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MU* Wishlists
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@Faraday said in MU* Wishlists:
@Livia said in MU* Wishlists:
FS3 has luck pools right? I feel like something like that could be used for things like Willpower. But I haven’t looked at how it’s handled.
FS3 doesn’t have scene-based or time-based luck pools. It’s just a permanent thing you spend, like XP. So it meshes a bit better with asynchronous/simultaneous scenes. Once you spend it, it’s gone, and it doesn’t really matter what order you do it in.
My experience of CoD is that the pools were all manual anyways. They’re time-based in the system, but the code people are using is still just people running a command to refill a pool based on IC time passing, rather than anything automated.
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@Roz said in MU* Wishlists:
@Faraday said in MU* Wishlists:
@Livia said in MU* Wishlists:
FS3 has luck pools right? I feel like something like that could be used for things like Willpower. But I haven’t looked at how it’s handled.
FS3 doesn’t have scene-based or time-based luck pools. It’s just a permanent thing you spend, like XP. So it meshes a bit better with asynchronous/simultaneous scenes. Once you spend it, it’s gone, and it doesn’t really matter what order you do it in.
My experience of CoD is that the pools were all manual anyways. They’re time-based in the system, but the code people are using is still just people running a command to refill a pool based on IC time passing, rather than anything automated.
I believe Theno’s code has something in it that would auto refill 1 willpower per day but that’s not even necessarily.
Most scenes people ran often came with a ‘don’t forget to fill up your willpower and essence!’ reminder at the start anyway.
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I think one of the main reasons X of Darkness games have that secrecy mindset is because the setting has secrecy baked into it, thematically. MORTALS DO NOT KNOW, WE MUST NOT REVEAL OURSELVES, THERE ARE EMEMY ORGS TRYING TO SNEAK IN AND DESTROY US FROM WITHIN
…
And yeah, wanting to keep sheets secret from people you are at war with for whatever reason is like. Appropriate.
But if people can be mature adul-NO WAIT COME BACK!
I didn’t have anything to actually finish that thought, just the joke.
LUCKY FOR THE EXALTED COMMUNITY, they already have open sheets. And lucky for the Ares code, the only thing Essence rules needs to track are motes.
Will isn’t Willpower, it’s built up SORCERY power, and can be done in downtime so you can assume you start at 10 unless plot intervenes.
Power is INERTIA built up towards dealing damage to someone, and I believe it always starts at 0, so ot can be tracked in-scene.
Anima builds during combat and fades after, so can be tracked in-scene.
Limit does not exist in Essence… the curse can go off at any moment!
And Health is health. Already trackable but healing can be sped up with charms. Need to look at the code for that.
So Motes are the only real thing to track (even then, you can assume full unless you’re doing ‘this takes place before you have time to fully recover from the last thing’ scenes)
Mummy Pun? MUMMY PUN!
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@Jennkryst said in MU* Wishlists:
And yeah, wanting to keep sheets secret from people you are at war with for whatever reason is like. Appropriate.
Meh. Do it anyway, show people everything. Any IC conflict I’ve had with other PCs has always been way better when there’s OOC comradery and communication backing it up. I have no interest in OOC antagonism with the actual player.
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In whole, my CoD MU* experience isn’t extensive – probably like a yearish total between a couple games? But after experiencing how the code was set up and used, I did come out of it thinking, “Someone could probably do this in Ares if they wanted to.” I didn’t encounter any custom code that was time-based other than XP accumulation stuff; it was all just manual commands for spending and regaining various pools. The OOC obfuscation wasn’t a huge thing the places I’ve played, but I’m sure that’s a YMMV. The biggest point there was just that sheets weren’t public, which I’m sure someone with the know-how to make a real plugin could manage.
(I’ve actually mulled over this and had a lot of Thoughts at one point, can you tell.)
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@Livia That looks dope as shit, awesome stuff!
