MU Peeves Thread
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I got all spun up and ready to fite against bank limits and cooldowns but it looks like almost everyone agrees that it’s a silly system. Welp.
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@helvetica All I remember from that episode is the bike.
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wait why would someone limit spending XP.
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@junipersky Games like Exalted and Shadowrun time-gate how long it takes you to learn stuff.
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I generally dislike time gates and justifications re: xp.
I think folks should do what they want within the normal rules of the game. -
Okay but - wait what?
Wouldn’t it make more sense to just… not allow the XP in the first place to be earned quicker than skills can be learned rather than give it and then tell people they can’t use it!??
I’m so befuddled by this concept.
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@junipersky Folks who prefer cooldowns on XP spends and caps to unspent XP tend to cite instances where a PC has spend a ton of XP all at once, to go from not having a skill to being an expert, particularly if the timing was particularly convenient, i.e., a situation arose where the skill would be useful so they spend their hoard of XP to suddenly be good at it. Some folks find this immersion breaking and obnoxious to deal with.
But I just can’t really bring myself to find it a compelling argument, particularly when weighed against the cons that happens: people getting behind where their PC could be due to entirely OOC reasons. Those reasons could be medical (very easy to forget for some ADHD folks), RL emergencies happening, even normal stuff like vacation. I just don’t think it’s fun, nice, or kind to turn this into a game of OOC homework just because of some potential edge cases that – aren’t really a practical problem other than temporarily bugging some people.
And you’d have the exact same impact from someone spending their XP regularly on raising a skill and just not really mentioning it/RPing it. It will look the exact same as them spending the XP all at once. Or they’re just not someone you know and RP with! Or sometimes someone IS RPing about it, but they miss a weekly XP spend cutoff, and then they lose out on that week of OOC progress even though it’s an active part of their story.
(And if the impact of raising skills is statistically negligible, as it can be in some systems…then it also doesn’t matter if someone raises it a bunch at once. If the numbers don’t matter one way, they don’t matter the other.)
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These problems largely stem from people trying to apply RAW to MUs. Most of those ‘time gates’ are IC time gates, which aren’t an issue in most tabletop games at all because the GM usually just goes ‘okay, time skip, spend your XP’ at some point. This is what those rules are written for.
Applying them to games with 1:1 or even 1:2 or 1:3 (rare as those may be) time progressions means no time skipping, and thus people have to wait real life units of time, which it was never meant to work with.
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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.
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I agree that there shouldn’t be any limits and I never understood why staff are against it.
Whatever the PCs can, NPCs can do better.
Bring out that near endgame monster/villain/situation you weren’t sure you’d get to use if the players get too ‘powerful’. -
@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.
