Posts made by Thenomain

There is no such thing as "proof" on Mu*s. I thought that we were beyond this.

Coming back from the dead is a huge spec-fiction trope. Also a huge video game trope. It's honest to the meta game rules, so it will probably only come up in argument about a game's internal consistency versus its external consistency. That's where I see it.

It's also not rare in RPG rules when they want to talk about that character death issue.

@Arkandel

For instance I might want to play a professional boxer but have no interest in having scenes around him sparring, working out, having actual fights

Then you shouldn't be playing a boxer.

Let me clarify: Most tabletop systems are about extraordinary people doing extraordinary things. If you are playing a boxer and your contribution to these extraordinary situations has nothing to do with boxing, then yes, I'm going to say you are playing your own character wrong at worst, that you don't get to increase your boxing skill at best.

Most tabletop systems don't award XP for downtime, and it's only the skill-based games I've seen that give GM the power to say "no" to spending. Really, the GM can say "no" to anything, but would be a complete jerk to do so.

Now, I'm talking in tabletop terms because the systems we're talking about were designed for tabletop. The situations that you're talking about are unique to Mu*s, and I generally think that you're smart enough to come up with some ideas that help transition from the tabletop to online. You don't, mind you, so you sound like you're shying at flies or making mountains out of molehills.

This is the preface to the following: WoD gives XP for showing up. You were there. You participated. How you take it from here is going to depend, but I prefer to think that showing up on a Mu* at all is worthy of a cursory thanks. If you want to use that cursory thanks to up skills you never use, then go for it. Call it a part of downtime.

RfK apparently folded the 'participation' part up into what kind of RP you were engaged in. Weighing one over another is smart. Hard to quantify and probably harder to qualify, but I like it. It's akin to a GM saying, 'Well this was a light day, so only 1 xp for everyone.' This is part of the table's rules and a right that's been given to the GM, sometimes explicitly. Without a GM, we need to find other solutions, and this one hits the right notes for what the RPG was going for.

This post has no grand conclusion. I've lost my train of thought, so I'm ending it there.

edit: @Misadventure asked me:

Did you miss that Arkandel was saying he didn't want to play up the practice/training side of being a boxer?

If this was the point, then I missed it like a skull-shaped meteorite misses the Earth, and Arc and I are in agreement.

What I thought was being said was, "I shouldn't have to play a boxer to raise boxing stats." I like my response to that—if you want to raise boxing then you better damn well have boxed somewhere along the line of the character's adventures—even if it's one-hundred percent inappropriate to what was actually said.

@Sunny said:

Has seriously no one ever played in an experience limited campaign in tabletop?

Though you don't answer your own question, I'll still take it that you have?

I'll answer this question in a slightly different way: I have never, outside of Mu*s, been sitting on XP that I thought was useless for my character. I have never had a GM tell me that I couldn't level, that I couldn't spend XP. I have had and followed occasionally the advice many skill-games give that you can't spend it on a stat that you haven't been using, as a way to give the GM control over saying "no" when someone wanted to buy a lot of melee when all they've been using in combat is guns.

The best GM I've ever had ran most of our AD&D2 campaigns, of which I sat through two over the course of five-ish years. For the second one, he said, "Okay, for this game I'll be giving out less XP but more rewards." He was tired of the system and tweaked it for us. It was an entirely different campaign, and I know he was the best GM I've ever seen because it did not for one instant feel like a grind. We were spoiled with things to do.

But there's one, and in the end I think the only important thing, that makes a Tabletop different from a Mu*: Control. Who controls what and at what level. On a Mu*, you don't have someone keeping an eye out for pacing and involvement, and therefore XP really isn't as reflective of what's going on.

(You didn't think that I could bring this back to the topic, did you?)

Eldritch uses the 2xp/week auto-award setup that I have wanted to try for years, but as we've seen from the examples here it may not be reactive enough to what's going on in the game. This is, I admit, the first time I've seen people complain that they're getting power without doing anything for it. For me, this validates one of my favorite play styles and I'm glad to see it as a pattern. For everyone else, this is pretty interesting feedback.

Which brings me back to the question asked: Yes, I have played in an experience-limited game, and even designed one that was meant to be more experience-limited, but I don't think that's an interesting answer. I don't think it gets us anywhere in thinking about what XP is and does, and what works and what doesn't.

In this entire thread I'm most interested in RfK's approach, which sounds like a mix of being rewarded for logging in and separately rewarded for doing things. I don't think I've seen a system that determines "are you logged in and also doing things" that has made me comfortable that this is actually what it's doing.

Finally made my way through Guardians of the Galaxy:

Better than I was expecting, wasn't as good as everyone said it was. Seen worse.

@Sunny said:

@Thenomain said:

I can't think of a single RPG that has both XP as a limiter at both ends of the stat. Curtail, guide, discourage, but never cutting you off from your own character sheet.

Any MMORPG on the internet.

What? If I get the XP, I'm not barred from doing things at that level of the XP on any MMO I've ever played. Mind you, those are limited to World of Warcraft, City of Heroes, and Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic.

Although, since you're starting to post quite a lot like this:

@Sunny said:

@Derp said:

@Sunny said:

To keep the game at a power level that fits with the campaign that I will be running while still allowing a very generous number of ways to earn experience.

This is not going to do what you think it's going to do.

Yes, it actually is.

... then you might want to stop posting. The yuh-huh/nuh-uh thing is just about as useful as it sounds.

To quote an earlier post:

@Sunny said:

I don't think going into it in depth here is helpful to anyone [...] I'm prone to rambling [...]

