World Tone / Feeling
-
If there’s danger around every corner that’ll get you if you slip up for even a moment, your CG needs to take ten minutes and approval even less.
-
@Pavel said in World Tone / Feeling:
If there’s danger around every corner that’ll get you if you slip up for even a moment, your CG needs to take ten minutes and approval even less.
It’s certainly possible to do so. TGG had a high PC fatality rate and zippy fast chargen (I don’t think there was even an approval step).
@Warma-Sheen said in World Tone / Feeling:
a game where there’s danger around every corner that’ll get you if you slip up for a moment SHOULD make characters risk avoidant. The problem is that most games don’t provide a reward that is worth characters overcoming that risk avoidance.
There are certainly players who enjoy a high-risk environment, though my experience is they’re a small minority. For the rest, I’m skeptical that there’s any manner of reward that would get players to risk their characters to death at the drop of a hat. Most MU players don’t want to play the “you have died of dysentery” version of a Wild West game—they want outlaws, gamblers, and high adventure on the frontier. A real post-apocalyptic world would involve a lot of people making gardens, filtering water, and dying from small cuts and poor sanitation. Sane people in such an environment take risks to survive, but how do you model that in a game environment without forcing a MUD-like level of survival mechanics?
-
@Faraday said in World Tone / Feeling:
@Warma-Sheen said in World Tone / Feeling:
a game where there’s danger around every corner that’ll get you if you slip up for a moment SHOULD make characters risk avoidant. The problem is that most games don’t provide a reward that is worth characters overcoming that risk avoidance.
I’m skeptical that there’s any manner of reward that would get players to risk their characters to death at the drop of a hat.
In my experience, most people don’t mind losing big – even going as far as character death – as long as it’s cool. No one wants to die just from slipping on a banana peel or even just randomly getting shot in the head by an outlaw. They want to go down in a blaze of glory, or with some amazingly funny Rube Goldbergesque series of coincidences, or through something that exudes pathos.
No one wants to die like a scrub.
@Warma-Sheen’s description of the crunch-storytelling continuum seems pretty apt. I know I definitely prefer the storytelling aspect of that; I find combat systems and dice throwing to be supremely boring and I’ve hated nearly every single combat scene I’ve ever been a part of.
Though I think this might be more of a scene-by-scene thing than an overall tone. I don’t see why a MU* can’t have room for both worldviews as long as everyone knows beforehand what a specific scene is expecting. The hard part would be quantifying where, exactly, on the crunch-storytelling continuum a scene lies.
-
@Faraday said in World Tone / Feeling:
It’s certainly possible to do so. TGG had a high PC fatality rate and zippy fast chargen (I don’t think there was even an approval step).
Oh I definitely agree, I played there exceptionally briefly (Russian front, obviously).
I think it’s one of those things that must be considered if one wants omnipresent danger while also having players feeling free to take risks. If one invests a lot of time into making a character, one is less predisposed to disposing of said character on a whim, generally speaking.
-
@STD said in World Tone / Feeling:
In my experience, most people don’t mind losing big – even going as far as character death – as long as it’s cool.
YMMV. Over the span of about 2 decades, I ran many different games with opt-in character death. You PC could be incapacitated, but would never(*) die without your consent. In that time, I can think of maybe two? three? players who chose to kill off their PCs voluntarily. These were high-stakes settings. Loads of gunfights, plenty of opportunities to write yourself out as a Big Darn Hero. The overwhelming majority of players I’ve encountered (both online and in offline TTRPGs) don’t want to lose their characters. Even if you ignore the XP loss, there’s an investment in relationships, story, development there that you can’t quantify.
(*) Barring extreme “you’ve painted us into a corner with your monumentally boneheaded actions” situations.
-
Decades ago, Tenebrae put something in place where you would basically rate your plot before people signed up. I think it was like ‘Risk of Death’ ‘Risk of Maiming/Weapon Sundering’ and then just ‘No Risk.’
It worked for the most part. People who signed up for the risk of death scenes knew that it was possible their PCs could die and they were usually Big Plots where it was cool if they did. Did that stop some players from still being super mad about it when it happened? Nope. In a big Save the World scene I remember a staffer had a monster with an insta-death ray that would kill anyone with a bad fort save. So he made sure it targeted the PC in the scene with the best fort score and thus the best chance of nothing happening. Like I specifically remember the conversation on the staff channel where a bunch of us weighed in on who it should target because while it was high stakes we didn’t really want to kill anyone.
