((OOC)) GMing and PRPs
Date
Dec. 19, 2020, 7 p.m.
Hosted By
Participants
Bhandn Merek Calypso Wash Quenia Haakon Drake Lora Porter Pasquale Kiera Andrina Harlan Rowenova Sorrel Fiora Gaspar(RIP) Lianne Teague Sydney Mia
Organizations
Location
Apostate's Work Room <OOC ROOM>
Largesse Level
Small
Comments and Log
Alena Sparks, unamused first mate, Silk, the Seafaring Spider, 1 Harlequin jongleur, Midnight Sea, an Ostrian gelding arrive, following Evaristo.
Primus, First of Monique's Assistants, Tertius, Third of Monique's Assistants arrive, following Monique.
Nunia the discreetest handmaid arrives, following Fiora.
Aleksei takes a rich mahogany jewelry box.
1 Greenwood Tribe Blood Warriors, 3 House Riven Soldiers, Lianna, Feydin, a white-tailed eagle, Vigilance, a juvenile female Oakhaven Bloodhound, Berthold, Tinsel arrive, following Mia.
Apostate says, "Okay, thank you all for coming, I'm going to be discussing some Story Teller basics for players wishing to GM for people under the new systems."
Beakers - an austere raven, Gorty - an apprentice in a yellow tabard arrive, following Orick.
Gunner, a lovable goof of a Mistward Labrador arrives, following Porter.
Captain Curls, an attentive, ebony guard poodle, Aspira arrive, following Quenia.
Lady Teonia Redreef, Aryka Wyrmfang, 3 Thrax Guards, Marquessa Pudding, a doughy dog, 2 Thrax Elite Guards arrive, following Sorrel.
Apostate says, "Before, most of player GMing on PRPs existed just in as very, very vague handwaved guidelines, and there was (essentially), no sense of risk. Particularly with old checks and harm, there was no random factor at all, meaning characters would pretty much always survive using the old system of checks unless someone explicitly killed them, so no character ever randomly died in a PRP. This made any kind of rewards problematic, and that's not to denigrate the months, or even year+ long work people invested in them."
Sir Rhys, a Valardin Knight, Laurene, a military adjutant, 8 Valardin Knights arrive, following Alis.
Winter, A Highhill Puppy arrives, following Kiera.
Ramona - A Guard in Ashford House Colours, Bigsby - A Thoughtful Looking Young Man in Nondescript Clothing, 2 Ashford Archer, 1 Ashford Scout arrive, following Lisebet.
Vladimir, 1 House Corvini Guard, Mihail arrive, following Giulio.
Apostate says, "So that's changing with the new @check and @harm. As I'm sure people have noticed, sometimes randomly getting botches, or unexpectedly bad outcomes. This is important because similarly, we have random variations on @harm as well. That means characters that have unexpectedly bad outcomes, can also take very sharp spikes in damage, and that there is going to be significantly more risk. I don't expect PCs to die constantly, but random non-consent character death will happen in GMing with @checks now. In addition, extremely high levels of damage can 'wound' characters, with a temporary or permanent loss of statistics."
Zane, a tall and silent servant, Vaeri, a Prismed Scarab Marine arrive, following Venturo.
Apostate says, "Because GMing is much more threatening, it's necessary to scale the risk of plot events and GM scenes. Tenatively, in that rough draft, I mapped out 7 different danger risk levels, and these will always be transparent and clear. I never want any player to feel ambushed by risk ever. I want it to be a clear, conscious choice that they are risking harm or character loss."
Apostate says, "For storytellers GMing combat, the risk is always going to be associated with the sorts of opponents they face, and with different difficulties of checks based on their opponents, and increasingly dangerous scales of @harm based on outcomes. For example, an unarmed villager is an 'easy' combat check for a player to attack, and an easy check to dodge against. A catastrophic botch, the worst possible outcome, would result in a 'heavy' category of harm, which is extremely unlikely to ever leave even a temporary wound. By comparison, a 'boss' level threat, like say, a Bringer of Silence, a Cardian adept, a ghost, something supernatural, a catastrophic botch is likely to result in immediate character loss even from an unharmed full combat character in maxed armor."
