@MisterBoring said in Empire Discussion Thread:

@somasatori I totally agree with this. Each character in the roster could have a set of links to the important world lore that drives their character to help people find what they need to know.

Looks like this has been done! It’s pretty helpful - there’s a nice in-web-site glossary now that lets you get immediate information on what certain things are.

@Tez Spoken on game:
[Public] Ada: See someone was asking about AI use, to which the answer is it was used for a list of names, about six images, and as a programming aid. No writing at all.
Albrecht has entered the game.

I’m impressed at the roster selections for characters, and it looks like several of the Houses have some meaty problems set up for them right off the bat, including at least one House who has to deal with being the royal family in a region where the King is insane.

Not all families have THAT level of excitement going on, so it feels like you can pick your level of conflict at least initially. The setting is interesting and each region has a different take on what nobility is and what the obligations of nobles are, providing a lot of opportunity to explore differences of ideology. The staff member I’ve interacted with has been pleasant and responsive.

Downsides: the coding is still a bit of a work in progress, and it wouldn’t surprise me if early play involves bughunting and debugging. Doesn’t bother me too much, but if that’s something that will cause you anxiety, I’d definitely say give it a little time to shake the bugs out.

@Ominous I would LOVE THAT so much. There was a game that briefly tried something like that set in London, but it never quite launched. But yeah, a society of spooky investigators, whether it was ‘official’ or not, would be great if you can find a way to keep the ‘missions’ coming, knowing that 80ish percent of players will not run anything.

And all of those very good comments are the flip-side of the issue:

Players/staff aren’t necessarily GOOD at dealing with these kinds of issues. No one wants to play a game with That Guy who is drooling at the thought of playing a Klansman. Not a lot of people want to play on the game where staff are like “women can’t be anything but mothers and wives because That’s Historically Accurate” (when it never has been). It’s exhausting to try and build something authentic that is actually fun to play, so I don’t honestly blame anyone for saying “I want something that’s got the fun parts and not the unfun parts”.

I just mourn the kind of stories that could be played if more people could be trusted with these kinds of subjects.

I admit, I am a person who wants historically accurate -isms and resistances in historical games. Does that mean I want to see a bunch of racist, sexist, bigoted PCs? No, of course not.

But these societal forces shaped the era and had a lot of impact on the culture, the structure of society, and the pressures that drove people to accomplish amazing and heartbreaking things. When you remove, for example, the fact that suffragettes could be and were tortured and murdered by law enforcement for campaigning for women’s rights, then the courage it took to be a suffragette is diminished. If you’re talking about union-building, I think you have to include the fact that union-busters used racism to try and drive working class groups apart, even if that effort fails in the context of your game. If you’re talking 1920s-30s, it’s a bit repugnant to me to not make it clear that it’s an era when the people who made some of the defining music of the era couldn’t have a drink in the “respectable” clubs they played in. It also helps contrast some of the speakeasys which were integrated and even havens for LGBT folk of the era, etc. The fact that people had to find refuge in criminality because the laws were bigoted and unjust is a huge part of the story of the era.

I just finished reading Last Night at the Telegraph Club (excellent book), and it’s a lesbian coming of age story that could not exist if you took out not just the anti-LGBTQ prejudice of the 40s, but also the harassment and abuse of Chinese immigrants by immigration officials on anti-Communist witchhunts.

Does every game have to include this stuff? No, of course not. It’s your game, make what you have fun with. But there are valid reasons for including major societal pressures that have nothing to do with wanting to abuse other players or PCs by playing a bigoted character.

Valdemar.

Valdemar is really made for MU*s. You’ve got several different kinds of magic powers, Heralds are canonically pretty promiscuous, there’s light lords-n-ladies action, with familiars and Companions and bondbirds you get all the special magical animal friends you can stand, and it can be as adventurous as you want, depending on when in the timeline you set it.

I was 22, I think, and my mom had recently died, so I was sort of–floating, I guess. Looking for something to do, I was hoping to find something online relating to In Nomine, a game I love with all my heart but could never find anyone local to play with.

I found Brass and Steel, an In Nomine MU. I connected on raw telnet, and played on raw telnet for a full year or more, because I didn’t know that “clients” existed. There were only a few players on, but several of them became great friends, and one of them became my best friend, a friendship that has now lasted more than two decades, even though they don’t MU* anymore.

It was a fun game, and still has some of my most fond gaming memories.

@MisterBoring Any deets you can spill on why not? I admit I’m super intrigued by the system, but wasn’t a backer and haven’t done any real dives into the mechanics or theme.

I think that it’s generally a much better system than CoD 1st edition or oWoD. There are some places where I think the ideas were better than the execution, mechanically, but I enjoy the theme and the vibes way more, and even most of the mechanics are an improvement.

A couple of places where CoD 2E stumbles:

1. Investigation sub-system. I’ve seen very, very few people even try to use the Clue system, and when I’ve tried to run using it, I honestly find it badly explained and pretty finicky. I like the IDEA of it: there’s an intent of letting the players guide the investigation, of being able to use a clue you find to mechanically help you out with further inquiries, of your characters’ strengths and weaknesses affecting what they’re good at finding…and all of these are appealing. But again, execution.

