SURVEY QUESTION: MOVES!

[Wyatt the Swift]

Ok, long story short: It's way to complicated and pricing seems esoteric.

The purpose of moves, powers, stats, and literally EVERY mechanical part of this site is to give good prompts for writing, and to open up creative avenues for players to do interesting things with, and the current way Moves are generated and priced does not reflect that. The amount of specificity is WAY too high, and the strictness of "variability" costing more is way too much. A Pistol, a shotgun and a machine gun are all fairly different weapons in the real world, but in the OV, they all function essentially the same. You're not gonna get a WILD amount of creative differences in writing when it comes to a fight, and fights are graded based on WRITING.

I feel like most of the irritating things about Moves rules (fatigue, Focus, Damage, exact ranges, extremely precise measurements, by the second refresh times) are metrics that hold next to NO MEANING in an actual fight. They would make sense as things to measure in a tabletop game, but we're not playing by those rules. Those numbers all fly out the window as soon as rubber hits the road.

Trying to focus on how something effects the WRITING of the writer and not the "stats" of the character is something that would help this out a lot, I think. 300 OM per "variable benefit" of a move is a decent way to price things, but when we start pricing an M4 at 900 OM because it has a selector switch with 3 options is completely pointless. Firing a cutting beam laser and firing individual laser "bullets" would be a meaningful difference, so, sure, I can see that being 600 OM.

What does it ADD to the game (meaning, how does it ADD to the writer's potential) to have that many specifics? If a person really wants to include the caliber and the exact range and the refresh time on a Move, that's their prerogative, but it shouldn't be the standard.

This basically sums up my current thoughts so I'll just reiterate it in a quote and add it to the pile.

Ok, long story short: It's way to complicated and pricing seems esoteric.

The purpose of moves, powers, stats, and literally EVERY mechanical part of this site is to give good prompts for writing, and to open up creative avenues for players to do interesting things with, and the current way Moves are generated and priced does not reflect that. The amount of specificity is WAY too high, and the strictness of "variability" costing more is way too much. A Pistol, a shotgun and a machine gun are all fairly different weapons in the real world, but in the OV, they all function essentially the same. You're not gonna get a WILD amount of creative differences in writing when it comes to a fight, and fights are graded based on WRITING.

I feel like most of the irritating things about Moves rules (fatigue, Focus, Damage, exact ranges, extremely precise measurements, by the second refresh times) are metrics that hold next to NO MEANING in an actual fight. They would make sense as things to measure in a tabletop game, but we're not playing by those rules. Those numbers all fly out the window as soon as rubber hits the road.

Trying to focus on how something effects the WRITING of the writer and not the "stats" of the character is something that would help this out a lot, I think. 300 OM per "variable benefit" of a move is a decent way to price things, but when we start pricing an M4 at 900 OM because it has a selector switch with 3 options is completely pointless. Firing a cutting beam laser and firing individual laser "bullets" would be a meaningful difference, so, sure, I can see that being 600 OM.

What does it ADD to the game (meaning, how does it ADD to the writer's potential) to have that many specifics? If a person really wants to include the caliber and the exact range and the refresh time on a Move, that's their prerogative, but it shouldn't be the standard.

This basically sums up my current thoughts so I'll just reiterate it in a quote and add it to the pile.

I, too, generally agree with Bandit. 

I'm just going to add a couple of two cents in here just about how, in general, the overt specificity of moves removes to me any sort of creative thought when coming up with them, and sometimes isn't necessarily easy to follow to an end. 

I feel like I've been pretty shit at creating moves since I came back, because I just can't wrap my head around all the things I need to talk about. I submitted a move for approval today, which was approved, that is essentially just Mickey transforming his sword into giant yo yo that he can fling around with a blue laser string and use, essentially, as like, big bludgeoning weapons. Two issues came up while I was writing this move: a) I overcomplicated it for myself and thought just being able to fling it in two different ways (i.e. a straight forward fling and a sort of wild, spinny fling) constituted it being variable, and so I overpriced myself, which Dane proceeded to point out (thank you). That stemmed out of my confusion over the nitpicky details of variability. b) I look at the description and find it full of numbers which I'll never ever write, and absent of details I actually care about. Just as an example, I look back over it and don't see anything about what the yo yo look like, or the exact aesthetic specifics of the transformation, which are things when I'm writing that move I'm actually going to care about. I'm not going to note, and probably neither is my opponent, that I conjure a yo yo that is one foot in diameter and shoot it twelve feet at my opponent. 

Certain numerical details are nice -- I appreciate range, sometimes, especially since as the system currently sits it affects proficiencies that I have to buy -- but overall I think these numerical values are unimportant, and have clearly taken a precedence in my creation of moves that, in my opinion, I'd rather attach to narrative or aesthetic qualities that will help someone actually write these things. I'd much rather talk about how they're a "pair of blue yo-yo with stainless steel, metallic teeth encircling them and a Monsters, Inc logo emblazoned in blue on the side" that I can "fling at the opponent as fast as a normal whip" than say I can "fling them at six feet per second." 

Maybe that's my bad, for skimping on details I care about because I'm distracted by the minutiae, but to me it just is a concept that reinforces the idea that these numbers mean something quantifiable in relation to writing, and I just don't think they do. Like I said in the other thread, I've never seen any fight actually use the damage counter outside of Dante's Abyss and Graveyardverse, and I don't see any reason why over-specificity doesn't absolutely reinforce the idea that creating a numerically-sound move is more important than creating a narratively-sound one. 

This isn't to say I don't think specificity is important -- just to say that I think the particular specificity being focused on comes at the sacrifice of other, in my opinion cooler, specificity. And if people want to write their moves with all these exact numbers, I think they should absolutely be free to; I just think some of us can get the same message across without having to sit and crunch numbers. Everyone understands that "as fast as a whip" is probably the same as "travels six feet in one second." They're just different styles of saying something, and right now it feels like one style is being required and for some players, it's just flat out less fun and not as useful and definitely more daunting. 

Also, mildly unrelated, I'm going to quote a question I put into the other thread, because it's less of a question and more of a constructive feedback. To summarize in a tl;dr way, right now there's a certain level of what I view as lack of incentive to incorporate canon character assists into your story narratively, because literally it's cost me about the same -- and a little more -- to include Simba as a character than it costs me to buy a Tier 3 Super Move, and he's much less powerful. (1000 OM and 1 SP for use in combat for a T3 SM vs 1000 OM, 1 NPC point for Simba, plus 1 SP every time he's used in combat, plus 900 OM for his moves since he obviously can't use Mickey's, narratively). 

On that note, and this is sort of a personal gripe, what’s the logic in having to pay NPC points for an assist to exist outside their combat capacity? They already cost more OM than almost anything else and it doesn’t always make sense to roleplay them as Shiva-style assists that just pop up and shoot ice (which, once again, feels like something that could even be rationalized as a move instead of an assist). If they show up for long periods of time (like my Simba and Retane’s Arith) should people like me who choose to integrate these canon characters into our story really need to use up one to three NPC points in addition to 1000+ OM? I can imagine a compromise on this that we should pay something if they’re A-listers, but it seems silly to drop OM and NPC points (and, for that matter, SP) on someone like Bambi. Especially when you also have to spend at least 300 OM (usually more) to make them even relatively useful bc it usually it doesn’t make narrative sense for them to use your moves? Like what us Simba without claws and teeth? He can’t exactly wield a keyblade.

Most of my gripes lie in these posts