@faraday For the WoD system the descriptions have always been complete nonsense. It is very easy for people to have the description 'greatest in the world' and still be worse at a task than someone with the description 'you've done this once or twice' because only half your pool comes from the skill.
@Ghost The correct response is: 
@thenomain Having a better idea what you're looking for now:
Standardize how various things work. Most tabletop games do an awful lot of 'things work this way, except when they work this way. Occasionally they will work this way and on rare occasions they will work this way'.
Probably the biggest thing, though, is don't just assume something (especially a social skill) is going to be used on an NPC. Provide some kind of real framework for what things mean (if someone is intimidated, wtf does that mean? Can they not attack the person who intimidated them? Do they need to make a willpower roll? Do they have a penalty if they attack? Don't just say 'the person has been intimidated).
@thatguythere I think you're missing the point. It isn't that the Generalist will get pushed to the side because the Specialist has skills that are higher than the Generalist. It's that all the Specialist's skills end up higher (or as high) as the Generalist.
Look at my example above about the two characters who leave CP and after a bit of XP the Specialist is able to catch up on the skills they missed while the Generalist is still stuck behind the Specialist. That kind of system encourages people to be exiting CG with highly specialized idiot-savants who are the greatest snipers in the world but who can't tie their shoes or string together two sentences, which would be fine if that were their actual character design but after they gain just a modicum of XP they suddenly learn these skills which have eluded them the past 20 years.
@lithium I'm quite willing to play by the rules. I'm simply suggesting that if you want these rules you come up with a system that makes some sense.
It's too complex? Well then, maybe you shouldn't try and force people to use something even you admit is broken.
The real thing, however, is you said 'People who die on the 'Player Agency' hill will not be happy with any sort of social combat system' and I'm saying 'Nope. Try again'. I think 'Player Agency' is quite important, yet I just demonstrated that I could be happy with a good social combat system. Such a system might not currently exist but your statement implies that I will never be happy with a system and that is simply untrue.
And WTF is up with you telling me to play by the rules? I have said 'this is what you need to do' or 'that is a problem'. I have never said 'I will just ignore that rule if you try and make me follow it'. Hell no. If I'm see a game with rules like this that I don't like I'm just going to walk away. You don't get to accuse me of 'not following the rules' because I won't play your broken system.
@nemesis said in Social 'Combat': the hill I will die on (because I took 0 things for physical combat):
OK so, yeah, common sense is actually neither of those things because Seduction isn't necessarily sexual in nature and getting Billy Badboy to knock over a coffee shop is something he's likely to do anyway, so good job identifying that as a good and reasonable use of social skills, but there's absolutely no reason that a female with high seduction can't charm a gay guy by some means toward any goal at all unless he actually literally has a stat that allows him to ignore Seduction.
But this is one of the big issues right here. In the example Suzie is using a specific type of action to influence Billy and Gary and that action doesn't work against Gary. In essence Suzie is trying to shoot Gary with a gun that has no bullets (or more accurately, bullets Gary is immune to). I'm not saying that Suzie is never going to be able to influence Gary simply because she's a woman but she's going to need some other kind of ammunition to do so (cash, convincing Gary that his partner has been unfaithful, threats against Gary's well-being, etc.)
Now you could abstract the system so much that Suzie only has to say 'I want to try and use Persuasion on Gary' and then we roll dice but do we really want a system that abstract? It seems to me like you're in real danger of:
'I enter the bar'
(die roll)
'My clothes appeal to people'
(die roll)
'People enjoy my presence'
<OOC> Thanks for the scene guys.
Of course that's a gross exaggeration and I'm not completely sure my concern is great enough to say 'don't go that way'. I'm just positing the negatives.
The idea that Suzie says '<OOC> I want to use Persuasion on Gary' and then the two players work out a reasonable solution for how Suzie is able to persuade Gary is a definite possibility. The only problem is this solution works between two players who can come to an agreement. It doesn't solve the issue of the completely recalcitrant player which means you've now codified a system (and increased the complexity of the game by adding more rules) that still may not resolve the original problem.
@faraday We're getting our wires crossed because you're operating under what I believe is a false syllogism.
Everything written in the book is a rule.
Something is written in the book.
Therefore it is a rule.
Using that logic everyone who fails to conform to their character cliches are quite literally cheating because they are not following all the flavor text.
So once more two steps forward and one step back, I've decided to try and code the game in Evennia instead of TinyMux. I've gotten to a fairly developed stage where I am relatively sure I could complete the entire project in TinyMux if I wanted to but I'm concerned about long term support. Even now looking back at a piece of muxcode that I wrote a month ago is painful. The thought that I might have to go back and work on a piece of code two years from now just fills me with dread.
I have to admit to having mixed feelings about leaving mux behind. I did my first MU* coding close to 25 years ago with a tinyMUSH and it's like a pair of comfortable jeans. I'm use to looking at old code and tweezing it apart and figuring out how it's working. Unfortunately with the extra complexity that an EP game is going to require (to calculate your COG you need to know your base COG, any bonuses from morphs or augments, make sure it is less than your attribute maximum with possible adjustments for augments or traits and less than 40 and did I mention a character can have multiple forks and multiple morphs?) I think I want to try using a real programming language like Python and a real data structure like MySQL that supports many-to-one relationships.
