Adviising students visiting the US for a short class to keep in touch with their nation’s consulates, and providing them with addresses and telephone numbers for the consulates closest to the cities the students will visit. Feeling like this is a necessary precaution. Want to cry.

I’m all for timelines on plots. If you do nothing, stuff still happens.

One of the most irritating situations I’ve encountered is to have all plot fed directly to Abelard, who is meant to distribute it but then refuses to give it to other PCs (presumably because this would disempower him) but also does not suffer any consequences for inaction. He excludes others and increases his IC power by ignoring the plot. @wheeee!

As for those players who don’t want to do anything to prevent the plot from destroying their favourite pub, but will complain bitterly when it does, well. None of the small handful of MUs I’ve made/run were meant to serve as sets for people to RP utterly independently of any GMing I might do. On a similar note, don’t come to D&D night at my house to play cribbage and bitch that the D&D players are noisy and have their dice all over the place.

@Juniper said in Lords and Ladies Game Design:

In my experience the PC with the most power, or the first player to hear about it handles it using their NPC minions. It ends up as:

GM, to King: There are reports of zombie coyotes around the villages west of the city.

King, to GM: I move my personal army to go take care of it, and my best friend Danielle can go bless the land.

Abelard, Bridget, and Camille: How can we get involved?

King: Fuck off, it’s handled.

Later, some political rival: Why didn’t the City Watch Commander do anything about those zombie coyotes? They’re inactive and lazy!

This is why I’m a fan of the bottom-up version where Squire Manfred and Lady Ophelia get looped in. The scenario is more immediate and if they end up needing backup they can kick it up the chain of command. But the best way is for the GM to directly loop in as many people as possible because if you’re relying on players to involve other players… they fucking won’t.

Just fucking so. Perhaps even followed by:

bbpost or IC event announcing that there were zombie coyotes in the Western Wood, but the King’s men have gloriously destroyed them and burned the wood where they were hiding, Huzzah!

Ophelia pages Manfred: Everybody knows we go hawking or lute-playing there three times a week, but we didn’t see a thing, ffs, GM. is such a dick.

Sir Wacko, Landed Knight of the Western Wood: I realise my keep doesn’t have windows, but WTF, I ragequit.

@Ominous said in Lords and Ladies Game Design:

My post was not meant to imply that plot stuff can’t flow both ways.

Didn’t mean to sound as if it did. I’m just saying, trickle-down-plot-economics has this peril. It works best in settings where the chain-of-command is almost invariably played by the book, like in a Star Trek or military game. (And still needs some shaking up in those.)

If you’re doing politics and intrique where players who are ostensibly lower on the chain of command are nevertheless trying to command, it just can’t work.

The question about NPC lackeys is something I’d strongly advise having a plan about. Lords and Ladies have lackeys, but how much can you do with them? If I was building an L&L game again I’d have clear rules about it, and a caveat that your NPCs are always kinda gonna suck against PCs, because. GoB had a couple of McGuffins that people used NPCs to steal and it was so boring and dissapointing to whoever lost it to just find it gone because NPCs rolled okay.

GoB’s set up had all the top (King, heads of major houses and almost all minor ones) as not only NPCs but not in the city. It was pretty much a bunch of non-heirs sent to the kingdom’s premier-but-not-the-capital city.

@Ominous said in Lords and Ladies Game Design:

in general, the top echelons of power should be NPCs who give tasks to the PC underlings.

When a plot is delivered to the IC-world via a ‘power gives tasks to underlings’ route, it doesn’t matter if the top PC power is the Galactic Emperor or the Assistant Manager.

GM, to King: There are reports of zombie coyotes around the villages west of the city.

King, to Lord Mayor: There are reports of zombie coyotes around the villages west of the city. Get somebody to deal with it.

Lord Mayor, to City Watch Commander: There are reports of zombie coyotes around the villages west of the city. Go deal with it.

City Watch Commander, to Abelard, Bridget and Camille: There are reports of zombie coyotes around the villages west of the city. Let’s all go deal with it.

Okay, but how about:

GM, to Squire Manfred and Lady Ophelia: You’re riding past the villages west of the city, singing ‘The Ballad of Brave Sir Robin’ and practicing the lute, when you spot some zombie coyotes.

Well shit. What will Manfred and Ophelia do? Tell the watch? Tell the mayor? Tell the king? Try to take out the coyotes themselves? If they tell the watch but not the mayor, does that reduce the mayor’s standing and power? If they tell the mayor and he deals with it without consulting the king, does that undermine the king’s power?

When plot-stuff flows both ways, PC power is constrained by the powerful PC’s need for IC support from the less powerful. If it always flows top-down, well, not so much. Not at all if you let the mighty get away with taking no action/ineffective action/action only involving off-camera NPC minions.

@Roadspike Yes. But if what proves a PC worthy of a leadership position is a high Leadership stat, this doesn’t work.

