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Concordia Thread
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I’m just going to be real with you all. I put in a request letting them know I felt awkward about the gods being white, and my non-white noble house worshipping a white patron god. And you know what? They were like, ‘good lookin out, this is on our list of things to review.’ And it made me feel immediately more comfortable.
I don’t think this beef in the comments is in the spirit of the game runners.
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@helvetica I hadn’t caught that (and I’m glad they’re going to correct), but I have to say that I was THRILLED to see that not every roster character was white and that for houses where POCs are the norm it wasn’t like “and so you love jade and tea obvs.”
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@helvetica I picked one of the houses of color! I love the fact they are scholars and the wise house! It is very refreshing in my book!
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Really glad to see there’s so much activity generated by this place! Congratulations, @Tez!
they/them
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@Warma-Sheen said in Concordia Thread:
@Faraday I think that just means allotting a certain number of xp points to character based on age. Or just granting a chunk of xp to an older character to indicate they have had more experience in their life than younger characters. I don’t think it necessitates code. It is definitely a game decision.
The code does not allow you to set different amounts of starting ability points based on age or any other criteria, and giving them a bucket of extra XP after chargen just won’t work due to spending/saving limits in the XP code.
Sure, you could try to work around the code and manually negotiate/set additional skills, but that undermines the advantages of the quick and easy review/approval system FS3 gives you. It also runs contrary to the design recommendations.
FS3 is designed to let everyone start out awesome. Older people are not inherently more awesome than younger people.
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@bear_necessities said in Concordia Thread:
See when you say things like ‘Aryan master race’ and go about two steps away from outright calling the gamerunners racist, but then slap on ‘constructive’, it does not make your argument actually constructive.
Which is why I didn’t say that in the post.
@bear_necessities said in Concordia Thread:
I didn’t see a single help file that suggeted there was racial politics in this game. I don’t know where you caught that assumption either. Honestly based on the PBs already, this is an encouragingly diverse game and race doesn’t seem to factor into anything except your own head.
It probably is in my head. I’m sensitive to it. Chalk it up to a lifetime of dealing with racism, overt, subtle, and unconscious. Again, which is why I asked if that were common in these games.
I caught that assumption from the post which stated that while all the houses had a general type or look, characters in the lead house had to be fair skin, blond hair, blue eyes. It was pretty clear that there could be no deviation for how the ruling house characters could look, and implied that the other houses could vary in how they looked, but not the ruling house. The rulers were all going to look this one specific, very White way. And all other characters of color were exclusively limited to lesser houses.
What I do know of L&L games is that there are house politics. But if you racially limit houses to specific looking races then you’re just calling racial politics a different name: house politics.
It gave me pause.
This was very WTF to me but I noticed no one else seemed to be bothered by this very obvious racial caste system. So I didn’t even question the system itself, I just asked if this was a common thing on these types of games.
The game runner came on and explained it.
Deal was done. It was simply an in game storyline gimmick.
That just wasn’t where my head went at all when I saw that. Is that just in my head? Sure. Say it was. I’m okay with that. My experiences are my experiences. They are valid, as are my questions.
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@Faraday said in Concordia Thread:
Older people are not inherently more awesome than younger people.
Could you tell that to every Boomer comedian, please? Thank you.
@Warma-Sheen said in Concordia Thread:
That just wasn’t where my head went at all when I saw that
I try my best, these days, to go for cock-up over conspiracy. Don’t assume malice until you’ve probed a bit to see what’s going on.
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@somasatori I didn’t do nothin’! All I did was split the thread. The work on this is all @Whisky and team.
she/they
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@Tez OH! Well, there’s egg on my face.
Congratulations to @Whisky and their team, then! Always good to see enthusiasm in new games as they come up, but it’s an even better feeling when people validate the work you put into something by really engaging and vibing with your setting.
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@Pavel said in Concordia Thread:
@Warma-Sheen said in Concordia Thread:
That just wasn’t where my head went at all when I saw that
I try my best, these days, to go for cock-up over conspiracy. Don’t assume malice until you’ve probed a bit to see what’s going on.
You’re right. And I tried. The probing was what people seemed to take offense to, or the way I went about it.
The actual issue was resolved within minutes, but the rest dragged on a bit longer.
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@KarmaBum said in Concordia Thread:
Thanks for getting that out of the way for all zero people who were hung up about it.
Indeed. For the record, I’m to some degree one of those zero people and I can safely say I’m glad it was brought up and discussed/clarified.
I have enough hobbies where surprise eugenicists/race theory kooks like to sneak in through the door and this sort of thing tends to flush them out. It’s nice to know who you’re dealing with and who you’re not and frankly, this is a valid thing to ask questions about and doesn’t automatically default to finger-pointing and witch-hunting.
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@helvetica I’m glad to see this, and their response. I actually had also taken a look at the game, and things like this felt icky. But it sounds like it was unintentional and the game runners are doing what they can to listen.
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@Anhedonia said in Concordia Thread:
@Whisky Good luck bud happy to see things taking off.
Thank you, really do mean it. A lot of the work you did into LA really helped understand the workload, the world, and how to create a place where people feel the creativity to tell their stories.
@bear_necessities said in Concordia Thread:
Anyway @Whisky and @spes good luck, have fun, don’t listen to the haters who aren’t going to play your game anyway
Thank you as well!
@somasatori said in Concordia Thread:
Congratulations to @Whisky and their team, then! Always good to see enthusiasm in new games as they come up, but it’s an even better feeling when people validate the work you put into something by really engaging and vibing with your setting.
Appreciate it as does @spes as well who spent a lot of time making things absolutely amazing looking, written, and thought out.
