March State of the Game

[powersthatbe]

I. JAUNT VOTE

For our next Jaunt, we have a few second-place setting options from previous votes that we’re bringing back for a shot at the big time:

Olympus Upended: Classical Myth & Fantasy, set in a Trojan War-era Greece full of gods, monsters, & titans, the Olympians and their chosen heroes must deal with the machinations of fate when their powers and domains begin to ebb and flow, faltering or in some cases transferring to others. Whether a curse, a trick, or the inevitable twilight of the gods, before the last oracle is cast and the mystery revealed, the foundations of the world will shake.
The Ark: A cyberpunk dystopia on a harsh alien world, all that keeps this fragment of humanity alive is a massive Arcology, or Ark - a self-contained, overcrowded urban environment, full of unimaginable technology that’s slowly running out of power under the strain of population pressure and a populace that’s not as well educated as its predecessors were, before an event they call The Fall. Rich in metaplot, dangerous crime, survivalist themes, social revolution, and subtle dangers, the Ark is a dark, heavy plot, one of the most dangerous we’ve considered so far.
Enterrado: In a frontier town in 1800s Nevada, a dead prospector is found with a large, rough nugget of pure silver in his bag. Who killed him is less important than where the site of his find is, in the mine-riddled hills around the city, and whether miners, bandidos, gunslingers, or outsiders will find it first - and what will befall anyone who’s suspected of having a lead on the stake.

Voting will close Sunday, March 12th, at 11:59 PM CST, in order to allow time for a walkabout vote if necessary, and for both jaunt and walkabout to be finalized. As always, first-place votes count for two points each, and second-place votes for one point each.

Poll #18064 April/May Jaunt

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 41

View Respondents

What is your first choice Jaunt for April/May?

View Answers

Olympus Upended
21 (51.2%)

The Ark
11 (26.8%)

Enterrado
9 (22.0%)

What is your second choice Jaunt for April/May?

View Answers

Olympus Upended
14 (34.1%)

The Ark
19 (46.3%)

Enterrado
8 (19.5%)

Would any of these Jaunts winning require a Walkabout for some or all of your characters?

View Answers

II. SKILL DISCUSSION
We’re preparing some new skills to be rolled out within the next couple of months, possibly in time for March AC but almost certainly no later than May. In the meantime, we’d like to hear your thoughts on the skills we currently do have.

First: Do you think any of the liminal, psychic, combo or favor skills currently on offer are notably overpowered? Do you think any of them are notably underpowered? What concerns you about these skills? We can take a poke at potential problem skills as part of the upcoming rollout and see if we can’t clarify matters and fix issues.

Second: Is there anything you’d particularly like to see in new skills? We can’t promise they’ll be incorporated into the immediate rollout, but we’re always open to suggestions for new stuff (for example, the rollout’s going to include a couple liminal skills with Object Portal as a prerequisite, to help encourage folks to pick up Object Portal).

If you have an idea after this discussion’s moved on, you can email it to the mods (synodiporians at gmail) at any time and we’ll add it to our list of possibles.

III. HELP WANTED
The time has come, the walrus said, to talk of recruiting players to help us with various modly functions we can’t always fulfill ourselves.

First: Due to the loss of one of our previous volunteers to RL and the ascension of the other to full modship, we once again need one or two folks to help out with NPCing Familiar Faces on an as-needed basis. (No doubt those of you on the walkabout have been feeling this need acutely; our apologies for taking so long to get you guys NPC’d up.) Familiar Faces take on plot roles when players cannot, or when a particular role is necessary for some reason but less than thrilling to play. Each Familiar Face has a defined personality and role in the metaplot, and is never seen anywhere but in infiltration.

To enable Familiar Faces to be used as extras or cameos with greater frequency and ease, and to lessen the burden on mods who play them (especially if there are Arcana to play in the Jaunt as well), we’re asking for experienced players with a good activity history and an interest in metaplot to sign up in the comments below if they’d like to take on one or more NPCs on a regular or occasional basis. We’ll contact volunteers to discuss the possibilities further. This is in no way a mod role, although it does come with occasional access to privileged information.

Second: We’re also in need of a helper mod for tallying AC, to help make sure it actually gets done in a timely fashion. One of our previous volunteers has left the game, so we’d like to bump the number back up to two, in order to keep the load from being entirely on any one player.

