MU Peeves Thread
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@Roz cool downs are dumb and shouldn’t be a thing
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@Roz Agreed. Both of those are dumb.
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I got all spun up and ready to fite against bank limits and cooldowns but it looks like almost everyone agrees that it’s a silly system. Welp.
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@helvetica All I remember from that episode is the bike.
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wait why would someone limit spending XP.
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@junipersky Games like Exalted and Shadowrun time-gate how long it takes you to learn stuff.
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I generally dislike time gates and justifications re: xp.
I think folks should do what they want within the normal rules of the game. -
Okay but - wait what?
Wouldn’t it make more sense to just… not allow the XP in the first place to be earned quicker than skills can be learned rather than give it and then tell people they can’t use it!??
I’m so befuddled by this concept.
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@junipersky Folks who prefer cooldowns on XP spends and caps to unspent XP tend to cite instances where a PC has spend a ton of XP all at once, to go from not having a skill to being an expert, particularly if the timing was particularly convenient, i.e., a situation arose where the skill would be useful so they spend their hoard of XP to suddenly be good at it. Some folks find this immersion breaking and obnoxious to deal with.
But I just can’t really bring myself to find it a compelling argument, particularly when weighed against the cons that happens: people getting behind where their PC could be due to entirely OOC reasons. Those reasons could be medical (very easy to forget for some ADHD folks), RL emergencies happening, even normal stuff like vacation. I just don’t think it’s fun, nice, or kind to turn this into a game of OOC homework just because of some potential edge cases that – aren’t really a practical problem other than temporarily bugging some people.
And you’d have the exact same impact from someone spending their XP regularly on raising a skill and just not really mentioning it/RPing it. It will look the exact same as them spending the XP all at once. Or they’re just not someone you know and RP with! Or sometimes someone IS RPing about it, but they miss a weekly XP spend cutoff, and then they lose out on that week of OOC progress even though it’s an active part of their story.
(And if the impact of raising skills is statistically negligible, as it can be in some systems…then it also doesn’t matter if someone raises it a bunch at once. If the numbers don’t matter one way, they don’t matter the other.)
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These problems largely stem from people trying to apply RAW to MUs. Most of those ‘time gates’ are IC time gates, which aren’t an issue in most tabletop games at all because the GM usually just goes ‘okay, time skip, spend your XP’ at some point. This is what those rules are written for.
Applying them to games with 1:1 or even 1:2 or 1:3 (rare as those may be) time progressions means no time skipping, and thus people have to wait real life units of time, which it was never meant to work with.
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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.
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I agree that there shouldn’t be any limits and I never understood why staff are against it.
Whatever the PCs can, NPCs can do better.
Bring out that near endgame monster/villain/situation you weren’t sure you’d get to use if the players get too ‘powerful’. -
@Autumn said in MU Peeves Thread:
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.
The ‘how much XP you can bank’ is rare, but a lot more common in our spaces now a days because it’s the default for FS3.
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You can set it so there’s no learning time or limit on how much XP you can save, that’s how Red Planet is doing it, but yeah that’s the FS3 default. In general I think the only complication in getting rid of it would be you’d have to take a look at what your actual skill caps were, since in my experience you CAN hit them fairly quickly once you take the learning time restraints off, since chars can come out of CG pretty close to their ceiling unless the game raises it or changes how long it takes to raise certain things.
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@Third-Eye said in MU Peeves Thread:
that’s how Red Planet is doing it
We’re actually capping the XP at 10, which is 5 weeks of accrual (on our game). I don’t have any experience with systems where a request is required to spend XP, but in a general sense I think there is a reasonable implementation of some limitations on XP accumulation and spending, depending on how your system works.
The point of XP is to reward players for playing. As long as the system does not punish players who are playing, then it’s probably working just fine. I do find the time gate on how quickly XP can be spent on a single stat as implemented in FS3 by default a little punitive in that dimension because you have to spend it EXACTLY when the cooldown runs out or you are “missing out” on progression. This is a small window to hit. On Red Planet, you can go 5 weeks before you’re “missing out” on anything and frankly I’m okay with that. It is still incumbent on you, the player, to engage with the game’s systems on some level to benefit from them.
I have played on games where you could bank unlimited XP and jump up whatever skill you needed in the moment and I can’t say that was my favorite thing. It absolutely happened and there was no law against it, it was just a little cheesy. It’s not a realism thing for me as much as it is a min-maxy approach to play that I don’t particularly enjoy in others. I’d rather see folks lock in a narrative and play it out than sitting on the fence until the literal last second, but some balance in there for players to live their lives and forget sometimes is definitely more user-friendly.
he/him
this machine kills fascists -
@Trashcan 5 weeks is at least more generous than i’ve seen elsewhere. i’ll just say that i’ve seen the cap hit people who are being actively engaged in the game and RPing and just sometimes lose track of how much XP they have. and i just think preventing those folks from missing out is worth the potential for some occasional cheesiness.
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What consistently happens to me when there is a cap is I am consistently rping and it doesn’t matter because my character is gonna be behind someone whose memory works right no matter what. Time gating xp spends is especially bad for this. I dumped 8 XP into a skill, my character was working on that this whole time - why it matter when I hit the button?
I can see why it is lame to do it mid action scene when the skill is being rolled. Otherwise? This exists just to torture people whose brains work like mine.
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@Trashcan said in MU Peeves Thread:
The point of XP is to reward players for playing. As long as the system does not punish players who are playing, then it’s probably working just fine.
But it’s not. The point of XP is to allow character advancement.
Playing is its own reward. Extra XP to reward participating in events has always struck me as daft – you get a bowl of ice cream (the gaming session) and then you get a treat (XP) for doing such a great job eating it.
One of my many unpopular opinions is that MUs can and should be very like tabletop, but this is one area where that doesn’t fit – if everybody in my gaming group participates one session except Phil, who stares at his phone for five hours instead, and I give everybody but Phil XP, good. Everybody on the MU can’t participate, though, only a limited number can join the event, and then I give those lucky ones extra XP? Meh.
Cooldowns/“learning times” (wasn’t the learning time the time it took to gain the XP?) and bank-caps suck. What sucks even more is those “You can’t increase your firearms skill above level 1 without using it on-camera in a GM-run scene” rules when coupled with a lack of opportunities to join such scenes, effectively creating a stat-cap for characters who are not favourite. Pretty soon you’ve got a huge bank of XP that you can’t spend without first successfully begging staff to create and run a scene for you that’ll give you a chance to roll.
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@Gashlycrumb I am also anti-XP as is probably well-known or know-ish at this point. If we have to go with advancement of that sort, I’d prefer a system where you set a skill or two that’s being worked on by the character, and, after some time, maybe with some random elements, it increases.