Apostate says, "Now about the different risk levels of PRPs, this is by no means to suggest that low risk PRPs are unimportant. In fact, I think demand for them might be high. As I talked about two days ago, any kind of meaningful GMing about secrets, or plot arcs, has to follow periods of collaboration, reflection, investigation. Low, and even no risk PRPs, can be for exactly that. So they can be the build up towards staff GMing."
Apostate says, "But for PRPs that yield high mechanical benefits, like say domain expansion by conquering an army of shavs, there will probably be some significant risk, even if character loss remains pretty rare."
Apostate says, "In the coming week, I'll be taking signups for player storytellers and story coordinators, and organizing chat channels, and probably running some example plots, and helping to convert planned combat PRPs under the new system, so +requests will be opened for all of those. Storyteller levels will be largely based off what someone has already run PRP wise, as I just don't want to have someone starting with high risk plots and having to constantly retcon deaths."
Apostate says, "Initially, I plan to have to tweak things quite a bit and probably overturn some deaths that were out of whack, but ideally by the time the Eurusi crisis GMing is done, it'll be settled and any going forward after that (including for the entire Horned God arc) are going to stand."
Apostate says, "All right, I'll take some initial questions. Go ahead and +getinline if you'd like to ask questions"
Bhandn has joined the line.
Calypso has joined the line.
Wash has joined the line.
Turn in line: Bhandn
Quenia has joined the line.
Bhandn says, "Based on what I'm reading in this document, I presume magical progression plots will still remain the province of Staff GM'ing only and be facilitated more through RFRs?"
Haakon has joined the line.
Drake has joined the line.
Lora has joined the line.
Merek says, "Yay!"
Apostate says, "Depends. Someone learning mage sight, that's minor risk and fine for a player to run. Many of the, 'I meditate on this' actions are minor risk plots. Someone doing some higher grade experimentation, that could be significant risk. But in general, I really only want 'staff needs to GM what happens for someone' to happen once per episode, whether through an RFR after a series of progression, or in a staff run event."
Turn in line: Calypso
Sorrel has joined the line.
Calypso says, "Are permanent wounds stat loss? If so, is that something that can be bought back, or is that stat then capped at one lower than it was?"
Apostate says, "Yes, it's a permanent stat loss, but no, it can be rebought. I want to leave a permanent change on a desc though."
Turn in line: Wash
Wash says, "1. Will there be a web-based tutorial/reference document for the level of challenges and risk, or just this google docs object?
2. Does the current iteration of combat code also include the risk of long term injury or wound penalties?"
Apostate says, "1. Help file, and possibly a wiki. This is still largely a transitional period, because frankly this is just until combat is redone and the new form of checks because automated in a combat replacement, with also a coded beastiary. But I think help file is probably the easiest, even if it's very clunky. 2. Combat code has been untouched, but I don't think characters in regular +combat can actually hit hard enough to inflict a wound. Probably not but I'll tweak if necessary."
Turn in line: Quenia
Quenia says, "1) Since there are now higher risk threats being assessed for PRPS, is it planned that player GM's be able to change the risk level when creating a PRP event? Currently only staff can change risk levels for events, otherwise everything is considered 'Normal' when creating an event.
2) Can you please define what an Episode is and what triggers an episode?"
Porter has joined the line.
Apostate says, "1. Yeah ignore the risk level thing that's coded, that was a placeholder and will be changeable.
2. So before, if you look at https://play.arxgame.org/character/story/ our story section, the overarching story of the game is separated into seasons (we're in season 2), and then each season having chapters (we're in chapter 4), and each of those sections where the emits are grouped are different episodes. Like all the story updates listed under 'Dominus', that's an episode titled 'Dominus', so we've had 9 so far during chapter 4. This is going to become much more tightly organized. Where each Chapter is dedicated to a single, overarching major gamewide plot, and each episode is centered around a specific round of plots related to that. Other unrelated plots are fine, but episodes are going to be just 'however long it takes to move things forward'. I don't forsee more than a few months per."
