High-stakes competitive PvP isn’t really my thing, but I can see how it could be appealing if it were done in a way that made it easy to jump in, easy to come back after a character gets killed, easy to resolve conflicts between characters without needing staff intervention, and that had pretty even game balance so that the PvP fights were actually challenging rather than just one-sided gankfests, and so that no single character or group of characters remained “safe” for very long.

And WoD just seems like a really counterintuitive choice for something like that.

• It has complex and convoluted rules that often differ significantly between spheres and that are a frequent source of arguments among players.
• Character generation is complex and time-consuming.
• WoD game balance is legendarily poor, both between splats and even between individual characters in the same splat.
• WoD puts a heavy focus on personal storytelling, so players tend to get more invested in their individual characters, and losing them feels like more of a hit.

Some of these things could be fixed! You could trim down the number of available options into a much smaller set that were reasonably balanced against one another and that reduced the time needed for character creation and the need for significant staff oversight. You could excise or rewrite some of things that make combat time-consuming and complex. You could throw out the idea of personal storytelling entirely and approve or deny characters strictly on the basis of whether their math adds up. You could, in short, make the process of getting into the game, participating into the game, and getting back into the game a lot more like popular PvP video games.

I have never played Fortnite, but I really doubt that it (or any other popular PvP game) makes you sit out for several hours working on a new character when you get killed. When death is a frequent occurrence, then the amount of investment that death costs a player needs to be smaller. The more common it is, the easier it has to be to get back into things. WoD is the opposite of that.

@Gashlycrumb said in Numetal/Retromux:

b) restrain your model-world building at least to the point where you do not need to assign plot-armour to PCs, ‘fudge’ rules to save them from their mistakes, or put up with them being rude, because losing them would lay waste to the setting

At this point I tend to assume that any game with a PC vampire Prince, werewolf sept alpha, changeling overlord of the whole area covered by the game, etc., is guilty until proven innocent.

@Pyrephox said in MU* Wishlists:

I’d really love to see more single-sphere (or Mortal) focused games with staff who were really passionate about running those stories. More often what I see is “here are the most popular spheres or the spheres that people have loudly demanded, anyway, but the game staff actually only feels comfortable doing anything with X and Y sphere, so Z sphere, while technically extant, is basically stuck with whoever decides to take one for the team until they burn out”.

I suspect there’s also a lot of “Well, when the game started, we had someone who was super passionate about running Highlander: The Quickening, but they eventually got overwhelmed with <thing> and had to step down, so now one of the other staff members who isn’t really enthused about it and doesn’t care much for a lot of what Original Highlander Staffer did and honestly doesn’t have the time because of the sphere they’re really interested in running, but we didn’t want to just shut down the sphere and leave all the players who are invested in it in the lurch.”

@Cobalt “People trying to get me fired/kicked off of a game” is definitely a peeve, though.

@mietze said in Factions:

I can’t really put my finger on it, because it wasn’t that the game was swarmed by evil people or anything weird like that. I am thinking perhaps it’s easier to mind small burps before they turn into catastrophic spew with a small number of players?

At the risk of overreading my experiences, I’m not sure it takes much more than a small handful of people who treat faction conflict as OOCly competitive rather than cooperative. Someone decides they’re going to get a definitive win over the enemy by leveraging their superior game stats to permanently eliminate someone on the other team, and now everyone’s thinking about that possibility.

People who are competitive by nature have something to point to to rationalize pushing their own stats further (and once you have that hammer, you start to look for nails). People who aren’t suddenly realize that their investment in the character is at risk from people with more system mastery, and become less willing to engage outside their comfort zone. And so on.

@MisterBoring said in Numetal/Retromux:

I think this is a whole different conversation, because looking at the documentation for all of the active WoD games out there, at least a couple of them have house ruled too much.

At one end of the spectrum, Changeling has so many unclear and sometimes self-contradictory rules that it’s difficult to avoid ending up with a lot of house rules, even if most of them are essentially just “and this is the interpretation we’re going with.”

At the other end is “We don’t like the way Vampire Disciplines work by the book and so we’re going to introduce a completely new set of rules for them.”

My extremely cold take is that if you’re advertising your game as using such and such system, you should probably make an effort to stick to the rules of game system as much as possible, and that the fewer differences your players have to learn, the better. But then again, two different people may have wildly different ideas about how that looks in practice for any given game system.

@Faraday said in "My Guy Syndrome":

But a lot of those things aren’t inherently bad. If your character wouldn’t think the planet is safe, and it’s really important to you to honor that, I don’t think it’s a cardinal sin to politely sit a scene out. Same for RPing out an IC grudge, or some of the other things you listed.

