@Gashlycrumb said in Lords and Ladies Game Design:

Sometimes I’ve found even the “your social conflict dice work on NPCs, PCs react to your RP” jarring. If Abelard has enormous influence in ‘society’ and everybody loves him based on his dice, but every single PC thinks he’s an insufferable prick and an idiot, it’s rough. Though really, this sort of thing may have less to do with social-stats and their use and more to do with players who want to play total assholes but not the consequences of assholery.

It’s fair to find that jarring, but there are a number of ways to deal with it.

You could try to figure out where the disconnect is. Is Abel just doing a spectacularly bad job of playing in line with his dice? Maybe he needs some help. Maybe there’s some kind of miscommunication. Who knows.

Or it could just be that the other PCs are reacting entirely appropriately from their character’s POV and what you have is just that the PCs are the outliers in society. You can then make clear through NPCs, plots, +rumours/IC news/whatever that Abel is in fact loved by the populace and the PCs are out of step with society at large. This could potentially lead them to some interesting RP and/or conflicts.

Regardless, I see no justification for forcing another PC to love Abel just because he’s got good dice.

@Gashlycrumb said in Lords and Ladies Game Design:

In tabletop it’s pretty ordinary for a GM to say, “Woah, hold on, roll intelligence,” and then inform the player (on success) that their scheme is flawed and why, and help them come up with a good one. It’s harder to do that on a MU, where play continues without the GM watching.

Yeah totally. And also that sort of thing is less jarring in tabletop because it’s far more common to just give the broad outlines of a plan, like “I try to convince the guard that I’m part of the cleaning crew ((rolls dice for bluff))”. That just doesn’t work as well on a MU where the RP is typically more down in the weeds.

Of course you have to handwave sometimes, but my issue with social conflict (back to the topic at hand) is that you tend to be handwaving, like, the core of the RP.

Something like @Roadspike suggested could be a decent compromise though. Being able to influence NPCs, gossip, etc. without having to make PCs behave in a certain way. It’s one thing to inflict something upon a character (“you’ve been hit in the head” or “there’s a mean rumour swirling about you”), it’s another to control that character’s thoughts and actions.

@Raistlin said in Lords and Ladies Game Design:

I think it’s similar to saying, “You want to play a strong character? Show proof you’re that strong in real life.”

Your own physical strength is not reflected in the words you write, though. Nor is your ability to throw a punch or fly a spaceship. I’m not saying you need to actually possess these skills, just be able to write it. Nor is there anything wrong with collaborative brainstorming.

I don’t think we’re that far off in practice, really, I’ve just literally seen too many cases through the years where people will do something like RP the worst line imaginable and think that a +roll Con or +roll Seduction should somehow make that work. For me, it doesn’t. If you can’t even get in the ballpark of portraying a convincing con artist, maybe that’s just not the right role for you.

@Raistlin said in Lords and Ladies Game Design:

Without them, you risk telling players “Sorry, you can’t play a charismatic character because you’re not charismatic in real life” or “Your character can’t pull off that brilliant scheme because you’re not smart enough to devise it.”

Unpopular take maybe, but personally? I don’t have a problem with that, to a point. Yes, we’re all playing characters that are not ourselves, but MU*s to me are more of a writing game than a puzzle-solving game. Writers have to do at least some modest amount of research into the characters/settings/themes they’re writing. You don’t need to be an expert, of course, but you at least need to be able to fake it to a level that isn’t jarring.

So if you can’t come up with a scheme for your character to break into the vault to steal the MacGuffin, or a way to convince the King to give you troops, it’s not my job to come up with one for you just because you made a few good rolls. I don’t want a game where the poses are like: “Faraday gives a rousing speech.”

Dice can be used as an adjunct to the story, but they should never BE the story.

@Roz said in Games we want, but will almost certainly never have:

Yeah, but those are all tabletop RPGs.

And even in those examples, in most cases any given character is still controlled by a single player. In Ars Magica for example, the main way it was done is described here:

In troupe style play, each player typically has one primary character who no one else can control. Since Ars Magica is focused on wizards and magic, very often this primary character is the player’s magus. Each player may also have exclusive control over one or more secondary characters, such as companions or grogs.

@Ominous said in Games we want, but will almost certainly never have:

let’s not pretend that the idea is some left-field ramblings of a crazy man.

I didn’t say that such a system had never ever been tried before, I said it was a radical departure from the established norm of how RPGs are traditionally done. Which is true. It’s almost unheard of among TT groups with a handful of friends. Trying to do it at scale with an entire MU game seems like it’s setting yourself up for big issues.

That still doesn’t mean that one couldn’t/shouldn’t do it, as I said. Just be conscious of what you’re getting into.

@Ominous said in Games we want, but will almost certainly never have:

I have a solution to that, but it always gets waved away - any character can be played by any player. When you log on, there’s a list of characters available, and you select who you want to play that day. Then there’s less connection between one player to one character, and any given character “losing” isn’t going to be devastating to that player.

By all means, if you think a game like that would be fun you should run it.

