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MU* Wishlists
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@Livia said in MU* Wishlists:
What I’m saying is that OOC secrecy and code like obfuscation etc has not been something I’ve experienced in Chronicles of Darkness games for several years now.
Cool. I’m not really involved in that community so all I know is second-hand. Like in your own post you mentioned shapeshift code, a pool tracker, and desc changer - all of which would be tricky to do. Not necessarily impossible, but certainly not straightforward. Those are the sorts of obstacles I am referring to.
If you don’t need any of that and just want a cooperative, OOC-transparent, non-immersive CoFD game with some stats and die rolls, you can absolutely do that in Ares. Indeed, people have.
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@Faraday said in MU* Wishlists:
Like in your own post you mentioned shapeshift code, a pool tracker, and desc changer - all of which would be tricky to do.
Yeah, there’s some tricky bits there. The desc changer I don’t think is really needed at all, just some old holdovers, a lot of people put both their mortal desc and fae desc up on their wikis anyway.
FS3 has luck pools right? I feel like something like that could be used for things like Willpower. But I haven’t looked at how it’s handled.
I’m mostly just thinking out loud now anyway.
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The main “issue” I have seen with a few attempts/thought exercises that never quite got to the nitty gritty attempt was people having a hard time adjusting to the very idea of “cooperative”/non-PVP if they’re playing CoD/WoD. EVEN IF they were essentially playing it anyway, there seemed to be just this huge cultural gulf of people for whatever reason /needing/ to feel like it was an option or that people could play that way sorta if they wanted to even if the games where that actually happens have been very few for years and years. Also some players really like the crunch and will be very noisy and mopey without it. And given all the epic freakouts about CoD in general I think as a whole the playerbase of that genre can be a little slow to adjust to new things sometimes. Open sheets. Not being able to win by OOCly being able to build the best mechanics. Ect.
Do I personally think people could get over it, yes, I would argue many have. Sometimes I wonder if one of the things holding back an open invite offering is just people not wanting to have to deal with the rush of people that would come and then like complain forever about all the ways they hate the game they’re desperately trying to be a part of. And I mean it would be different than the “good old days,” for sure. It would probably lean more into asynch. Story wise I could see it being more superfriends against a bigger baddie/less competition within the sphere and between spheres, ect to really take advantage of the awesomeness of FS3 (and I know you CAN do pvp and stuff with it, but I don’t know. It seems like that’s ignoring the beauty of how it works) system. I happen to think all of those things are positive to neutral. Aside from using the actual CoD mechanics I think people are already halfway there with how they tend to actually RP, it’s just that maybe they don’t want to admit it!
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@mietze said in MU* Wishlists:
The main “issue” I have seen with a few attempts/thought exercises that never quite got to the nitty gritty attempt was people having a hard time adjusting to the very idea of “cooperative”/non-PVP if they’re playing CoD/WoD. EVEN IF they were essentially playing it anyway, there seemed to be just this huge cultural gulf of people for whatever reason /needing/ to feel like it was an option or that people could play that way sorta if they wanted to even if the games where that actually happens have been very few for years and years. Also some players really like the crunch and will be very noisy and mopey without it.
This is what I mean, how much crunch has there really been? Since F&L in 2016, Reno, CoS and a couple of others that didn’t quite make it off the ground, I really don’t feel like there’s been that much, in the CofD space anyway. Some of the oWoD games lean into that old style.
And even when you have PvP (I still hate the term, this stuff should be called Character vs Character), I had some moments over the years that were full cooperation between myself and the IC person I was fueding with, OOCly we were communicative, sharing information about our characters, no need for OOC secrecy. I think the culture has shifted a lot, personally.
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@Livia said in MU* Wishlists:
FS3 has luck pools right? I feel like something like that could be used for things like Willpower. But I haven’t looked at how it’s handled.
FS3 doesn’t have scene-based or time-based luck pools. It’s just a permanent thing you spend, like XP. So it meshes a bit better with asynchronous/simultaneous scenes. Once you spend it, it’s gone, and it doesn’t really matter what order you do it in.
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@Faraday said in MU* Wishlists:
@Livia said in MU* Wishlists:
FS3 has luck pools right? I feel like something like that could be used for things like Willpower. But I haven’t looked at how it’s handled.
