The yin and yang of sparring/training now

[Eyeball]

GoT, a story with a handful of POV characters (i.e. PCs), features a dozen or more characters defined by their martial prowess, and it plays a central role in the whole narrative. Do you think it was too much? That it should have been toned down so that only a couple of characters in the story were notable fighters? What about in a game that features two hundred POV characters per week? Where do you think the line is drawn when it comes to an undesirable number of PCs who are good enough at fighting to where it's a noteworthy characteristic?

I actually only read the first book and I hated it.

But the point was, for every Brons, how many normal red shirt soldiers that wanted to be the best were there?  While from your PoV, this may be your story, from the overall perspective, you are much more likely to be a red shirt than a Brons.  Not that there haven't been Brons.  Those are the names we remember, like Thrain.

The thing about red shirts is that they're a part of a story (a brief part too) to make it fun and exciting for the central characters and the audience. Not themselves.

[Veselka]

I dunno, I feel like the Byn is just a Star Trek spin off called 'Red Shirts', just as Star Wars was originally supposed to be 'Droids'.

Not saying it's good or bad, just an observation.

I grow tired of the Combat Grind, even though I like playing Billy Badass probably more than anything. I find other roles that have absolutely nothing to do with combat refreshing as a palette cleanse. I feel I can actually focus on RP again, the story, and the game, and my PC. When I play Combat PCs or Magickers, it's like there's an ever persistent Code Virus in my brain that I have to appease. Be better. Do better. Skill up. Get it. Git gud.

Do I think something is inherently wrong with the way combat skill progression works in ArmageddonMUD? Absolutely yes.

I think it's a little dated and silly for Staff (or at least Brokkr) to state that combat should be resolved among mediocre, sort-of-talented combatants when literally 80-90% of conflict resolution in the game is achieved through combat/PK. Should that be the case, combat should be even more deadly and unpredictable than it currently is. Engaging in combat, even if you are a master, should mean life or death every time you attempt it. That simply isn't the case. The plateau is quite real, and there used to be nothing more boring than similarly talented "Warriors" fighting one another.

All I know is that being a great warrior in ArmageddonMUD is a taxing affair. When I see a new RPG game come out that offers '60-100 hours of play through' I laugh a little, because in those games, you 'git gud' within the first few hours of playing it, and it's more about the journey through it. Take any AAA title, and what it boils down to is it's fucking fun. Being a Combat Class in ArmageddonMUD is a chore, and it has its moments of fun, but it's otherwise esoteric, hidden behind a veil of mystery. You could be doing it all wrong, if you don't know how to do it right. From a game design standpoint, it's bonkers, but hey, it's Arm, and it's fun for other reasons besides impeccably designed game functionality.

There's some interesting ideas for fixes in this thread. Honestly, when I feel like chopping people up with swordz, I'll just play Witcher 3.

[Cabooze]

there's only a few animals that fit that mold and most of them aren't even that dangerous (Verrin hawk, Turaal, some spiders, stilt lizards, ect).

All spiders are extremely dangerous. Not sure what you're smoking. They are the manifested spawn of Ginka's own, the very colony of spiders which were born into and died within, the box we call Armageddon's server. I think just because of this inaccuracy, ALL spiders should be made even MORE dangerous. 

[Synthesis]

Namino: How many "easy" foes have you taken on at once upon hitting the plateau? Instead of fighting one turaal or whatever the current stilt lizard alternative is, have you tried multiple spiders? In my experience simply increasing the number of foes you fight at once means that you start getting more dodges.

You don't start getting more dodges.  You start getting hit more often.

I've soloed up to 3 sandy-brown tarantulas and won, but that was very, very sketchy.

With a little magick help, I actually solo-cleared both spider dens, heh.  SUCK IT BYN.

Once you plateau is a Mek a dangerous critter? Or can you take one down quite easily?

A mek at the plateau is a death sentence if you're fighting it to kill it.  Even at master, it is absolutely stupid to try to fight one solo.  The only thing being a master combatant does vis-a-vis a mek is to give you a longer chance to escape, assuming it doesn't instagib you on its first attack.

I think that Namino has fought everything, everywhere, in any multiple. These aren't unaccounted for variables.

Friday has witnessed the firepower of this fully operational battle-twink first hand.

Namino: How many "easy" foes have you taken on at once upon hitting the plateau? Instead of fighting one turaal or whatever the current stilt lizard alternative is, have you tried multiple spiders? In my experience simply increasing the number of foes you fight at once means that you start getting more dodges.

I've done it all. I came up with contrived reasons to fight in dark caves because blindfighting has a flat percentage chance to miss no matter what. I've fought up to 5 x groups of things. And one member of my D&D group who plays this game is even worse than me. He dragged a turaal into the kuraci arena so it would not only be dark, but he'd be fighting something super agile in the dark. The only thing I never did was try to fight something that had night vision in the dark because that is SUPER lethal, even if they dodge the heck out of you because you have negative penalties for being blind and they don't.

