@lithium said in Alternate Game Systems:
@ominous Sounds intriguing but I don't really see /how/ to efficiently convert that to mu code much at all.
Zones or parent rooms. Both would fit the bill easily. What I don't see is how this would effect the entire world, unless you ran the deck-generation for each event/scene. I'd have to look at the system.
@auspice said in Mac OS Sierra Client:
You're stuck with Atlantis
That's like being stuck with ten million dollars cash, untaxed, that you can spend however you want, no strings attached.
@girlcalledblu said in Mac OS Sierra Client:
Perhaps someone who is savvy can just let me know how to change the input box so it's white with black text and that text is a different font than the monospace of the output window?
If someone else doesn't get to it shortly, I'll edit this to explain the process.
The point, however, was that it wasn't fun. It could have been, maybe, but it wasn't. I posit that if a game system explains how it's meant to be used then at least everyone is on the same page. The World of Darkness games have always held the position that you only use the systems when you feel like it, and if it doesn't fit the situation then do whatever you want to make it fit. I think most people who play WoD games subconsciously remember this, even if they are doing such annoying things like arguing whether or not you use Crafts or Science for explosives.
The official answer is, "Whatever you decide." This doesn't work for a Mu*, and I'm snobbily analyzing answers with that in mind. Apocalypse World has a very alternative way of playing games (and FreeMarket used a similar conceit), but if you dropped it straight into a Mu*, I doubt people would know what to do with it.
They sure as hell don't know what to do with Fate, even though it's a hell of an engaging system.
@lithium said in Alternate Game Systems:
Obviously there's some balancing to do here, but the biggest hangup with Fate not really working in a MU* environment is the reliance on Fate points to be 'cool'.
Mine is the vague yet absolute way that aspects can be interpreted. Each table can come up with their own standards; I'm not sure what a Mu* would do.
@lithium said in Alternate Game Systems:
I know a lot of people don't like it, but outside of Fate points themselves, I do think Fate actually works pretty well in this format, in my opinion.
Well, how do you think Fate could be tweaked to be Mu* friendly? What would you do? I like the system myself, so the more ideas the merrier.
@lithium said in Alternate Game Systems:
@thenomain I have not looked at them no, I have heard of them, being bandied about here but everyone who mentioned them always said they wouldn't translate well so I've never invested much time into them.
That's part of the problem: The only system that will translate well is a system made for the format. The only systems made for Mu*s are those in Mud-likes (including Evennia), Faraday's, and a few other smaller games like Aether.
I'd like to entertain that LARPs can also make the translation well, but the only game I know that tried was Sanguine Nobilis, and it could be easily argued that the game did as well as it did because of staff.
The point is that if you really want to innovate, you can't take a tabletop RPG system whole-cloth, but you can (and indeed should) take tips from them. It's advised in many fields that if you want to improve, see what other people have done. Vincent Baker has been thinking outside the box in RPGs for a very long time.
The tips I take from Apocalypse World are:
The second, perhaps even meaner and funnier thing our DM did to us:
To identify a magic item, the magic-user has to use it as intended, even fakely.
Our magic-user was an illusionist gnome. Just let those two words together sink in a little bit.
He tried on a hat, the GM said he didn't know what it was, and that was that.
What we didn't know that it was a Hat of Feeblemind. The gnome illusionist's intelligence was reduced to 3.
And the player kept playing a gnome who did outrageous and sometimes slightly random things, and stopped casting spells, and for at least three hours-long sessions nobody noticed. I think it was even longer.
As players, we were so very blind. So fun.
Meanest but funniest thing that the DM did to us:
AD&D 2nd Ed. No, that's not the mean part, shush.
We were playing a ... morally ambivalent group and at some point of clearing out a different group of morally ambivalent people for money, we ran across a girdle that was marked "girdle of giant strength", so my character put it on. Of course it was cursed, but it was a 50/50 thing; it only happened to be a girdle of gender change.
My character played up the "oh no now I'm a woman how horrible my life is now" because, well, c'mon we were role-playing being jerks with a common goal of making money. This wasn't the mean part.
Later on we heard tell of an island where demons were keeping a Lawful Good sword (probably a Holy Avenger) and we thought: You know, we would piss off so many Paladins if we went and grabbed this sword and sat on it. It was so obviously a Paladin trap, else a bunch of demons wouldn't be this obvious about it.