FS3 doesn’t have scene-based or time-based luck pools. It’s just a permanent thing you spend, like XP. So it meshes a bit better with asynchronous/simultaneous scenes. Once you spend it, it’s gone, and it doesn’t really matter what order you do it in.
My experience of CoD is that the pools were all manual anyways. They’re time-based in the system, but the code people are using is still just people running a command to refill a pool based on IC time passing, rather than anything automated.
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@Roz said in MU* Wishlists:
@Faraday said in MU* Wishlists:
@Livia said in MU* Wishlists:
FS3 has luck pools right? I feel like something like that could be used for things like Willpower. But I haven’t looked at how it’s handled.
FS3 doesn’t have scene-based or time-based luck pools. It’s just a permanent thing you spend, like XP. So it meshes a bit better with asynchronous/simultaneous scenes. Once you spend it, it’s gone, and it doesn’t really matter what order you do it in.
My experience of CoD is that the pools were all manual anyways. They’re time-based in the system, but the code people are using is still just people running a command to refill a pool based on IC time passing, rather than anything automated.
I believe Theno’s code has something in it that would auto refill 1 willpower per day but that’s not even necessarily.
Most scenes people ran often came with a ‘don’t forget to fill up your willpower and essence!’ reminder at the start anyway.
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I think one of the main reasons X of Darkness games have that secrecy mindset is because the setting has secrecy baked into it, thematically. MORTALS DO NOT KNOW, WE MUST NOT REVEAL OURSELVES, THERE ARE EMEMY ORGS TRYING TO SNEAK IN AND DESTROY US FROM WITHIN
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And yeah, wanting to keep sheets secret from people you are at war with for whatever reason is like. Appropriate.
But if people can be mature adul-NO WAIT COME BACK!
I didn’t have anything to actually finish that thought, just the joke.
LUCKY FOR THE EXALTED COMMUNITY, they already have open sheets. And lucky for the Ares code, the only thing Essence rules needs to track are motes.
Will isn’t Willpower, it’s built up SORCERY power, and can be done in downtime so you can assume you start at 10 unless plot intervenes.
Power is INERTIA built up towards dealing damage to someone, and I believe it always starts at 0, so ot can be tracked in-scene.
Anima builds during combat and fades after, so can be tracked in-scene.
Limit does not exist in Essence… the curse can go off at any moment!
And Health is health. Already trackable but healing can be sped up with charms. Need to look at the code for that.
So Motes are the only real thing to track (even then, you can assume full unless you’re doing ‘this takes place before you have time to fully recover from the last thing’ scenes)
Mummy Pun? MUMMY PUN!
She/her -
@Jennkryst said in MU* Wishlists:
And yeah, wanting to keep sheets secret from people you are at war with for whatever reason is like. Appropriate.
Meh. Do it anyway, show people everything. Any IC conflict I’ve had with other PCs has always been way better when there’s OOC comradery and communication backing it up. I have no interest in OOC antagonism with the actual player.
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In whole, my CoD MU* experience isn’t extensive – probably like a yearish total between a couple games? But after experiencing how the code was set up and used, I did come out of it thinking, “Someone could probably do this in Ares if they wanted to.” I didn’t encounter any custom code that was time-based other than XP accumulation stuff; it was all just manual commands for spending and regaining various pools. The OOC obfuscation wasn’t a huge thing the places I’ve played, but I’m sure that’s a YMMV. The biggest point there was just that sheets weren’t public, which I’m sure someone with the know-how to make a real plugin could manage.
(I’ve actually mulled over this and had a lot of Thoughts at one point, can you tell.)
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@Livia That looks dope as shit, awesome stuff!
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Personally, I’ve played on many, many WoD/CoD games over my (gags) 25 years in this hobby. Some of them have had playerbases more interested in crunch than others, but considering the fact that the other big – and clearly much bigger – name in the gaming industry at the time was Dungeons & Dragons, with additional systems like Legend of the Five Rings…
World of Darkness kind of was the systems-lite game around at the time. And for a lot of people, that was almost as much of a draw as the themes of the games themselves. I’ve only ever played on one game where someone seemed more interested in mechanics that plot, and unfortunately it was the Changeling GM at the time, which was a big part of why I left. Dude was more interested in enforcing Glamour rules than running things, and it turned people off of the game.