But I think you may be overlooking some significant challenges. Most RPGs are designed around playing a single character who interests you. This would be a radical departure.

You also risk wildly inconsistent characterization, plot holes, dropped threads, and conflicts as multiple players try to steer a character in different directions from one day to the next. I think it would also be harder to make meaningful connections with other players, since you don’t have shared character bonds to latch onto.

@Gashlycrumb said in WoD/CofD/Supernatural Games, One Splat or Many?:

I think I can appreciate and value GMs and gamerunners, and I do, without thinking that those roles should be characterised as ‘volunteering their time for the community’.

Analogies are always imperfect, otherwise they wouldn’t be analogies. Since you recognize the value of the work GMs/gamerunners do, it seems that it’s mostly just a disconnect on wording. To me, it’s pretty straightforward. If I do a bunch of unpaid labor for a group of people, and much of that work doesn’t benefit me personally? That’s volunteering my time for the community. However, I recognize that my definition is not the only possible one.

@Pavel said in WoD/CofD/Supernatural Games, One Splat or Many?:

One also, largely, wants to avoid being in a position where only one staffer knows what’s going on. Faraday frequently manages it, from what I’ve seen, but I think she’s part dragon or something, so she doesn’t count.

LOL. It only works for me because I expressly set up the games to require minimal staff intervention. I don’t recommend it as a general strategy for most games.

@Gashlycrumb said in WoD/CofD/Supernatural Games, One Splat or Many?:

An aside, I wish we’d all get over the idea that MU staffing is volunteerism. Yeah, sure, it’s voluntary. But volunteerism implies community service. And okay, yeah, sort of, technically, but also, no. GMs are players playing a different role in the game. Yeah, we need them or we can’t play, but. Weellllll. You need a pitcher to play baseball, but you can play without a left fielder if you must. This does not make the pitcher a volunteer whose services you must constantly applaud and the left fielder a mere player who owes the pitcher. (For the same reason, gamerunners and players should all remember that GMs are players too, and they, too, should be having fun.)

I don’t think this analogy quite works. I think it’s more like someone running a community center. The work entailed in organizing the space and arranging the Valentines Dance Party is in no way comparable to the work entailed in showing up and dancing at the party. Even though, yes, the dance can’t happen without people showing up and dancing.

But even though the organizers of said community center may be volunteers, that doesn’t mean they have no accountability. If you signed up to organize the dance party and bail on it for no good reason, that’s a crummy thing to do even if you’re a volunteer. You can control the boundaries of what you volunteer for, but once you sign up for something, you should follow through (extenuating circumstances aside).

@Raistlin said in Games we want, but will almost certainly never have:

What about a game that took some of these more “niche” themes and put them onto one game? Like, it would have “eras” that players could make characters for. Wild West, Piracy, and Victorian, for example. … My first impulse is that this might just split the player base.

It’s a neat idea, but I think your first impulse is correct. There have been various attempts at things like this through the years, whether it’s characters spread across different planets in a sci-fi game or different eras in a historical game. Invariably, staff struggles to provide enough content for all the “spheres”, which can lead to one or more spheres dying off for lack of interest, or - worst case - ALL the spheres die due to the staff and players being spread too thin.

@Tat said in Games we want, but will almost certainly never have:

@Faraday Yeah, I’ve never tried it with vehicles, I do think that’d complicate matters.

Yeah, switching between types for regular characters is pretty straightforward. It mostly just switches their weapons/armor. But the vehicle is a separate entity with its own damage and stats. Theoretically you can change the vehicle’s type too, but then it gets a bit weird if it’s in Plane form and the damage list is like “Incapacitated wound to Right Arm”
Unrelated side note: changing combatant types also gets messed up if you try to go from Observer to regular combatant or vice-versa.

@Tat I don’t think that would work very well for vehicles - not without a bunch of extra work anyway. That’s why there’s no built-in command to do that.

@Jax Doing generic Mech v Mech combat isn’t hard in FS3. They’re just vehicles. You only run into trouble when you’re trying to model a pre-existing system. Battletech, for instance, has rules for heat, critical hits, finite ammo (not just clip-based), etc. - none of which are modeled in FS3. So you either get a very shallow approximation of Battletech, or you have a metric ton of additional custom code needed (at which point you should probably just make your own BTech specific combat system.)

@Tez said in Metaplot: What and How:

The problem I’ve run into is that players don’t necessarily feel that it connects back to the metaplot if there aren’t changes to the homebase region or overall story. Is that just out of the scope for your game?

Can’t speak to LB’s game, but that’s how it was on BSGU. Folks could run missions of their own whenever they wanted. (Also other plots connected to the war, though folks rarely did so.) But they couldn’t affect the overall trajectory of the war without staff approval and coordination. This was spelled out in the game policies, so if that was a deal-breaker for someone, they could decide that before playing.

@Tez Fair. I don’t think there is some magic “how” that will work for all games, because I don’t think all games share the same goal.

For example, on B5 MUSH, the whole goal of the game was to play out the events of the show (with variations). That carried implicit limitations on who even could be involved in the metaplot and what they could accomplish. It was a heavily-FC-driven game. You could still be involved in the metaplot as an OC (mine was) but it was a lot harder, and there were never any promises made to the contrary.