And sometimes this goes all the way around to what @Muscle-Car described as weaponizing my-guyness. “Hey, I’m sorry I blew up your character’s car that she got from her grandfather and rebuilt with her own hands, that’s just what my guy would do. Wait, why are you being such a My-Guy jerk and holding a grudge about it? Why can’t we just go back to being friends? You’re not being a very good collaborative roleplayer.”

Acting and reacting in-character isn’t binary, and, like a lot of things, it’s good up to a point and bad when taken too far. Of course, not everyone agrees on what constitutes “too far,” and that’s kind of the root of the problem. Some things are almost always not OK (the thief who murders everybody else in the party and steals all the loot because “that’s what my character would do” – but even this might be fine if the expectations are set appropriately). Some things are almost always OK (holding a grudge against whoever murdered your character’s best friend – but this can still be taken too far and become not-OK). Lots and lots and lots of things fall into a gray area where some people think they’re fine and other people think they’re not.

Communication helps, but even then you sometimes run into disagreements between players. What to one person feels like raising a reasonable concern over what someone else’s character might be contemplating, might from the other side feel like inadequate player-character separation (“gosh, she’s getting really upset over something that’s happening to her character”).

There’re just an awful lot of ways to misunderstand what’s going on in someone else’s head, and many (most?) of us aren’t really that good at putting ourselves in someone else’s shoes. I don’t think there is a single solution here other than to try to listen to what people are saying even when they aren’t saying it out loud, and that’s a really hard skill to learn.

At the risk of sounding like I’m victim blaming, we also have to be willing to take “yes” for an answer. If staff explicitly say something like “If your background is more then N words, you’re probably going into more detail than we really need,” and I proceed to write a background that’s 5N words in length … that’s not something staff can fix.

@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.

I agree with both of you! I enjoy not knowing everything OOC about other characters so I can discover it in play, and I enjoy knowing enough OOC about other characters to make RP happen.

If I’m playing in the Vampire sphere, I find it useful to know who the other vampire characters are, so I know who to look for if I want to talk IC about vampire stuff without a lot of hemming and hawing to make sure we’re not breaking the IC Masquerade by doing so. On the other hand, I don’t want to know what their sheets look like or what their backstories are because I enjoy that mystery.

But I’m also pretty sure everyone draws the line dividing “things they like to know about OOC” from “things they like to not know about OOC” in a different place. OOC Masq is a spectrum.

@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.

@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.

@Coin I don’t disagree.

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.

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.

@Raistlin Writing code for an even moderately complex RPG system really hammers home the lesson that not having a robust data structure design before starting on anything else is a recipe for pain.

To me coded sheets and in-game systems are primarily a convenience, especially for more complex systems.

If I have an in-game sheet and a reasonably well-coded dice roller I don’t have to remember or look up what my Dexterity + Lockpicking skill is in order to roll against it, I can just type “+roll Dexterity + Lockpicking” and away we go. It’s just easier.

You might say that it’s not that big a deal to just keep a tab open with your PDF character sheet, alt-tab over to it, look up the stats, alt-tab back, and then roll against them, and you’re right: it’s not really a big deal. It’s especially not a big deal for rules-lite systems or narrative-heavy systems when either I’m not going to be rolling a lot of dice or there aren’t a lot of stats to remember in the first place. But there’re certainly game systems where I’d look askance at doing entirely without.

Of course I’m sure it’s possible to put something in place that’s capable of reading a character’s stats from a PDF document and interpreting them in-game in exactly the same way that in-game sheets work, but – and please understand that I say this as someone whose brain has been permanently warped by MUSH code – that would be a much more difficult project to me than just writing up the in-game systems needed to do it. I’d rather write the in-game systems and something to dump in-game sheets to human-readable text files that get uploaded to the game’s web server than mess around with PDFs.

I do also enjoy a degree of OOC mystery, especially in less-narrativist games, but I can always choose to just not look at other people’s sheets even if they’re publicly available. And there are some game types – comic-book games, for instance – where open sheets seem like a benefit and I’d be happy to have them. It makes sense for characters who’ve been members of the same superteam for a while to have a good grasp on one another’s capabilities in a way that it doesn’t make sense for a newcome to know what powers each member of the secretive vampire coven has.