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Personally, I’ve played on many, many WoD/CoD games over my (gags) 25 years in this hobby. Some of them have had playerbases more interested in crunch than others, but considering the fact that the other big – and clearly much bigger – name in the gaming industry at the time was Dungeons & Dragons, with additional systems like Legend of the Five Rings…
World of Darkness kind of was the systems-lite game around at the time. And for a lot of people, that was almost as much of a draw as the themes of the games themselves. I’ve only ever played on one game where someone seemed more interested in mechanics that plot, and unfortunately it was the Changeling GM at the time, which was a big part of why I left. Dude was more interested in enforcing Glamour rules than running things, and it turned people off of the game.
So with all of that said and given some of the games I’ve seen and what I know about Ares…
I think both some of the strange mechanics and the cultural issues could be solved with a bit of careful planning. Limiting the game to a few related splats would reduce the need for some of the ‘OOC Masquerade’, especially if the setting involved some degree of uneasy peace between whatever splats are present. Then it becomes a question of keeping it from the mortals, not each other. The expectation of PVP - or CVC, if you prefer - also seems most heavily baked into the Vampire variations, so I’d probably suggest skipping that in favor of games that have regularly rotating leadership (Changeling) or various council models built in (Mage).
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@Aria speaks a lot of truth. Also I would simply just state up front, “Yo, this is a coop game, no PvP” and if people wanna ask about PvP, they can be asked to see themselves out. I don’t wanna sit here and wave +sheets against someone, I’d rather work towards more sphere-based goals, or do some whacky shit like be a mad mage scientist who tries to tinker with his own magical devices or something.
I definitely think it can be done, and I think there’d be an audience for that.
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@Rucket [nerd_glasses]But what about when the tournament arc happens and we all have to kung-fu eachother?!?[/nerd_glasses]
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I’ve always hated the concept of OOC Masque. It has always seemed wrong-headed to me. I know this is going to sound impossibly naive and possibly insane given some of the battle-scars people (including myself) have in this area, but I’ve always been of the staunch opinion that a game for adults should be able to have the players act like adults in an OOC way. So don’t take any OOC knowledge IC.
Tis a little dream I have.
That said, I think cooperative games – even with canonically opposed factions – can work just fine. I’ve seen it first hand, even. I’ve mentioned it before on some thread, but there was a game years ago in which the Technocracy and Traditions had to cooperate in a town because Weird Shit was going on and both sides desperately wanted to know why. So, while there was friction, certainly, everyone there was cooperating. Any character who wouldn’t either wasn’t approved or would “leave town”. So just a tweak to the setting can set things like that.
But even without that, being open and honest OOCly is the best policy, I think. In my experience, most folk are fine to talk out conflicts and find a narrative solution everyone can live with. Those that can’t, well, there’s always staff. And I think we all know at this point that those people would involve staff EVEN IF some OOC Masque was in place and all the bureaucratic 't’s were crossed. So I don’t think it’d even be any different in the worst case scenario, but substantially better in the best case scenario.
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I feel like how co-operative a game is depends on how it is presented from the get-go. Like, all WoD games seem like they are set up for all the factions to work in isolated groups. Lords and Ladies type games tend towards ‘everyone works together even if we don’t get along’ (And a lot to do with romance stuff). Fantasy games seem to be a mix. At least by my experiences. Firefly games seem to encourage getting along until the ships get involved and what not.
WoD would probably need a bit more enforcing that everyone works together over just for their area. Since it seems like ‘Vampires only trust vampires’ or something is pretty baked into the theme.
Firefly games would probably serve better as a purposefully kept small game with everyone on a ship or two, similar to the show. Rather than ‘As big as we can get for playerbase’. Firefly has some pretty huge ships, though. If I made a Firefly game (I’ve been tempted). I would likely build it around 1-4 ships for people to join and have a max number of players. Without time delays for travel if people want to so stuff on planets.
I can’t speak about any of the other types of games since my preference is Firefly, fantasy and/or Lords and Ladies type games.
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My wish is actually a game that supports PvP very well and not liking someone IC and OOC is considered fine. Some people suck, and murdering their PC is enjoyable. I want to assassinate dinos. I want be a villain that people hate and let them feel the catharsis of taking that character down and I don’t want to water down the experience by having everyone involved aware of my sheet and collaborating to tell a compromised story.
The part where this is a fantastical wish is I’d like this to work and not turn into the staff’s favorite clique playing by different rules and not have to deal with the OOC drama that seems to inevitably slip into MU* games when you play this way.