Yep, there are lots of ways to handle it. But none of them are half as much fun as having somewhat believable IC leaders rather than ones who are supported only by unseen faceless nameless NPC masses whose lack of desire to frag them is inexplicable IC.

@MisterBoring

@Gashlycrumb said in Lords and Ladies Game Design:

PC was supposed to be, and statted to be, incredibly observant and cunning. The player, however, wasn’t, or wasn’t paying attention. So the PC did dumb shit. Then the GM fudged things so they worked out. Sounds kinda fair, and it’s not even PvP. But like Faraday says, it’s jarring. And hard to RP around. The PC is supposed to be Machiavelli, but what I see is Mr. Magoo.

@STD I’d make the players (it is a big group) all roll 5d6 and write the total on a card, shuffle them and give them back to me and set the timer on my phone with the results but not tell them that’s what happened. But of /course/ it should have Fate points or their ilk.

But your ordinary before-you-roll SL roll doesn’t give you good or bad luck, just strange, so you still roll your attempt, you just succeed or fail in a strange way. You roll to search for clues in the room, you get strange luck and a success, you skid on the rug after being startled by a pigeon that’s in here for some undetermined reason, and uncover the hidden chamber. If you don’t get SL, you just look under the rug. Maybe if you get SL and fail you can spend one of your Fate points to make Strange Luck turn your failure to success, while if you don’t get SL and fail you must spend two.

ETA: Better yet, you roll a FATE system D6 when you get Strange luck, to determine if it’s good, bad, or neutral.

@STD oh god. Now I really want to work up a homebrew for my table-top game and do a Strange Luck game, where all the PCs have Strange Luck, and every time you roll anything you also roll for Strange Luck first, it’s just a pass fail, pass and the whole table quickly brainstorms some extremely unlikely result for your attempt. And there’s a timer set for a some random length of time between five minutes and half an hour, and every time it goes off you get another bit of Strange Luck. I wonder how far we’d actually get.

@Faraday I do remember a WoD +rumour system that I think was good – you rolled to see what rumours you heard. You rolled to see how easy it would be for another PC to hear a rumour you started. You could attempt to change that difficulty by boosting or quelling the rumour. You could investigate rumours and roll to see if you could find out who had started, boosted, quelled or investigated the rumour.

It might have seemed wonky if there was somebody who was really good at those rolls, but in RP nobody listened to them or told them anything. But it did put a sort of buffer-layer simply by making it not so immediately obvious.

Sometimes I’ve found even the “your social conflict dice work on NPCs, PCs react to your RP” jarring. If Abelard has enormous influence in ‘society’ and everybody loves him based on his dice, but every single PC thinks he’s an insufferable prick and an idiot, it’s rough. Though really, this sort of thing may have less to do with social-stats and their use and more to do with players who want to play total assholes but not the consequences of assholery.

@STD That sounds like it’d be hilarious and good fun.

I think of that short-lived TV 1990’s show Strange Luck where the protagonist is invariably drawn into things and solves them via a series of weird coincidences. The only one I can actually remember was him finding a glass eye in a can of beans, and later in the show dropping it and narrowly avoiding getting shot because he bends down to pick it up.

@Faraday said in Lords and Ladies Game Design:

I’ve just literally seen too many cases through the years where people will do something like RP the worst line imaginable and think that a +roll Con or +roll Seduction should somehow make that work. For me, it doesn’t. If you can’t even get in the ballpark of portraying a convincing con artist, maybe that’s just not the right role for you.

Exactly.

In tabletop it’s pretty ordinary for a GM to say, “Woah, hold on, roll intelligence,” and then inform the player (on success) that their scheme is flawed and why, and help them come up with a good one. It’s harder to do that on a MU, where play continues without the GM watching.

I’ve had this experience where some PC was supposed to be, and statted to be, incredibly observant and cunning. The player, however, wasn’t, or wasn’t paying attention. So the PC did dumb shit. Then the GM fudged things so they worked out. Sounds kinda fair, and it’s not even PvP. But like Faraday says, it’s jarring. And hard to RP around. The PC is supposed to be Machiavelli, but what I see is Mr. Magoo.

Yeah, I don’t think it needs to be psuedo-European or period. You could probably do Summering In The Hamptons as an L&L game.

I think Downton Abbey and Upstairs, Downstairs both count as L&L and those include the servants as major characters, though their influence is on a different level. But that’s more an extra.

I don’t think the characters in Pride and Prejudice are nobility, but I think L&L does imply serious social inequality and a lack of social mobility outside one’s class.

Ridiculously, I think it needs pretty costumes and the right flavour of pagentry. Does Master-Blaster run Bartertown, or does Tina Turner? Not L&L.

