MU Peeves Thread
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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!"
– A. Bertram Chandler -
@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.
