Bay 12 Games Forum

Conjure some pants for Doomblade from thin air (or turn thin air into cloth in the shape of pants, whatever). If successful, give him the conjured pants. Under no circumstances give anyone any article of clothing I am wearing.

It's hard to tell from simply glancing at the rules, but I would guess a lot of the imbalances and such come from the fact that powers are rather arbitrary in how much energy they use and can be completely OP at times, forcing the GM to create horrifically powerful monsters which no one can beat as a counter?

Pretty much, yeah. Also, noncombat challenges aren't challenging due to other powers. (Such as the characters with vaguely-defined creation powers.)

Chunky salsa is a cool way to do damage in my opinion.

Not sure why though.

...
Well, whyever it is, I agree.

If combat isn't the focus, why not ditch numbers entirely?  Have combat be all about description of effects (which the focusing and casting of such left to the players) and the reactions to the attacks of the enemies, which is scripted by the GM?

Partly because the missions are still important, partly because the game it's descended from was a lot more focused on the whole Overarching Alien-Invasion Plot thing.
Still, it's not a bad idea...although it could easily make the balance problems worse. Worth consideration.

Well, balance isn't needed for fun, but we're at the point where enemies are either a pushover or nigh-invulnerable and noncombat things are basically a nonissue.

Explain the game? Alright. Basically, there's a mess of characters with various powers, often unrestricted, who occasionally receive calls to deal with various problems. Also there's character development between missions, though a lot if it is kinda...cliche and dull to read. In theory, the latter is the main focus. In practice, the active characters get dragged into battles that take weeks or longer to complete.
What standard rules there are are here. It's not much, but there are some numbers.

Quote from: GreatWyrmGold on May 30, 2014, 07:59:30 am

Say, piecewise, there's a bit of a problem one of the bigger, older games is having with things like balance and handling tons of players. Would you be interested in advising them on how to fix it?

Mind if I ask which one that would be? The only I could even guess is the one magical girl game I think you're in?

Correct.

Quote from: GreatWyrmGold on May 30, 2014, 07:59:30 am

Quote from: Radio Controlled on May 30, 2014, 06:35:39 am

Quote from: Unholy_Pariah on May 29, 2014, 10:53:16 pm

Okay not arguing anymore

*Continues to argue*

I know, right? I might debate up a storm, but at least I actually leave when I say I do.

Theres a difference between arguing and clarifying a final point.

It's not "clarifying a final point" if you keep arguing after that, now is it?

Then youd be wrong. pill machine is easily predictable. Testing, trial, and error is likely to prove me right.

Reread my post and you'll note an "at the moment". We don't understand the pill machine, and without testing we're not going to. That's why we need to test it to figure out what we need to put in the pills to make the modifications we want.

Pill machine upgrades are already available to everyone on haphaestus, all you gotta do is prevent Simus from shutting you down because you forgot to ask for permission.

I mean that we'd have some shipped to the Sword somehow and added to the Armory.

Which game is this and what is the probnlem they are having exactly? Because the easiest two ways of helping if they're just havning prohlems keeping up is

1.reduce the number of players
2.reduce the number of rolls/hte complexity of the rules. Less rolls, less book keeping, less hassle, etc.

The game is RotMG. The problems are...well, it's hard to agree on what they are, but it's generally agreed that big ones are lack of balance and lack of cohesion. Not helping matters is that the rules are basically nonexistent, so whenever we come to a combat whoever's running that plot has to make up his own rules. Oh, and the GM's almost never there, so the players are running the asylum.
We're thinking that cleaning the slate and starting over might be an important part of the solution.

Yeah. Why did you have to forbid arguments on a post I agree with the gist of?

Can we throw a party for whomever causes the most destruction into jail? Stacy is winning, for now.

Seems a bit extreme, but sure.

Quote from: Unholy_Pariah on May 29, 2014, 10:53:16 pm

Okay not arguing anymore

*Continues to argue*

I know, right? I might debate up a storm, but at least I actually leave when I say I do.

I'm also starting to get a scary suspicion as to what that is...

I'm...curious and worried, but without knowing a bit more about the process I'm not feeling confident suspecting much of anything.

If you think arm fails at public relations now, be glad i never went after the pill machine.

At least on of the newbs would already be a 6 foot tall bulletproof termite/mantis hybrid with monorazor scythe arms and the capability to disguise themselves as a guy wearing a raincoat by folding their wings over themselves and covering their face with a two part bone mask.

I doubt it. The pill machine is too unpredictable at the moment, and only testing, trial, and error is likely to change that.
Still, once I do, I intend to make pill upgrades available to everyone.

Quote from: smurfingtonthethird on May 30, 2014, 07:45:51 am

In other news, can we drop Stacy on Earth-3 and wait for the utter chaos to begin?

Could work. Earth-3 probably has a defence fleet and laser guns the size of towers, but Stacy, with a small coat of invisi-paint to make him invisible could sneak by them. Then a grav-chute  to land safely and a supply of manipulators or other dangerous weapons to overload... Yeah, they won't know what hit 'em.

Or we figure out how to feed robots pills and give him a manipulator battery pill before dropping.
But not until we're invading Earth already.


Say, piecewise, there's a bit of a problem one of the bigger, older games is having with things like balance and handling tons of players. Would you be interested in advising them on how to fix it?

GWG, quit trying to get rid of everyone's most used and favorite characters. It's not working.

Screw you and your accusations. I'm trying to get this game to be fun again. If that means defining the powers of some people better, then great!
Example: Selina's power. She can only create mundane objects. No communication bracelets, no teleportation anything, etc. No longer an issue.

