Post by Talon Windwaltz on Jun 24, 2016 17:35:13 GMT -5
Thoughts --
As always, rules are not my forte, so I'm all for whatever you guys think is best.
Still, I don't think monsters should cost more than wizards. If anything, it should be the other way around. A level 10 Vampire Lord is not equal to a Thaumaturge. Wizards are tiny little baby humans with brittle bones and no strength, and they are rewarded by becoming God-like beings at the end of their progression. I think Abominations should level up a tiny bit faster. I guess one could argue the fact that Wizards have several schools to choose from means they should go faster, but I think you shouldn't have to put as much effort into your Abomination (which should be an alt) as you do your Wizard, since Wizards are the focus of the game.
Post by TEAGAN TEAGAN TEAGAN TEAGAN TE on Jun 24, 2016 18:59:45 GMT -5
Making level 1 free for monsters makes sense. I hadn't thought of that.
The first level for the first school free makes sense, too. Otherwise, we'll have characters running around and not knowing what they're doing there.
Since beasties only have one progression tree while humans can have multiple, making them cost a bit more makes sense after consideration. However, I still agree more with Talon here. If we make them more difficult, we may have trouble with producing them as antagonists. We can have sales later on when we need a lot of characters of certain type, but the writers already have to pay that bit of extra in the beginning just to use a monster character.
There are 9 pages of members on the FFU member list. 50 per page. The 50th highest poster out of our ~450? 327 posts. 100th? 133. 150th? 68. And we know a lot of those first 100 are the main crew or alts of the main crew (Out of the first 50, I know 16 of the accounts are people (or alts of people) who have posted in Op Phoenix or in shout). So there's some numbers to consider on post counts. Also, I don't forsee most people averaging more than 2 posts a day, maybe 5 max if they are RPing a lot with someone on the same schedule, so that's 150 points max a month I could imagine someone getting. (I dunno, it may not sound like much, but I feel on a good week the best I've done is like 10 posts on a weekend and 1 or 2 a weekday, so that's not even breaking 3 a day, and I'm top 50). So that would be a factor in progression, because we don't want people feeling stagnant. Also, that's like the posting load on one person, so if they're posting on multiple accounts they have to split those even more thinly.
Key question: how will this be tracked? We say a post of x length is worth points, but can Proboards auto track that? Or are we going to have to? Plus, I feel the word limit might get in the way sometimes. If a flow of a post dictates one person is doing a lot more and the other person is just reacting to break up the length, the occasional short post shouldn't not count. Otherwise people may feel pressured to try to drag out a post, and this is fun RPing, not grade school essays. And if one person happens to be the limelight of the post at the moment (the one telling a story, for example) I don't want the other person feeling compelled to take it. Though I guess I would argue the person telling a story is doing more roleplaying, you can't just overlook your support roles guys. Just play a team shooter and leave your healer in the lurch, see how it goes. It may be a non issue, but I'd rather us not get attached to a system we can't implement without excessive overhead killing our main core's ability to post.
So going into more details:
Grandfathering: I think we should work out level costs before the exact point amount. What I would like to see, if possible, would be like this: A person grandfathered in could create a level 5 or 6 mage, a person who is level 3 in two schools, or say 2 level 2 monsters.
Refunds: I approve. Though it definitely should be requiring death of character or extenuating circumstances. I don't want someone sending their points to the plot villain to beef him up and then drain him when the plot ends. But if they make a plot villain, RP them, and then they die, then they should totally get those points for their character.
Point costs: I mostly agree with Az's system, though see what I said about grandfathering above. With 250 points in grandfathering, a person could make someone level 6 in one school...or level 5 in two. Unless level 6 is drastically stronger than a 5 I don't think that's balanced. I'd say two level 4's max. Ideally, I'd like to see the grandfathering make it to where someone could make, say, a level 6 mage, or two level 3 mages (or a mage specializing in two schools to level 3), or say two level 2 creatures.
