MU Peeves Thread
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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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@Ominous said in MU Peeves Thread:
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.
I feel like, if you’re running a game that allows players to raise whatever they like whenever they like – which you are if this is a potential issue – then probably either:
- The things players can buy can influence the dice and might swing the results, but are generally not things that would completely change the complexion of a scene – you can get extra points in your Sword skill right before you duel a bad guy who fights with a sword of flame, but Fire Immunity is off the table.
Or else:
- The things players can buy can completely change the complexion of a scene and you’ve decided to embrace that and run with it.
And in either case I’m not sure adding a step like this is really the best use of your time. I’ve seen games that have this (or similar schemes, like time delays between when you buy something and when it shows up on your sheet), and for things like an intensely competitive PvP-focused game I could see it making sense, but generally I don’t think I’d bother.
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@helvetica said in MU Peeves Thread:
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.
Followup question - if a game makes it so you can only raise things via +job… do staffers processing those jobs also have to make sure you’re not doing any RP before raising stuff, lest THE DIRTY CHEATING happen, or whatever?
Mummy Pun? MUMMY PUN!
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If it wasn’t for the mid-scene “oh shit!” skill raise, my XP would never be spent.
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Wouldn’t the easiest way to avoid mid-scene advancement be to keep the commands to advance only in one specific OOC room on the grid? An XP Room.
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@Jennkryst said in MU Peeves Thread:
@helvetica said in MU Peeves Thread:
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.
Followup question - if a game makes it so you can only raise things via +job… do staffers processing those jobs also have to make sure you’re not doing any RP before raising stuff, lest THE DIRTY CHEATING happen, or whatever?
well i for one also hate XP spends only being allowed to happen via job. like if it’s because of code limitations or whatnot, i get it. but the sort of, like — staff has to approve each and every job because players can’t be trusted to spend XP even when those spends meat the mechanical requirements? hate it. (but i’m a hater.)
@howyadoin said in MU Peeves Thread:
If it wasn’t for the mid-scene “oh shit!” skill raise, my XP would never be spent.
this is honestly incredibly valid and i think probably something that is also forgotten. people can be RPing towards a thing and forget to hit spend until they’re reminded of the XP impact. which isn’t even people trying to cheese the system; it’s that people are naturally most reminded of the system when it’s the most relevant to them.
@MisterBoring said in MU Peeves Thread:
Wouldn’t the easiest way to avoid mid-scene advancement be to keep the commands to advance only in one specific OOC room on the grid? An XP Room.
this is what got suggested up-thread and my god i hate this too. this feels like SUCH an overcorrection to a fringe issue.
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@Roz said in MU Peeves Thread:
this feels like SUCH an overcorrection to a fringe issue.
Being that I’ve played on dozens of games that use XP rooms (without claiming they were a response to this fringe issue), I don’t really hate it.
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I am not actively on a game (sigh) however, I don’t see the harm in mid-scene skill raises. Most of those scenes, you are fighting an NPC. If it’s PvP, well who’s to say someone didn’t skill up just before entering the scene? Isn’t that basically the same? If you earned the XP when you spend it shouldn’t really matter. Or maybe I’m just not seeing why it does matter. What does it hurt or what does it do? Maybe I’m just not understanding the issue.
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@RightMeow I think it’s a situational fringe case. Example: A character with a bunch of saved XP is investigating a crime scene, their skill in Forensics is a 1, the lowest possible rating in the game. Prior to this they have not exhibited any affinity to the skill, any interest in the skill, and the only prior time they made a check against it, they failed. They have no narrative reference for raising the skill. They spend all of their saved XP during the scene and suddenly have Forensics 10, which per the system, would make them one of the Top 3 Forensics experts in the world. The character has effectively gone from barely functional in a skill to being part of the state of the art in the field, in a single scene.
This whole XP room thing or limits or whatever would be to deal with that sort of stuff. The kind of narrative record scratch that could come up in play.
I think the point is that for some people it’s narrative / immersion breaking to have characters do that. Which is fine. Everyone’s view of things is different.
Proud Member of the Pro-Mummy Alliance
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As a hobby we should be able to tell people who abuse rules (or rather, abuse lack of rules) to just fucking not.
If I ran a game and someone tried to raise their stat mid-scene or even mid-roll and got caught (not because I think it’s okay if you don’t get caught but because you can’t do anything if they aren’t caught) then even if I DON’T have a rule explicitly against it, it should largely be fine to say: ‘no, bad player, no biscuit’.
Changing an entire system (whether I agree with it or not due to other reasons) based on something like this is ridiculous; the kind of thing metaphors including babies and bathwater were made for.
(EDIT: also the kind of reasoning conservatives and would-be-progressives use to ban things – ‘oh, but it could be used to do this one thing, so we’re gonna ban the entire thing altogether’.)
In Occam I trust.
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There are various perspectives and experiences here and I think it’s swinging from big ol’ lawless crunchy traditional games where poor sportsmanship may be rampant, to ares games where by default you’re under 3 layers of thicc limits.
