Best posts made by Three-Eyed Crow

@Ganymede said in Where's your RP at?:

See, TGG was fun because it was fast-paced, and there was a high chance of death. It made success feel more successful. I get that. But what if death was optional? What if the point was to win or lose a battle, with consequences based on the win or loss, rather than death? What if the risk were more "global"?

On RfK, if you lost a political gamble, you didn't necessarily die. You probably owed some favors and were constantly worried about getting killed. But you were still in the game, and could claw your way back up. So, you lost the battle, but you don't lose your investment (entirely).

I think this is 100% the right track.

Because TGG was designed to more or less follow actual history (we could not kill Hitler), @EUBanana kept the stakes small-scale. Your squad was just one little part of the evac from Dunkirk, or Winter War in Finland, or any number of battles in WW1, but your individual actions mattered a hell of a lot. You could save your buddy! Or you could stumble into an enemy and get your buddy killed! You could win and lose grid-space 'territory' in what was meant to misrepresent a little section of the larger war effort.

I think you're right that it wasn't the risk that made it bracing, it was the meaningful stakes which that risk represented. I guess this circles back to investment (if you don't care about your buddy, you will not be invested in a scene in which he lives or dies). I definitely think there are other ways to create that than just a high body count (I find the idea pretty damn interesting).

I don't think it's a bad idea and really like it in concept. It relies on someone willing to be a central organizer for it, and for that person not to be insane (I seriously think OGR/Gateway might still be a viable thing is Ra hadn't been the one to take it over when that all happened), but that's not insurmountable and I think it's worth doing.

I have a preference for sci-fi and historical games. I've played Battlestar and original themed games the most out of anything on that list, I guess, but feel like that's more what's out there than what I'm necessarily looking for. And Star Wars, though I generally have issues with the 'grid includes a thousand planets and is split into dark and light side factions' that Star Wars games seem to favor (there are a couple out there right now not doing this that I'm interested in).

I do Lords and Ladies on occasion (trying Arx now). I genre-hop a lot, I think, though I have no interest in WoD, which is the 200 lb. MU* gorilla.

It's not MSB that makes me not want to staff anymore. It's players. But THAT'S a whole different topic and one that just leads to me hating on people for behavior that's down to the unavoidable price tag of dealing with humans.

Anyway.

I like that there's a place where people who MU can discuss MUing. The community is very fragmented. WoD players don't talk to non-WoD players. You get even smaller splinter factions, like people who are ALL transformers/mech games. Or people who only play MUX and don't play other codebases. I'm not sure MSB does as good a job as could be done to be an open forum for all different types of M* gamers (like, there's active MOO RP that's not that different than the game we talk about, but doesn't touch here at all), but it's what we got and I appreciate it for that.

I keep vaguely wanting to run a small group online TT with the "Leverage" RPG system (really, it's a thing): http://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/85727/Leverage-Roleplaying-Game

Dunno if it'd work for bigger groups, but a buddy of mine ran it for a few of us and (before that game dispersed, as games do) it was a lot of fun.

@Scissors said in Why do you play? (Or not.):

And honestly, even in my college days I never understood the appeal of getting uproariously drunk together as a social event, which seems to be the most common party option available. I just feel it's better to do something creative with people with similar interests.

Same, honestly. I come from a family with looooooooooooooooooots of alcoholism going on, so binge drinking culture grossed me out. This is probably why I got more into MU*ing while in college, along with the other obvious gateways like a more active campus nerd culture than my high school had, and part-time computer lab job.

I don't actually think forums like this are particularly good places to get general feedback on broad theme-building concepts. I find the write-up pretty interesting, but that's just due to my tastes (and my want for off-brand fantasy, not just another L&L game). Ideally, you do theme-building brain-storming with a few close friends/possible potential staffers or potential alpha players, then bring stuff to a larger group once you've got some concrete ideas you're committed to.

ETA: Although, for serious, don't split up a playerbase on your new game.

