Posts made by Thenomain

@faraday said in Identifying Major Issues:

While there are absolutely players willing to run their own stuff (and I love them), they are the minority. There are also a lot of players who are gunshy about participating in PrPs.

Because we have made this not fun. That was my point. The PrP system was created to put some mechanical controls on things that players were doing anyway but complained that the rewards people could invent for themselves were unfair to others who ran similar plots but didn't get the same goodies.

PrPs came from D&D and Shadowrun games, where systems monetizing the risk/reward cycle were much more researched; I had a lot of push-back when explaining why PrPs wouldn't work for WoD because they obviously worked so well elsewhere.

Before the introduction of the PrP to WoD games, people would run whatever, whenever. Even I, one of the worst STs you could have the misfortune of running something, could feel comfortable saying, "Hey, let's go out into the swamp and kill some ROUSes!" Now? Forget it. I'm not sticking my hand in the blender of bureaucracy.

My last few games have all but begged players to run PrPs and empowered them to do a lot, but the number of people actually doing so is tiny.

Quelling the willingness of people to do things on their own didn't happen overnight, either. You can't expect people to trust you personally when the experience has been quite different elsewhere.

As much I abhor a certain member of the Arx staffing team, they lead by doing, not by telling people to do, and that's the other problem with PrPs; it was designed so that staff didn't have to be involved in the storytelling portion of the game.

So PrPs:

1. Tacitly turned RP into a monetized activity
2. Turned the reward system of doing things into a bureaucracy
3. Removed staff from a key position of running of their own game

No, I don't believe that "The Players" are at fault. It seems like blaming Millennials for being poor; reversing cause and effect. I don't buy it.

@Ataru said in Fading Suns 2017:

@HelloProject If you play Fremen yes.

Gordon Fremen?

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Look, just start building the game and invite people to play while it's being built. It will either explode in popularity, or just explode. Either way means that you either didn't waste any time or didn't waste too much time, and everyone got some well-needed fun in the process.

If I had the minimal time and interest, I would open a game with a base system code and leave the players to it. (I have three base concepts that can do this.) However, the only people I've known to successfully do this are writers, and willing to use the game itself as a canvas to write a part of a story and let other people write their part and let it snowball.

Who cares about system if people are playing with it? System can only influence people so far, and god knows that people will put up with it if they see other people doing the same.

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Edit, because the above post happened when I was writing this one.

Players do not need to be spoon fed. Players need to be comfortable in their agency, and we especially in the WoD realm have been beating that agency out of them for decades. Partially because people need to play the game in front of them, partially because we got concerned with people getting rewards. Look at most WoD games struggling with PrPs. First we said that the player must build their own fun from the ground up, then we said that they can't do it without extreme vetting. And that's ignoring the bitchy behavior of manipulative and controlling staff.

Players know exactly what they want, they just don't know when they are going to step on some hyperactive staffer's indignant power-trip.

Players don't need to be spoon fed, we just turned all their fun to Mush.

@Jaded said in Good TV:

Yeah it is on Fox. I do not trust them with sci-fi shows of any sort.

X-Files started on Fox. There was a War of the Worlds TV series that was surprisingly good, too.

Just being a pedantic nerd, there. On the whole, yeah.

@Rook

Yeah, those games DOTA and Portal 2 were one-offs that never really went anywhere.

Valve is Valve. Valve will do what Valve does. I doubt we'll never see Half-Life 3, but not because Valve is too busy making a ton of money doing something else. Gabe could simply not be interested in it anymore. Its time may have past, like people still dreaming of a new season of Firefly, which should never happen.

@Paris said in Fate's Harvest BETA Live (Full Open Soon):

@Thenomain said in Fate's Harvest BETA Live (Full Open Soon):

Partially to piss off @Wretched,

Two words: mariachi hobs.

One word: Wings.

When Fallout came out, it was a side project that everyone expected to fail, so the creators had fun with it, took their time. When it was popular, the developer stepped in and started making demands. This happened with Dragon Age 2. This happened with Knights of the Old Republic 2. This happened during Vampire Bloodlines. Big name developers have to keep the lights on, and so they're going to push for only the most successful projects.

Hare Brained Schemes may not be the best studio, but I will buy anything they do with the word "Shadowrun" on it because they're trying new and interesting things. I haven't played through Wasteland 2, but I sure as hell Kickstarted it because I know that the authors are creative and care about what they're doing.

Bethesda just doesn't get Fallout. Bioware was gutted for their brand recognition. Numbers must be crunched. Bills must be paid.

Alas.

I'm thinking about recreating my seagull, homeless and filthy and fun, over here. Partially to piss off @Wretched, mostly because she's an enjoyable concept.

CofD has a system in combat where you must declare the purpose of the combat beforehand. If it has to do with death, you must roll and spend to maintain it.

WoD and CofD work best when you front load the challenges, so you know what modifiers to apply to this. It's really the only way to know what modifiers to apply to it.

It's not anybody's fault but their own if they don't want to live the life of modifiers outside of combat. Maybe people would only take social combat if it was actually combat, if moves had meaning.

@kitteh said in FS3:

@Thenomain said in FS3:
The trust thing I just think is ridiculous, to be blunt. Not that I disbelieve it, but... if you don't trust staff, idk, what are you even doing and how is some text of pretend dice making you trust where you didn't before?

Trust in what, exactly? Trust is not a binary, and is not all inclusive.You can trust the system and not trust staff. I have done this so many times that it's not funny. I admit, doing it once isn't funny, but no less true.

