SURVEY QUESTION: MOVES!

[Ezrihel]

Incoming stream of thought.

Personally I think the move system is fine. Could use some polish, but so could everything and that will come through iteration.

From what I’ve gathered is that people feel that their creative agency is being restricted because moves require more details than they have in the past. Additionally people feel like they end up fighting with staff when trying to get their moves approved.

I enjoy reading moves that have appropriate amounts of detail. I like to see that “okay this move can only go so far so if I’m at max height while flying I can avoid it” or “this move is over after 5 seconds of continuous fire so I know how long to hide behind cover.” Yes time and distance are fluid when writing and there are a million variables but without something concrete to draw from we’re basically playing a game schoolground wizards. I’ve played on sites without any rules beyond no godmodding and they were largely awful to write any kind of fights. Vague moves that had undefined limitations are just unfun to write against and open up more room for stupid arguments of “well this move is super fast so you can’t dodge it.” Part of the reason why I love the Omniverse is specifically because things are limited and defined.

I don’t think anyone is suggesting that level of lawlessness. But I’m getting the vibe that people are on one side of the fence or the other, and I just don’t know why we can’t have a happy middle and why we have to get so damned emotional about this. As with most things I think a middle ground is where we’d all be happy, and honestly I think we’re there with the current system I just think there is misperceptions about what is required and what is recommended.

As far as move variability we can take the example of the M6 with a selector switch. Imagine your character can shoot fireballs. You can shoot one fireball relatively accurately and it will have a decent amount of punch. You can shoot three fireballs in quick succession but your accuracy is worse and the individual fireballs are weaker. Thirdly you can shoot a hail of fireballs, each of them weak and inaccurate but you can carpet an area with them. Obviously that shouldn’t go in as one 300 OM move so I don’t see why a rifle with a selector should either.

Additionally the idea that the actual specifics of the move don’t matter because it is up to the writer to create the narrative. Yes that is true, but the writer still has to live within the world set before them. Weiss recently won a fight against Okor, Anderson, and I. Her crowning moment in one of her posts was where she knew she could attack Okor because she had fought him before and had counted precisely how many bullets were in his gun. That level of detail was only possible because we defined Okor’s capabilities. If he had the choice to not have that detail in there, well Weiss just lost out on some sexy writing.

Ultimately I just don’t understand why people feel that their creative options are constricted because they are asked to define characteristics of their moves. What do we lose by defining how far a gun can shoot and how many bullets it has? Why are we up in arms about removing things that ultimately add clarity to a move? Yes half of it might not be directly written about, but it is all useful to have so you can stay grounded within the reality of the universe. I’ve never seen a single staffer refuse to work with reasonable submissions to the move approval. Fuck even Urururu’s moves were worked with and eventually molded into reality and her moves were batshit insane and complex. To me it feels like people have this feeling that staffers are against them. That the move approval system is player vs staffer and in reality I see it more as a cooperative exercise so you actually think about and define your move.

At the end of the day why can’t we have both?

I second this. I'm a very numbery person. Numbers help me relate, visualize and understand a move. Telling me the reload or charge times or literally any other tiny detail is honestly intensely helpful for me, both as a past judge and as just a normal writer/reader. I understand it'll put some people off and vice-versa, and I think it's more a preference thing.

So the actual effective "strength" of a move is actually, in all practicality, how much NARRATIVE AGENCY it removes from the other writer. A move that prevents a player from doing something, or that imbues a clearly defined negative consequence (like, being tied up is a clear lack of narrative agency. Not being able to see or sense your opponents. Even being hit with a bullet or bazooka reduces narrative freedom, because you have to write as being injured or risk your work being garbage).

Pricing things off of:
What narrative opportunities they afford their owner
and
What narrative agency they remove from the opponent

would make a lot of sense. In this way, the "300 OM per variable" somewhat makes sense, and is a pretty easily measured metric, but obviously that's breaking down. Trying to figure out a method of figuring that out is gonna be where the trouble and the goal lies.

The simplest solution would be to create a list of Moves and limit people to only purchasing those (with the option to flavour to fit their character). Obviously, this limits creativity, but you could allow members to submit new Moves for review by staff to see if they should be added to the list, if they already fit within another Move, or if they're too unbalanced to be workable.

Using a Mutants and Masterminds style of "simple powers list" is actually something I considered bringing up. You can literally make ANY character in Mutants and Masterminds, if you're willing to get fiddly with the rules. It's not completely unreasonable to have a list of mix and match powers that you skin differently. I could probably go through and convert every move written in this game into Mutants and Masterminds power sets.

On the topic of overhauling... Why don't we just do a small test? A little experiment to help flesh out and tinker with how that new system would work could go a long way. You could bang out some of this systems 'rules' in a small group DM before posting a thread on it in either OVD or CC (along with it's own QQ thread if you want to make it really nice and tidy). People would use it as if they were trying to actually get their moves approved by this system, you (jeff/bandit)go through and 'moderate' like move approval staff, then you can have a legit staff member slide in and give their opinions on if it's up to snuff/works out. If people like it, then staff should make it an 'alternative' method of move creation and approval, at least for now.