Posts made by surreality

@Groth said in PC antagonism done right:

@Tinuviel said in PC antagonism done right:

@Bobotron The massive staff overhead suffered by RfK was due, in perhaps small but not inconsiderable part, to the behaviour of the headwiz. Without her it would have taken a fair slug of work, certainly, but at least they'd be able to get the work done without her going over everything to ensure it fit "her vision."

No, the staff overhead suffered by RfK was almost entirely caused by the fact it was originally conceived as a game run by the book as much as possible, including the LARP rules. However as the game grew more popular it became increasingly obvious that those rules scaled poorly and were not a great fit for a MU* environment meaning that a complete redesign was necessary designed for the MU* context from the ground up, however this is difficult to do when you're buried under the work of actually running the game.

This is one of those things I've written about and ranted about for ages. A system designed for probably 12 people tops around a table, which would be a really big tabletop game... does not work for a MUX. It won't. The overhead is far too high. A 12 character MUX would be tiny. Could still be great! But it's tiny for a MUX. Even smaller games tend to have at least 2-3 times that.

@Gingerlily For what it's worth, I think it has meandered amongst various things.

Speaking personally, I prefer to not have 'designated' antagonist characters, be they PCs or NPCs on grid (barring the occasional monster of the week, but those are easy).

It isn't just the system and mechanics that need attention paid to their design in this regard: the factions in the game need planning as ally or opposition, and the resources available in the game need to not be big enough for everyone to have everything they want, creating the need for competition (beyond the usual 'I just want to have all the things so nobody else has any', which is a fair motivation in itself).

All of this stuff needs to work together, and you essentially have three 'core' systems on any given game: the IC realities of the game world, the game system mechanics, and the OOC policies/code/rules/support/staff mindset. This is one of those subtler truths that a lot of game creators/runners are slow to realize -- until it explodes to prominence when what seemed to be a harmless policy or house rule tweak suddenly screws a set of abilities or a character type, that then screws a faction vital to keeping things moving or balanced in some fashion, and suddenly there's an IC mess due to the ripple effect that just undoing or reworking the original tweak can't repair.

@Bobotron said in PC antagonism done right:

It needs to not become something that requires tons of back-and-forth, and also not something that is sudden, instant gratification; it takes a little time, and people seem to want things to go 'oh, I put in this Allies action, WHY HASN'T IT HAPPENED IN THE LAST TEN MINUTES?!'

I agree with this.

You probably could work something up with a system that involves X number of 'action points' per week -- could be a stock number for everybody, could be based on stats of some kind (different game systems might want to go about this in different ways). Action A normally costs X of those action points for the week, but it gets done over the course of a week.

Want to bump it up in priority? It'll cost more -- that old saying about 'fast, good, cheap -- pick two, tops' comes to mind. 'Rush orders' always cost more -- because they're more hassle. In game terms, telling that cop you know owes you a favor over that week's poker game about how you need help with something is a different animal from calling him at 4am and waking up his cranky newborn and exhausted wife with an emergency in the real world -- you need to either be a much better 'bud' or be offering something more -- which is fairly easy to represent in terms of the added 'cost' for the rush.

I gather this is fairly similar to what Arx is doing with 'action points' or whatever it is (I don't play there so I couldn't say for sure) and while I can't speak to how good or bad their implementation is, something along these lines could likely be managed in some way.

@Sparks The stuff I want to do can all be done pretty easily with some formatted pemits, so it's totally doable that way, yeah.

There are probably a LOT of things I do ten kinds of 'not best practice' (since I am clueless) but I'm weirdly fussy about some things. The end result for this one is really just some ambience pemits for areas (which can be turned on or off with a preference since I know that kind of thing is a big love/hate no-middle-ground territory). One of the things I'm doing with them, though, is definitely fussbait of the first order: they're color coded in a way to make clear they're messages from the game itself; it's sort of a comfort-factor thing, so no one thinks there's someone DARK in the room or otherwise sending specific messages. People can pick their own ansi highlight colors, though -- so it needs to check for that to use their proper 'this is what isn't going to make me go blind' color for IC game notifications. (Theno deserves the 100% of the credit for getting that to actually work; I'm just abusing the hell out of it.)

Since some of the things I want to do with it are the kind of old-school easter egg flavor-bits (like short sequences of a few scheduled messages for a room) it seemed more sane to do one message with a @wait or similar than enter a dozen things on the CRON for one fairly minor effect in random nooks of the grid. (It's a really, really haunted grid. There's a reason the last room down the hall's so cheap, after all... etc.)

That's what it looked like -- many thanks! I was hoping there would be an easier way, but this works.

OK, so. I half-heartedly remember a function called suspend? Which does not seem to exist. Clearly I was hallucinating that. The only thing I can find is @wait -- but I really would rather make a neat and tidy function without it (or with it at this point, since it doesn't seem to work inside a function the way I'd like it to).

