In Changeling the Lost (1e), Hedgespun Rainments give you a social benefit in courtly situations.
There are many kiths and powers based on social interaction.
Yet I almost never saw anyone use them.
I don't know if this is because there's a tacit "no social rolls against PCs", there's a more obvious "if I do this people will drag this into a headache that I can avoid", or what.
But they're there.
Details are there.
Social tools are there.
It just doesn't click, so people don't use them.
@Tempest said in General Video Game Thread:
Any chance Borderlands 3 isn’t going to suck?
I know one thing that won't suck.
@ganymede said in Social Stats in the World of Darkness:
@derp said in Social Stats in the World of Darkness:
At the end of the day, the rules don't get taken seriously because of desuetude, essentially. It's not that the rules aren't there, it's just that people have gotten so used to being able to break them that they have come to expect they will be ignored.
Let's suppose for a moment that the rules will always be enforced by staff when needed.
Would people still use social stats to resolve conflict? Why or why not?
No.
I wish I played on Return to Kingsmouth to see how they approached these things. I've seen a few people in this thread complain how interweaving RP into a combat scene is clunky and they'd skip it if they could, and that is so far the best we can do with WoD/CoD combat.
In Tabletop, combat is fun. Rolling to hit and the GM deciding your abysmal result meant you stepped on the hidden yellow spore and now you're charmed and your fellow players have to figure out a way to get you out of combat without killing you? FUN.
WoD Combat on Mu*s are tedious. Gone is the era of a single scene taking two days to resolve (I am not kidding, peeps), but damn it's still involved and you still have to wait ten minutes for your turn and guh.
So maybe the comparison is not the best one, at least not for me.
I'm glad they're still writing for the immersive universe.
I can wait for it to get out of Epic.
@faraday said in Social Stats in the World of Darkness:
Just to be clear - I wasn't saying people would leave the game en masse or refuse to play there. I just think folks avoid interacting with systems unless they either a) buy into them or b) are forced to use them.
And this is why people would, because of Ganymede's primary conceit:
@ganymede said in Social Stats in the World of Darkness:
Let's suppose for a moment that the rules will always be enforced by staff when needed.
For this my "no" was heavily defined as "because this sounds like combat". If it's not like combat, but some other conflict system that's quick and easy, then I can see people using it.
I really can see people using it anyhow, but for the sake of discussion I wanted to start with the pushback and "no, but also yes" doesn't have the same impact.
I agree with a lot of what @Derp says, but for the WoD crowd I also believe in what I said.
Haven't played.
Not willing to give money to Epic Games.
No logical reason. It may be overridden at the first sale.
But that screen-shot reminds me of everything I love about Borderlands.
What I like about @faraday's concept is that it adds Mudlike elements to our Mushlike expectations, which is something we should be embracing. As @Misadventure said once long ago (on Wora): We should make the computer do the hard things that we can't do in RPGs.
But as usual, I'm going to play That Makes Me Think Of:
Back on AetherMux, the entire conflict resolution system went something like this (I can't remember the exact inputs so ignore this):
<thenomain types>: +compare strength+weaponry=faraday dexterity+dodge
<game replies>: Thenomain is trying to compare his <foo> to your <bar>.
<faraday types>: +compare/accept thenomain
<game replies>: Faraday narrowly succeeds by 15%
<faraday poses>: The claymore comes down slowly on Faraday's side,
cutting through her coat and drawing a red line across her skin.
There's $300 she won't see again in a hurry.
There was no limitation to what could be compared, no hard system, just what the players decided was appropriate for the situation.
The game never rolls anything; it just compared values. It helped that the stats were all 0-50 allowing for a decent percentage comparison, but the concept is there: The game didn't have a barely-nonbinary success/fail system. You compared results and decided what that meant.
People used this for social interactions all the time.
This was a fairly consent-heavy game, but everyone knew this going in and people would lose the small things.
Bonus points: Link game to Metacritic.
Not the worst game I've played, I'm sure, but it's the first one that came to mind. Played with a friend and it was so just too bad to be forgettable. The writing was tepid, the acting was mediocre, the set-pieces were barely sets and hardly challenges, the combat came and went like a nervous virgin.
One of the things I appreciated about Aether was there was no randomness. You decided what '15% better' meant. Almost everyone recognized that the person on the other end of the screen was also involved and added that to their pose.
As people here were talking about "why don't people talk about this OOC?", here's a system where exactly that happened, and was quick.
Final review of Divinity: Original Sin, Enhanced Edition.
Not the best writing in the world, but holy shitballs is it fun with others.
70 hours. Not even 2/3rds of the achievements. Check it out.
@goldfish said in Unlikeable, incompetent, and inactive: Can these characters work in an MU?:
So I'm sitting here, wondering to myself: Can I make an unlikeable character?
Yes. @Coin does this all the time without even trying.
