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.

Game’s good, would recommend.

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

@OnceWas It was present at 10:00am EST today. As I said, someone has since gone in and wiped the entire board as there was more than just this advertisement in there.

@OnceWas Someone has since cleared the entire board.

WARNING: Cursing, questionable text-based content, etc.

Spoiler

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

@Cobalt I’ve never played a game as a member of a family. How do you reconcile things like time zones/play times?

@Mercutio Including these points in the application would be helpful. I would also include examples so that I can get excited and engaged with the ideas and thus more motivated to slog through this.

Picking the Memory item at random here: What might happen if I lose a memory? Am I aware that I have lost a memory? Is the memory lost random? Provide a made up scenario like: Sarah likes puppies because she had one as a kid. After dying, she lost that memory and instead of being happy and excited when it comes to interacting with cute animals, they just make her sad now and she can not explain exactly why.

@Mercutio I do not have particularly constructive suggestions to offer as I was cycling through games at the time in an effort to find a new home so I do not recall many details. The only reason I piped up is I wanted to mention that even though I did not go all the way, my experience was a positive one. With that preface out of the way…

I am pretty new to these games and my attention span maybe isn’t the same as most of the community. I think at a high level, my problems mostly hinged on my disillusionment with writing backgrounds and filling in these massive personality quizzes that never come up beyond getting in the door past whatever gate staff has erected.

I do not have a specific desire to spend hours detailing my childhood, creating a dozen memories of varying gravity, and digging through a Codex just to get a feel for things in a game that I may or may not enjoy. I also did not know anyone on the game. The desire to invest so much time piecing together things just was not there.

I have never had my background have any meaningful impact on a game unless I instigated it and at that point whether or not the hook I drop is in some staff set field on my bit is immaterial. The purpose of these fields, aside from the ones that are obviously there to define what my faction is or whatever mechanics underpin the rollplay part of the game, is not apparent to me. I get that the application process is a filter of sorts but a broad strokes overview is likely just as effective at gauging my ability to roleplay in a sane way as a granular recounting of every major event of my character’s formative years.

I would like to see, in all games, the barrier to getting started drop as low as possible. This could result in limited power, or a restricted involvement in things until more concrete decisions are made, but it at least would encourage me to see the value in completing a big application in the future once I am more invested.

TLDR: I’m lazy and either need an extrinsic reward to invest the time or understand the value of each field in an application when it comes to my future roleplay.

Feel free to prod me on any point of this rant. It’s probably not particularly articulate and it is not specific to just Elder Tale.

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!

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

@Whisky It’s on top of Evennia.