So we went and battled demons and demons and survived the craggy and slightly volcanic island. At the end we found the sword and freed it from its difficult imprisonment. Whatever AD&D called an angel appeared and said, 'Oh thank god, you freed me with it! Whatever you want is yours!' My character, of course, asked to be switched back to male.
Now here's the cruel and funny bit.
The angel was another demon. He didn't undo the curse, he just cast "Polymorph Other" and since my character agreed there was no save. The next minute he got affected by a Dispel Magic or a magic-dead zone, it wore off.
The angel was another demon. The sword was not a Holy Avenger but cursed to high heavens lowest hells. It gave some pretty nice bonuses but the user was at a decent risk to go berzerk. So we kept it.
What we didn't know was the sword was also intelligent and took over the free will of the fighter who was using it. We didn't much care until it started trying to kill us.
So we dropped it into a Bag of Devouring.
Much, much later, when we had all forgotten about it, it came back from the Astral Plane to get revenge.
So much fun.
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My thief kept the Bag of Devouring because hell, why give up a perfectly awesome cursed item? It sure helped us get rid of an otherwise impossible to destroy intelligent cursed sword.
I posted a response that got eaten by bad connection, unless it's going to appear while I'm typing this.
CF's magic system was based on the lay line, which worked in cycles, so it was thematic that you would not see a color/value combination until the deck was reshuffled.
There are board games where you won't see the card ever again, as well, mostly used as a way to either create tension in the decision-making process or so that you can bury the card and prevent another player from having it. The former is more interesting than the latter in most RPGs, but may also have an effect in a creative GM-less PvP system which almost all board and card games really are.
Otherwise I agree. A deck of cards as a dice system doesn't seem that interesting to me, though Fate Core sells one. Where it might be interesting is if the card is mixed with another effect, as mentioned above and/or a different thread, pressing that "limited decision" button. And...Fate Core sells one.
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It doesn't help that card-/deck-management code for Mu* is ugly and cumbersome.
(edit): It's not that you can't create a system that does the work for you and outputs, say: Either +3 or Carry Forward.
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That reminds me: @Lithium, have you ever looked into Apocalypse World or any of the many, many Powered by the Apocalypse games?
The main problem with them is they are designed for a small group at a table. I don't know how they'd scale, but I'd love to find out.
@faraday said in Alternate Game Systems:
@thenomain Yeah, on reflection it wasn't CF. It was some other system that used cards but didn't have a "hand". The cards were basically just "dice with memory".
One of the cooler concepts in CF that can be applied is the idea that magic is a limited resource that runs in cycles, so when you draw from a ley line you basically do not see that particular combination of suit/value from the magic deck until it gets re-shuffled.
A lot of board games run on this principle, too. In 7 Wonders or Terraforming Mars, you know that if you bury a particular card then that card is gone, forever. You can do it to prevent someone else from gaining its advantage.
I'm with you that as a replacement for dice, a deck of cards makes no sense, though Fate Core sells one. As a game mechanic with some other effect (c.f. 'ongoing effects' mentioned above or in another thread), it would make a lot of sense. And...Fate Core sells one.
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That doesn't stop the problem that card-and-hand-management code on a text game is ugly and awkward.
@faraday said in Alternate Game Systems:
Falkenstein is a card-based system with no agency, for example
I don't know what you mean by "agency" in this case, but it's more like a system where you roll a whole bunch of dice at the start of the scene and as the scene progresses you pick which die (only one) to aid you. You can only re-roll when you're out of dice.
To add a layer to that, if you use 4 different colored dice, and each skill has its color, you get a bonus if you match the die you use to the color of the skill.
So in a way, it's a randomized luck pool, plus one dimension.
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Now that I mention it with dice, I can imagine an interesting tabletop system.
Each skill has a die type.
At the start of an event, you roll one die per skill, regardless of the skill or the die.
Through the scene, you can use any die's result with any skill. If you match the die to the skill type, you get that die's value.
If you mis-match the die's type to the skill's type, something interesting happens. Depending on the deeper system, some examples are:
You'd keep the number of dice type down to a Castle Faulk "4 suits" and number of skills at about a WoD-level "8 per type". Say: 4, 6, 8, 10. (Drop the 12. It would cause far too many mismatches.)