To be fair, Kyle got slightly less OP in terms of powers.

How?

And you never objected to the OP people when they were in the original thread.

Because they weren't breaking the game. Now they are. Also, there's a lot more of them.

before you guys get started, this is not a rant, no argueing.

Just for that, I'm going to find something to argue with.

...to deal any damage whatsoever, ICARUS needs to roll above 35 - there is only a 30% chance of that happening, meaning there is a total of 15% chance to deal any damage whatsoever.

Last I checked, there was a 35% chance of that not happening.

...giving ICARUS a DPS of 1.4 points of damage per turn.

DPS is "damage per second". Talking about it in damage per turn is like saying "My car can get an mpg of 70 miles to the liter".

(Did this thought never occur to Sanure or Elf during discussions that the enemy also needs to be defeated in less than an IRL month?)

One, with turns as infrequent as they are and hit points as numerous as that, it'll take a lot more than a month.
Two, they probably added all those abilities to make sure that the OP characters wouldn't be screwing with him too badly.
Three, we should be using more OP abilities in this combat. Someone should have borrowed Will's rifle.

((also what, we were all in the matrix? God damnit guys, yeah go ahead and make any char development that happened and that was planned, alongside all the plots I had planned irrelevant))

Some things will need to be lost to benefit the game. The needs of the game's funness outweigh the character development of the few.

High str, mag or mind, no problem, but dex and end are the game makers

Another thing we'll need to solve for the new version, along with how absurdly undefined combat rules and such are.

How about this? Handle plots, lore, effects, etc from their cause and not trace from effects and do so with limitations in mind?
First, get a reason for why the eldritch/infernal/divine entities that everyone and their fucking pet dogs seem to be homies with can't just dues ex machina.

They don't need to, as long as the characters themselves can do so.

Next, ground the setting in causality. If Kyle or ICARUS or HILDA want to use or make some sort of technological or magical-technological implement, don't do just let them with a roll or something. Get them to explain precisely how it works. Consult @GWG for the science involved, consult relevant lore-holders for the magic involved. If it's possible but the means isn't known, do not allow it. What precisely did Jung have to do with the actual supernatural personae? For that matter, what about Freud, who was rather close to Jung and whose theory had some points of similarities?

Works for me.
For the record, I'm willing to be fairly flexible. Although I intend to make sure that impractical things remain so without effort.

Review non-original content. This has an awfully large quantity of stuff from other sources made by other people for other settings. Do they fit? If their mechanics don't work, then figure out what alternate in-universe mechanics could let them and what new limitations are consequently formed.

*cough*Personae*cough*
Those are hardly the worst as far as game balance and such goes, but to people who don't playtheg  ames they are confusing.

Hmm. I would recommend Ross Vernal, being the only other former I know of who managed a 4000+ page monstrosity (his went somewhere around 6000 pages) but he's kinda busy.

What about piecewise? Aside from managing a multi-thread (even before getting a subforum), ~3750-page-at-this-time game, he's dealt with the problems inherent with having dozens of players, applies specific rules to the situation, and keeps supertech and such under control.
Although he's busy too.

...the only person here I would actually trust with that would be @Xantalos simply because the only stakes he has in this consists of the desire to watch it burn to ashes as opposed to having actual interests inside the game.

...
I would count that against him. Nothing personal, Xantalos, but it seems that the last person I'd want fixing my car would be someone who wanted to destroy it utterly.

hmm, after some thinking, I think I may actually do have a proper explanation for the character development of ICARUS so far, in perspective to the whole matrix thing, alongside a possible redesign of ICARUS field of abilities in regards of a possible rebalancing of abilities. That is, ICARUS was not put into the matrix by the layar - she attempted to hack herself into it as part of the resistance. ICARUS will remain an electronical entity even in any reboots, so she more or less entered her mind into the matrix, as a mission to wake people inside up. The hacking process was slow, and so her mind entered the matrix gradualy, bit by bit. By now, she is still not fully inside, and thus the in-matrix ICARUS is still entirely convinced of the actualy backstory the out-matrix ICARUS made up.

when the time for the reboot comes and people are to wake up, ICARUS may very well be the one who initiates that. My plots can possibly be adjusted to fit whatever setting we are in when we wake up, but is definetly a post-layar thing.

See? With a little work, everyone's character plans can fit into the retcon.

I'm still not sure that the matrix reboot is a good idea, it's basically just saying we're bored of this game now lets make a new one. If we do that I would actually prefer it if we just started again in an actual new game, that way it would be a completely fresh start rather than a clumsy retcon.

That's true enough. The one advantage it has is that it lets us keep our characters, which many of us are attached to.

What would be the point though? Why would the Layar, who were just in it because it was cheaper to defeat humanity and extract resources than trading for them, proceed to blow god knows how much on creating something like this simulation, presumably using plenty of the resources they are fighting for in the first place?

Depends. Why were they invading Earth in the first place? Seems like anything they could want from Earth, they could get cheaper from asteroid-mining robots or using material mined from asteroids to make robots.

Plus if it's fueled by the people imprisoned in them, then it won't work. Because there are people cynical and grounded enough to oppose the unrealistic elements. The nativity that fuels the inconsistencies only works if enough people are that naive.

Also there's conservation of energy.

there ought to be some entities in the world that evaded the mind-controle. While we are fighting in the simulation, other demons or gods or whatever may be fighting him in reality. Gods don't usualy intervene, but when such large scale stuff is going on for too long, some of them may very well descend into the world so set things right again

Sensible.