Creatures: I'd like to suggest we state up front the cost of making a creature are variable. That way if we start getting an influx of vampires we can make them cost more to discourage people till numbers balance out. I feel just like FFU, we want students to be more of the main focus (there's no use in a complex house system if students aren't outnumbering creatures). Essentially, I think 2 houses worth of students should be equal to a group of creatures (excluding plot points or some such). The theory being if a majority of houses ever came together they could actually take out a group of creatures, but infighting makes it unlikely. Basically think of this: 1 house pro lycan, neutral on vamp. 1 house pro vamp, neutral on lycan. 1 house anti lycan, neutral on vamp. 1 house anti vamp, neutral on lycans. 1 house anti fae, neutral on groups on the island. The anti fae house won't go against the creatures cause they got no beef and want to work with creatures to fight the common Fae enemies. So any one house dependent on pushing their views has only 4 choices left. Their opposition won't agree, so in order to gather a 3 house army they'd have to convince the opposing sides of the other factions to overlook their differences against a common enemy, which would take a lot. Obviously levels would be a factor but I mean from a rough numbers standpoint.
Also, will professors/professions get a boost somehow? Essentially, with the current point amounts suggested, grandfathered in my choices would be a level 6 student w/ 25 extra points , or a level 5 max professor with a level 4 school, a level 3 school, and a level 2 school (zero points left over). Or I could be a student with two level 5 schools and 45 extra points left. Unless the special humans get boosts in power or RP earning ability, students would generally be more powerful to make.
It's all balancing issues and probably premature but worth considering I feel.
Quick suggestion of an idea: an RP boost for active posting. Basically if you do x posts a month you get an RP boost. Make it scale as well though to encourage posting, and lengthing allowable breaks before losing the boost (so say at 1 month of 30 posts you get 10 extra points, at 2 months in a row of 30 posts you get 20, at 3 months of 30 in a row you get 35 and you can go a month without losing it, etc.) That way someone sees "Oh hey, if I do at least maintain a post a day, I get an easily obvious benefit". But you base it on monthly posting so that if they want to they could just do say a post or two during the week and 3-4 on the weekend.
Post by TEAGAN TEAGAN TEAGAN TEAGAN TE on Jun 25, 2016 7:19:21 GMT -5
I like the idea of point refunds.
A lot of what Pman says makes sense. I think that professors, NPCs, and those with special positions should earn extra points, too. Since they will have more "work" to do, I think they should get some kind of incentive.
-Rate of posting: you are right about it taking a while to hit some of the milestones proposed here and that was actually the main idea. I was personally assuming that a good average rate was one post per day, with it being a pretty intense task to go master any individual path. That being said, it is also why I was intent on brainstorming a list of ideas for ways to participate in the community that didn't necessarily have to involve posting but could still help advance someone more rapidly.
-Tracking RP: yes, you can set a minimum post length with proboards, where it won't count posts towards post count that fall below the minimum. As for occasional short posts, that's why I suggested a low threshold for posts to count. Pretty sure you can even set a word counter that auto updates while you are posting to show you where you are at. Mostly just looking to remove the chance that people will spam one-liners back and forth. Your support roles would likely have to do about what is in this paragraph to still meet that threshold, which doesn't seem like a super strict set of standards to meet. The overhead wouldn't be too much, beyond setting up the basic plugins and editing some profiles now and again when someone wants to make a new character or advance a current one.
-Refunds: I do like the idea of being able to retire characters rather than strictly players death for them, but I also do see the problem with allowing for "retiring" and "un-retiring" characters at will to just jump points around. I feel like that's something that we'd only have to deal with if someone actually tried it. One of those "don't be a diiiiiiiick" kinda chats.
-Grandfathering: The thing about level6 in one or level5 in two is right and I am also not opposed to it. You picked the exact point where I had point values start scaling up more steeply and really just demonstrated that it is much easier to diversify after hitting level five in a school of magic than it is to keep advancing. Thus, tis working as planned, especially since I had it in my head we would have level5 the minimum level to be a professor, meaning people can get there easily enough. I also don't see grandfathering being too much of a problem considering it only really applies to the people who have been here running around and plotting for years. I am okay with trusting you all to make stuff that is fun and ultimately only adds to the world we are building.
-Active RP boost: This isn't a bad idea. I think it's along the same line as when I mentioned monthly activity checks. The only problem here would be figuring out a way to manage it so it doesn't become a huge time sink and burden for the one in charge. Also to make the exact flow of how it works super apparent.