Turn in line: Haakon
Haakon says, "Regarding the limits on number and quality of NPC combatants by tier, would it be acceptable to have additional enemy background NPCs which do not directly affect or interact with the party?
Example: if the risk tier permitted a maximum of six mooks, could the players be defending a castle gate against those six in combat, with the failure objective being an enemy army of hundreds of Shavs pouring in the gate and forcing the players to flee?"
Primus, First of Monique's Assistants have been dismissed.
Tertius, Third of Monique's Assistants have been dismissed.
Apostate says, "Yes absolutely. That's a VERY rough draft, and I am totally fine with a storyteller GMing army battles with that as a backdrop and the party really only engaged with a relevant number of combatants. And also the range in capability between a maxed out combat character and a non-combat character is pretty significant, so I know the numbers have to be a bit fuzzy right now, as we need a better way to really quantify someone's combat ability with skills/stats/armor/weapons. So that'll come, and right now it'll stay pretty flexible until it does."
Turn in line: Drake
Zane, a tall and silent servant, Vaeri, a Prismed Scarab Marine leave, following Venturo.
Drake says, "Can you explain the focus on player death with this? It seems random death is a big focus of your design here. This makes me feel like it would lead people not to want to invest characters they'd invested a lot of time into. Your catastrophic botch right now is a 1 in 20, right? So, 1 in 20 I could die? Help me get a little more clarity on the actual risk if you could?
Also, is there a path for socially focused characters here? They can't get rewards from PRPs anymore because meaningful PRPs are set up regarding combat risk?
Finally this one is not about the document but about ST functions in general. As a GM, I'm confused about how I'm supposed to interact with the lore on this game. I thought this question up at the last meeting, but I figured I'd wait until this meeting to ask about it since people said that my understanding was possibly mistaken.
You said near the end of the last meeting that one big issue you were running into was lore bloat. II worrk it's a bit of a self-perpetuating problem. Say that I for example find a Clue about some kind of supernatural creature. Hypothetically, say that I get a clue that a kappa was sighted in an Oathlands marsh. Now provided I have the requisite permissions, am I allowed to run a plot about the kappa of Oathlands Marsh, or do I have to figure out which staffer or storyteller is in charge of the kappa and ask them to run it? If I want to run a plot of my own later, am I allowed to use that particular creature-type, or does that creature type belong only to the story originator, so, I'd have to invent some other type of magical creature and how they work (causing some lore bloat)? Same question even with non supernatural stuff, just to take it off the table. Say I find an old clue about Joe Badguy, the leader of some tribe of bandit shavs. Am I allowed to submit a plot about Joe Badguy? How do I know if that plot has already been run or not, in all the years of things on the game? Right now, I've been taking a sort of hybrid approach here - if a clue was written specifically as a result of my investigation, I figure it's okay to run with it a little bit. But I am not sure how to interact with older clues in this fashion. And it seems like new clues might be going away? Sorry this is a very broad question I guess."
Drake says, "*worry not work, typo"
Pasquale has joined the line.
Vladimir, 1 House Corvini Guard, Mihail leave, following Giulio.
Apostate says, "1. I forsee PRP risk to be pretty low. I think moderate risk events, if happen, will have permanent wounds upon occassion, but death from them would be vanishingly rare, and I think most PRPs will probably take place within that scope. For significant risk events, which are the highest a player can run, I think it would be rare to have more than say, 10 percent of the run PRPs result in character loss. That's still an awful lot when you get down to it, so I think players will take that seriously. For staff events, I rarely want high risk ones run, and those will -probably- have character loss, unless everything goes well. For herokiller risk, it's unlikely any characters survive. I basically will run those only as a result of something going terribly wrong and characters trying to sacrifice themselves to reverse it, as big writeout adventures, etc. Keep in mind, this is about making character loss possible, not to make it frequent. Characters having wounds they can talk about in adventures of near losses, great. Mass character loss is not what I'm looking for here.
