MU Peeves Thread
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@Autumn said in MU Peeves Thread:
I’m okay with limits on how many individual XP requests I can submit within a given time frame, in the interest of preserving staff sanity … but also I would probably limit myself on my own even if the game doesn’t have one. I’d feel like a selfish jerk for flooding the system with 20 XP spends all at once.
Limiting how much XP you can bank at once is one I’ve never encountered. Of the two, I’d much, much rather have to deal with “you can only spend N XP per week” with “you can’t have more than Y unspent XP.” At least with the former you can eventually get it spent without losing out on any.
Which does bring me to a related peeve: you can get it spent if staff have consistent guidelines for what you need to do to spend it, and will tell you what those guidelines are so you can work toward them. I’ll go along with almost any XP spending requirements if the game is good enough, but please for heaven’s sake tell me what I need to do to meet your standards.
The ‘how much XP you can bank’ is rare, but a lot more common in our spaces now a days because it’s the default for FS3.
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You can set it so there’s no learning time or limit on how much XP you can save, that’s how Red Planet is doing it, but yeah that’s the FS3 default. In general I think the only complication in getting rid of it would be you’d have to take a look at what your actual skill caps were, since in my experience you CAN hit them fairly quickly once you take the learning time restraints off, since chars can come out of CG pretty close to their ceiling unless the game raises it or changes how long it takes to raise certain things.
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@Third-Eye said in MU Peeves Thread:
that’s how Red Planet is doing it
We’re actually capping the XP at 10, which is 5 weeks of accrual (on our game). I don’t have any experience with systems where a request is required to spend XP, but in a general sense I think there is a reasonable implementation of some limitations on XP accumulation and spending, depending on how your system works.
The point of XP is to reward players for playing. As long as the system does not punish players who are playing, then it’s probably working just fine. I do find the time gate on how quickly XP can be spent on a single stat as implemented in FS3 by default a little punitive in that dimension because you have to spend it EXACTLY when the cooldown runs out or you are “missing out” on progression. This is a small window to hit. On Red Planet, you can go 5 weeks before you’re “missing out” on anything and frankly I’m okay with that. It is still incumbent on you, the player, to engage with the game’s systems on some level to benefit from them.
I have played on games where you could bank unlimited XP and jump up whatever skill you needed in the moment and I can’t say that was my favorite thing. It absolutely happened and there was no law against it, it was just a little cheesy. It’s not a realism thing for me as much as it is a min-maxy approach to play that I don’t particularly enjoy in others. I’d rather see folks lock in a narrative and play it out than sitting on the fence until the literal last second, but some balance in there for players to live their lives and forget sometimes is definitely more user-friendly.
he/him
this machine kills fascists -
@Trashcan 5 weeks is at least more generous than i’ve seen elsewhere. i’ll just say that i’ve seen the cap hit people who are being actively engaged in the game and RPing and just sometimes lose track of how much XP they have. and i just think preventing those folks from missing out is worth the potential for some occasional cheesiness.
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What consistently happens to me when there is a cap is I am consistently rping and it doesn’t matter because my character is gonna be behind someone whose memory works right no matter what. Time gating xp spends is especially bad for this. I dumped 8 XP into a skill, my character was working on that this whole time - why it matter when I hit the button?
I can see why it is lame to do it mid action scene when the skill is being rolled. Otherwise? This exists just to torture people whose brains work like mine.
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@Trashcan said in MU Peeves Thread:
The point of XP is to reward players for playing. As long as the system does not punish players who are playing, then it’s probably working just fine.
But it’s not. The point of XP is to allow character advancement.
Playing is its own reward. Extra XP to reward participating in events has always struck me as daft – you get a bowl of ice cream (the gaming session) and then you get a treat (XP) for doing such a great job eating it.
One of my many unpopular opinions is that MUs can and should be very like tabletop, but this is one area where that doesn’t fit – if everybody in my gaming group participates one session except Phil, who stares at his phone for five hours instead, and I give everybody but Phil XP, good. Everybody on the MU can’t participate, though, only a limited number can join the event, and then I give those lucky ones extra XP? Meh.