It depends on who I’m playing with. If it’s someone (or a group of someones) who I’m in sync with on a roleplay level and who I’ve established a baseline level of trust with, then there’s a lot to be said for freeform. I enjoy adding some randomness into the success/fail decisionmaking process using dice, because fairly often this ends up generating a result that’s interesting and fun to play that I might not have opted for if I eliminated dice/cards/RPS/etc. entirely – but under these circumstances then I’m happy to do things freeform. No need to roll dice for every little thing, you know?

When I don’t have that, it’s useful to me to have some game mechanics to fall back on that put some level of restriction on the ability of players to bigfoot any and every challenge that comes by. That doesn’t always happen even with game mechanics; we’ve all witnessed that one person who absolutely insists on handling everything they’re even remotely qualified for rather than occasionally cede the spotlight to someone else. But it does seem to make it a little less frequent?

Of course, whether I’m playing system-light or system-heavy I will inevitably end up creating all sorts of additional details surrounding the characters I write up, to the degree that the game permits it. Extended families, in-character organizations, backstory details that I didn’t think to include in the character creation phase, subcultures that the character’s part of, stuff about where they came from if it’s a fantasy or sci-fi game – I’m an inveterate backstory expander. But that doesn’t seem to me to be so much system-dependent as setting-dependent (or maybe staff-dependent), since I’ve gone off on wild tangents of this sort even in games that use World of Darkness or D20 as their RPG system.

@Faraday said in "My Guy Syndrome":

But a lot of those things aren’t inherently bad. If your character wouldn’t think the planet is safe, and it’s really important to you to honor that, I don’t think it’s a cardinal sin to politely sit a scene out. Same for RPing out an IC grudge, or some of the other things you listed.

And sometimes this goes all the way around to what @Muscle-Car described as weaponizing my-guyness. “Hey, I’m sorry I blew up your character’s car that she got from her grandfather and rebuilt with her own hands, that’s just what my guy would do. Wait, why are you being such a My-Guy jerk and holding a grudge about it? Why can’t we just go back to being friends? You’re not being a very good collaborative roleplayer.”

Acting and reacting in-character isn’t binary, and, like a lot of things, it’s good up to a point and bad when taken too far. Of course, not everyone agrees on what constitutes “too far,” and that’s kind of the root of the problem. Some things are almost always not OK (the thief who murders everybody else in the party and steals all the loot because “that’s what my character would do” – but even this might be fine if the expectations are set appropriately). Some things are almost always OK (holding a grudge against whoever murdered your character’s best friend – but this can still be taken too far and become not-OK). Lots and lots and lots of things fall into a gray area where some people think they’re fine and other people think they’re not.

Communication helps, but even then you sometimes run into disagreements between players. What to one person feels like raising a reasonable concern over what someone else’s character might be contemplating, might from the other side feel like inadequate player-character separation (“gosh, she’s getting really upset over something that’s happening to her character”).

There’re just an awful lot of ways to misunderstand what’s going on in someone else’s head, and many (most?) of us aren’t really that good at putting ourselves in someone else’s shoes. I don’t think there is a single solution here other than to try to listen to what people are saying even when they aren’t saying it out loud, and that’s a really hard skill to learn.

@catzilla said in Long or Short? Application Process!:

Do you prefer lengthy/intensive application process? Or a shorter one where you get into play quicker?

I don’t have a single answer to this; both long and short processes have worked for me in the sense of “I got a memorable character and some good RP out of this”, and both have been failures in the same sense.

I think that the length of an application process should be informed by the kind of game being run. A game where everyone is a World War 1 soldier in the Battle of the Somme and it’s expected that characters will die in droves will benefit from making it as fast and easy as possible to get back into play. Similarly with a no-holds-barred PvP-encouraged type of game.

At the other extreme, a game where you’re expected to hold onto the same character for years and build up an extensive in-game history and character relationships doesn’t have to have a lengthy application process, but it’s more tolerable to me since I know I’m not likely to have to do it again any time soon.

People have mentioned the desire that information provided in an app be used in play by staff, which is also vanishingly rare in my experience. I also appreciate getting some indication that my work was actually read during the application process. If I spent hours putting the writeup together, it’s nice if the feedback touches on some of the stuff I wrote about in terms of “we liked this, it fits well with the game” or “this isn’t a great fit, but what about this?” instead of just “your stat math is off, fix it.”

I strongly agree with @Pavel (and others) that if a game has requirements then they ought to be explicitly set out - ideally somewhere that’s as front and center to the players as possible so that it’s difficult to miss. And while I don’t usually write my backgrounds in bullet point format, I do find “here’s the bullet points we’d like your background to cover” super helpful in making sure I cover everything that staff wants to see, and not too much that they don’t.