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A Constructive Arx Thread
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@Narson said in A Constructive Arx Thread:
My problem here is I don’t exactly know what makes a good roster char - to take the example of those written for the Templars: Flora, Katryn, Leif, Cabrera, all excellent characters. All super interesting backgrounds etc. All have good links, or had good links. Yet. None could keep a player.
I could be some of the secret stuff or the stats. Combat stuff costing double of everything else can be off putting. I rarely look too closely at combat types so I don’t know much about them, at all. So, I can’t offer much thought on why they don’t hold a player beyond that.
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Catchup XP exists specifically for that reason – none of the characters @Narson referenced have been played long enough to not to have serious XP coming to them. I do think there’s some issues with their non-Faith orgs being dead as doornails, and the fact that a lot of players are scared of doing religion wrong so they avoid Faithy characters, but combat XP shouldn’t be what’s keeping people off.
let it be a challenge to you
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(Also I know what Flora’s and Cabrera’s secrets are and both come with hooks to more active groups, so I don’t think it is that either.)
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This is my own experience so take this for what it is, but when I grabbed my character from the roster, he already had a good chunk of development (including a 6), and I have one skill I want to get to 5 that’s roughly ~350 xp. Just in my 2 week “new period” I managed to rack up ~160 xp. I don’t know what catchup xp is or looks like, but I really only had maybe 1 scene a day (sometimes more on weekend days), but it does feel like there are some opportunities to be had with the right groups/orgs, enough so you don’t feel like progress is impossible.
Maybe one improvement for rosters would be to provide more information. I had to rely on people with actual experience with different orgs/fealties or whatever. I don’t know what it would take to add some “hooks” to a rosters page, but if each character had a couple clear hooks about the character, maybe people would walk into a character armed with more knowledge and not get too surprised with what they walk into.
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Some of my issues could be picking up a very brain-heavy character when I am both dumb, and also like… do not grok all of the setting. Some issues could be the journals might not cover all the things. And some of it could be because I’m sure that all the +clues I have access to sure made sense to the player who discovered them in context, but I definitely don’t know that context.
And maybe that’s why the were on the ‘we need to rework these chatacters before they become available again’ list, which… uh, I might have bumped them off that list by asking if there were update on the rework. Or maybe the rework was finished and I am still too dumb to brain it.
But I am having fun not knowing anything and trying to ICly bug people about ‘golly, I was gone for so long, I simply forgot everything!’ Hopefully this is not too annoying.
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@Rucket said in A Constructive Arx Thread:
This is my own experience so take this for what it is, but when I grabbed my character from the roster, he already had a good chunk of development (including a 6), and I have one skill I want to get to 5 that’s roughly ~350 xp. Just in my 2 week “new period” I managed to rack up ~160 xp. I don’t know what catchup xp is or looks like, but I really only had maybe 1 scene a day (sometimes more on weekend days), but it does feel like there are some opportunities to be had with the right groups/orgs, enough so you don’t feel like progress is impossible.
Catchup XP, to clarify, is not an automatic thing for every roster. Basically: there’s an overall average of XP spends calculated across the playerbase. When a PC has a number of skills below this overall average, they basically get free XP to help bring them up to that average. So you wouldn’t have seen it, because you picked up a PC that had been well-developed sheet-wise over years, but if someone picks up a PC that hasn’t had much of any skills bought, they’ll find that they may have skill buys that cost literally 0 xp.
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I mean, maybe that’s a question to people: What stops you from taking a Godsworn char? Are there things you’d like to see that you don’t? Is it just that the Faith is a whole layer of lore that is dense and you feel such a char would need to be right all the time?
When someone shows you who they are, over and over again? Believe them.
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@Narson I can answer that. For me, it’s a geniune lack of understanding about the Faith. I don’t know if there are any ceremonies written down, I don’t know what it means to be a member of the Faith or a Godsworn, I don’t even know where people get the prayers that they RP during Assembly of Peers, etc.
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I was very, very, very unsuccessful in my attempts to be engaged with the Faith AT ALL with my PC that had pretty significant ties to Solace for a while. I eventually gave up after several months of all of my attempts being unsuccessful (my messengers were straight up ignored). It was a pretty un-fun experience, and did not lead me to being interested in trying again on another character. I had a pretty large hook thing I kept trying to throw/get a bite on (there’s an area in Elwood lands that’s set aside for Solace at this point) and just got noooooooooowhere.
eta: To be clear, nobody violated any rules or did anything unpleasant. It was all fine and completely within the bounds of acceptable behavior. Nobody owes me anything, after all. But! It was also discouraging, and I don’t think I’m the only one who had a variation on this tune. That could be a pretty big contributing factor.
the entity previously known as Sunny
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@IoleRae I am very sorry that that was your experience. It sounds deeply discouraging.
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@bear_necessities said in A Constructive Arx Thread:
@Narson I can answer that. For me, it’s a geniune lack of understanding about the Faith. I don’t know if there are any ceremonies written down, I don’t know what it means to be a member of the Faith or a Godsworn, I don’t even know where people get the prayers that they RP during Assembly of Peers, etc.
Honestly? We make it up. A lot of the Faith detail between the lore is bullshit bingo - make it up, find what works, keep rolling with it. Is there a way to overcome that? like a FAQ along the lines of ‘So you are thinking of playing a Godsworn…’?
@IoleRae said in A Constructive Arx Thread:
I was very, very, very unsuccessful in my attempts to be engaged with the Faith AT ALL with my PC that had pretty significant ties to Solace for a while. I eventually gave up after several months of all of my attempts being unsuccessful (my messengers were straight up ignored). It was a pretty un-fun experience, and did not lead me to being interested in trying again on another character. I had a pretty large hook thing I kept trying to throw/get a bite on (there’s an area in Elwood lands that’s set aside for Solace at this point) and just got noooooooooowhere.