I've done it all.

I've been everywhere, man.

I've sparred tarantulas in the dark, not gonna lie.

[Riev]

The only reason to fight something "dangerous" like a mek or a silt horror, is so that you DO get hit, raise your defense, and then can be someone ELSES training partner.

The really dangerous stuff doesn't use Dexterity to Dodge with a 26AC. It has 12 flat Damage Resistance and no AC. Unfortunately, you don't gain in your offensive abilities and techniques by fighting something with damage resistance, at all. You can only progress by fighting something with a high AC, and most creatures with high AC aren't dangerous.

Bronn was a very good fighter, both upfront and with a crossbow. If you need someone dead, he's likely to be able to do it, because he's a fighter. I'd assume each of them had some sort of combat Mastery.

I wouldn't be surprised if he didn't have his weapons at max. You can be pretty deadly without max weapon skills. Especially when playing a dwarf.

This was so far from the point of the post I'm wondering if you are even on the same planet.

[Armaddict]

Bronn was a very good fighter, both upfront and with a crossbow. If you need someone dead, he's likely to be able to do it, because he's a fighter. I'd assume each of them had some sort of combat Mastery.

I wouldn't be surprised if he didn't have his weapons at max. You can be pretty deadly without max weapon skills. Especially when playing a dwarf.

This was so far from the point of the post I'm wondering if you are even on the same planet.

No it wasn't.  There were specific examples brought up to highlight a point, and those examples were then scrutinized for relevance.  I too found them irrelevant, because out of those names listed, there aren't many that I would call 'legendary' swordspeople.  All of them received their own beatings, too.  People became legendary in that series for a variety of reasons, the same way that you can in Arm.

Attaching the two, i.e. Saying that we are unable to make well-known notable characters like GoT because of how weapon skills go, is a faulty comparison, and thus it deserved the scrutiny.

It may be off the wayside of the discussion, but when examples are used poorly, it's worth noting that they're being used poorly.

[Namino]

Bronn was a very good fighter, both upfront and with a crossbow. If you need someone dead, he's likely to be able to do it, because he's a fighter. I'd assume each of them had some sort of combat Mastery.

I wouldn't be surprised if he didn't have his weapons at max. You can be pretty deadly without max weapon skills. Especially when playing a dwarf.

This was so far from the point of the post I'm wondering if you are even on the same planet.

No it wasn't.  There were specific examples brought up to highlight a point, and those examples were then scrutinized for relevance.  I too found them irrelevant, because out of those names listed, there aren't many that I would call 'legendary' swordspeople.  All of them received their own beatings, too.  People became legendary in that series for a variety of reasons, the same way that you can in Arm.

Attaching the two, i.e. Saying that we are unable to make well-known notable characters like GoT because of how weapon skills go, is a faulty comparison, and thus it deserved the scrutiny.

It may be off the wayside of the discussion, but when examples are used poorly, it's worth noting that they're being used poorly.

You've mis-interpreted the point. The point isn't that we can't recreate the achievements of Game of Throne characters. You can be a Cersei, who politically wheels and deals and subterfuges her enemies. You can be a Jaqen H'ghar, who masters poisoning and stealth. You can be a Sansa, mastering tailoring (okay, fine she did other things but stfu least favorite character ever). You can master the things those characters mastered either through social engineering or by directly raising the skills they were good at (sneak, hide, ect). You can even be a Melisandre or Thoros if you have RPP to play a mage and get mastery in magical abilities.

What you cannot be is Tormund Giantsbane. You cannot be the Hound. Any character in the show/books who had <master> in their score sheet for weaponry based skills, their achievements requires seriously twinkery and out of character meta gaming in order to achieve equivalency in Armageddon. Even if you manage to find a great sparring partner and eek it out in a sudo-non-meta-gamey way, you still take orders of magnitude longer to max it than the skills enshrined by other character archetypes (crafting, magic skills, ect).

Why? Why do we apply this EXCLUSIVELY to combat skills? They're not even that gamebreaking. Any stunt you can pull off with a piercing weapon you can do 30x easier with mon level fireball or demonfire.

[Armaddict]

No, you missed the point of why it's a bad comparison.

You have attached (master) to everyone you thought was a badass in the show.  Realistically speaking, though, and demonstrated by the show/books, the legendary swordsmen are far rarer than that and it's openly discussed as such.  The guy Ned Stark 'killed' was known as a legendary swordsman, granting Ned Stark the humungous reputation boost.  Barristan Selmy was known as a legendary swordsman.  Jon Snow was known as very good, Tormund and the Hound were good enough to kill lots of red shirts, and Jaime Lannister is known as incredibly skilled with a legendary future.