Target goal: Take a list of messages (or commands, or whatever) and basically run an iter() with them... with a delay tucked in between.

It'd be possible to do each of these individually on a number of objects with each custom, but I'd really like to try to get it to recognize 'do thing 1, wait X seconds, do thing 2, wait X seconds' for the duration of the list.

I am code stupid, so I've not had any luck with this save for each of these being a custom attribute with @wait 5=[thing(1)];@wait 10=[thing(2)];@wait 15=[thing(3)] -- and so on. While it can definitely be done this way, something tells me there has to be something that works better than that, and I'm just running into my usual ignorance barrier. I'm having no luck finding it, though.

Any thoughts? (Other than 'why in the blue hells are you doing that, woman?!') Or is that the only way to really go about it?

@Derp Yeah, I'm with you on things re: respecting status merits and similar. Those things exist for a reason and they shouldn't be ignored.

In the situation you're describing, though -- the example earlier re: domain is a good one.

Some of it is supported, but people don't use it. A lot could be done with resource blocking, for instance; use contacts to figure out JoeAdversary's money comes from his graft, get Allies in the PD to look into it and freeze the assets for investigation, etc.

One of the problems is that this isn't horribly action-packed or exciting, really. That said, one of my favorite scenes in The Originals (shut up, errybody ) involved having an enemy's residence declared a historical landmark and had the city claim it to gain access to the building without invitation, for instance. That was great to see make it on screen as a great social mechanic in action, and it stands as an ideal example. (Sure, it was 'gain access and then full steam ahead on the murderboat', but it's still a neat example of something we rarely see on screen or in games.)

@Tyche Probably... 95 or 96. That I know that is one of the reasons I'm surely going to hell.

Now back to doing my taxes whilst gripped by wayyyy too many flashbacks.

@fatefan said in Suitable system for a gritty fantasy game:

For me, I think one of the other big obstacles is making sure players feel empowered to contribute to the game world by inventing details (whether in the role of player or MC) that can then be used by others. A wiki is an easy way to try and help everyone keep tabs on this, assuming the playerbase buys into its use. But I don't know if they would.

I'm banking on this for a current project. I think people will -- but I don't know for sure, either. Part of the reason I'm following through with it in spite of a case of the blahs playwise is just to find out, and see if the tools and systems and whatnot help work toward that end. If and when there's a verdict there, I'll let you know.

@DarkDeleria said in Full spoilers: Iron Fist:

But after reading this, I see what my problem was: I'd been watching it with a typical superhero frame in my mind. Where he knows who he is, what his role is in life, and kicking ass one iron fist to the gut at a time. But that's not who Luke Cage is; that's not who Jessica Jones was either; and Matt Murdock has some pretty grey morals by playing lawyer by day, blind-vigilante by night. So--why should I've assumed that Danny Rand was going to be any better than these three fuck-ups forced into being the budding defenders they will become?

This is a really good overview of their whole collection -- and it's spot on. It's what I like about the series they've done on the whole.

Typically, when we see this stuff in movie form, there's that 'budding hero phase' that is more or less a training montage punctuated by a dramatic heartstring tugger of an emotional turning point scene and even when well done, it's fairly sterile stuff. Expanding that out into the gritty detail of the hand-wringing, the failures that aren't played for laughs or seemingly exclusively to build up the cheer for the underdog finally seizing their power at the end of the training sequence, is a big change... but it's a starkly human one.

@Derp I've actually only seen one instance of someone pitching a fit over the use of social merits (contacts/allies/etc.) in the way you're describing. That it was someone who had used them plenty herself more or less made it nothing more than eyeroll-worthy, and the actions went through (just like hers had for others before). I don't see any wholesale rejection of those systems or ick factor associated with them -- there really isn't one to have -- as much as I see people not grasping how they work or what their value can be.

They get used about as much as social combat does, but the reasoning behind that is more cluelessness and people having no real idea how to manageably implement that staff-side (similar to the issues people are having figuring out how to effectively implement all the new investigation mechanics from CoD) than any ick factor, since there's no ick factor associated with blocking someone's resource spend or preventing someone's status raise/etc. They work on a macro and less intimately personal scale, while social combat works on a personal scale; the difference is clear enough that I don't see the same sorts of objections to using those as I've seen (and sometimes have) re: what some folks try to do with social combat going around, really. I mean, sure, you could probably use allies somehow to prevent someone from buying food until they cave and kinky-TS somebody's brains out, but that's more... roundabout and impersonal (and let's be honest, more overseen/observed/is more work/is less appealing to people trying to abuse a game system to fulfill an RL kick than 'because I'm just so damn charming' on a raw ego level) than the social combat approaches that raise some hackles.