Third: We’d really, really love to have a volunteer to put together an Infiltrator Directory at or near the beginning of each jaunt. The directory’s been handy the couple of times it’s been put together, but as you’ve all probably noticed from the fact that that’s been all of twice since we decided to offer the option, the work is one of the first things to fall by the wayside. It’s not difficult, just time-consuming, often involving wading through both the plotting post and the first week’s worth of played material. This role could easily be done alongside one of the other helper roles.

If you’re interested in volunteering for one or more of these positions, please let us know in the comments below. As a reminder/reassurance, helper mods ARE NOT involved in app reviews or handling complaints in any way, shape or form. You guys are there to do useful paperwork and help relieve us so we can do the hard stuff.

IV. CHARACTER CAP AND WHAT IT MEANS
The last app round, as a few of you may have noticed, brought the game up to brushing against the character cap. While we’ve had a few drops since then, we wanted to take a moment to discuss the character cap and how we’ll handle things going forward.

First, one major reassurance: Idled characters may still come back in via dungeon at any time, even if the cast list currently shows we’re at cap. If we hit around 110 characters, we may revisit this; the character cap is to help us bring you plots everyone can engage with that the mods can still draw metaplot-relevant conclusions from.

Should we actually hit the cap, we’ll hold off on accepting applications until the character count dips below 100 again. At that point, we’ll start with any acceptances we had to leave hanging because of the cap, bringing them in in the order they applied. We have, other than the post-Dodgeball round, typically lost roughly as many characters as we gain in an app cycle over the course of the next jaunt, so there’s a possibility we’ll just keep dancing close to the line and never actually hit the cap, but we wanted you all to be prepared for it, just in case.

V. OTHER ISSUES
Did we forget something? Is there a pressing concern you’d like to raise? Let us know under the appropriate toplevel!

Comments

II. SKILL DISCUSSION

[powersthatbe]

Re: II. SKILL DISCUSSION

[leftbehindagain]

I personally would love to see some high-end psychic skills that do NOT ultimately require you to have Filter Intrusion. The highest thing currently on the list is Psychic Interference, and given that that also entails messing with someone else's stuff, it's not necessarily going to appeal to characters who are avoiding the privacy-invading end of the skill tree. Otherwise you currently top out at Dream Communication/Mind Palace II.

(I know we have things pretty well in hand for the next rollout and one of the new skills does address this, but... more than one option would be a Good Thing.)

Re: II. SKILL DISCUSSION

[thornsofmalkav]

Ditto. More psychic stuff for the non-spies.

[comebewe]

Maybe these skills could also use an 'alternative pre-req', like how Object Portal is for Stationary Portals? (even if it doesn't often get used that way, but I suspect an alternate Filter Intrusion pre-req would get used way more)

[leftbehindagain]

Given that most everything that branches off filter intrusion entails intruding on more filters, I'm not sure it'd be practical. (I mean, I like the suggestion, and Matt's the final word on it regardless; I just don't know if it's feasible in this case.)

It also wouldn't necessarily solve the problem we currently have, where there's a huge imbalance in favor of one stripe of psychic skill at the top of the chain.

[comebewe]

Ah, that would make things tricky, yes (I am, admittedly...not as up with the psychic tree as I am with liminal, hah)

[thornsofmalkav]

I've got two skills up the pipe that need Dream Communication so after the new skill rollout we'll have Psychic Topography heading up the non-intrusion psychic skills, but possibly I should work out more. Hrm.

[comebewe]

I brought up Liminal and Psychic Severance rather belatedly on the last SotG, so I'll just repost what I said again here:

Liminal Severance and Psychic Severance last for one hour per tree skill possessed. Since this means that if someone like Matthew had Liminal Severance and used it, someone would be cut off from liminal space for 23 hours, this feels kinda overpowered and excessive. (God help anyone Armin ever decided to use Psychic Severance against...)

I know there's skills that reduce this time, but they're not skills that everyone has - so what you have are some very aggressive skills that are weighted extremely heavily in favour of more established characters against less established ones. So, I think these skills could use some rebalancing so that they're not so extreme - maybe giving them a set time rather than a "per skill" timeframe, or reducing the length per skill, or bringing in another skill that could be used to 'unsever' someone. Or maybe a mix of a few things, whatever works best.

[amadine]

I actually disagree with most of this, for a few reasons. First, both of those skills require a pretty significant investment - Liminal Severance is 6 skills deep, and Psychic Severance is 7. Assuming someone arrows straight for one of them along the shortest path and doesn't take anything else, that's minimum 3-6 months of work for the former, and 4-7 months of work for the latter, depending on how often they manage to make double AC (and find a skill teacher) and assuming they don't straight up miss skill during any of those months. You're already looking at something that should be pretty shiny, just based on the time commitment required.

