MU Peeves Thread
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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.
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I agree with a lot of the takes here, particularly the ones around the impact of XP spend mechanics on neurospiciness.
I’m also one of those guys who really hates someone coming into a scene with a 2 Firearms and then suddenly having a 4 when they find out that shooting a gun is critical to the scene.
I’ve previously been of the opinion that setting your cooldown to about the frequency of XP drops (on games where XP is a weekly/monthly/daily/whatever occurrence) was the way to go, so that people could keep up with spending their weekly XP as it came in, but if they wanted to store XP, they couldn’t bank a bunk and plop it down all at once during a scene. But, as mentioned above, that runs into problems with ADHD and other neurospiciness (it’s not great for my OCD either because I feel like I’m “slipping” if I don’t do it at the same time each week, because I can’t ever get the hours I lost between the cooldown ending and my actual spend back).
I’m now coming around to the thought that (for FS3), the solution may be a 1-day cooldown for weekly XP (and a high XP pool cap, like 20ish). So yeah, someone can pick up a brand new skill (for 1 XP) or go from 1 to 2 (again for 1 XP) during a scene if they want to, but they can’t jump from 5 to 6, say. But if they’ve forgotten for a couple of weeks, they can go back over the next week and spend that XP one per day, and unless they’ve really been ignoring XP (like for 5 months), they won’t actually lose the XP. Should help out with the feeling that you need to “keep up” because if you forget for a couple of days, you can just spend immediately and your cooldown will be over before the next XP is given out. There’s still some waiting if you’re way back, but it shouldn’t be as impactful if you can spend XP every day if you’ve got a stash instead of having to wait a week.
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What if a server has a special room (OOC makes the most sense, but I could also work with the right flavor) that one has to be in to spend XP? Then people couldn’t raise skills mid-scene without very obviously ducking out to do so.
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Is raising a skill mid-scene really that rampant of a problem that we really need to twist ourselves into knots over this? Like, do people do this for real or is this some mythologized outlier situation? Rather than preemptively punish everyone for one theoretical idiot, why not simply toss out that idiot if and when this occurs?
I gotta tell you, I was just in a scene rolling quite possibly my highest skill the entire time… and I still (hilariously, in a fun way) got my ass kicked by the dice. Specifically, basically a huge chicken attacked my ass. You can raise a skill all you want. It’s no guarantee.
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tbh i just can’t bring myself to care that much about mid-scene skill raises. like, it’s not like they’re sneaking it for free, they’re still spending the xp. they’ve presumably been working on the skill, either on-cam or off. who’s to say that mid-swing isn’t when they break the arbitrary, artificial threshold of skill level 3 to 4 in swording?
i know there were absolutely mid-scene skill raises happening plenty on arx and i think it just wasn’t a big deal in the end. (although a vague memory of someone asking for a mid-scene train to make the cost cheaper was p funny.)
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