I've never felt like most games that calls themselves "consent" or "non-consent" were hard-and-fast just those things, outside a couple of entirely free-form consent games I've played on. Most consent games I'm familiar with have some concept of Actions/Consequences. Most non-consent games I've played on are OK with players negotiating what happens among themselves and settling things without dice in certain - though not all - situations. I find those terms more useful in sussing out the culture staff is trying to instill more than anything else. They can be applied in variable ways and to variable degrees, and that's as it should be as far as I'm concerned.

What most dramas centered on persistent criminal environments have in common (someone mentioned "Sons of Anarchy" in another thread, the first show that came to mind for me is "The Wire," where the cop and criminal characters interacted semi-regularly, but there are a handful of other good models) is that they put their criminal characters within an organization that supports ongoing crime'ing. Your crime boss will get you a lawyer to find the technicality to get you off on. Your low-level enforcer friends will make NPC/guest character witnesses disappear. Your mole inside the police department will tamper with evidence for you, and your crooked politician will make sure the crusading prosecutor and/or judge are dissuaded from doing anything about you. Crime is dangerous, and if you don't have protection from the societal rules erected against it, you won't last long.

There's very little care taken with setting up a criminal infrastructure, in my experience. Also, players want to play lone wolf criminals which, in reality, probably will get arrested and/or killed fairly quickly. And in fiction (since this isn't reality we're talking about), can't interact with anyone else and aren't very interesting. Lone Wolf Anythings suck, but they're particularly unsustainable if they're criminals imo.

That's a long TS file and is the kind that just makes me shake my head. Long TS files tend to do that, because it twigs my, 'If you're spending this much time explaining Tinyfucking, you must really care about Tinyfucking' light in my brain. Which is never a positive for me.

But I get that people from vastly different game cultures than me think it's necessary. Mostly it depresses me about other players. Do whatcha got to do.

I generally use opposed rolls for one-on-one sparring and the like on FS3 games (opposed rolls are actually one of my favorite aspects of Fara games). I don't think the +combat is suited for everything, though for what it is suited for, I think it does it well. It made learning to GM large combats on BS Cerberus pretty painless (I did some player GMing before I was a staffer there, and my experience player-side made me more sure I could handle it), and I thought it worked well for small group combat on X-Factor, even if the mutant powers still had to be +roll'd and up to some GM discretion.

@kitteh said in FS3:

OK, you're actually worse than me

Yes, I am. I'm playing somebody who was a civvie a year ago and used to fly cruise ships. Her stats are not uber. But. Calliope has Just OK stats and is the first Raptor pilot to make ace in the squadron, iirc. I show up and RP and have fun with her, which is why that is the case. I do not feel horrifically crippled. I'm telling the story I want to tell.

Also, I understand how the ruling attributes work and will totally own that she's optimized there, but that doesn't feel like twinking I need to guilt myself for too much.

@Auspice said in FS3:

There will be days you are Awesome. There will be days you are Not.
Check out Charlie's sheet sometime. Charlie should, arguably, be one of the best shots on the game re: firearms. She's meant to be. She's a sniper.
And then some of you saw how my dice treated me in that shooting competition. Even spending a luck point to reroll, she came out near the bottom. If I hadn't spent that luck point? She would've been the worst.

Stats are weird like this. On my deeply mediocre Raptor pilot, I'm chill as fuck during combat scenes. I hit things, it's a cool little surprise! I don't, whelp, I don't expect to most of the time, but I'm not too fussed about it. Meanwhile, on Arx right now I play a veteran combat tank, and dice rolls stress me like whoah, because I'm not supposed to suck. I have solid combat dice and usually don't, but those fails get in my brain. It's been interesting playing these characters at the same time, as they're both action-oriented, but the effect of their action scenes on me OOC is quite different.

I think a lot of what's being talked around in this thread comes down to player psychology, which you can't 'correct' mechanically.

@kitteh said in FS3:

Re Supress: Oh, I thought people were saying that when you had multiple people firing at at a target it was automatically causing some degree of suppression or whatever, outside of the specific action. I've seen the Raptor ECM thing, although I assumed that was Raptor specific.