2.Yeah, there will be higher risk social plots. One of the first GM events I did in the game in a trip to the Twilight Court was like that, where I had etiquette checks to avoid death, essentially. But something much lower than that, and I just wanted to map out combat first, as it was the one people would ask most about. I intend to map out all the common plots, and we'll ideally have a crowdsourced table of @checks, as GMs come into situations and are resolved, it becomes the mold we use after that.
3. I gotta be honest, I really would rather player Storytellers not be adding new lore in ways that aren't org contained, in say naming a bandit group, shav tribe, or the like. Prpclue is probably going to be deprecated. But, when it is defined yes, I do want it to be accessible to everyone. But yes, I really need to halt or rein in new clues because it's just too much staff time dealing with it and not sustainable."
Turn in line: Lora
Lora says, "Related to Drake's third question... How much interface is there going to need to be between STs and staff? For instance, someone recruits a storyteller for a house plot that has some secret background lore that was previously hinted at in past actions/clues, or they want to dig into their personal secret but there's just a lot of question marks on both the player and storyteller's part. Is the ST free to make up the lore as they go along, or is staff still going to have to write up plot packets for STs?"
Apostate says, "All storytellers and story coordinators will be in a chat channel/board with me and any other staffers, so there will be a constant feedback loop. And I know what I just said, but it really does depend on the lore. Like for example, someone detailing what the Roseward looks like, or its walls- as long as that's you or the DiFidante story coordinator, great. Someone wanting to detail a secret race of lizard people, that's just not in the cards because it's too much time for me to make it work normally"
Turn in line: Sorrel
Turn in line: Porter
Porter says, "Probably the least pressing question of all time from me, lol. But here it is: Currently when I finish a PRP or something significant in it happens, I'll write up an emit for the org that I'll request you push through as an org story update. With us having coordinators + storytellers now, would the storyteller now write their story emit and then send it to the coordinator who does all of the beep-boops? It seems like something like that would be nice and eliminate some staff busy work. I hope. In theory."
Apostate says, "I intend to give storytellers and story coordinators commands to do it. But that might be a bit, so in the short term, yeah, things will go through me and other staff. Probably not even as requests, just asking in channel when I'm on."
Turn in line: Pasquale
Kiera has joined the line.
Andrina has joined the line.
Pasquale says, "How do you move between storyteller ranks?"
Apostate says, "Perfect world, positive player feedback on at least 5 events of a tier and then a up/down vote from everyone senior. Not so perfect world where I don't have time to do that, probably me not having to retcon or do any significant work or dealing with a drama meltdown from an event going horribly wrong for 5+ events"
Turn in line: Kiera
Merek has joined the line.
Arvie arrives, following Gaspar.
Harlan has joined the line.
Kiera hms "So say I'm doing an investigative prp for instance about a kidnaping and want players to find victim's ransom note. as things are now that may have been a prp clue which is exactly the bloat we want to avoid. How should i get said info to plays in lieu of a clue
Kiera says, "*players"
Apostate says, "What would be the most likely replacement: 1. A storyteller would create a +plot about the kidnapping and investigation, and then with a new command send out a spoofed messenger with a name you select ie 'an anonymous messenger' that is automatically associated with the plot and a beat. That means abuse cases would be eliminated as it is still automatically associated with a plot oocly so it's clear what GM is doing it and why, even if it's only visible staff side, but still be able to create a similar vibe to what old clues would do, and it would live on as a plot beat if it needs to be referenced later."
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Turn in line: Andrina
Andrina says, "For @org storytellers. I've noticed that some people have it listed as OOC titles. So I have two questions with that. 1) Will there be a +storytellers command or something that will give people a list of who the storytellers are? 2) If you wanted to be a storyteller for a secret org how would that be handled?"
Apostate says, "1. Yep, 2. No titles but show to members in org, and won't show on masterlists to people that don't have the org as visible"
Apostate says, "Also, related, a list of available storytellers, and all plots that are open and accessible to a character"
Apostate says, "Like say, if the Great Cathedral blows up, a great cathedral rebuilding plot being accessible there with the emits about it being blown up directly linked to it, and finally ending the 'how do I interact with the emit' problem that's existed since the dawn of Arx."