-Creature costs: I am pretty opposed to the idea of varying creature costs. That just seems like a recipe for salt, especially if we raise them, people pay them and eventually lower them again. Might also run into conflict with the whole idea of refunding. Personally, if we have an influx of one kind of creature and they begin to have large number active, that just feels like we make it into a plot and integrate what is going on in character with out in character world rather than go change the rules to try and assert dominance over how we feel the story should go.
I did have some thoughts on professors and such, but company just arrived, so that will have to wait.
In my head, I feel there's going to be a post for each character with their trees and point usages. I figure all boosts would be tracked there. So proboards keeps track of post count, and if boosts are awarded, they are noted there. Then a person planning their points just has to add their post count to the points listed there. That'd be easy for event based things, but it would be more complicated with recurring/time based ones. I guess it's a matter of how many active users we have vs. admins/mods. Admins and mods might just be able to do quick skims of activity/recent posts to verify people earn boosts (skim recent posts, make sure they look decent length. Then look at activity and see if there's 30 posts that month in non OOC boards. The big issue would be the heavy OOC posting I guess. Does admin status give any sort of user statistics like posts in the past x days?
On the creature costs, do we intend to worry at all about creature vs student numbers? Because if it ran into an issue with students being unable to do student stuff due to lack of students, I'm not sure how we'd fix that. I feel as if it would make sense IC (a weak pack bolstering its numbers quickly, but a large group being hesitant to bring in outsiders or draw more attention) I don't intend for them to be crazy large numbers, but say 100-150 max. Maybe not even that. And do it as visibly as possible. For exmaple, if we feel wolves are getting too high, we announce that next month we're raising the rates to x, giving people warning. And of course we'd allow exceptions if some people missed the mark by a bit but had obviously been working on it in the month lead up (but say if someone did 10 posts real quick at the end of the month and then a splurge right after the deadline, not so forgiving).
As for refunds, I had an idea on that. The cost would be what you pay when you make the creature. But if the costs go down? You're refunded what extra you paid, on the idea that the weaker pack is more on guard and wary due to depleted numbers. If costs go back up, we don't charge them more, on the IC basis that they gained more skill and did more for the weaker pack. If they retire a character, it's just like normal, they get all their points back that was currently paid in. If they want to return it, they pay the same they got when they retired it, with maybe a slight refund if the cost dropped again (which would just be an update to the creature cost when reactivating).
If we do allow character returns, I think we should make clear that except in certain circumstances (basically any time they'd be deactivating one and reactivating another, or if they made a character for a plot that ended) there may be a cost for retiring a character for their points. Not huge, but enough that it will either a) discourage deactivating characters without some trade, as that cuts down character diversity or b) encourage them to do some more posting with the other character to make up the loss. And people can petition when they ask to reactivate for the cost to be waived, and cite something from the approved list or if they feel they have extentuating circumstances.
I mean, every character should have a profile and every profile would have their current powers and stuff listed out, but it just sounds like a whole lot of time and effort to personally micromanage every character of every account on such a regular basis. You can certainly look at people's recent posts, but even then we're still looking at what feels like a big amount of extra work. XD
As for creature costs, I'm still just not concerned at all about numbers. It's one of those sorts of things that seems unlikely to happen and if it did, we'd prolly figure out how to deal with it then. Even something as simple as: "hey, people should make s'more human characters". Rather than pulling up prices, if we really really wanted people to make more of a certain thing, we could do a temporary promotion, like: "costs for magic on characters made in the next two weeks are half as much until the two week period ends".
When it comes to refunds, I'm leaning more and more towards not letting people just up and retire characters the moment they no longer feel like playing them at the moment. I figure if you go to make an alt, you don't get all the gear and levels of your main toon. XD
Post by TEAGAN TEAGAN TEAGAN TEAGAN TE on Jun 26, 2016 5:31:58 GMT -5
We could just do a thread every month where active members post and say they're active or something. The members can post. At the end of each month, an admin marks off that point in the thread and hands out the points to everyone who posted. Although it is imperfect, it is far less difficult for us. It's not our fault if someone forgets to respond.
I think we can worry about the mismatched population if/when that time comes. Rather than making things complicated and making lycans more difficult, we could do something that motivates writers to bring in human characters, such as a quite a few being picked up from Faerie. The deal Az mentioned work be effective as well.
