- What sorts of game decisions shouldn't I put up to a vote? I tend to prefer putting issues up for voting, but I understand this can lead to mob justice, and this isn't intended to be a game of Mafia
What issues?
- Right now, actions are parceled out once a turn, and negating an effect requires approximately double the actions used to cause the effect. Should I use a different ratio than 2:1? A different system?
Generally speaking, straight negations suck. They're boring. Try to get more creative than a straight negation, and consider just disallowing things that have to be or necessitate negations from others.
As an example, consider the following myths:
Grok was angry, so he instantly wiped out all of Mok's followers with hellfire. They're dead now.
Grok was angry, so he turned all of Mok's followers to stone. Mok oiled them up so they could move again, and they got to liking their new stony hides. They grew fat off all the oil, though. They're ogres now.
Grok was angry, so he began turning Mok's followers to stone. Mok heard of this and decided to play a trick on Grok, by carving stone statues of his followers and leaving them in his path. When Grok tried to turn these followers to stone, they came to life instead, and because they were born of stone to begin with could not be turned back. Grok was so mad when he figured out how he'd been tricked that he taught the stone-followers how to fight with their bare hands, which being born from stone were far harder than those of their fleshy companions. They even began worshiping Grok as thanks, and beating up Mok's other followers when they didn't get their way. Mok's followers have a weird stonepriest heretic caste thing now, it's pretty complicated.
You notice how the first one sucks? Adding a resurrection war probably wouldn't help, because it's basically a negation. They were there, now they're dead, the world is less interesting.
The second is arguably better, and also a lot more myth-like. If you turn somebody to stone and they come back, it's a negation again. A negation of a negation, so whether that's better or worse depends on whether the original condition or new condition were more interesting, but it's still the kind of turn/action you can skip over entirely because the net effect is nil. This one has permanent effects, but they're negotiable, which is arguably more interesting and definitely more myth-sounding.
The third is a little rambling, but also reasonably interesting and meaningful while still being back-and-forth. There's no proper negation without some kind of side effect (stoneborn), and a lot of it isn't really a negation at all (well your new followers are my followers, and bully your nerds).
My advice, generally speaking, would be to lean towards the latter methods. They come at the dual costs of potentially being less satisfying for victims (my perfect elves are gray-skinned now and there's no physical way to change them back) and requiring more creativity on you and your players' parts (how much fire is an okay amount of fire, how do I undo my people being seduced by trees), but in my opinion avoiding boring yes-no cycles is worth it.
As an addendum, when following this advice or not: Consider adding stacking costs/difficulty/diminishing returns to modifying the same thing over and over again. Adding every blessing under the sun to your elves or yes-no cycling a city into and out of effective existence (but creatively!) can also be boring. Sometimes it's better to just call a thing done, or at least done for now.
- How do I deal with player-player vendettas so they don't take up all of the unwilling target's time?
Yeesh, no good answer for that one.
If at all possible, just talk to the players in question, because this sounds like it might be a meta issue more than an in game issue.
If you
need a mechanical solution, consider adding some kind of diminishing returns to aggressing the same player over and over again. Maybe a ramping cost/difficulty to affect them, maybe ease of crafting player-specific defenses, but something to make the aggressor reconsider and/or be less than 100% efficient.
- Is there a good way to balance freeform whole game-scale effects? I feel like they add a nice reward for those interested in writing them up and let players' actions have lasting consequences, but I'm not too good at actually assigning numbers to their costs and what not
No. You can try by breaking them down into their component parts and asking what effects that chunk has, but gamewide freeform stuff is by its nature rather far-reaching and hard to quantify. The really obvious stuff like "I kill everything everywhere" is fairly easy to break down and price, but adding infinite knowledge obelisks everywhere or inventing star magic is fairly hard to compare to local actions, especially if players can come along and modify them further later on.
- Spoiler (select to show): [I've deliberately been avoiding putting in over-arching NPC antagonists to keep the focus on the players. Is this a good idea? I know Paranoia, for example, partially counteracts the vendettas by having bigger trouble to shoot.]
Can go either way. I'd probably go the Elder Scrolls route of having optional
quest objectives- could be antagonists, opportunities, friendly NPCs, anything- to grab people's attention if they're bored or looking for an edge, but make it mild enough that they can keep doing their own thing with each other if they prefer.
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Topic: Gaming Block (Game Discussion Thread) (Totally Not Roller's Block) (Read 418244 times)