Witcher MUSH Design

[hellfrog]

@Faraday I mean, it’s a witcher game? Entirely possible in this (or other games) that the characters are not actual humans.

[Faraday]

@hellfrog said in Witcher MUSH Design:

@Faraday I mean, it’s a witcher game? Entirely possible in this (or other games) that the characters are not actual humans.

I mean, if whatever kind of being is reflected in the game learns everything in a perfectly balanced pyramid, go for it I guess? It’s just a weirdly arbitrary skill system IMHO. You don’t have to agree.

[Pavel]

@Istus said in Witcher MUSH Design:

I like when characters are different mechanically and personality-wise. I also like giving people the opportunity to continuously improve their character rather than arbitrarily limiting them through some upper XP cap.

Unfortunately, at least in my experience, if the only limit available is “things for people to buy”, given enough time, they’ll start to become the same mechanically. I’m not a game designer, though, so I don’t really have any advice or contribution to the mechanical choices you’re considering.

That said, if you want people to specialise, don’t let them specialise in things you have no interest in. If you want to run monster-hunting stuff, don’t let folks blindly specialise in basket weaving. Be specific and encourage the kinds of characters you want, while advising people making characters you’ve little interest in that they’ll have to find their own fun.

[Istus]

@Pavel I am definitely reaching the conclusion that I am going to need to divide things up in to classes and then have further specializations on top of this. The nice thing about this is that the end result is predictable and that I can telegraph my expectations on what will be useful for what I want to encourage. The negative is that there is an upper level on the amount of experience that can be sunk in to advancement. I think in a practical sense most people will grow tired of a given character in less than a year anyway so perhaps it does not matter.

What if I instead view XP as earned currency that can be spent on other fun things as well as character advancement? What would be fun?

Giving things a brief think I believe there is two categories of stuff I could see sinking excess XP in to:

• Temporary mechanical advantages. Luck points that might confer an extra boost die due to luck.
• Prestige items. Uniquely named/described items, for example.

I kind of like the idea of ‘cosmetics’ for that cool factor.

[Roz]

@Istus said in Witcher MUSH Design:

• Temporary mechanical advantages. Luck points that might confer an extra boost die due to luck.

I think this can be particularly potent. We’ve ALL had those dramatic moments in plot where we just really want our character to be able to succeed that roll to do the badass thing they’re statted for and focused on. I do think you’d need to cap this one pretty hard, just to avoid people being able to bank a ton and use them a bunch. And probably have a moderate to high cost? But I definitely think it can be an effective XP sink.

[Roadspike]

My thoughts on your design conundrums:

@Istus said in Witcher MUSH Design:

Are classes a thing?

I don’t see much point in classes – that’s really not how people work. It’s not like you can’t learn something if you want to put in the time just because you’re a baker and not a candlestick maker.

How is advancement going to be handled?

I’ve become a fan of weekly XP rather than XP based on noms or scenes or anything (as @Tez suggested too). Then you don’t have to worry about Bar RP leading to swordmasters, and you don’t have to worry about the people who have all the time in the world shooting past the people who can only play a couple of times per week.

I would actually suggest caps on skills – only allow one skill above certain level, two skills to a level or two below that, three to a level or two below that, etc. That way the only benefit that dinosaurs can get is that they can fill out all of their ‘other’ skills to a certain low level that newbies can quickly get their specialties past (preferably at chargen so that they’re useful right out of chargen).

So maybe you can get one still to 10, two skills to 8, three skills to 6, and as many skills as you want to 4. This doesn’t just encourage specialization, it requires it after a certain level, and emphasizes that if you’re going to become a master of something, you aren’t going to have the attention/time to master something else.

If you wanted continual improvement, you could even have a system that theoretically had no cap on what you could get your highest skill to, but with diminishing returns and increasing costs. I don’t think I would suggest that, but it would accomplish one of the things you were aiming for.

I agree that recording everything on the game and having Staff (or even Head Staff) have ready access to that if they “need” it is a turn-off to me. I know that other systems record that data, but it’s not easy for Head Staff to access without significant coding knowledge, and is only shared with Staff if there’s a complaint/report.

I agree strongly with @Pavel that you should know what types of character you want, and only let people create those characters – there’s very little more frustrating than being allowed to create a character that will have little to no bearing on what Staff wants to do on the game.

As someone who enjoys FS3, I do enjoy having a pool of Luck to spend to enhance my rolls or make dumb-dice failures less likely.

[Pavel]

@Roadspike said in Witcher MUSH Design:

I agree strongly with @Pavel that you should know what types of character you want, and only let people create those characters – there’s very little more frustrating than being allowed to create a character that will have little to no bearing on what Staff wants to do on the game.

I generally go a little less prescriptive than this. So long as you make it clear that X-character type is what you’re aiming for, if someone makes something antithetical to that then they’ve only got themselves to blame.

Some people just want to play a baker in a world full of swordsmen, and that’s okay.

[Istus]

@Roadspike To further clarify the logging situation, I would be the only one with access/visibility of them in the off-chance that they are required.

On to classes, I think one of the biggest problems with them is that you have to make a choice at the beginning that you do not truly understand the consequences of. Perhaps you organically go in a different direction and that puts you in a bad place mechanically.