Turn in line: Merek
Merek says, "My question is simple, sorry got distracted, I was wondering if future plots might note if there were preference for permanent wounds vs the killing of characters, I know that seems pretty silly to ask though."
Merek says, "Like some kind of optin field so people/GMs know preference when going in."
Winter, A Highhill Puppy leaves, following Kiera.
Calypso has joined the line.
Apostate says, "No, afraid not, because it will not be discretionary to a storyteller. A storyteller could be your best friend, and if the roll kills Merek, it is out of their hands. This is critical because generally speaking, no GM ever wants to inflict loss, I do not want them to have that responsibility. Now, for lower risk plots, there's luck rolls to have items damaged or destroyed instead to do that. For example, on a low risk plot, someone getting a temporary wound is allowed to damage their most expensive item to avoid it, or to turn a permanent wound into a temporary wound, or death into a permanent wound, a 'shift down' of one level. Moderate risk plots require an easy luck roll to do so, and significant risk plots (the highest run by players) require a hard luck roll. So it's still increasingly unlikely to have a random death."
Turn in line: Harlan
Apostate says, "But I forsee cases when someone takes a permanent wound rather than break their magic sword, tbh."
Merek says, "Ah, that makes sense, thank you! Also, I must away to the @cal thing that just started! You all be well!"
Merek nods!
Merek waves!
Harlan waves, "Ok, so! That last answer kind of did my question. I was going to ask if we would need neutral runners for our orgs, but it seems everything will be more straight forward!"
Fiora has joined the line.
Apostate says, "Right, I'm fine with people GMing for their friends, and honestly that's the most common use case, just I think it's important that the discretion on risks and rewards are pretty limited."
Turn in line: Rowenova
Drake has joined the line.
Rowenova says, "1: how do you feel about the style of GMing where dice are used to help determine number of thugs and guns, etc, on the fly. I have never GMed here, but when I do, it is something I do to keep things random and spontaneous because people can only see what they can see (but also being fair if they investigate prior to getting in the mix). Are you good with some of that?
2: if that is something with which you are cool, and the plot was low risk, but the characters ended up facing more than originally expected (even unexpected by the GM because dice rolled high or low or whatever) or creatively overcome something in a unique way which was not just beating it up, are staff good with supporting adjustments to rewards if those had to be preplanned before the run? If there is a good justification for it?
3: What if GMs don't mind their players sandboxing and going off the beaten path, and they decide to get sidetracked (which is fine when I GM: I don't mind that stuff because I'll recycle the instance later, and some of the coolest scenarios can happen because of that kinda thing, is that going to be supported (like if they loot a rich merchant rather than beating up said merchant, or they double cross their job giver, etc, any number of things they wanna do). I'm not big on boxing folks into my GM vision. I want to be able to support that. Will staff work with us if we want to run that way?"
Apostate says, "1. I wouldn't want randomization to go above or below the scope of risk set in a prp. Like for example, if the guidelines are 20-30 infirm villagers are rioting, and the difficulty rating is 20-30, then I'm fine with randomizing the 20-30, but not 10-60 because that can produce unreasonable outcomes.
2. So having said that, I think there are cases when characters will want to make choices that organically would -force- it to become a higher risk plot. I am okay with this, not as a result of randomization, but as a choice that they and every character is willing to do. If that happens, and they are clear what that means with the higher risks and what it represents, then it can proceed as higher risk and staff steps in if it's beyond what a storyteller is okay'd to GM. Or lower risk, if characters are all like, 'no, we decide to run from everything'. Then I mean, no reward but their lives if not their dignity is intact.
3. So to a point yes, but what I need to be careful of here is rewards that are out of proportion to risk, or creation of new lore. But as long as that's kept in mind, tenatively yes."
