@Gashlycrumb said in MU Peeves Thread:

My immediate reaction to people spending XP in the middle of a scene is “Noo! Wrong!” but after taking a moment to contemplate how this relates to that all-important question “So fucking what?” I don’t see it as being a real problem.

As I said, it’s a fringe issue, and only for some people (like myself), and most people who have this as a peeve it’s a low priority peeve at best, not something that would cause me to avoid a game. That said, if I ran a game, it would have an XP room and leaving mid scene to go use the XP room and come back would be forbidden. And I would suspect that having that policy wouldn’t be a game killer.

@Gashlycrumb Yes. I find that frustrating. Even more so when someone does it in the presence of someone who’s character is focused on whatever it is. This is what they built towards, let them have their moment of triumph.

@Ominous said in MU Peeves Thread:

I think it’s more of a “Git Good Waveform.” The exact skill the XP is ultimately going to go toward is spread across multiple possibilities until the player observes a particular skill needing to suddenly be increased during a dire moment, which causes the waveform to collapse into the needed skill.

I call it the “Personal Narrative Swerve Particle”. Where a character builds a narrative of being focused on one group of things suddenly becomes a master of something completely unrelated. So like when a violent druglord suddenly becomes the world’s foremost expert on neurosurgery.

One version of this I refer to as the “Oh You Didn’t Know Corollary”, where the character in question suddenly remembers their previous life as a teacher at Harvard Medical.

@Jenn My preference (though not an RP killer for me) is that entering a scene be a soft lock for your character sheet. Basically, for the duration of the scene you don’t mechanically change as a character, outside of stuff like taking damage from a fight or spending points that are meant to be spent on actions or whatever (like Willpower in WoD or Conviction in Blue Rose).

I think this whole “when can you spend XP” thing is ultimate a fringe thing that is up to personal preference, and usually something that isn’t dealbreaking for whether or not a particular person would join a game.

@RightMeow I think it’s a situational fringe case. Example: A character with a bunch of saved XP is investigating a crime scene, their skill in Forensics is a 1, the lowest possible rating in the game. Prior to this they have not exhibited any affinity to the skill, any interest in the skill, and the only prior time they made a check against it, they failed. They have no narrative reference for raising the skill. They spend all of their saved XP during the scene and suddenly have Forensics 10, which per the system, would make them one of the Top 3 Forensics experts in the world. The character has effectively gone from barely functional in a skill to being part of the state of the art in the field, in a single scene.

This whole XP room thing or limits or whatever would be to deal with that sort of stuff. The kind of narrative record scratch that could come up in play.

I think the point is that for some people it’s narrative / immersion breaking to have characters do that. Which is fine. Everyone’s view of things is different.

@Roz said in MU Peeves Thread:

this feels like SUCH an overcorrection to a fringe issue.

Being that I’ve played on dozens of games that use XP rooms (without claiming they were a response to this fringe issue), I don’t really hate it.

Wouldn’t the easiest way to avoid mid-scene advancement be to keep the commands to advance only in one specific OOC room on the grid? An XP Room.

@Ominous said in MU Peeves Thread:

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.

One of my RL friends is currently working on a tabletop RPG where the players are androids who are the only beings on a space station after a mysterious event kills all the humans, and advancement comes in the form of software updates being transmitted from a satellite light years away, so you build this little track of advancements in the order you want them, and every time a cycle happens (a nebulous in game unit of time that represents some level of narrative motion), you check a box in the top most item in your track. When it fills with checks, you add it to your sheet and start checking the next item. He’s working on some mechanics for rearranging the queue, but so far it’s been pretty fun the few times we’ve met to test it.

@helvetica All I remember from that episode is the bike.

@Roz Agreed. Both of those are dumb.

@catzilla said in What's up with the two Age of Heroes games?:

From what little I know about Ruby, we all know that she’s picking LC for two very certain assets that appeal to Ruby’s target audience and nothing else.

Pistols? It’s pistols right?

@Raistlin said in Coded Systems vs PDF Sheets:

That said, I’m also a fan of transparency with character stats. Too many bad experiences with the “OOC Masquerade” from WoD games.

Me too, but I understand some people enjoy that Masq stuff, so having the PDFs kept somewhere away from prying eyes would be ideal in that regard. If no Masq, then just have them somewhere that staff can easily see when players are updating the important bits of the sheet. If a character in a fantasy game suddenly has 18 Strength when they had 7 the week prior, staff need to notice that stuff. And yes, I’ve had a few poor experiences in games where the players kept their own sheets privately.

@Ominous said in Coded Systems vs PDF Sheets:

The only downside is that everyone can see your stats, so, if you’re trying to keep that hidden, coded stats it has to be.

At this point, it should be pretty simple for the staff of a game to create a Google Drive folder or something equivalent to hold the PDFs in a fashion that each character’s sheet can only be accessed by the player of the character and the staff of the game.

@Raistlin said in Coded Systems vs PDF Sheets:

Would you avoid a game if it used PDF character sheets instead of a coded chargen/web-based character creation system?

No, as long as the staff on that game had control of the database of PDF sheets and were alerted if anyone was to update their sheet outside of what was allowed by the rules of the game.

It depends on the people I’m RPing with. If it’s either of my regular RL groups, freeform is fine. If it’s a game with a bunch of relative strangers, I’d rather have some sort of structure to the task resolution and character sheets. I’ve had several bad experiences in the past with freeform games with strangers (a PBEM and a couple of forum games) go absolutely haywire because everybody had a different interpretation of how capable given characters were.

My go-to system for Superhero games when they show up at my RL tabletop group is Wild Talents. The One Roll Engine does superheroics really well, and the basic resolution mechanic takes only a few minutes to explain.

Over the years I’ve played HERO, Champions, Mutants and Masterminds (1st & 2nd Editions), Godlike, Capes, Aberrant, Scion (yes, I count Scion as a superhero game), and MSH. I feel like having a solid core system is important for a superhero game as you need to know what the baseline for task resolution is before you start throwing superpowers at the narrative, or you end up with everyone operating on their own idea of what the power scale is.

@hellfrog said in What's up with the two Age of Heroes games?:

@Colette yeah but you can just ban them again and make more mocking additions to their banning post, and eventually - probably after they send some unhinged email to your coder about exposing his girlfriend on facebook - they will get bored and go do something else. Ask me how I know!

A game I was playing on around 2013 had a problem with a ban dodger so persistent they temporarily blocked all Comcast connections except the IPs of players known to behave.

I’ve been in this hobby 20+ years now and I still don’t know what makes RPI unique. That’s what I learned from taking and reading the results of this survey.

@Pavel said in Hello, Survey, and Looking for Recs:

We have WoD. MUDders don’t. >_>

Haven of the Embraced is / was a thing.

@Coin said in What's up with the two Age of Heroes games?:

This largely implies that World of Darkness games or Star Wars games or Lords and Ladies games don’t share the same issues and, uh, lmao.

Yeah, the issues are tied to the hobby and not a specific genre. There might be some validity to the concept that some genres attract more of them than others, but I would argue it’s probably not a giant gap.