The PC then rolled a 1 and accused the staffer of doing it on purpose and declared the whole scene had been set up just so they would die and it was a whole thing.
-
I certainly want a grounded game where there can be death and consequences.
On the topic of death and consequences. I feel like the best way to have non-consent death in a game is MUD style where there is cold hard code making that decision and not necessarily GMed rolls. Only MUSH game that I have seen do that was Firan.
You also have to have a game big enough to survive the inevitable blow ups that will happen with players quitting.
-
Also I want a Grimbright/Nobledark sci-fi/fantasy with mechs and lords and ladies and dragons.
Because I am like 14 and hate having to work and laying taxes.
-
@real_mirage said in World Tone / Feeling:
laying taxes
Taking the “fuck the state” idea in a whole new direction.
-
I want so many hyper-specific games that I won’t actually get them barring starting games myself, and I can’t honestly be sure that they would even get enough players to be runnable.
Like my idea for a post-apocalyptic game where the remaining people on the world live in and around a huge metal tower. The people who have all the power live above the smog clouds choking the world below, and have access to the remaining places above the clouds, including the last bits of fertile land and potable water. The rest of the people live below, in claustrophobic spaces where their survival is only guaranteed by toiling to get access to resupply of the filters that keep the smog out of their cramped quarters. The lower class use power armor suits to try and clean the world, much like the Chernobyl liquidators, while the upper class vie for control of the remaining clean resources and do what they can to keep the lower class from climbing the tower and destroying everything.
-
@MisterBoring said in World Tone / Feeling:
Like my idea for a post-apocalyptic game where the remaining people on the world live in and around a huge metal tower. The people who have all the power live above the smog clouds choking the world below, and have access to the remaining places above the clouds, including the last bits of fertile land and potable water. The rest of the people live below, in claustrophobic spaces where their survival is only guaranteed by toiling to get access to resupply of the filters that keep the smog out of their cramped quarters. The lower class use power armor suits to try and clean the world, much like the Chernobyl liquidators, while the upper class vie for control of the remaining clean resources and do what they can to keep the lower class from climbing the tower and destroying everything.
I had a similar idea for an anthology game I was thinking of creating. Basically you are in the tower and the only way to climb is to participate in virtual reality “simulations” where your goal was to amuse the people in the upper floors, kinda Hunger Game-y except you were a different character in each sim. The purpose was to die, repeatedly and violently and epically. I just couldn’t figure out what people would do when they were killed off and waiting for everyone else.
-
@Pavel said in World Tone / Feeling:
@real_mirage said in World Tone / Feeling:
laying taxes
Taking the “fuck the state” idea in a whole new direction.
I never thought I’d see “sex worker” meaning “tax collector” in even a fictional government, but here we are.
-
@dvoraen
Im being audited! -
@real_mirage said in World Tone / Feeling:
Also I want a Grimbright/Nobledark sci-fi/fantasy with mechs and lords and ladies and dragons.
Allow me to introduce you to Lancer. You’ll want the Dune-esque Karrakin Trade Baronies setting. Though, it’s mostly a D&D 4e style game, e.g. a miniatures wargame focused on tactics with very few mechanics for out of combat stuff.
@dvoraen said in World Tone / Feeling:
I never thought I’d see “sex worker” meaning “tax collector” in even a fictional government, but here we are.
Do…do I even want to know what it is they’re collecting as “taxes?” I suspect I would want to refuse any tax refunds.
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam
-
@Ominous said in World Tone / Feeling:
@dvoraen said in World Tone / Feeling:
I never thought I’d see “sex worker” meaning “tax collector” in even a fictional government, but here we are.
Do…do I even want to know what it is they’re collecting as “taxes?” I suspect I would want to refuse any tax refunds.
-
I am familiar with Lancer! I plan to run a TT game using it sometime in the future.
I think it be a fun setting for a MU*, although you would have to build out the mechanics for social and non-mech interactions.
-
@real_mirage said in World Tone / Feeling:
Also I want a Grimbright/Nobledark sci-fi/fantasy with mechs and lords and ladies and dragons.
Because I am like 14 and hate having to work and laying taxes.
Funny enough I know someone working on a game that could fit that whole-ass description.
ETA: Not me. I’m not working on this. I’m not being coy about me working on this. IT’S NOT ME.
she/they
-
@Tez said in World Tone / Feeling:
Not me. I’m not working on this. I’m not being coy about me working on this. IT’S NOT ME.
The they-dy doth protest too much.
-
@Tez so it’s you eh???
-