Turn in line: Calypso
Calypso says, "In the days of the old PRPs, where everything was made up and the points didn't matter, I was (under a different character) in a couple of situations where other characters did really foolish things that brought a whole bunch of badness on everyone's heads. Will there be anything in place to protect people from someone shouting 'LEEROY JENKINS' and pissing off a bunch of dragons? (Or whatever). It feels like the alternative is being very selective about who does the moderately dangerous/dangerous stuff with me, and I'm afraid that could lead to people getting excluded, potentially by a lot of people if they get a reputation for doing the Leeroy Jenkins thing."
Apostate says, "So that's one of the limitations of going with this style, is there are some places where we can't be organically flexible. For example, if someone on a starting plot of talking to a council of villagers says, 'Well okay I murder all of them until one confesses', and this is a no risk plot, it just can't be allowed without every player involved OOCly agreeing to massively escalate the risk and go above that storyteller, because that character is doing something that is ICly going to get them executed, which is way beyond the scope of a no risk PRP. So it's going to have some cases of, 'sorry you can't do that', or if some players broke sanctuary in a no risk prp and no one understood the thematic implications, a retcon."
Turn in line: Fiora
Sorrel says, "Sorry about that. RL interrupted immediately as my place in line came up. There have been some questions asked about lore prior, and those answers I think I understand fairly well. I also understand that clues/lore will not be a reward for RFRs and the like. However, there are a lot of People and Places and Things out there that exist in clues, and there's a natural tendency to want to investigate them. (We seem to have a GRRM situation where there's a lot of named characters who might not actually be important.) Is there a good way to facilitate that with staff and storytellers? Is it reasonable to ask 'Hey, I'm excited about Osmium, the dog Metallic. Is he worth putting energy into?'"
Fiora will wait
Sorrel says, "Sorry, Fiora. I just managed to get back."
Fiora says in Draconic, "np np"
Fiora ahem
Fiora says, "np np"
Apostate says, "So I think the way to do that is to associate that with an actual org plot and PRP arc. Like for Osmium, becoming like a Red Warden story arc of finding out something he did that could help with the Horned God. The reason I say that is I think what staff needs to devote its energy to is mostly trying to make anything we do relevant and helpful towards the main current arc of the game, to try to draw strands in, otherwise you have the same situation where things keep spreading out and we are in the same general game state for 3 years"
Apostate says, "But like I'm not going to yell at a staffer either for just writing up something for fun, I'm just saying what -I'm- going to be focused on really"
Fiora says, "go?"
Fiora says, "In regards to people GMing for their friends, or say people GMing for people who are very much not their friends the first thing my mind goes to is well the rolls may not be theirs to decide but they do get to set the rolls. A friendly GM for example not wanting to harm their friends could put in just one tough roll and just pose out everything. A GM who doesn't like someone maybe could make several more dangerous rolls for a particular act that could be argued as excessive or w/e.
This sort of thing will probably happen in different degrees of severity and will probably have arguments to their lack of rolls or their excessive rolls being appropriate, etc. Will there be anything to combat this? For example a plot that gets X reward must require X rolls of X difficulty and a plot that is difficult should not exceed X rolls of X difficulty or whatever. Let me know if the question didn't make sense I can try to rephrase"
Apostate says, "I should clarify, roll -difficulty- is not discretionary either. A low risk prp has easy difficulty rolls, a high risk plot has daunting rolls. A single boss is daunting checks, an elite is hard checks, a mook (regular opponent) is normal checks, an unarmed villager is easy checks. Shifting difficulty of rolls based on clever ideas or terrible luck or anything like that we normally associate with GM judgment has to go through the storyteller channel with staff approval, so it's going to be pretty damned limited."
Apostate says, "At a certain point, with automation, a GM is really more determining the whens and wheres, and descriptions, not so much the hows."
Turn in line: Drake
Drake says, "So second question, basically, a follow up to my lore question, this time based on the document. As an example, in your tier 3 story list, you say this: -Very minor supernatural threats are permitted as enemy elites, if still under the threshold of under half as many combat PCs. (Imps, shards, hordelings, minor elementals, etc).
Is there a list of what kind of types of supernatural threats, all up, are at what tier and able to be used by STs? Is this waiting on the coded bestiary that you mentioned? If so, what's going to be done in the mean time?"