To side step, I think I may change it so that once you hit a certain level in a class of abilities you can purchase a specialization. This will open up access to a branch of talents specific to that specialization.

I think continual improvement is a pipe dream. If XP advancement is mostly automatic and predictable (with a little fudge factor for activity related bonuses) then I can set an arbitrary timeline for when someone will ‘max out’ and provide other things to spend XP on that do not affect mechanical prowess in a permanent way.

[Pavel]

@Istus said in Witcher MUSH Design:

and provide other things to spend XP on that do not affect mechanical prowess in a permanent way.

There’s a bit of a… kink, I guess, in this plan. XP=mechanical progress, so adding things that don’t contribute to mechanical progress as an XP sink may not work the way you want.

It’d likely depend on specifics, though.

[Istus]

@Pavel I can not figure out how to allow unlimited advancement without clamping down growth to a point where it may as well be 0, or implementing some form of skill decay. At that point, I started to consider what else could potentially be ‘fun’ for someone who does not wish to try something new or what sort of temporary boosts could be purchased to provide a sink.

[Pavel]

@Istus Oh, for sure, I absolutely understand your goal. I just don’t know whether people would opt to spend their mechanics tokens on non-mechanics things.

One could implement some kind of ever increasing cost for buying skills or what-have-you. When you have X-amount of XP invested, it takes more XP to raise things. And/or it costs more to raise things outside of one’s specialty than within it.

[bear_necessities]

I’d probably take a look at Arx’s system because I think that’s a good example of specialization and how you can create more XP sinks. It definitely gets more costly the more things you are great at, and so you are forced to pick a few things to be great at and then some other things to be less-than at.

That being said, I kind of question the flavor of game you’re going for? The hard focus on skill-gaining seems more MUD than MUSH, which is fine if that’s what you’re looking for. If the focus is on RP, I’d start with a more simple system and then add things in as you get off the ground.

I agree with the other comments about not tying advancement to failure, that just sounds exhausting and I don’t think that’s how most creatures advance in life.

I also would rethink the whole privacy thing. While there should not be an EXPECTATION of privacy on a game, I also wouldn’t play on a game that is transparent about logging everything. It seems very Big Brother and admittedly from an outsider’s perspective, kinda creepy.

[Pavel]

@bear_necessities said in Witcher MUSH Design:

I don’t think that’s how most creatures advance in life

Sorta kinda sometimes. People commonly advance through practice, so perhaps the more one uses a skill, the cheaper the XP cost? But then you get the same thing @faraday mentioned:

@Faraday said in Witcher MUSH Design:

FWIW, I’ve seen systems like this in the past and in my experience all it does is encourage people to +roll their skill in BS situations just to accumulate the necessary failures/executions to advance.

[Istus]

@bear_necessities I like having some crunch behind the scenes so that’s the direction I am driving towards. I am putting a lot of work in to minimizing how much is exposed to the player while they are doing whatever it is they are doing.

I do keep flip-flopping on the logging aspect. Regardless of what I say on that front people are going to make their own conclusions. My original plan was something more like logging interactions. So rather than logging contents, it would be like the following.

[12:37] Blah paged Istus.
[12:38] Istus paged Blah.
[4:36] Istus posed with Foo, Bar.

Maybe the softer touch is a better path?

[bear_necessities]

@Istus I guess my question is, what purpose does that serve? I mean not to beat this horse but I don’t see the point.

[Istus]

@bear_necessities Removing problems faster.

[bear_necessities]

@Istus Right but like, how does logging interactions get you to the point where you can get rid of problems faster? All you’re seeing is ‘someone paged so-and-so’ which gives you no context. So what would be the point of that?

This probably isn’t the right thread for this but unless you truly intend on reading all the logs every single day you’re not going to catch the bad players, and who has time to read all the logs every single day? And if you are just going to use the logs to “prove” accusations - that means that people would have to make those accusations, which honestly most people tend not to do. And then you’re potentially making really big judgment calls that just … I don’t know. As a former gamerunner, the idea that I’d have to police my own game to catch the creep just would make me never run a game again lol

Anyway if it’s important to your game philosophy go for it! It just doesn’t work for me as a player.

[Pyrephox]

@Istus said in Witcher MUSH Design:

@bear_necessities I like having some crunch behind the scenes so that’s the direction I am driving towards. I am putting a lot of work in to minimizing how much is exposed to the player while they are doing whatever it is they are doing.

Keep in mind that, psychologically, this will have unintended consequences. In a very real way, obscured mechanics will encourage a certain fraction of your playerbase to overinvest, frantically hitting whatever buttons they can, as hard as they can, to map out the way to maximize rewards. They’ll stress out about it, and they’ll also stress out everyone else around them with trying to develop optimal strategies and “beat” the system.

This happens with transparent systems too, of course, but in my experience, it gets a lot worse with obscured systems. So you may want to think about how to counter that anxiety in some way.

[Pavel]

@Pyrephox With the added consequence of, at least potentially, making a One True Way to go about things, mechanically, to the exclusion of those who don’t optimise as strongly.

[Istus]

@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.