Best posts made by Istus

Not all of the feedback was truly constructive, for sure, but even purely dissenting opinions have value. I have not digested everything as of yet but here’s some cliff notes of my headspace for those that are curious:

• I am slowly pulling back from my ‘log everything’ perspective. I think that I may end up having a report function that allows a player to highlight something problematic in a verified manner.
• I like having some extrinsic rewards. This obviously does not jive with the purity of RP for RP’s sake but whatever. I will figure something out.
• I really like the idea of consistent XP for existing rather than tying it to a specific activity. I really want to reward people for participating in a meaningful way but I do not want to expect people to be on daily. I think in the short term this means that if you don’t have /some sort of scene/ in a two week span or such you will start to get less of a return until it approaches zero. There may be a vacation mode ‘cuz life happens.’
• There will not be any nom/vote systems or any system defined notion of prestige. If you want to be well-known, get out there and be that thing.
• There won’t be classes. On a surface level I think I will set things up such that there is baseline availability of skills or whatever and then later on you can buy in to a specialization or two - or never specialize at all if you wish!
• There will be an upper cap on the amount of mechanical power you can obtain and you can not get everything. This will likely be tied back in to the specialization notion I am mulling over.
• There won’t be randomized vendors for ‘stuff’. How stuff distribution works is still a jumble in my mind but I may roughly tie it to an activity metric or something (re: extrinsic rewards for participation). Hand-me-downs will be prevented in some manner - advanced stuff requiring advanced skills or something. Who knows?

I may not always sound like it, and we may not agree, but I appreciate the suggestions and criticisms. Spending your own time to help me refine things is lovely.

Hello friends,

I have been building out a game based on Fantasy Flight Games’ narrative dice system with an aim to have a Witcher theme. This generally means low magic fantasy.

Having abandoned a certain vilified Star Wars game, I have a great deal more time to devote to this project than I otherwise would have with another project on my plate. Since I am more technically minded than design oriented, I am hoping that there is interest in providing input on shaping such a project!

My goal is to avoid all of the pain points I have experienced in my time on other games. For example:

• Bar RP being the fastest means of accruing experience that can be put towards combat related abilities.
• Arbitrary time sinks being present that contribute nothing to RP.
• Giant, insurmountable gulfs in power level between ‘old’ characters and ‘new’ characters.
• Large scenes contributing more experience to players than smaller scenes.
• Character homogenization when indefinite advancement is allowed.
• Gear inflation and hand-me-downs.

In general, as long as there is a deterministic way to drive something, I can code it. Nothing is off the table from a technical level.

Some other bits of preface I want to get out of the way to make plain my prospective administrative methodology:

• I log literally everything that passes through the server from pages, to public chatter, to the movement of objects, and everything in between. Anyone that expects privacy between their activities and myself is going to be disappointed. This will be made plain several times before any sort of effort is taken on the part of a prospective player so there are no misunderstandings.
• Individuals will only be allowed a single account. There is enforcement on a code level. I understand there are going to be some complications around proxies and ‘family’ scenarios that I will have to deal with on a case by case basis but that’s fine with me.
• ‘Dark’ is not a possible state for staff or players. It is not possible to be unfindable in general.

To kick things off there are two main things that I am crunching away in my head as I decide what next to work on:

• Are classes a thing?
• How is advancement going to be handled?

I like the idea of indefinite advancement but, on an unlimited time scale, this means that everyone can potentially become the best at everything. There are a handful of ideas I am considering:

• Use classes and restrict some things behind classes.
• Allow experience expenditure only on things you fail.
• Force choices between abilities in tiers.
• Use a pyramid-type structure where you have to build the base of the pyramid to get to a higher tier of abilities. Make expansion of the base potentially more expensive over time so that being too broad gets prohibitively expensive.

Anyway, thanks for reading!

I have everything I need to get to a functioning alpha now. Everything else will just have to come out in the wash.

The goal has always been to create somewhere I want to play, to avoid the problems I have experienced elsewhere, and to be in a position to create new features and fix problems as they arise. Hopefully someone else will decide that they want to put some effort in to participating as well.