On the other end of the spectrum are TGG and BSGU. Pretty much every big metaplot event was open to everyone, and varied schedules included off-hours folks too. But this only worked because of the design of the games. The metaplot was war, the PCs were all soldiers, and the events were all battles. It was super easy to involve everyone.

Neither is good or bad - in B5 it was fewer PCs / more influence and in TGG/BSGU it was more PCs / less influence. But if you want PCs to be involved, you’ve got to design a metaplot that they’re going to have reason and ability to be involved in.

@Tez said in Metaplot: What and How:

That is, talking about it in big picture way. I’m more curious about the actual direct implementation of how people do it.

I’m not really sure what sort of implementation details you’re looking for.

A metaplot is fundamentally the same as any other plot. It has an overall story arc / direction, and then the individual events that happen along the way. Some events may happen off-screen and some may be more passive (PCs get to react but not necessarily change things). But to keep PCs the most engaged, you’ll need to provide them opportunities to feel like they’re able to influence the metaplot in some way. Otherwise they feel railroaded. It’s a tricky balance to have engagement without running the whole metaplot off the rails.

I have always used the old TTRPG definition. As summarized by wikipedia:

The metaplot (also, metastory) is the overarching storyline that binds together events in the official continuity of a published role-playing game campaign setting, also defined as an “evolving history of a given fictional universe”. Major official story events that change the world, or simply move important non-player characters from one place to another, are part of the metaplot for a game.

So while individual players/storytellers will run their own plots, the metaplot is more like an umbrella plot - an overall direction for the game as a whole.

Some metaplot examples from games I’ve run (or helped to run):

• Babylon 5 MU basically followed the key events from the TV series, with variations influenced by the PCs.
• BSG Unification had an overarching plot of “war progress” with the PCs changing planets and ships.
• Sweetwater Crossing had a metaplot around the range war conflict between the Blake and Cooper ranches.
• TGG had a metaplot for each campaign, following (generally) the major events from history.

My definition differs slightly from @Roadspike’s because I think you can have really big game-impacting plots that are not part of an overarching or connected story. They’re more like episodes. Battlestar Pacifica was more like this. You could connect the Big Plots in retrospect and call that a “metaplot”, I suppose, but they weren’t deliberately planned/connected that way.

@Gashlycrumb said in Staff and playable pcs:

I don’t think staff should GM themselves to get to have fun on their own games. They should get to actually be Big Damn Heroes in proper RPG fashion.

Though, yeah, if as you say, nobody will ever organize a plot to further your PC’s development, well, that does suck and I wouldn’t hold it against you of you do a plot to showcase your own PC.

I think we’re on close to the same page. It’s just that in the first paragraph you say you don’t think they “should” like there’s some kind of moral or ethical problem with doing so. That’s where I passionately disagree. Some staffers who can’t do it well maybe would be better off not (to @Pavel’s point) but that’s different from a blanket rule that people shouldn’t even try except maybe as a matter of last resort. It’s a pretendy–fun-time game with no real stakes. As long as people are having fun on the game, who cares?

@Juniper said in Staff and playable pcs:

In my opinion the next best thing is for staff characters to be totally anonymous.

The idea that staff alts will stay anonymous is perplexing to me. Even on games where it wasn’t required to be disclosed, it was generally widely known. People just aren’t that good at keeping secrets or varying their playstyle. So all the “anonymity” does is erode trust and encourage people to play guessing games about who’s playing who.

Sorry for double post, missed a part of the thread.

@Roadspike said in Staff and playable pcs:

I also think that a staffer’s PC should never be “out in front” of a story.

@Gashlycrumb said in Staff and playable pcs:

I think that they should not be at the front of their own stories. Writing a “this looks like a job for my PC!” plotline is not a great look.

Unpopular opinion maybe, but I disagree. Again it goes back to the idea that staff is entitled to have fun on their own game. Staff deserve to have their PCs be the Big Darn Heroes sometimes, just like everyone else.

I’ve been staffing for decades and have run hundreds of plots for others, but I can count on one hand the number of times someone else organized a plot to further my PC’s development, or to give them the spotlight. Relying on other people to generate your fun is a losing proposition.

You just need to avoid turning the game into the “staff PC show” where the staff PCs are doing All The Things or getting all the cool stuff, and everyone else is a side-show. Just maintain a healthy balance and most players aren’t going to care.

Unless you’re paying me, it would be insane to expect me to only do all the un-fun “work” parts of running a game and not have any fun on it. Good luck finding other staffers who’d be willing to do it either (though I’m sure there are a handful scattered around).

MUs are not like TTRPGs, where it’s considered poor form for a GM to simultaneously run a PC. The groups are smaller, it’s often friends, and there’s a lot less administration and shenanigans you have to deal with.

I think all alts should always be transparent. I’ve never seen any good come from hidden alts. Especially so for staff alts.

@Tez said in Big Update Thread:

Changed themes from the default since other people seemed to hate it as much as I do. Bar is back on top.