This also assumes a WoD/CF/Fate-like assumption that you have access to skills even if they are at '0'.
The big drawback I can see here is that people would be rewarded hugely for keeping their character even, or put a disproportionate weight on Attributes in an Attr + Skill style system.
I still think it's worth some system-building.
(edit): The more I think about it, the more the "color" thing would be better. So if you have 3 Social (blue) skills and 4 Physical (red) skills, you roll 3 Social dice and 4 Physical dice. You can match a red die to a blue skill, but you'd be at a disadvantage or something else interesting would happen.
@faraday said in Alternate Game Systems:
@thenomain Yeah I did that too. Didn't help. But I'm glad it worked for you.
Well to be fair, doing it here is inviting criticism for the sake of criticism. If it was people on the game then eh, we do our best and we move on.
@faraday said in Alternate Game Systems:
"OK! The system now uses dice. Each rating rolls 1d8."
"Argh. I failed and I can't see the dice results. This system sucks."
I used to keep a brute-force randomization checking system so I could run it and post the results on the bboard. Faced with a myriad of numbers, most people accepted that the system was working as intended. Though say what else you want about WoD players, they accepted that they volunteered to play the system with eyes wide open. The downside of that is they tend to spend the rest of their days trying to game it for the outcome they think they deserve. So yeah, no system is perfect.
What the game didn't do was help people figure out how to play. My gaming group, who loved original Changeling for instance, absolutely hated the CF card system. They attempted things specifically to fail them so they could dump cards from their hand and force a re-draw. So.
@ganymede said in Potential Game / Temperature Read:
@auspice said in Potential Game / Temperature Read:
I approve of anything with cards (look I own like, 80+ decks okay).
But I'm not sure on the Victorian era setting.Then don't. It's just a setting. CF can really be applied to any time or place.
But cards are important. I think random PCs + random cards = fun and mayhem. Make it a wacky post-apocalyptic world where your enemies are robots, but not cool Cylons or deadly IG-88s, but instead WALL-Es. Nothing but WALL-Es.
Have you looked into the d20 version of Gamma World? The concept is that three other sci-fi-like realities crash into our own. It's very card-heavy for the powers, and the system is pretty generic d20 so probably can get tossed for something else.
Castle Falkenstein tried using cards, mainly for more of a LARP feel at the table, and enough people asked for dice mechanics that they came up with them.
Cards are fun to play with, fun to explore and look at, but on a text game they lose a lot of that. I coded a pretty decent visually stimulating text interface for FreeMarket RPG, which doesn't use a typical deck of cards but feels more like what would happen if you asked a board game creator to create a system for an RPG, and the nice thing about board games is that they almost never rely on a rules-master; the rules have to work on their own.
Or LARP systems. Why don't we use more of those? We are, effectively, a computer-aided LARP.
I personally think that a light-touch MUD system is good for the hobby, something where we realize that the entire game lives on a computer so why not let the computer do all the work. Push that "computer-aided" part further, and let the LARP part happen as it will.
I would also like to see how Mouse Guard RPG would work online, because while it's far more traditional, it hits lighter and easier notes, far more tabletop LARP than what we normally try.
I use multiple windows for spawns. It's about the only time I can use spawns; the 'new activity in spawn' distracts me way too much and makes me OCD about checking, which is half of what defeats the purpose of spawns to me.
The second thing that defeats the purpose of spawns to me is that outside of context, I have no idea what's going on.
@auspice said in Potential Game / Temperature Read:
There's a lot of reasons for me not to use WoD.
- I hate the current CG system out there for it. I hate it with a burning passion. I don't want to touch it. I hate using it to build characters. So if I used WoD? Oh look, back to having to code something from scratch.
Hi. My name is Thenomain and I code WoD related things for fun.
Well, not fun, but it’s second nature now.
This isn’t a reason to do it, but it’s a thing that I do. The reasons not to do WoD far outweigh the reasons to do it.
@ghost said in Yes! More Micro-transactions! (Activision, WB Games and EA appreciation thread):
@misadventure Short version: Activision patented a microtransaction+matchmaking system that will provide options for advertising in-game for items/purchases that require hard currency, and then the matchmaking system will purposefully pit players who opt-in/buy-in against players who don't.
At least they patented it so it’s less likely to be used by anyone else.