Posts made by Tat

@Lithium

Easier sometimes than others, I think. Sometimes they just really need that bit of information, and now.

Most of the time, investigation is something I'd rather just reward if people are RPing it (or around it).

@Pyrephox said:

@Arkandel said:

If I don't want to adhere to a roll's result I won't ask for it.

This is something I've had to get better at, and part of that has meant /calling for fewer rolls/. I've had to remind myself that I should not be calling for a roll for the expert investigator to pick up the basic clues at the crime scene that will give them a few ideas of where to go next. That's their /job/, and it should not necessarily be trusted to the whims of dice. Now, if they're a rank amateur, or they've snuck in and are trying to get the same information while avoiding people who want to kill them, that's enough tension and stakes that a roll is warranted.

This is how I like to do things. My current game is the first time I've been a GM with dice (as opposed to lots and lots of GMing without dice), and I find that for many, many things, I'd rather just assume success.

I use dice in combat (where I find them super helpful), but generally I don't make people roll their investigation or their mutant power unless there is a real reason they ought to be somewhat likely to fuck things up. Part of this is because I want players to be awesome. Part of it is that these days, neither I nor most of my players have the time to reroute around a botched roll (just watch me try to GM for my Brit and my West Coasters in the same weeknight scene, man), and I want things to keep moving.

And with that in mind, I sometimes fudge rolls to the betterment of players, or by accomplishing a thing in a different way. Using the investigation example, when a player with one or two dots in that failed a roll, I said that he had to have involved one of our high-statted players in the investigation beforehand to get the information he's using now (confirmed OOC, of course). This had the benefit of not slowing down the scene and looping more characters into the action, even if off camera.

I agree with the general consensus that transparency helps a lot in these situations. I've unKO'd players who have barely gotten to play, or even enemies who went down so fast that people were disappointed, but never without asking first.

One thing I do appreciate about dice is how much more creative they sometimes force me to be. What exactly do I do with that amazing success? How can I make this even more awesome than just 'successful'. Or even worse than just 'failure'?

@Roz said:

Tez is right that our logs page is a good indicator -- pretty much every scene gets posted -- and if you're super curious we have a staffer who loves putting spreadsheets together and literally makes graphs of our log numbers by week and month to see how we're doing.

I KNEW THAT WOULD BE USEFUL ONE DAY.

@Coin said:

@Tat said:

@Roz said:

I just look the most impressive because I post the most here out of any of the staffers.

Wait wait. How do I get to look impressive?

You don't. @Roz is a fame glutton.

Good point.

@Roz said:

I just look the most impressive because I post the most here out of any of the staffers.

Wait wait. How do I get to look impressive?

I really like breaking 'background' skills into expertise and interests - in setting up FS3 (but never having played it previously), I found the concept of background skills to be kind of hard to wrap my mind around, and I've seen players fight similar confusion. These terms better reflect what they're meant to be, I think.

I'm of two minds about dropping from 12 to 5. We do use all 12 levels and stare hard at sheets to be sure that they match the little chart I made after reading lots and lots of documentation, so part of me is attached to the level of granularity we can get - I mean, we can reflect whether, say, you're a professional cop who can fire his gun /well/ or one who just managed to pass testing.

That said, I had to read a lot of documentation to fully understand that, and I do think it's confusing to players, and my understanding of the way the dice work is that there's not actually a HUGE difference in the upper levels when it comes to chance of success (?) anyway. The biggest difference would maybe be in vs. rolls?

I'm glad quirks are gone, I hated them (we removed them). I like the idea of RP hooks and goals and I'm now trying to decide if we can retroactively incorporate them.

I second @Tez's suggestions regarding customizable defaults - we have a LOT of customized weapons and armor and stances to match mutations, and it'd make life a lot easier.

I also share her question regarding NPCs, because that's also something I struggle with. In fact, it's one of the places I might suggest could use more documentation. I'm never entirely sure how my NPCs are going to match up against my PCs and end up having to mod things more than I'd like (though I'm glad I can)!

@Ghost said:

Trying to be constructive here, but when another player has done things that come across as disruptive to the scene (or attention whoring), have any of you asked them politely to tone it down a notch? Any first-name experiences with trying to work through that kind of behavior?

Yes, although /usually/ not in the scene as it is occurring. Generally people have to build up a pattern for it to be bad enough to get called out (speaking as staff). But I've had frank conversations with people about the ways in which they are not sharing the story nicely, or in which they may be (sometimes unwittingly) stepping on other people's story by, for example, trying to insta-solve a problem the other person clearly wants to be a major plot point for their character (this comes up with money a lot).

I've also said something in a scene when, for example, people have brainstormed some cool reaction on channel and then a character other than the player who came up with the idea goes and poses it. I mean, that's just not cool. Don't steal other people's cool ideas.

Reactions to this? Mixed bag. Sometimes passive aggressive butt-hurt. Sometimes dismissal. Sometimes actual productive change (less often). The total freak-outs have actually been very rare, but maybe I'm lucky. Or scary. IDK.

I've also had conversations about grammar and spelling and improving those to get better responses to RP requests. Somewhere round about the last game I feel like I sort of (along with my fellow staff) got a lot blunter and just started saying things that we didn't used to. I don't know if it's better that way, but I do think it's at least less stressful on staff, strangely. It's nice to feel like if you know someone is struggling simply because they don't bother to capitalize, you can just tell them so, and then they know. And they either address it or they don't.

@Roz said:

@Three-Eyed-Crow said:

I think the best way someone can remedy this if somebody feels like maybe this is happening to them is make an effort to RP ABOUT other people if you're in a scene, rather than themselves. Like, ask about somebody's IC job or how they feel about that thing that happened ICly or whatever. I feel like this also helps in the being inclusive thing. I don't mind people who pose less-than-perfectly, as long as they're engaging with me and not expecting it to be All About Them 100% of the time.