Iirc you can suppress with any weapon. In a Viper or with a gun, you'd be adding 'covering' fire probably most ICly (not necessarily trying to hit the thing, but distract it/fire in its general area). Or however you want to pose it. One of the things I like about FS3 is that it's fairly simple in terms of feedback and I can pose what I'm doing with a degree of freedom. If you're expecting it to tell you (or the GM) exactly what to pose, I suspect we just want VERY different things out of our dicerolls.

ETA: Can the GM not grab a +combat/log anymore? That was useful as hell. I'm a fan! It should continue to be a thing!

@ThatGuyThere
That's how it works now, iirc. ECM suppression (and other kinds of suppression) fucks with the enemy's ability to hit things (I actually don't feel like the Raptors in series acted as spotters for the Vipers shots, but more as sonar/radar because they had more advanced detection systems and could sense things from farther away - once the target was THERE it was up to Lee and Starbuck to hit it - but this is getting into the weeds).

The GM can already add a positive modifier to someone's roll if they're doing something that seems to warrant it (or if something in general is going on that seems to warrant it), and you can take a round to aim (which also adds to your roll). Idk. There's a lot the +combat system is capable of right now, and it's up to the players involved to work cooperatively with the GM to utilize it (and for the GM to be on top of what's going on in action scenes and make appropriate limitations). It doesn't always get used. I'm somebody who usually likes to keep things simple, so I don't fuss to much with it, but the capability of fussing is there.

I also think if someone is doing something dumb-ass IC, they should become easier to hit, just like the enemies should. But I'm mean.

@WTFE said in FS3:

The problem with FS3 is that the number of times you do actually have to roll is so small that any failure is magnified tremendously. If you only roll three times in a combat, even a single failure is going to make a "can't miss, hotshot badass" look "ho-hum". If the character is, by reading the sheet, supposed to be "ho-hum" that's not a problem. But when the character sheet reads "this guy is a veritable god of combat" failing even one out of three is pretty bad.

I think this is a really good observation, though I'm not sure how best to address it. FS3 dice are very forgiving until they're...randomly not, and there's sometimes just this 'Whelp, that weirdly happened' feel to Failure, rather than any kind of opportunity to make it fun and interesting. Maybe everyone should build in an RP Hook 'flaw' they could exploit to earn a Luck point in Failure situations? I don't know. They're rare enough that they should be cool/exploitable for some drama, not just 'huh, shrug, that dun work.'

This is more an issue in straight-up rolls, not so much opposed/+combat situations.

@faraday said in FS3:

3. Having had a bad experience on a game. As @Three-Eyed-Crow pointed out, there have been some pretty weird FS3 setups out there. Giant "Action Skill" lists, bizarrely low chargen point limits, befuddling rating limits, imbalanced combats, trying to graft on superpowers... the list goes on. Some of that is on me for not providing good enough guidance on how to use the system effectively. But even the guidance I did provide was often ignored. So. Meh. Perils of making an open toolkit I guess.

On the other hand, this customization can also be rather great. @Tat at X-Factor really dug into the code, streamlined a lot of the commands, and made it workable for a mutant/super-powered setting. AresMUSH being more coder-newb friendly presents more opportunities for stuff like this. And more opportunities for randos with bizarre 50-long lists of action skills, but the internet is full of bizarre randos who'd probably f up any system. I view the malleability of it as a feature, not a bug.

@krmbm said in Coming Soon: Arx, After the Reckoning:

I seem to have picked him up in a time of intense OOC drama for Darkwater and may put him back on the roster.

The roster's at least deep enough that there's a decent variety to choose from, and seems to get refreshed regularly. One of the things that typically bothers me about roster games is feeling like all the 'good' characters get picked over and you're left with the dregs if you show up six months in, but I find the pre-gens at Arx pretty rich all around (I'm very happy with mine, and I'm a heavy roster skeptic in most respects).