@Tinuviel Walking the grid and stumbling into a scene is just... so much less work than all the pre-negotiations and +event planning and arguing over where to go. "Just show up, don't be a dick, do stuff" was good enough once upon a time.

@ThugHeaven @Alamias It really does feel we're moving toward 'walking up hill both ways' instead of away from it in recent years, and that's a very sad truth.

@Derp said in PC antagonism done right:

@Arkandel said:

Ideally that's the main question I'd like to see addressed in this thread; not just what (which I feel most of us agree with) but how. And remember, such systems need to be as easy to use on an everyday basis and require as little direct staff intervention as possible.

Fundamentally, I disagree that the systems used need to have as little direct staff intervention as possible. I think that staff are ultimately the ones who tailor both the world and the story, and while PCs can do meaningful things inside of it, the 'hands off' staffing approach is really not a great idea for making sure that this sort of things comes to pass.

I yanked the two bullet points here because I agree with them -- I just don't necessarily think they're reason to think there isn't a lot more that can be done to empower players with thematic 'backup' of sorts for the ICly NOT trendy (but OOCly popular) viewpoints present in game without doing the equivalent of handing nuclear warheads (or something like the Spear of Destiny from the recent Legends of Tomorrow story arc) out to all and sundry with no oversight.

@mietze There was one a few years ago that played the Hamster Dance; I forget where we were at the time but it wasn't local. The husband and I just sorta stared at each other and broke out in helpless giggles.

This one was so 'this is a dream, right, this is some post-dentistry horror movie dream involving zombie clowns, it's gotta be a dre--really?!'

OK, that was... what in the actual fuck.

It is weird enough that the ice cream truck is already making the rounds.

It is irksome enough that it woke me up while I was trying to sleep off some painful dentistry.

But did it really have to be playing 'In The Hall of the Mountain King' in that super fucking creepy and always off key ice cream truck chime?!

I refuse to believe there aren't frozen human body parts collected underneath the frosty pops at this point.

I am not super familiar with most of these, but used to play HERO system/Champions tabletop. I have to agree with your verdict on it; I always had to have somebody else help me build something and it felt pretty confusing to play. I like the versatility of it and a lot of the concepts in the system in terms of powers, but it's eye-crossingly complicated to learn enough that I think it could be problematic to learn (and code).

Another thing to check is how the various companies take to having coded systems built -- sometimes that can get iffy. I don't know of any red flags associated with any of these titles, but some companies do have that, so that may help narrow the list down a little if any do.

Good luck! I'm hopeful this works out, since I'd really like to see an OC Superhero game out there and am looking forward to seeing what happens!

All the SQL-wiki (and vice versa) stuff I'm dealing with unfortunately was all set up by someone else. I'm sadly unfamiliar with Volund's stuff or how to get that all linked up.

@lordbelh said in Great TV:

@Coin Its the series finale, wrapping up after 4 seasons. Also sets the stage for a sequel if they want to do the whole Treasure Island.

Its hard to think I almost stopped watching the show halfway through the first season. I'm glad I didn't!

I think a lot of people are in the same boat there (pardon the pun). I started and stopped a few times before I realized I could pretty much watch that show on repeat for a year and still find new things to 'OMG' at. (Which is probably a good thing since it's the kind of setting I'm working on?)

It's a great show for this hobby, too. It's come to mind repeatedly during the 'antagonists' discussion, since I can't think of a better example of 'this is a land of grey and heroism from not-heroes and utter bastardry from not-just-complete-bastards, everybody's allegiances shift constantly as circumstances change' off hand. The writing was glorious in that regard.

There's only one character I can think of as being a true 'black hat' in most respects, and the character was entirely aware of it and the power it granted them, which was interesting in itself.

Just the amount of discussion and character awareness of the power of a good story, the power to tell one, and the importance of the story that is told after events are said and done, is something that I think makes it worth a watch for folks in this hobby, despite the fact that a lot of other content can definitely make it a hard watch for some, I'm sure.

(That, and anyone who has ever staffed on a MUX and dealt with a tense negotiation or mediation needs to watch at least through season 1, ep 3. If you don't completely recognize a certain scene as being entirely too familiar and laugh your ass off on some level, you are a much, much luckier staffer than most!)

Tangent-wise, I'd say the bunk situation is more or less exactly the kind of thing places code was made for.

The OOC areas in and of themselves are really not the problem. People behaving like trolls or attention whores or brats or creeps are the problem.

These people will be a problem whether you have OOC areas or not.

If you don't address the actual problem -- the obnoxious behaviors -- you're going to keep playing a game of very indirect whack-a-mole as people take the behaviors increasingly underground, where it generally becomes no less prevalent or problematic, but becomes a lot harder to police.