I personally like it when characters leave. They get removed for being killed, having no further use, and etc. It allows for more variety in my mind and allows their stories to come to an end. Therefore, I would rather not deter writers from doing things like that. Since this is a dangerous world, we could strongly encourage writers to get the characters turned into vamps or lycans or even get killed off instead of just stepping out of the limelight.
I considered suggesting having the users post if they were active, but then we gotta worry about people complaining if they forget. However, that would give more flexibility. One thing that would have to be considered: Do we go by 1 month of active posting from month start to end, or in the past month? If we just make it past month it'll get more hectic to manage because the updates and checks will be random. If we say it based on the end of the month, it's a lot easier for admins to handle, but then people might be upset when they have to take a week off and can't get enough in the remaining month. Personally I support just setting a hard date and having a growing grace period the longer you've been active.
Doesn't that get into the same issue? People being salty over things they bought getting cheaper, or things they wanted to buy going up when they can't get the promotion in time? And again with point refund issues? And so if students are the main body, that's pissing off a larger portion of population than rules on creatures. At the very least we need to state up front costs are going to change if we're going to go either way. Any changes in cost have to be highly visible so the community has time to respond and react. Not to mention students are the more entry level characters, less invested in the site than the monster players (since monster players had to spend to have monsters). The people with more investment will more likely be our more understanding group. Flow generally goes people make student>it becomes a creature, and unless we are totally okay with creatures outnumbering students, we have to either enlarge the first pool (either through advertising or rewards) or limit the second group (by forced removal, capping numbers, or just making them harder to get). Advertising isn't guaranteed to bring in people wanting to just be students, and rewards have the same issue as costs for creatures (Plus I feel it's more likely people will make an alt that they won't be as interested in).
Characters leaving is a needed thing imo. Honestly I don't like people being able to retire characters and bring them back, unless they have damn good reason. But people shouldn't be penalized for killing off a character if it was a plot one or something like that. I'd still suggest the scaled point release I suggested earlier so their other characters don't become uber powerful uber fast, but yeah. If a character's time is done, we should give the person some acknowledgement of what they invested in. But again. Hard permanency on the death, that way people know they can't just kill a character and bring them back if they change their mind. Resurrections would be like...plot level or admin override kind of things. (If a dead person can get the support from other people to make a whole big resurrection plot? I'd be down with that, so long as the points are still unallocated). I don't like characters being able to shift points around too much, but I think if they die and it was a fitting story, then their RP should be rewarded. Maybe just make it a stock reimbursement. 100 points if you had a plot character that had to be killed off, 250 if it was a longtime character you got tired of and gave a fitting end to. (Essentially, if you've Rped their life from arrival to death, rewarding them for the story they wrote).
Post by TEAGAN TEAGAN TEAGAN TEAGAN TE on Jun 26, 2016 12:32:18 GMT -5
As long as we keep a thread open for the whole month and as long as a player takes a minute during that entire month to post there, then even going on vacation for three weeks would be fine. We can just check the thread at the end of the month. We will also have that thread to reference as evidence if anyone wants to get snotty about not commenting in it during that time. I vote for any time during the past month because life happens, and sometimes the rest of us are stuck waiting in limbo for other people to respond to our posts and get things moving again. There are threads that get left hanging for a whole month.
We can leave a disclaimer to point costs... "Costs are subject to change." People get salty, and it's impossible to satisfy everyone. It's impossible to be perfectly fair or equal. Let's just have fun and let things happen as they come. Even if vampires or lycans were to one day out-number humans 2:1, so what? Who cares? Does it make any difference? Hell, they can even invade the city and try to take over if they want. The unpredictability is what makes things fun.
Scaling points to release sounds like too much work. If they want to transfer all that magical ability into abomination strength, then why not? This is not a battle but a fun creative writing game.
Necromancy is all about reviving the dead, bro.
I agree that killing of characters in a well-written manner should be worth some bonus points.
Post by Morgan Pendragon on Jun 26, 2016 13:13:40 GMT -5
Re: Variable creature costs.
If the idea is to incentivize folks to make active student/wizard characters, then why not do just that? Instead of penalizing creatures, we could reward humans. If we feel that the ratios are imbalanced, we could offer bonuses to new human characters that maintain activity for x posts/weeks. Once someone starts putting time into their characters, they have an internal locus to keep posting.
Teagan Offline: This board is full of nostalgia.
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