Second, having a couple of potent skills boosted by the number of skills you have in the applicable tree seems like a pretty fitting reward for focusing primarily on that tree. It's essentially giving people the option to either be versatile (by focusing on Jaunt skills, or by splitting their focus across a subset of Jaunt/Liminal/Psychic/Favor), or to potentially do a limited section of things very well. Characters who've already been skilled to focus on one aspect do have a bit of an advantage, but that seems like a fair trade off for the loss of flexibility.

Third, if someone like Matthew had Liminal Severance and decided to use it, the target would be cut off from Liminal Space for 23 hours. That's less than a day. Even Armin, if he hit someone with Psychic Severance, wouldn't cut them off for more than a day and a half (slightly less, actually, if I'm not miscounting). In a game that runs in real time, that isn't all that long - it'd essentially mean that someone couldn't use those powers in a small handful of threads. It wouldn't even bar them from using them for a whole mingle, unless there was a particularly time-compressed Jaunt going on.

It's also only usable once per week, so once it's used, it's used - it's not like someone could spam it to keep a target locked down for days or weeks at a time. (Unless they bought a half dozen uses of Liminal/Psychic Power and were willing to blow them all on keeping that one person locked down, which probably isn't going to happen barring the mutually agreed upon culmination of a very antagonistic personal plot arc.)

I do think a skill to unsever someone would be a neat addition, though. Not because I think either version of Severance is actually overpowered, but because it'd be a cool addition to the game, especially when we've had a character come temporarily unglued from Liminal Space and the Network once before, meaning there's IC motiviation to figure out how to undo that in the future in place already.

[comebewe]

I do agree that having skills that scale is a nice reward for focusing on one tree. Mostly I just disagree that these skills specifically need to scale, at least to this extent. It's a shiny, yes - but it's a shiny that specifically involves taking away other people's shinies. All their shinies, in fact, considering that it cuts off access to their respective trees entirely. It's effectively a partial depowering. So basically, no matter how long they last for, they're big and very powerful skills to have, for which the most obvious uses are not friendly. For that reason, I guess I feel that it's not unreasonable to err more on the conservative side in terms of how long skills like these last.

Though, if we have something like an Unsevering skill to act as a counter / way to remove the Severing that's not just 'waiting around for potentially up to a whole day', then I don't find the length to be as much of an issue. It'd mean characters have an IC way to work around being severed. And if it's just a cool skill to have, well, that's also good XD

[bite_the_hand]

I think part of why I'm not really bothered by the idea of these Skills is that they, like any other Skill that affects someone else's character, need OOC permission to use. So if somebody's not comfortable with it happening to their character, it won't happen for some reason, regardless of how dead-set the other character in question might ICly be.

I also kind of like that they're overpowered in a sort of backwards way: I actually like that my character can be completely screwed over by one of them, and I like having such a nice potential option if I want to do something to mess with him. With Eren here as an example, I very specifically made him bad at Telepathic stuff. That weakness was purposefully written in, and Psychic Severance plays to that very well, mostly because of how it gets partially depowered by the target knowing stuff in the same tree. I like that the Psychic version can hit him way worse than the Liminal equivalent. Which... I admit might not be a way most of the game looks at it, but I wanted to toss it out there.

All that said, I do like the idea of Unseverance Skill(s), but maybe they're something that can only be used if there's a long moment of relative calm? Something that can't be used in the middle of combat, basically, because otherwise the Severance Skills become utterly useless combatively - and hard to keep going if the player wants a fight with those powers sealed - unless it's essentially a one-on-one thing with no hope of backup.

[dino_zarf]

I mean, I'm biased, but I have been devoting all of Wash's skill gains since this was added to the express purpose of getting this skill with the understanding that once a week it would last "a proper night's sleep". Obviously I'd like to see it stay at the potency I was targeting it for.

And it is worth noting that this has in fact been a months long project, this isn't a trivial skill to pick up. Doubly so because so many of the pre-reqs are skills that are extremely difficult to get as taught skills since most characters are rather understandably not keen to teach them or even ask for them.

An unsever skill could be interesting though.

[powersthatbe]

After discussing the issue, we've agreed with the opposite consensus - the time investment to get to the Severance skills makes their power acceptably high (not to mention, there are some jaunt skills that are as or more debilitating if properly applied). We'll keep the thought of an Unsevering skill in mind for future rollouts, if we can make it work in a way that isn't too 'late-season anime.'