If it does not work out at the very least I can take the experience and the framework, refine it, and give it another crack in the future.

@Warlander This was probably also done to maintain some parity between Force Users as they are getting the ability to add 2 skills in each tier, except for the final tier, up to 100.

For those that are not familiar with the way the Force works on AoA, there are 6 tiers of abilities. Since this advancement is allowed up to and including tier 5, this is a boost of 1850 experience. Force users also get the age related XP for a grand total of 2350 XP.

There are other wrinkles to consider though outside of this:

• You may only put 35 points in to Force skills each month. If you put 35 points in to a single skill, and have access to a Holocron, you get 45 points. The additional 10 points are not free from an XP perspective but it does save you time.
• To advance to the next tier, you must have a minimum of 4 skills at a minimum of 75. This means that it is 8 months minimum per tier of advancement.
• The bonuses being handed out for the time jump are allowed to violate the minimum skill requirement.

The TLDR is that Force users that take advantage of the time skip will be granted an approximately 25 month (5 months per tier) head start over their peers plus the advantage of having access to high tier abilities long before they would under ordinary circumstances.

@shit-piss-love This was good to look at.

Further refining my ideas on character advancement, I have the following items in mind:

• I am building my system with the idea that it will take a year for the first character to hit maximum power. I suspect that very few people will actually get to this point.
• Mechanical power gain will be non-linear with most of your advancement happening in the beginning of your character’s career and tapering off as things get to the end. For example, the last six months may actually only represent a power delta of 25% versus someone making the exact same specialization choices.
• New players will only require half the time to get to the point of the player with the highest level of experience.
• The ‘advantage’ that comes with being around longer than someone else is reputation you earn through social interactions and the opportunity to acquire ‘stuff’.
• XP earned beyond the cap will be converted to a currency for fun things like custom item descs, recolors, or whatever cosmetic nonsense. It’s a little mobile game-y but no mechanical advantage will be had.

@Pax Totally fine! There is always going to be a red line and I want someone to see where the lines are drawn up front so that they can spend their time and effort on somewhere else that better fits their ethos. The input is helpful either way.

@KarmaBum Words are hard and I don’t always get them right.

@shit-piss-love said in On the utility of Logs, Receipts, and Proof:

@Istus said in On the utility of Logs, Receipts, and Proof:

Is the idea worse than doing nothing? What I am trying to wrap my head around is whether such a thing is intrinsically negative in terms of the behavior it would encourage me to engage in. If I understand its limitations, and do not rely on it to ‘do my job’ what negative consequences could arise from it?

Do you consider reading the logs of people who have not asked you to read them a problematic act?

If permission to do so was not granted at the outset, absolutely. There is a reason I have been very clear that anything I end up doing will be clearly labelled on the tin - be it logging everything, logging nothing, or something in between.

For all discussion/debate purposes I hope that everyone is considering things from the position that nothing is being done without previous disclosure and acceptance prior to making a character. There may be some subtlety in specific cases such as noting that some words may automatically trigger an investigation but not publishing the specific words.

@mietze I think I should clarify that ‘doing nothing’ in this case is specific to triggering passive investigations based on keywords or not. It does not mean that everything is hands off outside of that one discussion item. Part of the reason why I am so passionate in finding some balance of tooling and culture management is because I have been the victim of this sort of behavior in the past, like many others, and anything I can do to prevent it or slice it off early I will try and do.

@Pavel You’re probably right. These debates are constructive and help to check my personal biases.

There are opinions and perspectives here that I may not have considered. The result will be better for it.

@Whisky It’s on top of Evennia.

Game’s good, would recommend.

I’ve already thrown enough of my soul at it that I am already burning out!

@CuriousGamer The TestDummy has been a thing for a long time.

@Jennkryst You likely did not reactivate your venv.

I personally found the application process and the depth of information to absorb too onerous to give the game a fair shake. This being said, those I interacted with on the help channel were earnest and motivated. The real problem was me in the end.

Happy to see an original content game still thriving!

@KarmaBum Whatever system I would put in place would only be viewable/usable by myself. It would never change once established.