Cooldowns/“learning times” (wasn’t the learning time the time it took to gain the XP?) and bank-caps suck. What sucks even more is those “You can’t increase your firearms skill above level 1 without using it on-camera in a GM-run scene” rules when coupled with a lack of opportunities to join such scenes, effectively creating a stat-cap for characters who are not favourite. Pretty soon you’ve got a huge bank of XP that you can’t spend without first successfully begging staff to create and run a scene for you that’ll give you a chance to roll.
"This is Liberty Hall; you can spit on the mat and call the cat a bastard!"
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@Gashlycrumb I am also anti-XP as is probably well-known or know-ish at this point. If we have to go with advancement of that sort, I’d prefer a system where you set a skill or two that’s being worked on by the character, and, after some time, maybe with some random elements, it increases.
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam
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@Gashlycrumb said in MU Peeves Thread:
One of my many unpopular opinions is that MUs can and should be very like tabletop, but this is one area where that doesn’t fit – if everybody in my gaming group participates one session except Phil, who stares at his phone for five hours instead, and I give everybody but Phil XP, good. Everybody on the MU can’t participate, though, only a limited number can join the event, and then I give those lucky ones extra XP? Meh.
I have always liked the catchup xp of TR, in theory at least. Maybe not an automatic gain, but if a dinosaur and a newbie both RP the same amount, the newbie gets bonus to catch up.
It is always annoying on games with universal xp tick. Like, if Im not there in the first couple of months, it feels like I am forever behind.
@Ominous said in MU Peeves Thread:
@Gashlycrumb I am also anti-XP as is probably well-known or know-ish at this point. If we have to go with advancement of that sort, I’d prefer a system where you set a skill or two that’s being worked on by the character, and, after some time, maybe with some random elements, it increases.
I’d also like maybe Milestones blended with catchup? Like ‘the plot has progressed so far, anyone with X major milestones gains a minor one (basically a skill swap, rather than a flat +1 or something), anyone with more gain a bigger bonus’
But I haven’t even done napkin math on it, let alone proper thinks.
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@Ominous said in MU Peeves Thread:
I’d prefer a system where you set a skill or two that’s being worked on by the character, and, after some time, maybe with some random elements, it increases.
One of my RL friends is currently working on a tabletop RPG where the players are androids who are the only beings on a space station after a mysterious event kills all the humans, and advancement comes in the form of software updates being transmitted from a satellite light years away, so you build this little track of advancements in the order you want them, and every time a cycle happens (a nebulous in game unit of time that represents some level of narrative motion), you check a box in the top most item in your track. When it fills with checks, you add it to your sheet and start checking the next item. He’s working on some mechanics for rearranging the queue, but so far it’s been pretty fun the few times we’ve met to test it.
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@MisterBoring It sounds a bit similar to some of BRP’s games. Every time you fail a roll in a skill, you out a check by that skill. At the end of the adventure, you roll those skills. If you fail, the skill in increases by 1d4+1 points. If you succeed, it increases by just 1 point.
For MUSHes, I feel like my system makes sense. Since skill increases are incremental, you don’t have that scenario where a PC had a 2 in a skill one day, and a 7 the next. It also assumed the character is working on whatever skill(s) during the time that the player isn’t actively playing them, thereby benefitting people who aren’t super popular or have to play 16 hour a day for bunches of xp.
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Late to the game, but I don’t mind cooldowns on xp spending so much. I just wish the cd’s came with pop ups or notifications that would tell you when that cd was done.
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Even rping a full scene over the course of a whole day, actively focused, via text, is going to account for what would maybe be two hours of conversation irl, max.
This means that even the most active characters almost certainly are doing things offscreen. Let people spend their XP how they want, when they want, on what they want.
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When designing any MU system, it’s absolutely critical that you ask yourself what implementation is far and away the most punishing to anyone with ADHD and makes them feel unwelcome, in order for for you to address a problem that doesn’t really exist and to police someone that you made up in your head.
It’s the MU standard.
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My lukewarm take is that if you are running a game that’s strongly focused on narrative, and if a player is buying something that has narrative significance, then asking them to show some of the impact that learning or gaining that thing has had/is having on the character’s life is … reasonable.
Of course ‘narrative significance’ is one of those slippery things that will be different for every game. If you’re running a modern game then ‘learning how to drive a car’ is probably not something of ‘narrative significance.’ If you’re using a 1-100 skill system then going from 5 points in Toaster Repair to 6 points is almost certainly not something of ‘narrative significance.’ In pretty much any game there’ll probably be a ton of things that don’t meet that standard, and which the game shouldn’t bother to ask for much if anything from the player in order to get. Some games probably don’t have anything that qualifies as having ‘narrative significance’.