Can I make a low activity one?
No. I mean, yes, but when the chips are down you have to involve the character in events. If those events are "hanging out at the bar" then you're already active.
This discussion happened at work yesterday:
Person A: I'm out of Blizzard.
Person B: Yeah, me too. Look at all this stuff Riot doing!
Person A: Umm...
@admiral said in I owe a lot of people some apologies.:
@thenomain ...what? I don't recall ever posting that. I'd appreciate you not abusing your position. Thank you.
And I'd appreciate you not trolling the boards, but since I have no position here and you're not likely to not add sprinkles of drama wherever you go, I'll just keep on keeping on.
You're...um...welcome?
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@tempest said in I owe a lot of people some apologies.:
So, can I get a tl;dr on this? I got bored at like page 1.5
Surreality felt bad after she learned that the things she thought about people weren't true, and went on to apologize publicly.
People responded, as they do on boards.
At first it was a mix of support but mellowed out into a frantic, "What the heck happened?" It didn't take too long for people to out what the heck happened. Some calls for administrative correction of the underlying issue. Etc. etc.
Everything since then is just community chit-chat. Like a near 100% of the threads on this board it's nowhere near its initial purpose. It's a thing we do. You probably got the gist on page one.
How do people decide how much text is a "page" anyway? Soapbox has always been infinite scroll for me.
Are Troika peeps involved in Bloodlines 2?
And we should take Bethesda with an albeit mild caution from this point forward.
I sincerely hope there’s enough out there that nobody needs to be the “go to”. We need people trying different but interesting things, as many as possible.
I tried for a long time to not be Thenomain, but that turned out poorly.
@Arkandel said in General Video Game Thread:
@Thenomain A review I read mentioned its single-player campaign is too short. Do you think that's the case?
Still working through it, but it depends if we're considering it an RPG or an...Action-Adventure? What kind of game is The Outer Worlds?
I'm now putting it solidly in the Bioshock/Borderlands camp with stronger RPG elements. I am enjoying all of the world-building and the conversations and even the RPG system is pretty nice (though I accidentally agreed to a concussion; this will be interesting), but at its core it's a Dungeon Crawler. (Not quite a Looter-Shooter.)
My euphoria from the first scenario has worn off as the game is trying to be more generic, and I can see how there isn't as much depth as there is from a typical Fallout, though I will contend it's still much deeper than Fallout 4 (but not as deep as Far Harbor).
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I started paying more attention to the messages Outer Worlds is trying to pass on and I think the tone just doesn't quite nail it. The ambient music is much more Mass Effect moody than Borderlands quirky. The world-building is neither as dark nor as satirical as it could have been. There isn't enough Fallout for me in Outer Worlds.
A lot of reactions I've been reading seem based on the marketing which always has me waffling because people need to stop being so trusting of marketing. I've brought that up in this thread already, and will continue to warn people: Marketing is there to make a product desirable, hopefully though honest means but this is a video game. Even big companies like Blizzard can't manage to get marketing right.
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I'm enjoying it for $1. If I had $60 to drop on a video game sight unseen then I wouldn't be complaining because I'd be rolling 'round in the dolla dolla bills y'all.
I guess my message is: Be better consumers.
Also: Don't know if it's worth $60 yet. Will review more when I get there and when I better know what $60 means nowadays.
That's fair. I think searching for homogeneity is a mug's game; it's traditionally been the GM's job to make things interesting for the players, or as @Sparks says, the systems are there to facilitate RP, not replace it.
However, I have upped my concern to: It looks like the players are playing an incomplete game. I have no problem with this. But as a defense, it makes this entire thread moot, academic for the sake of academics.
I also have no problem with this, but if true it does mean that Arx staff should probably stick to this as their one and only defense of Arx, if they feel that Arx needs defended at all.
Explained, sure. Defended? Not at all. We are, after all, blowing in the wind, and anyone who doesn't realize that now is probably just fooling themselves.
System design is fun, even when futile. So onward, to system design theory!
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edit: Er, that said, it's still staff's job to try and make all sheet designs as fun as reasonable.
edit 2: By "explained", I mean if you lot want to explain the theory behind a certain system design, cool. I'm interested in design theory, and tend to prod at its weaknesses in the White...ish Hat Pentest manner. If you want input, you're already getting flooded with it. If not? Yeah, not bringing it up might be best.
@Auspice said in General Video Game Thread:
Outer Worlds needs more Doc Brown
Oh thank god someone else said that, because the number of characters that are almost another character keeps bugging me.
And @sparks is what "elegant" looks like.
Staffers and wannabe-staffers, take notes.
The Outer Worlds: A 5-Second Review
Didn't hate it, didn't love it. Wished there was more...everything.
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The Outer Worlds: A 5-Second Follow-Up
Wait, Ashley Burch voiced for it? 10/10! Game of the Year! Wooooo!