@shit-piss-love I am still trying to figure out where the line will be drawn. I have no desire to make a full time job out of looking through logs - I want it to be purely reactive - and I do not have any specific desire to read what consenting adults are up to behind closed doors. But I also have people talking about trust loops and how predators get away with stuff for far too long because people do not report predatory behavior.

It is very easy to point out the many problems - and doing so is still a super useful exercise for me and appreciated - but a perfect solution for everyone can not exist. I know that whatever decision I make in the end is going to conflict with another’s desires and that is perfectly fine in my mind as long as it is not delivered in the form of some rug pull where all of a sudden I pull something on someone after they have made a time and emotional investment under misunderstood or false pretenses.

It is our passion for the hobby, and the nuance of interpersonal relationships, that makes this subject so complicated.

@bear_necessities Off the top of my head, having a list of potentially problematic keywords that get flagged up is easy enough. As you say, I do not have the desire nor the time to sit there and comb through logs on a regular enough basis to be absolutely proactive.

Patterns of behavior do eventually bubble up to the surface but I would prefer to minimize the potential damage that is left in its wake without having to make gut responses.

@Pyrephox The system would be transparent. I just meant that the interface that the player uses to interact with it is simple. For example, you do not need to know that skill X is opposed by Y except in a scenario where player B has this talent that modifies Y.

@Polk More likely in play to inflate online player numbers.

@Roz The only goal is to provide the means to investigate without requiring victims to justify their complaint. I understand that it is impossible to automate the resolution of an issue, and it is impossible to catch all instances of abuse. If it was possible, the YouTubes and Facebooks of the world would have already implemented it.

By ‘gut check’ I mean making a subjective decision on whatever evidence is available.

@icanbeyourmuse I can not avoid distrust from the outset. If I say I am logging everything, some people will assume I will abuse it. If I say I am logging nothing, some people will assume I am lying.

@Faraday I do certainly have the power to bury myself!

@Jennkryst You’re better off looking at Ainneve. It’s actually intended as an example: https://github.com/evennia/ainneve/blob/master/README.md

@Whisky I probably should not have attached a label to it. I don’t think I truly understand the nuance between the various flavours. I’ll do my best to describe the end goal.

It is not a MUD. It may feel like that since my focus on chatter here has been on mechanical elements. That is only because that is where my current interest lies.

What I am shooting for is a storytelling platform with TTRPG elements. I do not expect, nor wish to encourage, a roll with every pose. When you roll against someone the result is not automatically applied. There is no enforced social or combat cadence such as turn order. There aren’t NPCs running around to whack at.

I personally like ‘stuff’ and I like acquiring abilities or whatever. I also like writing flowery nonsense as if I was authoring a novel. I am attempting to combine these in a reasonably cohesive way with a slant towards favoring narrative over rote execution of a system.

Theme-wise, I want to focus on city life and its outskirts with pressures coming from an on-going war, organized banditry, a powerful religious faction, and the aristocracy. Of course there is room for ‘monster of the week’ type stuff as well.

A little fluff piece I’ve been fussing with:

Novigrad, a city of wealth, power, and decadence, is a place of contrasts and conflict. With its towering spires, grand structures, and bustling streets, it is a hub of commerce and politics, where powerful factions vie for control. The church, with its imposing cathedral and army of fanatical faithful, holds a great deal of power, seeking to impose its will on the masses through holy doctrine and the threat of excommunication. Meanwhile, the criminal underworld, embodied by the powerful King of Beggars and his network of thieves and assassins, operates in the shadows, manipulating the city’s commerce and politics to suit their own ends. The rich merchants and powerful nobility hold court in the city’s many taverns and palaces, vying for influence and wealth, while outside the walls, the common folk struggle to survive. The air is thick with the scent of intrigue and the sound of clashing steel, as the different factions jostle for position and advantage. Amidst all of this, witchers, sorcerers, and other outcasts roam the city’s streets, surviving by their wits and the edge of their blades, always searching for the next job that will keep them fed and clothed. Such is the city of Novigrad, where the strong rule, the weak suffer, and only the cunning survive.

It’s a little puffed up but I’ll pare it down eventually.