I am genuinely sorry to hear that. Can I ask, did you try going around Solace? Or was that line of reporting even clear? Just to think about how we might have made it easier (I do know with the rosterings etc, things can get dropped, and genuinely I’d love to know if there are ways we could make faith interaction easier - and maybe there aren’t!)
When someone shows you who they are, over and over again? Believe them.
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I did not try going around Solace, no.
Against the rules of the game to “make” people interact with you, and going over their heads would have been just that. They didn’t want to play with me, so I’m not going to try and force somebody to participate in my plot shit. It wasn’t really an opportunity that made sense for anything past Solace.
the entity previously known as Sunny
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@Narson said in A Constructive Arx Thread:
Honestly? We make it up. A lot of the Faith detail between the lore is bullshit bingo - make it up, find what works, keep rolling with it. Is there a way to overcome that? like a FAQ along the lines of ‘So you are thinking of playing a Godsworn…’?
I do realize it’s generally made up, but it feels almost like - I don’t know how to put this, like the stuff that got made up is canon now except I don’t know what the stuff is that got made up and I PERSONALLY would feel uncomfortable coming in and making up stuff on my own. I’m really great at coming up with stuff but not if I don’t have any basis with which to start from, you know what I mean?
I think a FAQ would be great. But there should also be theme files of common ceremonies, prayers, important days/events, etc.
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@bear_necessities making a faith faq is a great idea and idk why we never did besides that Roz stopped being a priest and I’m super lazy
let it be a challenge to you
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@sao Probably that. I’m a big ol’ Snorlax.
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I don’t play Faith characters (though it appeals to me) because it is unclear what I should be doing and/or what I should know IC. I don’t need a super break down but I don’t know how all the ceremonies/sermons/whatever should be done, how often I should be doing ‘prayers’, what I should be making fuss about people not doing. Basically, it is to vague for me to want to play part of the Faith as anything more than a bit of side fluff.
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I guess the other side of it is I heard recently that the Gods aren’t supposed to be beings but “ideals” or something but there’s been a lot of stuff that’s gone on that contradicts that too and I don’t know, maybe I just fundamentally don’t understand religion on Arx to begin with.
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@bear_necessities said in A Constructive Arx Thread:
@Narson I can answer that. For me, it’s a geniune lack of understanding about the Faith. I don’t know if there are any ceremonies written down, I don’t know what it means to be a member of the Faith or a Godsworn, I don’t even know where people get the prayers that they RP during Assembly of Peers, etc.
Super quick Faith Primer (as based on my time on Arx and thus may not be entirely accurate to current situations)!
The Faith of the Pantheon is a high-ceremony state faith built around 13 gods. It’s a syncretic faith, which means that godsworn (the ordained priests) are not priests of X god, but priests of the Faith as a whole. The Archlectors are an administrative position that indicates a godsworn who is in charge of trying to keep the volunteers - the disciples - from going off the rails. They’re not ‘the only priest who speaks for Mangata’ or anything. The Legates are similar, except that they have additional adminstrative responsibilities and serve as Voices of the Dominus, who is the Voice of the Pantheon, and fantasy pope.
Tenets and dogma: The Faith is a very present, action-oriented Faith. The gods each represent a virtue that the faithful should strive to embody, or an aspect of the natural world it’s important to venerate. You do not get to say ‘I worship Mangata but not the Sentinel’ unless you want to be a heretic. Also, for the vast majority of the Faith, a ‘god’ isn’t a person/entity, it’s the virtue that entity represents. Someone saying, “I don’t like Sentinel” or “I don’t worship Gloria” is saying they they’re a liar or that they’re dishonorable or a coward. As such, virtuous behavior is the concrete display of the virtues: honoring one’s vows, being a good lord of the land, being generous, being honorable in war even when other options for victory exist, etc. Sin, likewise, is the display of things that are NOT virtuous: betraying your word, being dishonest, cowardice in battle, etc.
Most godsworn priests don’t necessarily have a lot of piety. The Faith is a good way for common-born and nobles born low on the family totem pole to gain power, wealth, and prestige. You get a lot of very ambitious types who say the right words, but are happy to take bribes and stab backs if it gets them closer to the life they want. Again, think High Catholic Church, when it had a lot of power. You could have a great vicar of your village, but when you got to the cities, a lot of people were preaching one thing while doing another.
None of the worship ceremonies are very ‘set in stone’. We know that there are Canticles - songs of faith - devoted to each god and those who, throughout history, have strongly displayed the virtues associated with that god, but we don’t have those written down at not. Most prayers are made up on the spot, and where the Lost Gods are concerned, that’s probably even IC, since they weren’t worshipped until an IC decade or so, ago.
A godsworn doesn’t really have to be a ‘great priest’. You can be a warrior who just didn’t want to deal with their family anymore, or someone who just really likes the idea of having a steady paycheck from the Church.
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@bear_necessities said in A Constructive Arx Thread:
I guess the other side of it is I heard recently that the Gods aren’t supposed to be beings but “ideals” or something but there’s been a lot of stuff that’s gone on that contradicts that too and I don’t know, maybe I just fundamentally don’t understand religion on Arx to begin with.
Yep - most of the populace think they are simply ideals. Including most of the Faith. That Gods aren’t really real things. Obviously PCs largely know that isn’t the case!
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We do have SOME prayers and ceremonies written down, but they’re like… optional, player-created resources that float around for people to use if they want to.