And yes, some schemes for gating narratively significant things are better or worse than others. Yes, if you’re going to do that then it’s a good idea to make it as user-friendly as possible and to have accommodations for players who are in time zones that don’t intersect with staff’s or for whom the system as written doesn’t work out for some other reason. I agree with all that!
Still, I don’t think it’s unreasonable for – and I’m picking a deliberately over-the-top example here – staff to tell Luke Skywalker’s player, “No, sorry, you can’t buy up all your Jedi powers without at least some of the learning process happening onscreen.” Of course I’m not saying that that’s one and only right way to do it it – if you want to run a game where Luke can just buy Telekinesis whenever he wants to, then sure! Run with it. But it doesn’t seem inherently crazy to me to do it the other way round.
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My take is: if staff is going to impose certain gating tactics when it comes to the expenditure of XP, then it is staff’s responsibility to provide the chance and situation necessary to everyone, actively.
If you don’t wanna do the work, don’t apply the restriction.
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@Coin I don’t disagree.
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An idea I’ve been toying with is more of a carrot over stick approach, because I actually tentatively agree with you that stat/skill point-based systems can often incentivise approaches to progression that feel a bit silly.
But I feel that players often don’t respond well (myself included) when there’s a lot of restriction. I mean even knowing myself, if I’m playing in a game where something is on cooldown to prevent overuse, it will actually incentivise me to immediately do it on cooldown, when maybe without that cooldown I would’ve happily waited a lot longer than the cooldown period for story/realism, most of the time. The cooldown makes me feel like I have to do it ASAP regardless, so I don’t miss out down the line. So, by trying to hold off the worst players, I think it often actually brings more normal players up to their level and discourages a more intuitive, story-focused approach to that kind of decision-making.
The idea I’m workshopping right now is to have in parallel both a more conventional progression system (get XP, spend XP, progress) alongside free, event-based skill distribution.
So, if you don’t want to attend events, and just wanna up your strength one point a week, go ahead. But alternatively if you attend a training montage event at the dojo, staff reading the logs may just toss you a +1str that week as a freebie recognition of the RP you’ve been doing. With lower frequency and less guarantee for those sorts of casual social events, but a more explicit expectation for big season finale type events and boss fights.
Ideally my hope is that maybe people will stress less about the progression-over-time aspect if they know the story will organically reward them with progression that reflects their RP. But also keeping the more conventional progression track for people who either can’t or just don’t want to always feel like they need to prove their progress in public scenes, albeit a little slower.
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@Kestrel Your comment about them being an encouragement to buy things up immediately when you have to wait for the cooldown anyway is spot on. In every game I’ve played that had cooldown mechanics I can remember people engineering their purchases and their XP totals to make sure they could drop the request as soon as <thing> came off CD, regardless of whether it made sense in the context of what their characters were getting up to in game.
I admit I’m not a fan of cooldown mechanics generally, but I also don’t play a lot of games that have a highly granular progression system like the one you’re describing, and they may be a better idea where raising Strength 1 point a week for ~3 months is a plausible thing for characters to do. It feels like a strictly mechanical gating might be the more practical sort in that situation, where probably 20+ characters are all raising at least one thing once per week, or more if the XP gain rate permits it – anything dependent on staff to review and OK those 1-point-per-week gains seems as though it would very quickly devolve into either rubber stampery or staff madness, maybe both.
I do think that if you’re going to do extra progression for appropriate RP, you may want to have some sort of randomized scheme to determine if it occurs, just to deflect any potential accusations of “well, of course staff always give a point to X, they love that player” … which there probably will be anyway.
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If you don’t want people buying skills mid-event in order to increase rolls, just make a rule about that. You can’t do an xp spend to buy a skill that has already been called for by a gm.
If you want people to justify their xp choices with rp logs or something, well - stop. It’s not reasonable.
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@hellfrog said in MU Peeves Thread:
If you want people to justify their xp choices with rp logs or something, well - stop. It’s not reasonable.
Depends on the system. Raising PUNCH, sure. Gaining an ENTIRE ARMY with Followers? Maybe a log about it.