Apostate says, "I'm definitely going to have to list one and just sign off on every single thing by hand, but generally speaking, if it's supernatural, it's probably a lot more dangerous than people would think. A wee little imp is like say, a king's own elite guardsman type equivalent."
Ramona - A Guard in Ashford House Colours, Bigsby - A Thoughtful Looking Young Man in Nondescript Clothing, 2 Ashford Archer, 1 Ashford Scout leave, following Lisebet.
Nunia the discreetest handmaid leaves, following Fiora.
Gaspar has joined the line.
Turn in line: Gaspar
Gaspar says in Nox'alfar, "This may have been answered, and apologies if it has, but its there a workup on 'commands' for STs? The mechanics and whatnot? Sorry if that's vague."
Gaspar says in Nox'alfar, "This may have been answered, and apologies if it has, but its there a workup on 'commands' for STs? The mechanics and whatnot? Sorry if that's vague."
Nunia the discreetest handmaid arrives, following Fiora.
Gaspar says, "This may have been answered, and apologies if it has, but its there a workup on 'commands' for STs? The mechanics and whatnot? Sorry if that's vague."
Primus, First of Monique's Assistants, Tertius, Third of Monique's Assistants leave, following Monique.
Lianne has joined the line.
Rowenova has joined the line.
Apostate says, "Not yet. So @check and @harm still will be there, albeit in the new forms, and @check/contest is pretty useful, but that's more a matter of outlining common checks. Like say, if someone wants to do iniative rolls or checking for ambushes or any of a million things. What I think will happen most frequently is the first few weeks will be very much more like communal GMing, as each Storyteller is referencing with the group with what are appropriate checks, and then get more and more defined over time based on precedent and rulings. Now, for new commands there will be emitting, voxes, handing out rewards, plot management stuff, etc. That all has to come, but it's easier to get everyone working under a new system and add the tools based on what we need, then try to predict the need with tools that aren't quite right."
Turn in line: Lianne
Lianne says, "If I'm reading correctly, staff will still be required for ST judgment calls. How does this reduce staff workload? It seems to rely on folks going by script, fully, and players notoriously do not do this, which means STs tend to need some flexibility."
Teague has joined the line.
Apostate says, "That's a good question, the reason why it will decrease over time is because I do not want the answers to become lost, but a continuously updated mass library of precedent that will be automated and referenced. For example, the first time wants to try to scale the cliffs of the Ward of the Crown, yeah, that's a ruling. The second time it's a quick reference to past precedent, until you have a compendium of 50 different things under 'climbing' for the many, many different ways people can fall and break their necks. And also, the place people ask this is in a channel with all the other storytellers and story coordinators, as well as staff, so it'll probably feel less like a +request than asking on 'info'."
Apostate says, "Like one advantage we do have over say, tabletop, is that everything we do can be stored and cross referenced, so we do have a way of compiling datasets based on existing GMing"
Sydney has joined the line.
Apostate says, "I also foresee, 'someone wants to do something more dangerous than the PRP allows' to be the most common case that comes up for arbitration, and as long as the player knows that, hey, fine."
Turn in line: Rowenova
Rowenova says, "This goes back to Leroy Jenkins. Could we have some kinda disclaimer/HR command we can set and flash for everyone at the beginning of plots (or which can be attached to our @cals we're GMing). So if we are pro PVP lite (KO level) and sand boxing and random junk, we can state all that up front. Also a sign off which says players who joined read it? So they've consented to your style?"
Pasquale has joined the line.
Apostate says, "It will be very, very, very visible exactly what kind of risk level a PRP is. The most sensible way to do that is an 'okay with risk increasing' toggle tbh, that has to be unanimous, though that's for the future with more automation."
Turn in line: Teague
Teague says, "My question is more about languages. Even in this meeting, we have had people use their languages, which you can't read if you don't have them on your sheet. When we are sting or running a plot, will we have a flag/trigger to make it translate or allow us to speak in other languages? Allowing us to give more real-world flavor to the scenes."