100% this. I always tell people that the best way to get attention is to give attention. It won't always work, because some players are pretty self-centered and don't really play off other characters well. But a good amount of players will note when others are playing about them or expressing interest in their character and will feel goodwill that tends to get returned. And the playerbase at large notices it in logs.

@Thenomain said:

The second is that all new players are introduced to the game. I want to mention the AetherMUX quiz and casual newbie channel again. They also had reccs read by other players, so everyone had a chance to see everyone saying good things about everyone else. The game did not just expect a positive atmosphere, it created one.

I am interested in learning more about this!

I am also super interested in learning more about this. I really, really like to think about ways to create positive atmosphere. I remember when I was a new player on Second Pass, for example, I found the comps people gave to award XP really helped me feel a part of the game and showed me what was working with my character. So it's an idea I stole for the game we run now. And I love reading what other people enjoy about a scene or a character that I'm not involved in. It gives me a sense of the pulse of the game.

@surreality said:

I'm wondering if it'd be possible to have something like a 'chatbox' imbedded at the bottom of a 'room log' or something along those lines, or on the bottom of whatever the structure was for the 'building the scene' pages. Then, small OOC commentary can go back and forth.

I'd certainly think so. There's this, for example: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Chat

You could probably combine that with extensions that embed one wiki page in another.

There are also extensions to add comments, like https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Comments

And you could do something like embedding a google doc at the bottom of a page, too. Just sort of depends on what functionality you want.

Randomizers would need work, which is never easy.

There is a dice extension (https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Dice), but you're honestly probably better off with a third party platform built for handling rolls and sheets if you're doing a game solely on a wiki. There are a few forum/play by post games that I've seen do this.

@surreality said:

...now if there was a way to create a 'play from the wiki' or wiki-based game engine that links around to all the things when/as needed? AWWWWWWYEAH. So many of the things we talk about wanting from a MU* -- links, instant access to data, graphics, color, etc. -- would be entirely possible.

But that's ten thousand miles beyond me. The things that could be accomplished with that could potentially be amazing. It strikes me as something that is likely possible, though.

Yeah, I feel like that's the dream and I wonder if it could re-invigorate the hobby. The reality is that there is TONS of roleplay out there, it's just scattered, and the entry-barrier to M* is super high.

It'd be an entirely viable option for play-by-post/play-by-email style games, and I'm surprised that isn't something I see everywhere already.

I've seen it before, but it doesn't seem to be super common. I suspect this is because 1) wikis aren't actually very good for discussion or give/take in the way that RP needs. Even forums are better. And 2) though wikis can become super user friendly, they don't start that way - getting a wiki into shape takes a lot more technical know-how than getting a forum into shape.

Even a package like what we refer to would involve someone adjusting LocalSettings.php and moving things around on a server on a constant basis.

If I were building a play-by-post wiki, I'd be looking for, at MINIMUM, a chat-box extension, something like liquid threads, something to prevent edit conflicts, which have always been buggy for me, preferably semantic wiki and semantic forms to keep things easy on the player end, and then the 'usual' stuff like parser functions, arrays, input boxes, etc. I'd also want a better rich text editor - and I don't know of any that work with semantic forms, unfortunately (I haven't looked much though).

In other words, there'd be a lot of stuff. I think it can be done, but it almost has to be done by someone who already sort of understands the strengths and weaknesses of wikis and how to make it work for RP - and I think most people who run Play by Post probably don't. Heck, it took me until like my 3rd wiki to even start to feel like I was doing things in way that made reasonable, consistent sense.

One of the main stumbling blocks is that everything is visible, and privacy would be an issue. If something involving bot edits could be tweaked, there's hope at least, but still. Otherwise it'd more be a cultural issue of people getting used to things all being 'public' in some fashion, like open sheet/etc.

It's interesting that you mention this, because most the games I've played for the past 10 or so years have been pretty much completely transparent. I actually don't think it's as big a hurdle as it might seem. That said, these games have ALSO not been PvP. I think transparency is ttly different when PvP comes into play.

If I am ever poking at the original system thing again, I might try this in the more 'play by post' (play by edit?) format. I was able to get the basics (and the basics aren't very basic) of a +sheet together, and with original systems, every element on the sheet is clickable so you can see exactly what the power/stat/whatever does. (Not possible with copyrighted game systems, alas, unless it's something HR'd or just a reference to the book and page -- but even that can be a major help.)

Yeah, THIS sort of thing is what makes wikis super powerful and super awesome. Semantic wiki is pretty damn great because you can then also manipulate those by clicking on a header and seeing, for example, everyone who's taken that skill in order by points or something like that. It automates a ridiculous number of things if you're smart about how you do templates.

@Roz said:

Lol of COURSE wikis are the one thing that would get Tat on Soapbox.

I literally registered this morning to post that comment.

Spreadsheets may also have been successful.

LOOK I LIKE WIKIS.

@surreality If you ever end up working on this project and want some help, let me know. I staff with @Roz and have spent a lot of time neck-deep in SMW and basic infobox templates. I've also recently moved most the back-end set-up stuff from our previous wiki to our current one as we swapped games.

The big issue with this is probably version issues. Inevitably every time things upgrade, things break. There were only 2 and a halfish years between building one wiki and building another, and I still had to fix extension compatibility issues. I'm not entirely certain I've hashed them all out yet, even.

But the basics of an infobox template and how to get that into a form ought to be pretty easy to do. So too should a list of really great extensions for M*s.

I might be a little bit of a mediawiki nut. Little bit.