However, we did make a clarification to the Severance skills that they don't have to be used for the full duration (and cannot be divvied up into smaller severances across the cooldown period). Hopefully that'll help them come off as less all-consuming.

[comebewe]

That's fine! Obviously, as all the discussion showed, there are are lot of different viewpoints on this one (and I did seem to be the minority too).

Having it be clear that it doesn't have to be the full length of time is also a good thing.

[truerevelation]

Are more favour skills planned to be rolled out in future?

[thornsofmalkav]

Yes! They're part of why we're not done with skill rollout. We've got some tree skills but we're still working on favor.

[amadine]

It feels to me like Psychic Protection has had some pretty serious power creep recently, in terms of just how much protection it offers from non-network-based interference. It feels sort of like it's become a complete catch-all defense against any mind-affecting powers, which really diminishes the effectiveness of those as a plot device, at least when it comes to Investigating characters.

[powersthatbe]

After discussing the issue, we do not see any power creep in Psychic Protection. The skill has always said that it may afford protection against off-network psychic intrusions; as the game has progressed, more characters have picked it up, and more players have become likely to ask if it'll help in any given situation. Psychic Protection will not be foolproof against every off-network psychic intrusion, and even in the cases where it does provide some help, how much an intrusion affects any given character is ultimately up to the player.

Re: II. SKILL DISCUSSION

[theflyingone]

I just learned that taking Color Magic as a skill requires the understanding that there are TWO meanings of "level" being used in the Previous Jaunt skill description and the accompanying primer resource, which is otherwise very helpful. "Levels" as in how strong the spell is, and "levels" as in how many points you are allotted to spend when taking the skill.... Do I even have this right?

Unrelated to confusing words, there is some other confusion as to whether characters are capped at 2-3 spells per skill take, or at 9 points-levels per skill take to spend on any number of spells that by their strength-levels add up to 9, or both. Is it not possible to take 9 level 1 spells? What about 3 level 5 spells? etc.

All descriptions need to be updated as if someone has never even heard of D&D or game mechanics in general.

Also have fun watching me flail on plurk and others attempting to explain, including a link to a delightful comic.

Re: II. SKILL DISCUSSION

[powersthatbe]

Meta here. At least the way it was worked out recently, it would be possible to take nine level 1 spells, and three level 3 spells - but if you wanted a level 5 spell, you'd need to take a level 5 spell and a level 4 spell, or perhaps a level 5 spell and two level 2 spells, for a total of nine spell levels spent per Color Magic gain. If you max out the skill to Color Magic II, then you would have eighteen spell levels to work with total. This could mean eighteen level 1 spells (omfg why) or two level 5 spells and two level 4 spells.

We can definitely discuss this at next mod meeting though if general consensus is that it needs reworking or tweaking!

Re: II. SKILL DISCUSSION

[theflyingone]

It seems that the rules themselves are fine (though anyone is free to chime in if they think they really need changing). It's just the wording, plus the old jaunt skill explanation still limits to 2-3 spells, when in actuality someone could take 9 level 1 spells on their first go if they really wanted.

Re: II. SKILL DISCUSSION

[powersthatbe]

I (Jill) just went in and made some wording tweaks to both the skill description ('two or three spells' is how it usually works out, but was misleading wording) and the primer. How's that look?

Re: II. SKILL DISCUSSION

[theflyingone]

Should be fine! If you want, ask a new player to blind-read the description just to be sure?

Re: II. SKILL DISCUSSION

[theflyingone]

Dear Lord not another one. Royal Treatment seems underpowered compared to the other Favor Skills. Clothes, (some forms of) money, and even royal seals can be created or replicated with already existing Liminal Skills--or heck, even stolen. A character moderately good at acting the part can take care of the rest.

I'd suggest a magical component, like most of the other Favor Skills have. Something that persuades NPCs/Infiltrators to recognize one as upper class. Played right, that could get one into box seats, private salons, throne rooms, etc. How strong it is, e.g. if claims to being the ruler of a nonexistent country will be believed, if it still holds when one breaks character, or when changing clothes or going without (geddit), is up to you.

Re: II. SKILL DISCUSSION

[powersthatbe]

We had already assumed that much - that Infiltrators would recognize someone using it as upper class - but as it is not reflected in the wording, we will go ahead and add that.