliberately obtuse could interpret in a certain way, yet everybody online sure did.

I cannot tell that story sober any more. I just can't.