@tehom said in Development Thread: Sacred Seed:
Things might have been a tad different in those societies if the people in question had the ability to turn someone into ashes with their mind.
Even more than that; we did not have an real understanding of genetic inheritance during the medieval period. If, as seems proposed, the civilization in Sacred Seed does have at least a passing understanding of genetic inheritance it creates a very different situation for women.
The most desirable women would be those with strong gifts. These are, by their very nature, not the kind of women you are going to be able to push around. Given how human reproductive cycles work these women are not going to only be protected by their direct power but they are going to be protected by indirect power as well because in many cases they will have multiple males competing for reproductive access. If any one of them tries to get too pushy it offers an excellent opportunity for the other males to gang together and 'remove him from competition'.
@faraday It turns out not to be too terribly difficult, at least at the level I'm working at right now. There's certainly more advanced Docker stuff that will probably result in images that are more secure and which do things 'properly' but for now what I'm doing seems to work.
What I did was I created a Docker instance for Ubuntu (I actually tried some more minimal setups at first but went back to Ubuntu because of some of the tools I wanted). Once you spin that up you can log into it using a command similar to docker exec -i -t mocker_game_1 /bin/bash (mocker_game_1 is the name of the Docker instance I'm running and /bin/bash gives me a shell inside of it).
From there I basically figured out all the steps that I would have to run to setup a new tinyMux server (downloading build tools, configuring, compiling, etc.). You then create a Dockerfile (not to be confused with docker-compose.yml) that repeats those instructions. You run a new command along the lines of docker build -ttinymux:2.10-U ~/Docker/mocker/release/ which tells Docker to build a new image called tinymux:2.10-U using the Dockerfile found in ~/Docker/mocker/release/.
That's sort of the 'elevator pitch' version of it, anyway. It does get a little tricky since the commands in the file can't pause for input and you need to work in stuff so that when you run things for the very first time data gets moved around so it is accessible from outside docker (for persistence and so you can back it up) but if you're already capable of compiling a game on a new machine you can probably handle those extra issues.
Like I said, I will provide more complete details about everything I was doing so that you can build your own Arcker (or whatever you'd like to call it) image. I just want to wait a day or two in case someone says 'oh, Holy Hell, the way you've done this will lead to the eventual extinction of life on Earth. Don't do it that way' or something similar before I write out the more detailed account. This is just to show you that it is probably not hard at all (having never spun up a copy of Ares I don't want to absolutely promise it will be easy since there might be some gotcha I don't know about) for you to build your own image.
@lithium I thought about gates. The issue is that supposedly you're not suppose to do a whole bunch of back and forth between those gates. As you said, there are only a handful of them and they are in use by they whole system. As a result they have pretty long waiting lines and usually only open up to any given location for a few minutes each week.
Out of system gates don't have the same problem since they have a lot fewer people trying to use them. Their biggest time restriction is that they can only link to system gates during those limited windows. Linking to other out of system gates is a lot more free which is part of the reason I was toying with an established colony idea.
@Jennkryst, I was not considering any kind of 'space minigame' because I figured for the most part it would probably include all the excitement of a highway drive combined with calculus. That said, what kind of 'minigame' would you be looking at?
@Runescryer said in Altered Carbon Style MUSH - Eclipse Phase 2e:
For those not familiar with Eclipse Phase. You can be....
-An Infomorph (sentient program)
-An Uplifted animal like a dog, dolphin, ape, raven, or octopus
-An 'Infogee'; a stored personality that evacuated from the fall of Earth and has been in digital storage ever since. And you can finally afford a sleeve to come out of storage
-Other type of humanYour sleeves can be biological, mechanical, or a synthesis of both. Besides basic humanoid forms, there's:
-'Space Whales' that use magnetic shielding to hang out and chill in the sun's coronasphere
-Gliders that soar through the clouds of Venus
-'Swarmbots' made of clouds of interconnected micro-robots
-Gigantic cyborg coconut crab tanks
I once summed up Eclipse Phase with the statement 'My artificially intelligent starship is psychic. Your argument is invalid.'
And yes, in 1e that is a valid character build (albeit one with a rather strange backstory)
@mr-johnson It's always been a little amusing to me that when Steve Rogers was first thawed out and was 'a man out of time' it was only 20 years after World War II ended.
@lithium In theory that sounds like a good idea. The boats in Everquest were built around the idea that they would foster interplayer RP while people were sitting around and waiting for them. In practice people largely hated the wait and that was for something that came by every 30 minutes, not something that opened a few times per week.
The real problem (as I see it) with the gates is that it is really easy for a player to wind up with friends on both sides of the gate. Logging in and not being able to RP with the group of friends who are connected because you're on the wrong side of the gate seems frustrating (especially if the other group isn't connected at that time).