Teague says, "Also understand players that have Languages that we might know IC."
Teague says, "Not know. Sorry."
Apostate says, "That's an excellent idea and yeah, I can add language flexibility to plot runners. Good suggestion."
Turn in line: Sydney
Sydney says, "You mentioned compiled datasets a moment ago. Just wondering how accessible stuff like @harm DB entries are going to be, going forward as more stuff gets migrated to DB. Are these going to be publicly viewable, or visible only to Storytellers and Staff? One of the things I enjoy about Arx is how open the code is on a whole."
Mia has joined the line.
Apostate says, "So will probably be putting harm in its own jinja templates so that we can edit them readily. Unfortunately we'll probably be making a lot more calculations live in the database for a lot of reasons and some like harm calculations I don't think are a big deal to make public, but for obvious reasons we can't publish the DB because we don't have a few free years to sanitize it. While design wise, I prefer things to be more abstract and less crunchy, I'm not really obsessed with data obfuscation so much as really wanting the ease of like a jinja template for editing vs hardcoded modeling"
Turn in line: Pasquale
Pasquale says, "If i understand right you can have one player decide to escalate/alter everything (ie its supposed to be a social plot and one guy decides to start filleting people)and when this happens the gm has to stop and check if everyone is willing to go with a higher prp grade.
What happens if only one or two people agree? Do they then need to sit out the plot because of the other guy? And what if it pushes it up beyond the storytellers rank. Do they then have to reschedule it with another gm or can they just refuse to let that player do that thing in the first place?"
Apostate says, "The player is not allowed to take the course of action and can't do it OOCly. I mean inorganically, 'sorry bro, you can't murder the villagers'. It's a shame but I think a necessary consequence of design, and if they'd rather leave the PRP that's okay."
Turn in line: Mia
Rowenova has joined the line.
Mia says, "So, apologies if this has already been made clear elsewhere or if it's just a dumb question, but. I was recently in a scene where a roll I made was botched because I used capital letters in my @check rather than all lowercase, and the only reason anyone caught that there was an error in the roll was because the associated GM could see the roll on the back end. What level of visibility will PC GMs have into the actual mathematics of rolls and will there be any systems or mechanics in place to correct those without needing to ask for staff review or intervention, given the increased risk of many PRPs?"
Apostate says, "Not much, I just need to make sure inputs are sanitized to make sure nothing funky can go on. Fixing that is a lot more important than adding new functionality imo"
Turn in line: Rowenova
Rowenova says, "I just thought of another idea. Could there be a command to turn PRP rooms to nonlethal combat? That way, everyone can just tackle Leroy but he won't die outright if he had a moment where the HG decided he was supposed to be controlled to do the thing (if that was something he was RPing). It'd make sense for folks to snatch him and tie him to a tree. I don't think everyone should get to 'just do it' though, without proving they can fite him with the combat code?"
Rowenova says, "if that already exists (it might) I don't know."
Mia says, "Cool. Thanks!"
Apostate says, "That one unfortunately is a hard no. Nonlethal has to live as a low risk plot and lower, can't mix and match this without undermining the entire reason for the changes."
Rowenova says, "Sorry for adding: is there going to be a way to allow characters to choose the damage they're dealing? Let's say they want to just bonk him but not chop him up?"
Apostate says, "So player character damage is abstracted and not automated yet, some from a player side sure as you are doing hand book keeping there for the short term. From an NPC side, you could use a lower harm if it's reflective of the rolls and plot difficulty, like a low risk plot where none of the bad guys have any intention of killing someone (say, a bar brawl scene) could be realistic there. But not for a higher risk one from NPCs"
Rowenova says, "Sweet, thanks."
Alena Sparks, unamused first mate, Silk, the Seafaring Spider, 1 Harlequin jongleur, Midnight Sea, an Ostrian gelding leave, following Evaristo.
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Apostate says, "Okay, we'll call it there, I'll probably do a follow up one in a few days, or among associated stuff. Thanks a ton to everyone for coming"
Fiora says, "Thanks!"
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Porter says, "Thank you for your time!"
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