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@shit-piss-love said in MU* Wishlists:
My wish is actually a game that supports PvP very well and not liking someone IC and OOC is considered fine
Isn’t that basically what MUDs are? Each mud I’ve tried has just been pvping people with all the code stuff.
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@icanbeyourmuse said in MU* Wishlists:
Since it seems like ‘Vampires only trust vampires’ or something is pretty baked into the theme.
Of all the groups in WoD you could’ve picked as an example, you picked the main one with a theme of PvP baked right in.
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@icanbeyourmuse said in MU* Wishlists:
@shit-piss-love said in MU* Wishlists:
My wish is actually a game that supports PvP very well and not liking someone IC and OOC is considered fine
Isn’t that basically what MUDs are? Each mud I’ve tried has just been pvping people with all the code stuff.
Huh that’s interesting. I always felt the defining feature of MUDs was their focus on PvE over human interaction. Makes me wonder that a lack of coded systems to enforce fair play contributes to PvP not working out in a MUSH/X format.
To clarify my wish; I want a MU* where I do not have to think about the real people behind the characters and can act entirely IC, and not have that negatively impact my outcomes. I recognize this is not a wish that can be fulfilled; the human element is precisely why there are so many problems in MU* and there’s no way to prevent OOC from getting involved.
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There has been a very different divide for me where Mud/Mush/Mux’s specifically had things put in place to allow PvP. Where as a Moo wouldn’t at all.
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@shit-piss-love said in MU* Wishlists:
the human element is precisely why there are so many problems in MU* and there’s no way to prevent OOC from getting involved.
I would argue that the human element is the entire point of a MU*. The fact that you are interacting and collaborating with another human being through the thin veneer of a fictional character is one of the key differentiators between MUing and other forms of gaming.
He/Him. Opinions and views are solely my own unless specifically stated otherwise.
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@Pavel said in MU* Wishlists:
@icanbeyourmuse said in MU* Wishlists:
Since it seems like ‘Vampires only trust vampires’ or something is pretty baked into the theme.
Of all the groups in WoD you could’ve picked as an example, you picked the main one with a theme of PvP baked right in.
Haha. Did I? I don’t know much about them. Vampires just were the first that came to mind since the last WoD character I played was a ghoul.
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@icanbeyourmuse So when Vampire was first written in the early 90s, the game was primarily about the Camarilla (a large Vampire faction of many different Vampire clans that has a sort of Medieval lords vibe to it) and their conflict with the Sabbat (a smaller Vampire faction that also had several clans, but not as many, with a sort of Crusading church vibe to it), but layered with hundreds of years of history and bloody vampire horror.
This conflict was written as frequent, hostile, often intensely violent, and an intrinsic part of the game. Some variation of it has been baked into every version of Vampire since, whether it was in VtM 2.0, the anniversary editions, or as Invictus/Lancea Sanctum (with a few additional convenants just for funsies!) in what became the Chronicles of Darkness. It’s a big part of why - as much as I love both WoD/CoD Vampire as it’s written - I generally don’t think it’s a great fit for large online games unless staff actively wants to spend a decent bit of time telling stories around and adjudicating interfaction and interpersonal conflict. Most of the other splats will have some shared antagonist that they’re willing to at least temporarily set aside their petty differences to face, but in most versions of Vampire, the antagonists are… some other group of vampires. Could it do well in a smaller, controlled setting with a clearly outlined group of antagonists and and a narrative driving towards a particular endgame? Yeah, I think it could. But that would have to be baked in from the beginning and constantly reiterated, because otherwise you’re eventually going to get some random player(s) that decide their primary goal is to be Lord of All the Fangly Ones and being an ICly scheming, manipulative dickface to get there is part of the theme as written.
Note that I have had plenty of fun over the span of many years playing exactly this theme. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with it. But in comparison to a lot of the other World of Darkness lines I’ve run on various games over the years, I’d say that Vampire: the Requiem was 100% the one that caused the most amount of me sighing and going “…fucking really, guys?” at something that was OOC, in comparison to both versions of Mage and both versions of Changeling, which I’ve also staffed.