I think handling intrigue with dice-mechanics is kind of a problem. Maybe not a big one, depending on your player base. But you know how you always get that one person who keeps going, “My character has a 20 charisma, love me!” while behaving in very uncharismatic ways. There’s also somebody out there who will go, “Make my dumbass scheme work as if I’m the genius my sheet says I am!” It can be a heck of a lot of work to translate dice-throws of this nature into narrative.

@Raistlin I suppose it depends on what you want? GoB was set up to have an excuse of sorts for lots of nobles to be about, lord and ladying it up and having tournaments and romances and rivalries, ocassionally taking on bandits, pirates, spooky supernatural schemes, hoardes of crocodiles, etc. People who wanted an epic war (which would have been a lot harder to run) were disappointed.

@Artemis It’s weird that there don’t seem to be several floating around. Brigerton was fun, right? And L&L is probably among the easiest themes to run.

@bear_necessities I toyed with the idea of both current-day-ish and 1930’s – somebody set up a portal so they can go see Billie Holiday. But its a theme where it’s already very easy to get PCs spread apart. I figured to base it around New York, grid for a bit of Brooklyn, the Flatiron and Greenwich Village, Brakebills. Ya gotta go adventuring to end up on other worlds, like Fillory, but it’s also gotta happen.

@MisterBoring Yeah. I read the first novel when it was first published and was really in love with it, it’s the first fantasy I’d read in decades that really enchanted me. But a lot of friends dropped it about when you did, feeling ‘who cares and the main character is an annoying wanker’. I think I’m just the right kind of annoying wanker to relate.

@bear_necessities I like. My own druthers would be to set it in the 1930’s or 1960’s, but I bet the appeal of that is too narrow. I’m pretty much against cannon characters as PCs and want every PC to be original. Roster PCs created for the game and played by someone who didn’t create them are great, but the characters from the shows and books, naw.

@helvetica Same. I think magic school can be fun, but don’t want the boarding school kids (Harry Potter/Wednesday/The Wolves of Willoughby Chase etc) YA subgenre to be a big theme-element. I thought the show largely eliminated that, which was good. I’d figure to mix-and-match book and show elements and have thought about having a Brakebills with both graduate and undergraduate levels, but I have enough RL dealings with young undergraduates these days. It sounded more fun when I wasn’t teaching.

@helvetica @Roz

Thanks. I remember reading that thread for a while and losing interest 'cause it seemed to be all gamerunner being a fuckwad rather than theme issues.

Now I wonder, though, how did they handle the character ages?

In the novels Brakebills is an undegraduate program that takes five years. The characters are 17-18 when they start. It has a bunch of those ‘school novel’ tropes, Grossman lampshades them with Quentin wondering why the hell it’s like a prep-school.

The show made it three-year graduate program. And changed the name from ‘Brakebills College’ to ‘Brakebills University’ because people think that grad-programs make it a uni? I dunno. But the students are in their mid-twenties. Which seems like a better choice for a MU, especially if you are wanting to avoid the more squicky interpretations of “It’s Adult Harry Potter!”

I don’t really want to do the ‘School Novel’ stuff, and yeah, it wasn’t really that big a part of the IP. I think of The Magicians more as Mage minus WoD, plus extra queerness, plus neurodiversity, plus subverted Narnia tropes. (I’m all for magical talking animals who are assholes, sweary-fairies, and the like.)

I know there have been two such games, but I only saw the one, and when I checked it out I went, eehhh, not for me and didn’t app.

I wonder what happened? Partly 'cause, hey, spill the tea, but also 'cause I keep wanting to make a The Magicians MU and it’s good to know The Perils.

@bear_necessities said in Games we want, but will almost certainly never have:

@Gashlycrumb I do but it has made for an awful MUSH every time

@bear_necessities said in Games we want, but will almost certainly never have:

@NotSanni said in Games we want, but will almost certainly never have:

I think about The Magicians as a setting for a TTRPG quite a bit - but I also think that the most people who say they want a setting like the Magicians really just mean they want a slice-of-life urban fantasy game.

I think most people who want a Magicians game want a magic school game and … again, that’s not really what the Magicians is about. I agree with everything else you said, and I think the dark interpersonal social drama of the Magicians makes it not a great theme for a MUSH.

Haha, I wondered if the magic school part should even be on-camera for a MU.

@Faraday The time and exercise of professional skill you’ve put into the hobby is probably above next level to the kind of thing I’m talking about.

@Pavel Valid, but I guess I didn’t exactly consider it to not be in my own service. I wanted a game with theme-x, and more players than just me, there were things I needed to do to make that happen.

But I’m making a distinction of degree. No matter anyway, I think we can agree with Faraday above saying that voliunteering doesn’t exempt one from accountability, and Pavel’s point about still being responsible to do what you agreed to do. (Which is true for showing up at tabletop RPGs and baseball practice and the bird-count and many other only-a-game/hobby things.)