The opposite can also be true. I can be trusted to code but god forbid someone ask me to lead or to create a playable game situation. I would probably not trust @EmmahSue to make an RPG system based on statistics, but I would run over most you (on my bike; I'm not mean) to play in a plot she's constructed.

Different people need different things to trust systems. Computer game programmers are aware of this, tho we end up with pretty shit games anyway because knowing what's important and knowing how to apply it is a huge leap.

@kitteh

I agree. Oh how I agree. But eventually you'll have to explain to someone what a "+1" means, and you'll have to find some kind of way to explain it. You have XP to spend, how do you know what to spend it on. You are building a situation for people to overcome, how do you decide what numbers to put where to make it challenging.

It works in cRPGs. I think it works in cRPGs because the game is balanced to a certain story. In MMOs, it's balanced because if you die trying something you have a lot of solid feedback and oh my god the analysis people do on these things is insane, and the time and effort put into coding these things are insane.

@The-Sands said in FS3:

Heck, even games like Dungeons and Dragons weren't actually developed by one person.

TSR was two people. Then four. Then ten. And by the time they could afford more, they couldn't make it any different. Oh they could, but then people would revolt and go somewhere else. By the time that WotC bought them (a board game company), TSR had tried other systems. And people kept coming back to D&D. The bad statistics was far from making it unpopular. Hell, around 3e/3.5, the games that were supposed to "fix" the bad math of D&D, some upstart company made Pathfinder and ate WotC/Hasbro's dessert. Not quite their lunch, but enough to continue to show that most people don't care about the math; they care how it feels.

So yeah, I know what it's like to be one person in a crowd shaking your nerd fist nerdingly. It's still a very interesting analysis.

I would absolutely love to see a mail system that takes 2-3 days to get the message to the other party. I would love to code the phone/text system so that you would occasionally not notice that you'd gotten a message for hours. Or force people to report what the time is that they made the call or text, and the person at the other end be asked what time it is there to see if they receive it at that moment.

However, this shit is annoying as fuck. If you want to expand @mail, then by all means pick up BrandyMail (and only BrandyMail) and make it annoying as fuck. You know, that kind of annoying that will have me turn it off when I make a character there, because I find that kind of thing annoying as fuck.

We also used to do commands like this:

call bob on phone
speak into the phone, "Hello."
tip the messenger 3p
open door north
set language to french
say "Hello."

We moved away from this because it's not immersive; it's distracting. About 15 years ago we tested the system to see how we can cut through the code and get to the RP.

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My rant is done. Of course dip whatever random-@emit-generator you want into the code as fits the mood and desire. A lot of my code allows hooks for it and should be easy to expand, especially the Dumb Phone Code. But when you get to the point where people are forced to register how their voice sounds so that you only get 'a deep and husky voice says...', or the cheerful and repetitive messenger @emit is bugging you in the middle of combat on top of a volcano, you'll know what I mean.

I am interested to see how large you can make this bonfire.

@The-Sands said in FS3:

@Thenomain You're not wrong there. Sometimes it just drives me crazy that game designers pay so little attention to their math.

Most RPG game designers are authors, a field not known to attract many people going for the sciences. Conversely, most of the best board game designers do have a strong grasp of statistics, or know how to fake it. Guess which field makes enough money to live on? (Hint, not RPGs.) I would hate to see an RPG designed solely by an expert statistician, but would forgive a badly mathed game made by an expert writer.

This reminds me of that one illustrator/designer that Google hired to help them fine-tune their brand. He quit after a few months because the engineers were arguing technicalities over various shades of blue.

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edit, because sloppy connection: @Faraday, consider instead mapping it out as an 'at least' graph. Those curves sure are wonky, but visually it'd be easier to understand. And probably still wonky. Probably.

@The-Sands said in FS3:

So I dug down a little bit more into the probabilities of FS3 and found something that I think exemplifies what happens when you design a challenge resolution system using a semi-arbitrary 'this sort of feels good' mechanism.

This just came to mind, not to discount anything anyone has said about this, but it'd be a shorter list to find a rolled RPG stat system where this isn't true. The rest of the analysis is deeply interesting but, yeah.

@Monogram said in Mass Effect: Andromeda: The Thread:

@Thenomain Oh, I've read quite some conspiracy theories on it so far.

It was put right there. If you put something right there, then not doing something with it, is digging up Chekhov's body and tent-pegging it with his own gun.

@Monogram

Protheans? No. Let's not be silly. Remnant and Kett.

@Ganymede said in Mass Effect: Andromeda: The Thread:

Would be nice if Lexi finally just asked Drack out or something.

It would have been nice if they closed any storyline, really. It's hard to tell how much was laziness, how much was being rushed, and how much was being saved for the sequel. I mean, you have one mysterious disappeared race and you have another race with similar ideals but opposite in application. How can you miss the opportunity to mess with the player's mind about this?

Ffffft.

Someone tell Anna that I will help when I can if she needs to piece things back together.

@Bobotron said in Vampire the Masquerade 5th Edition Info:

@Thenomain
Mostly just notating that death can come a lot more easily in this than it seems to in standard VtM. At least, based on my experience with multiple attackers vs. a vampire in TT.

Then I will remain a little flabbergasted. I would be surprised in any RPG not about gods where a starting-level character can take on 9 guys with assault rifles and expect to get out alive, unless it was one at a time via close-quarters stealth methods.

My experience with Vampire in TT is that starting characters are a little squishy. Freaky.