Now you might chose to handwave waiting for the gates to open and have people bounce back and forth freely but essentially what you are doing is building a game with one portion of the grid set as New York and another portion set as London. Some people will probably feel that it hurts their experience when someone else bops back and forth casually between the two areas, especially when that person wouldn't normally have easy access to that type of travel. More casual players who want to bop back and forth will become irate at people trying to 'stifle' them.
Which isn't to say you can't have the gates and the other planets and such things being part of the game world. I think it just might be prudent to handle them through temp rooms, much as you would in a WoD game when someone goes out of town.
@Runescryer said in Altered Carbon Style MUSH - Eclipse Phase 2e:
@Jennkryst Well....I mean....technically, spaceships exist...but the only group that uses them are inbred space gypsy clans. Or the fascist-evangelical-space Nazis that consider cortical stacks to be shat straight from Satan's bunghole. 3D manufacturing is so cheap and prevalent, every habitat can make everything they need, so there's no real need for in-system commerce. Likewise, bio-printing new bodies is insanely cheap, so it's faster and more efficient to call ahead to a habitat, have them thaw out or print a sleeve, and then quantum-cast your consciousness into that body in a matter of minutes, rather than take a system ship that can take months or longer to get to where you want to go.
Not entirely true. 3D printing may be cheap but materials still need to get moved around. Players are about as likely to be involved with them as players in a modern game are likely to be involved with cargo ships, however. It's just not a very exciting area.
Also, bio-printing bodies is not only not cheap, it's not even possible. They have to be grown. Growth is accelerated but it is still something like 18 months. That's why when you ego-cast somewhere you have to take whatever body is available rather than just having whatever you want printed out. (It's also why so many people live as disembodied egos working inside computers. There just aren't enough bodies to go around)
@tinuviel +job/deny ###=It's not the +sheet. It's the stupidity.
@jennkryst At present I can't really see putting that much effort into a spaceship portion of the game. It might be interesting at first but in the long run it would probably become tedious and people would lose interest, especially if you implement it in any fashion that mimics spaceship travel in EP (people generally prefer to egocast between the different planets because space travel is relatively slow. Spacetravel largely occurs in those instances where raw materials need to be physically moved and for little else).
Don't get me wrong. I love space travel. I've got spreadsheets to help me get really good estimates on how long it should take to travel from one place to another with a given setup (percentage of ship dedicated to remass, specific impulse of the engines, etc.). One of my 'toy' character concepts (i.e. a concept that I've made that I find amusing but I would probably never play) is an emergent AI that was exposed to the WM virus while it was sleeved in a biomorph and which is now sleeved into a nautiloid with a brainbox (making it a psychic artificially intelligent spaceship).
I just think it's a lot of work for very little payoff and is about as necessary for an EP game as a 'car driving minigame' is for a WoD game.
Runescryer's statement that only inbred space gypsies use spaceships is certainly not supported by a lot of material. There is an entire faction of people who live out in space who are the people he's probably thinking about, but there's still clearly plenty of ships travelling around as well.
For one thing a lot of people aren't comfortable with the fact that their brain patterns are going to be going through machinery other people control. There's very valid concerns that people can make a copy of the data and then extract information from the copy (either by spooling it up on a computer and then virtually torturing it or else by literally prying the data apart. There's an entire field of people who edit mental data for a variety of reasons).
And of course if it is a relatively short distance (only a few hours) some people don't want all the time and energy that has to be expended getting use to the new body. Likewise, if someone is going to a location for a protracted period of time they may not want to remain in a rental body. They may prefer to physically move the body they are currently comfortable with.
I think the closest modern analogy I came up with was that bodies were sort of like cars. If you've got a meeting 3,000 miles away you're probably going to fly and then just rent a car when you get there. Depending on how close the location is, however, you might just drive. On the other hand if you are moving then some people will sell their old car and buy a new one at their new place of residence, but most people won't.
@tinuviel "Youth ages, immaturity is outgrown, ignorance can be educated, and drunkenness sobered, but stupid lasts forever.”
@saulot said in Singularity: an Eclipse Phase Game:
I love EP, and would be happy to help in any capacity needed.
I'm guessing I'm at least a couple of weeks away before I think the code base is really solid enough to have people kicking the tires and things. I was pretty close to having what I would have called a 'runnable' system, but all that means is it could have handled the features that would be needed when you were 'in play'. Doing things like entering a new character would have to be done by hand. However, as I said up above I'm actually taking a short step back in my code right now to better accommodate forks and backups (I'll be honest, part of me isn't even that sure how critical having forking code will be, but I realized if I didn't put in at least some basic support for it then I could have a real nightmare later).
I'll definitely be needing help, though. As I said, I'm still unsure of what the setting should be. The only thing I've really decided is that it probably should be somewhat limited in scope. It isn't that the rest of the solar system or the areas beyond the Pandora gates don't exist. It's just that they will be 'out of town' if this were a more conventional setting (i.e. off grid locations).
I'm going to need people to test code and tell me what's good and what's bad, people to help with the wiki, and people to run spheres (I'm not even sure what the various spheres will be just yet, but I'm pretty sure that type of organization will still end up being needed). And of course there's going to have to be a bunch of building to be done.