Current Projects:
Twitch -> https://www.twitch.tv/dukewhisky
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THE FIRST STAFF RUN PLOT SCENE WAS AMAZING! AS a very well-controlled and well-paced large scene, with something for everyone to do! SO PUMPED FOR MORE!
(Edit:Clarify better)
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@BloodAngel They did a really good job on this, considering how many people were there. The pacing was perfect and gave people enough time to pose their reaction/actions between GM poses.
I was really impressed with how it was handled. Usually scenes that big take hours and are exhausting/not much fun.
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I’m trying to sort out how to write this, because I don’t want anyone thinking this is meant to be negative(it’s not), but it is my initial thoughts after letting it sit for a night. Because I was kind of at a loss to how the whole thing was handled.
From a GM perspective, I’m trying to understand the decisions and why where they made. Is it just alpha? Was there not a lot of faith in FS3 as it currently stands on game? Were the NPCs not ready? How is damage and wounds going to be handled? Were healers going to be able to actually heal instead of simply RPing it?
I had written out a whole diatribe on my thoughts and giving feedback, but I feel as if it’s better used as a +request, since feedback was asked for. And I’ll leave that for staff to read rather than putting that all here.
I’ll say this much; I believe staff have the very best intentions, but it almost felt like they were making things far more difficult on themselves than they needed to. Using FS3, and breaking the event into two scenes of combatants and non-coms would’ve likely have made the whole thing more manageable.
But deciding to do manual rolls and math to determine combat? Seeing that took me back to PennMUSH games cira 2005. As far as I could tell(and I could certainly be wrong)everything that I saw happen in that scene could’ve been represented with various different commands in FS3.
I am glad that everyone had a good time with it, but I kind of found it very chaotic and confusing.
I don't know what I'm doing. Poke at Seven Nations sevennations.aresmush.com port 2021
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@Testament I think that there’s still work going on behind the scenes to try and balance weapons and armor for FS3 combat. I could be way off base of course, but that’s the impression I’ve gotten. I can’t fault them for that, it IS Alpha so now is the time to tweak and tweak and tweak and I’m not sure a BIG PC combat in a BIG GM scene is the best time to test and tweak the system.
But I get where you’re coming from and they do want feedback so for sure send in that request. -
I think any worthwhile GM would concede they don’t know what they are doing half the time. It’s a lot like Whose Line Is It, Anyway?, at least in my opinion – the rules are made up and the points don’t matter.
There were a few things that could have been done better/differently. Staff seems to be acutely aware of as much. Nothing fundamentally wrong with trying a different system during a larger scene. Every mistake is an opportunity to learn something.
Chaos and disorganization are inevitable when player counts exceed 10. To staff’s credit, they wrapped up a large event in about 3 hours and no one walked away terribly upset. There was good communication and most of the playerbase seemed engaged.
Next steps are just about refinement. They called for constructive feedback, so it’s a good idea to submit a job if you have any ideas or observations.
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No large event is ever going to be perfect, but this is especially true when it’s the game’s frist event and it’s a monster of an event.
It’s extremely easy to look back at a scene and think about all the ways you could’ve done it better if you had been the one running it. This is especially true when you have no concept of what’s going on behind the scenes and why certain decisions are made, and when you didn’t even participate in the scene to begin with.
I’ve never been in a large-scale battle with 30+ people that’s worked out perfectly. I don’t honestly believe coded combat would’ve made things better - in fact, it would have negated some of the things staff was trying to do (get people to work together) because there’s no way to really do that with the FS3 combat code. It would have just been a bunch of people individually throwing coded weapons at different NPCs, with staff playing the role of “did we make these NPCs too strong/too weak”, and honestly I have found that after 2 or 3 rounds people get tired of coded combat and just want to get it over with.
I think people often get caught up too much in the dice rather than the actual roleplay, and they feel like they didn’t make an impact unless the system tells them that they did, but that’s not really a Concordia problem.
Staff did a great job for their first big event. Would there have been things I would’ve done differently? Absolutely. Were there moments where I was irritated, confused as to what was going on, or felt the scene was too chaotic for my tastes? Yep. But also hey, I’m a MUSH person, I can find things to complain about and criticize all day long if I really wanted to, even in the most well-thought out and well-planned scenes. Do I think that even if they had made smaller scenes or used coded combat or any other various combination of things that people would’ve still found something to complain about? 100%, see previous sentence about MUSH people.
At the end of the day, this event successfully did what I think it was set up to do: give people something to RP about.
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There seems to be this misconception that I think that staff did a bad job at running the scene. In no way do I think that at all, so that is not the takeaway that I want to give. It obviously was a success by the amount of people that said so.
Everything that I say is my own perception of what I personally experienced. So perhaps it’s a me problem that I found myself confused and frustrated that at times I didn’t really understand what was going on or what to do and the rules that came along with the scene itself. It felt like a lot to keep in mind. I’m sure there a plenty of reasons that justify those decisions. Or at the very least, give them context.
Does that mean the scene was bad? No, because I figure what’s considered good or bad is a matter of subjective taste. And again, just because I left feeling frustrated does not mean that I didn’t enjoy myself for what it was. Is it my preference for combat to handled via FS3? Sure, I’m a big fan of the system and I believe that streamlines combat. That’s obviously a preference of mine. I know people that absolutely loathe FS3. Probably just as much as I think manually rolling and math creates more difficulty on both the GM and players.
Just because that’s the view I took away from it, doesn’t mean that I don’t want to help and try to improve it. I also want to point out that criticism isn’t necessarily meant as negative. And because I might believe that I think it could’ve been handled better still does not mean it was bad. Nor does it mean that I have any wish to take away credit from the event runners from where it’s due. Certainly doesn’t stop me from playing and enjoying the game, despite the fact that I think that things can be improved. Because I have to believe that a lot of people there want and desire it to be successful.