2. Doors sub-system. I love the idea of Doors (you’ll read that phrase a lot), but again, the execution. In this case, it’s not necessarily the straight mechanics of it, but more the intent. Doors are intended to be used against NPCs to win favors/concessions over an extended basis. The thing is that very few of the things PCs want from NPCs actually work on that basis. Players, honestly, don’t tend to think that far ahead, so when they want someone to let them in a door, it’s usually three minutes before they have to be somewhere on the other side of that door, so “this will take a week and three attempts to influence the NPC” just doesn’t work. Ironically, it SHOULD work better in a MU*, but few games flesh out important NPCs to the extent that players think about earning favors/concessions from them for the future. I’d suggest taking the concept of Doors (favor for favor, being able to use skills other than social ones for manipulation, leveraging vices and leverage) and cutting it down to something that can be resolved in a scene.

3. Combat declarations. Honestly, this is just a failure by GMs and players to use this system or take it into account when planning things. It’s a SOLID mechanic. But yes, in CoD 2E, you’re supposed to start any combat by having both the PCs and the antagonists (or any other factions involved) declare their win conditions, what they’re trying to ACCOMPLISH with the combat, and if someone gets to it, they win whether the other side is dead/injured or not. It’s a great way to design combats that are more interesting than ‘let’s you and him fight’ and I really wish it was used more often. But the fact that it ISN’T suggests there’s a design flaw there, either in how it operates in situ or how it’s explained to people.

@catzilla If it makes you feel any better, I had the exact same issue. I wanted to set up an original theme Ares game and just could not figure anything out, even the really basic stuff. Tried to go step by step in the tutorial, but didn’t understand what I was doing, and eventually gave up in embarrassment.

@Yam On a colonized planet, the descendants of the colonists bond with genetically engineered, psychic dragons to protect the planet by fighting all-consuming spores from space.

While I vastly prefer 2nd Edition Lost in 90% of everything…the complaints about pledges are absolutely valid.

There’s some good things: bargains with mortals are better in that they serve a specific purpose that mechanically explains HOW they hide you from the Gentry and how that can be useful.

Likewise, Seasonal bargains are better (but badly organized - it is a badly organized book overall, with a lot of weird things hidden throughout).

But I really miss being able to strike mechanically detailed pledges with other characters outside of the few defined bits in the core book. YES, the pledge mechanics were overly complicated and desperately needed some streamlining, but they threw the baby out with the bathwater.

@somasatori Pardon my code ignorance, but it feels like you could use a variation of this to have plot attributes - i.e. someone signs up for Plot 13: The Square Bullet Hole Murders, gets an attribute like square_bullet, and could be eligible to find any of the clues for that plot…but it also might open up things like a plot command that auto-mails everyone who has signed up for that plot, or that lets GMs easily pull up how many people are involved in a given plot (or even plots as a whole, and how many people are involved in, like, 4 plots, if they want to do some quick analysis of how interest/involvement is distributed across the playerbase).

I’m not saying you want to, or that’s even the point, but it’s something that intrigues me, as a way to have a decent understanding of activity levels beyond log-in numbers, and maybe recognize if there are people who might appreciate being drawn in.

@somasatori Holy crap I love that.

It’s been interesting to read all the different takes on minigames, it’s made me think about what I actually like in minigames, and what I don’t.

When I think about minigames that I’ve genuinely enjoyed, I like something where I get to use my character’s skills and abilities (especially ones that maybe don’t get used a lot in scenes, like research, finance, social, etc.) to create something (including just an experience) that enhances my enjoyment of the game.

I don’t like grind, or minigames I must engage with on a regular basis or face negative consequences. I don’t like minigames that replace a fun scene or that become a bottleneck to being able to do the things I’m there to do.

So something like a poker game that takes into account character stats (luck, for example) or skills (gaming/gambling/bluff/sleight of hand)? That’s pretty cool. +hunt code that I must remember to use every couple of days or else Bad Things Happen? Not so much. A crafting minigame would be fun (as long as I don’t have to do ASCII), or an investigation or research minigame.

I really liked a few of the things @Jumpscare had done in Silent Heaven, even though I didn’t get to play with many of them while I was there. But you had forensic kits you could carry around and read fingerprints, or other forensic evidence from people who had been in rooms previously.

Something like that tied into a robust investigation setting would be super cool for a mystery/crime focused game.

@Pavel She was a good horse! I’m glad she had a nice retirement.

Love some cheese and crackers. Slice it up, get some good quality, rosemary and/or olive oil crackers, go to town. If I happen to have an apple or something, slice that up super thin to give a little sweet crunch layer.

But usually I’m lazy, so just cheese and crackers.

@Pavel said in AI In Poses:

Can LLMs be of benefit to people with disabilities? Fuckin’ probably, I dunno, I’m not an accessibility expert.

Honestly, I doubt it? If something existed that was what people who want to use LLMs THINK LLMs can do, then it would.

But an LLM is not that. They have no sense of accuracy, of understanding of the data they’re receiving or outputting. They’re often (like, sometimes higher than 50%) confidently wrong, which is the last thing you need to assist you with a processing or sensory disorder. They create a sense of deceptive empathy but don’t have the ability to consistently and accurately recognize distress or self-harm, so I sure wouldn’t use them for cognitive or emotional disorders.

Do some people probably use LLMs as disability assistance tools? Yes, and some people take horse deworming pills to cure COVID. In both cases, they should be stopped from doing that, because it very well may injure or kill them. “People do this” does not, in any way, equal “this is a good or effective thing to do”.

And I’m not even trying to be funny, or talking about MU*s anymore. An LLM cannot and should not be trusted with ANY situation where there’s a negative or harmful consequence to error, because they are fucking black boxes filled with errors.