Take this wise man's advice.

@Sunny said:

Once I have everything organized and presentable I'll toss it up on the forum for you to look at.

Well my comment wasn't entirely for you. I don't disagree that finding something else for people to wibble their XP on is an interesting goal, it's just not WoD's goal. It's Fate Core's goal. It's D&D 3/3.5's goal. (Spending XP for magic items.) I'm sure there are other games in which you can spend your XP more on than character advancement.

So let's go ahead and make it WoD's goal. Why not; bringing in elements from other games to potentially solve a problem is a good thing. Think outside the box.

This doesn't answer the question: Why a spend limit? I can't think of a single RPG that has both XP as a limiter at both ends of the stat. Curtail, guide, discourage, but never cutting you off from your own character sheet.

I'm not asking you to defend the choice (maybe explain it), but there's enough chatter that the idea is good and ... no, no it's not.

I suppose I don't understand the benefit of this system. Without knowing what is transitory, or what extra things XP can be spent on, it's a discussion about how to make stat systems in general. Even with more information, it may become so house-rule dependent that it would be useful in a terribly focused setup that I, for example's sake, will be calling Sunny's World of Darkness.

And no, I don't think this is similar to any old house rule setup. Changing how XP works is a fairly deep system change.

@Sunny

yearly spend cap

For the sake of St. Gygax, why? If you don't want people to spend XP, don't give it to them. Why complicate things by throttling both ends?

The only spend throttles I remotely agree with are increasing costs for linear gains (how WoD used to do it) and spend timers to space out the spending, and I can be on the fence about both sometimes.

So what in Planescape is this meant to accomplish?

@Arkandel said:

The Warcraft trailer looks really good!

This has to be one of the more generic displays of moderately good special effects budget I've seen since Lost In Space. The best I can say about it is that it doesn't look offensive, unlike Prince of Persia or (shudder) the D&D movie. I thought the Hitman movie was good enough; worth a dollar movie price. WoW The Movie looks, from this trailer, to be heading the same direction.

For a video-game tie-in movie, this is really good, indeed.

@tragedyjones

Smoke breaks. Even if you don't smoke.

@tragedyjones

Yes, yes it should.

So nice.

You also might want to check if all the Mu*s are using the same database. From inside the game, type (and be prepared for spam from):

think sql( show tables )

You should get 51 wiki tables and whatever else you use. If you get more than, say, 60 tables, you're sharing a database.

I don't know anyone on Third Hosting to check this out, but I bet you're fine there. MUSHPark is not to be trusted, as this is the hosting service I discovered this on.

Again, this isn't the fault of any other game, but something to keep an eye out for.

@Derp said:

I mean, yes, the amount of xp gain on Eldritch seems to run a bit on the high side, but if we were to make it lower, people would scream and bitch that the 'dinosaurs' are outdoing them in everything (which is kind of laughable since we don't actually have any 'dinosaurs').

Except that the system is designed for catch-up. Dinos gain auto-XP slower and slower. We could easily tweak the numbers and still give newbs a chance. We took Reach's system and made it more flexible.

I would not be unwilling to try RfK's system, tho.

@EmmahSue said:

Making PC actions matter is a huuuuge-mongous deal. I certainly plan on saying over and over again (until folks are sick of it) that I'll run with anything done in-game. If you want to take a knife to the local faction leader and stand over his body shouting about how you're the king of the mountain, let's play that out! If you want to create a kraken mid-air and drop it on a nephandi's head in broad daylight, we'll play that out too!

Apocalypse World, p 108:

There are a million ways to GM games; Apocalypse World calls for one way in particular. This chapter is it. Follow these as rules. The whole rest of the game is built upon this.

AGENDA
• Make Apocalypse World seem real.
• Make the players’ characters’ lives not boring.
• Play to find out what happens.

#3 is probative here.

@WTFE said:

Theme ≠ plot.

Metaplot ≠ plot.

So.

Must. Fight. Urge.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0MW9Nrg_kZU

That makes it even more imperative that you help this poor turtle stuck in the desert.

@tragedyjones played d20-Questions:

Do/did you play in a tabletop game now or in the past?

Yes.

What games(s) do/did you play as tabletop?

In no particular order: Dungeons & Dragons (blue box, aka version 1; purple box; AD&D versions 1, 2, and 3), Shadowrun, Gurps (for about a week), Cyberpunk (2013 and 2020), Paranoia (2nd or 3rd ed, the first one where they stopped trying to be correct about light waves and just said red lasers and armor < orange lasers and armor), WoD Vampire (v1), WoD Werewolf (v1), WoD Mage (v1, but only for about a week), WoD Changeling (v1), Toon, Teenagers from Outer Space, Castle Falkenstein, I am absolutely sure I'm forgetting something here.

Are/were you the GM/ST/DM at your tabletop?

I did for a short while with WoD Werewolf game with a bit of Vampire crossover. People seemed to enjoy it, but otherwise I am horribly bad at STing. Exception: TFoS and Paranoia. People did seem to enjoy my one-shot chaos.

Would you tabletop if you had the opportunity?

Only if I can come and go without negatively affecting others.

Do you have the opportunity but choose NOT to tabletop?

No.

Misc

Why don't you help the turtle?

Both fallcoast.org and lightsoutrp.com are forwarded to thirdhosting. They probably live on the same machine but different ports. I bet if you tried to connect to lightsoutrp.com 2009 you would get Fallcoast.

edit: Yup, that happens. I doubt there is anything either of you can do without Third Hosting's help, but it is not malicious.