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@RightMeow said in MU Peeves Thread:
I am not actively on a game (sigh) however, I don’t see the harm in mid-scene skill raises. Most of those scenes, you are fighting an NPC. If it’s PvP, well who’s to say someone didn’t skill up just before entering the scene? Isn’t that basically the same? If you earned the XP when you spend it shouldn’t really matter. Or maybe I’m just not seeing why it does matter. What does it hurt or what does it do? Maybe I’m just not understanding the issue.
I can kinda see this being bigger deal in PvP settings, especially if you can see other PC sheets. Best of luck on those games, wherever they are.
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@Yam Yeah.
I have a feeling that the type of games one’s been on weighs into the irritation factor here. If there’s only 12 skills and they’re all pretty broad, you can justify an “I was doing this off camera” in a lot of ways. If there are 100+ fairly niche skills and a not-niche person is suddenly an expert in them, that breaks immersion a bit more, and cheapens the experience for the players who were focusing on that niche ahead of time.
For me the issue isn’t that Gun Man is going from level 3 to 4 in Shoot Gun mid-scene, it’s that Gun Man is going from 0 to 85 in Computer Surveillance in a scene that I finally ran specifically to please the one person who has been steadily leveling Computer Surveillance. This did not happen a little bit. This happened a lot. Crunchy traditional game where poor sportsmanship may be rampant, etc.
This whole phenomenon does not bother some people, which is fair. It does irritate me, which is just a personal preference. I have seen too much of it from too many people who weren’t fun and weren’t trying to make IC sense. I find it annoying. I don’t like it. Peeve.
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@Ominous said in MU Peeves Thread:
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.
This was, like, every oWoD place in the late 90s and early 2000s.
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@Coin said in MU Peeves Thread:
then even if I DON’T have a rule explicitly against it, it should largely be fine to say: ‘no, bad player, no biscuit’.
While naturally you can do basically whatever you like on your game, perhaps the first instance should be a “oh I should make this a policy from now on” moment instead of an instant boot.
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@MisterBoring said in MU Peeves Thread:
@RightMeow I think it’s a situational fringe case. Example: A character with a bunch of saved XP is investigating a crime scene, their skill in Forensics is a 1, the lowest possible rating in the game. Prior to this they have not exhibited any affinity to the skill, any interest in the skill, and the only prior time they made a check against it, they failed. They have no narrative reference for raising the skill. They spend all of their saved XP during the scene and suddenly have Forensics 10, which per the system, would make them one of the Top 3 Forensics experts in the world. The character has effectively gone from barely functional in a skill to being part of the state of the art in the field, in a single scene.
The ability to do this seems so rare and niche that I’m not even sure I’d be mad even at this one. Because for the most part, on any game I’ve ever played, banking up enough xp to go from 0 to 10 in one fell swoop? You’ve been sitting on that stockpile of xp for at least a year.
So… If someone has that kind of savings in the bank, and decides to blow all of it on that one single thing? Welp. Ok. We’ve now got a kick-ass investigator on the game with no skills in anything else, and no ability to improve in other areas without re-saving up again. So it’s not like the investigator won’t still have to work with the fighters and the doctors and the whoever else’s to actually accomplish something from that investigation.
So if someone randomly decides that they’ve spent the last three years off screen taking online courses in a degree for a criminal justice program and ran out of Murdle books to solve along the way… Who cares? They’re not doing anything more with the same xp from the same amount of time as any other players are.
IRL, I run into people I’ve known for years having skills about which I’d not known prior to them popping up. Yes, I knew immediately that my bestie runs marathons for fun. I knew her eight years before I knew she was an amazing pianist because piano never came up until she came to visit me in a place that had a piano and she sat down and played. She didn’t cheat at life by having a 3 dot background talent I hadn’t seen yet. And it didn’t take away from the other friend who was there with their guitar.
I’ve never seen any harm come from letting people spend what they’ve earned when/as they decide to, because they’re still only spending the same things as anyone else. If you have 100 points earned in a one year period, your investigator going from 0 to 10 in that year is the same cost, time, and effort to make that change overnight as it would have been doing it at two points a week the whole time. They aren’t getting any advantage other than not having to remember that entire year to spend the points on that online degree they’re working off screen while hanging at their day job and chatting with their friends over pancakes because they’d rather write those scenes than endless vignettes alone with their laptop.
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@Jenn My preference (though not an RP killer for me) is that entering a scene be a soft lock for your character sheet. Basically, for the duration of the scene you don’t mechanically change as a character, outside of stuff like taking damage from a fight or spending points that are meant to be spent on actions or whatever (like Willpower in WoD or Conviction in Blue Rose).
I think this whole “when can you spend XP” thing is ultimate a fringe thing that is up to personal preference, and usually something that isn’t dealbreaking for whether or not a particular person would join a game.
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In some ways, letting people suddenly up their skills mid-scene is a bit like quantum equipment in the OSR, where characters just buy generic “adventuring gear” then when they need something, one unit of gear becomes the specific item they need. Or the ability to do research and save the “knowledge” to answer a question in the future: https://todistantlands.blogspot.com/2016/01/books.html . It’s basically quantum skills.
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