So with all of that said and given some of the games I’ve seen and what I know about Ares…
I think both some of the strange mechanics and the cultural issues could be solved with a bit of careful planning. Limiting the game to a few related splats would reduce the need for some of the ‘OOC Masquerade’, especially if the setting involved some degree of uneasy peace between whatever splats are present. Then it becomes a question of keeping it from the mortals, not each other. The expectation of PVP - or CVC, if you prefer - also seems most heavily baked into the Vampire variations, so I’d probably suggest skipping that in favor of games that have regularly rotating leadership (Changeling) or various council models built in (Mage).
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@Aria speaks a lot of truth. Also I would simply just state up front, “Yo, this is a coop game, no PvP” and if people wanna ask about PvP, they can be asked to see themselves out. I don’t wanna sit here and wave +sheets against someone, I’d rather work towards more sphere-based goals, or do some whacky shit like be a mad mage scientist who tries to tinker with his own magical devices or something.
I definitely think it can be done, and I think there’d be an audience for that.
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@Rucket [nerd_glasses]But what about when the tournament arc happens and we all have to kung-fu eachother?!?[/nerd_glasses]
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I’ve always hated the concept of OOC Masque. It has always seemed wrong-headed to me. I know this is going to sound impossibly naive and possibly insane given some of the battle-scars people (including myself) have in this area, but I’ve always been of the staunch opinion that a game for adults should be able to have the players act like adults in an OOC way. So don’t take any OOC knowledge IC.
Tis a little dream I have.
That said, I think cooperative games – even with canonically opposed factions – can work just fine. I’ve seen it first hand, even. I’ve mentioned it before on some thread, but there was a game years ago in which the Technocracy and Traditions had to cooperate in a town because Weird Shit was going on and both sides desperately wanted to know why. So, while there was friction, certainly, everyone there was cooperating. Any character who wouldn’t either wasn’t approved or would “leave town”. So just a tweak to the setting can set things like that.
But even without that, being open and honest OOCly is the best policy, I think. In my experience, most folk are fine to talk out conflicts and find a narrative solution everyone can live with. Those that can’t, well, there’s always staff. And I think we all know at this point that those people would involve staff EVEN IF some OOC Masque was in place and all the bureaucratic 't’s were crossed. So I don’t think it’d even be any different in the worst case scenario, but substantially better in the best case scenario.
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I feel like how co-operative a game is depends on how it is presented from the get-go. Like, all WoD games seem like they are set up for all the factions to work in isolated groups. Lords and Ladies type games tend towards ‘everyone works together even if we don’t get along’ (And a lot to do with romance stuff). Fantasy games seem to be a mix. At least by my experiences. Firefly games seem to encourage getting along until the ships get involved and what not.
WoD would probably need a bit more enforcing that everyone works together over just for their area. Since it seems like ‘Vampires only trust vampires’ or something is pretty baked into the theme.
Firefly games would probably serve better as a purposefully kept small game with everyone on a ship or two, similar to the show. Rather than ‘As big as we can get for playerbase’. Firefly has some pretty huge ships, though. If I made a Firefly game (I’ve been tempted). I would likely build it around 1-4 ships for people to join and have a max number of players. Without time delays for travel if people want to so stuff on planets.
I can’t speak about any of the other types of games since my preference is Firefly, fantasy and/or Lords and Ladies type games.
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My wish is actually a game that supports PvP very well and not liking someone IC and OOC is considered fine. Some people suck, and murdering their PC is enjoyable. I want to assassinate dinos. I want be a villain that people hate and let them feel the catharsis of taking that character down and I don’t want to water down the experience by having everyone involved aware of my sheet and collaborating to tell a compromised story.
The part where this is a fantastical wish is I’d like this to work and not turn into the staff’s favorite clique playing by different rules and not have to deal with the OOC drama that seems to inevitably slip into MU* games when you play this way.
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@shit-piss-love said in MU* Wishlists:
My wish is actually a game that supports PvP very well and not liking someone IC and OOC is considered fine
Isn’t that basically what MUDs are? Each mud I’ve tried has just been pvping people with all the code stuff.
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@icanbeyourmuse said in MU* Wishlists:
Since it seems like ‘Vampires only trust vampires’ or something is pretty baked into the theme.
Of all the groups in WoD you could’ve picked as an example, you picked the main one with a theme of PvP baked right in.
