A Constructive Arx Thread
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Honestly I would love to take a chainsaw to the roster in some way but I don’t know that characters that have been handed around a bunch are the problem…
let it be a challenge to you
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@sao said in A Constructive Arx Thread:
Honestly I would love to take a chainsaw to the roster in some way but I don’t know that characters that have been handed around a bunch are the problem…
I think the main problem is the inactive houses/families. Not many people want to take a roster that is basically an island. The biggest advantage of rosters is the built in connections. There is also a lot of rosters which can be extremely overwhelming. With rosters, at least to my thoughts, many rosters can be good and bad. Always options but that can create indecisiveness.
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Naw, you’ve got a point. I think this crosses over into more of a peeve, as I’m just fatigued of introducing myself, getting comfy with someone, and then having them plonked back on the roster.
(Rosters be tough.)
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@Solstice oh yeah, I find this exhausting too. I try to remember to do it every time but sometimes I just lie there like a bump on a log and think well, if I interact enough that it becomes relevant I will provide backstory to this person if they want it… I paged the last time my husband came off roster, he didn’t respond and then idled out so I assume I have super bad B.O. even in pages.
But I think part of the problem the roster has right now is that there’s a lot of characters on it that no one will take, and even just searching through it people get discouraged. One time I started submitting roster rewrites for some characters and this burst of activity got them players but it turns out doing roster rewrites for characters doesn’t take into account their +sheets I can’t see so there were some conflicts… lol
So meteors is probably the answer.
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I don't know what I'm doing. Poke at Seven Nations sevennations.aresmush.com port 2021
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As someone who took a roster relatively recently, I would add that what would be really nice is a more ways to search characters. Like the alphabetized list is nice, but with the website why can’t you separate between nobles and commoners, males vs. females, age ranges, fealties, that sort of thing?
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@Testament Replying to myself because I was making a joke on the meteors, not on the game. I’m now far more paranoid these days.
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The idle families issue is real. For a lot of the roster characters available, if you want some connections you’ll have to make them yourself and possibly step into an org leader position you might not want. Another issue I had recently was that I took a roster off that was a bit of a dinosaur and there was just SO MUCH to try to figure out with almost no context available (she also had not one but TWO nearly nonexistent family orgs and the vast majority of her built in connections were idle or dead).
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My problem here is I don’t exactly know what makes a good roster char - to take the example of those written for the Templars: Flora, Katryn, Leif, Cabrera, all excellent characters. All super interesting backgrounds etc. All have good links, or had good links. Yet. None could keep a player.
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@Narson said in A Constructive Arx Thread:
My problem here is I don’t exactly know what makes a good roster char - to take the example of those written for the Templars: Flora, Katryn, Leif, Cabrera, all excellent characters. All super interesting backgrounds etc. All have good links, or had good links. Yet. None could keep a player.
I could be some of the secret stuff or the stats. Combat stuff costing double of everything else can be off putting. I rarely look too closely at combat types so I don’t know much about them, at all. So, I can’t offer much thought on why they don’t hold a player beyond that.
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Catchup XP exists specifically for that reason – none of the characters @Narson referenced have been played long enough to not to have serious XP coming to them. I do think there’s some issues with their non-Faith orgs being dead as doornails, and the fact that a lot of players are scared of doing religion wrong so they avoid Faithy characters, but combat XP shouldn’t be what’s keeping people off.
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(Also I know what Flora’s and Cabrera’s secrets are and both come with hooks to more active groups, so I don’t think it is that either.)
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This is my own experience so take this for what it is, but when I grabbed my character from the roster, he already had a good chunk of development (including a 6), and I have one skill I want to get to 5 that’s roughly ~350 xp. Just in my 2 week “new period” I managed to rack up ~160 xp. I don’t know what catchup xp is or looks like, but I really only had maybe 1 scene a day (sometimes more on weekend days), but it does feel like there are some opportunities to be had with the right groups/orgs, enough so you don’t feel like progress is impossible.
Maybe one improvement for rosters would be to provide more information. I had to rely on people with actual experience with different orgs/fealties or whatever. I don’t know what it would take to add some “hooks” to a rosters page, but if each character had a couple clear hooks about the character, maybe people would walk into a character armed with more knowledge and not get too surprised with what they walk into.
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Some of my issues could be picking up a very brain-heavy character when I am both dumb, and also like… do not grok all of the setting. Some issues could be the journals might not cover all the things. And some of it could be because I’m sure that all the +clues I have access to sure made sense to the player who discovered them in context, but I definitely don’t know that context.
And maybe that’s why the were on the ‘we need to rework these chatacters before they become available again’ list, which… uh, I might have bumped them off that list by asking if there were update on the rework. Or maybe the rework was finished and I am still too dumb to brain it.
But I am having fun not knowing anything and trying to ICly bug people about ‘golly, I was gone for so long, I simply forgot everything!’ Hopefully this is not too annoying.
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@Rucket said in A Constructive Arx Thread:
This is my own experience so take this for what it is, but when I grabbed my character from the roster, he already had a good chunk of development (including a 6), and I have one skill I want to get to 5 that’s roughly ~350 xp. Just in my 2 week “new period” I managed to rack up ~160 xp. I don’t know what catchup xp is or looks like, but I really only had maybe 1 scene a day (sometimes more on weekend days), but it does feel like there are some opportunities to be had with the right groups/orgs, enough so you don’t feel like progress is impossible.
Catchup XP, to clarify, is not an automatic thing for every roster. Basically: there’s an overall average of XP spends calculated across the playerbase. When a PC has a number of skills below this overall average, they basically get free XP to help bring them up to that average. So you wouldn’t have seen it, because you picked up a PC that had been well-developed sheet-wise over years, but if someone picks up a PC that hasn’t had much of any skills bought, they’ll find that they may have skill buys that cost literally 0 xp.
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I mean, maybe that’s a question to people: What stops you from taking a Godsworn char? Are there things you’d like to see that you don’t? Is it just that the Faith is a whole layer of lore that is dense and you feel such a char would need to be right all the time?
When someone shows you who they are, over and over again? Believe them.
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@Narson I can answer that. For me, it’s a geniune lack of understanding about the Faith. I don’t know if there are any ceremonies written down, I don’t know what it means to be a member of the Faith or a Godsworn, I don’t even know where people get the prayers that they RP during Assembly of Peers, etc.
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I was very, very, very unsuccessful in my attempts to be engaged with the Faith AT ALL with my PC that had pretty significant ties to Solace for a while. I eventually gave up after several months of all of my attempts being unsuccessful (my messengers were straight up ignored). It was a pretty un-fun experience, and did not lead me to being interested in trying again on another character. I had a pretty large hook thing I kept trying to throw/get a bite on (there’s an area in Elwood lands that’s set aside for Solace at this point) and just got noooooooooowhere.
eta: To be clear, nobody violated any rules or did anything unpleasant. It was all fine and completely within the bounds of acceptable behavior. Nobody owes me anything, after all. But! It was also discouraging, and I don’t think I’m the only one who had a variation on this tune. That could be a pretty big contributing factor.
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@IoleRae I am very sorry that that was your experience. It sounds deeply discouraging.