The point is exactly what I said but you still insist it's -me- missing the point.  Good at fighting =/= master, being known =/= legendary swordsman, and vice versa.  It actually means something to reach that level precisely because of how it's set up, and people do reach it, albeit rarely, and it also means nothing to not reach it, precisely because of how it's set up.

If your entire purpose is to reach that point, it is doable.  You can twink it and it will probably be frowned upon, or you can have it take longer and with constant risk-taking (i.e. Involved in lots of combat), but you can't just reliably get there just because you want your character to get there.  As with those in the books, and most meaningful novels that express such superiority in combat...it's gained via time, experience, circumstance, and physical prowess.

Beyond Synthesis's point of a skill that branches, all of this is just the demand to be able to reach master, without any attached presentation as to -why- that is so absolutely necessary, and -why- every warrior who wants it should be able to get it, or how they suffer horribly if they don't.

[Namino]

Why is it necessary to reach mastery in fireball? Or a crafting skill? Again, we don't apply any of this logic to any skill that isn't a combat skill. You achieve 'proficiency' in those skills soon enough as well, where you can out sneak/out craft/out fireball a 'redshirt' crafter or magician. Yet people plow on to master without inhibition and we don't deride or resist their right to do so. Ser Arthur Dayne (the 'guy' that Ned Stark killed) was better than Tormund. But Tormund and co were not sitting at jman plateau levels.

Human beings achieve the best they can be for the sake of it. Again, people climb mount Everest. There's nothing fucking up there, yet they do it because it's the best thing that can be done. They want to see the summit. <Master> is the summit of a skill grind. People want to see the summit and if you tell people they can't climb any higher than camp 2 they'd be just as annoyed.

Also the fact we're using the term 'redshirt' like that's where we should aspire to end up on average while playing this game is hilarious. Redshirts were literally used to emphasize danger by killing someone who was not important, preserving the cast. So basically by saying that 95% of everyone can only aspire to be a redshirt, you're informing 95% of your playerbase that they can only ever aspire to be unimportant, a cast away trope to make the remaining 5% (most of whom are npcs) more special.

Again, we've fundamentally subverted the purpose of entertainment as a medium. People already feel fundamentally unimportant in their day to day lives, or at least average at best. And now we're coming up with this concept that we should be satisfied with mediocrity in our fantasies that we indulge in for fun?

And again, this bears repeating, none of these standards are held true for any other class of skills.

[Brytta Léofa]

Why is it necessary to reach mastery in fireball? Or a crafting skill? Again, we don't apply any of this logic to any skill that isn't a combat skill.

I mean, for the record--insofar as anybody knows / the documentation doesn't say--day 50 fireball is no more powerful than day 10 fireball.

(Try to not laugh too hard as I imply that magick is underpowered.)

[Armaddict]

none of these standards are held true for any other class of skills.

Uhm.  And when is the last time you referred to anyone as a -legendary- sneak.  Or a -legendary- swordmaker.  Or a -legendary- tracker?

We say these people are good at what they do.  You trying to standardize all skills is a weakening of the one class of skills where you -can- achieve notability, by virtue of it having a place that is above and beyond where most go.

The GoT analogies grow very tiresome, the whole point was that they were bad examples because they take people on a scale themselves, then just plop them all into the 'master' class because somehow that makes them lose the redshirt status, not the characters themselves, despite most of them being beaten in combat by one another or someone else throughout the show.  The 'master' achievement doesn't do that, the characters and perspective following them does.

If you really think all warriors in the game are just redshirts, then I'd hate to be a clanmate of yours knowing how disappointing my character was as just another redshirt to you, because I didn't reach master level.  That's really disappointing to me, so at least the feeling would be mutual.

Once again:  Trying to fix things so that there are more pertinent encounters to gaining skill, or conducive ways to bring that risk/reward scenario into play, I'm all for.  But as long as we keep on talking about 'fixes' that really just make it so that sparring gets you to master, I'm going to keep on emphasizing that mastery is special and unnecessary.  Except for Synth's qualm with the enforcer backstab.  Never-branching skills are always frustrating, though I believe this time it was at least done -completely- knowingly.

[Namino]

none of these standards are held true for any other class of skills.

If you really think all warriors in the game are just redshirts, then I'd hate to be a clanmate of yours knowing how disappointing my character was as just another redshirt to you, because I didn't reach master level.  That's really disappointing to me, so at least the feeling would be mutual.

It's not my sentiment.

GoT, a story with a handful of POV characters (i.e. PCs), features a dozen or more characters defined by their martial prowess, and it plays a central role in the whole narrative. Do you think it was too much? That it should have been toned down so that only a couple of characters in the story were notable fighters? What about in a game that features two hundred POV characters per week? Where do you think the line is drawn when it comes to an undesirable number of PCs who are good enough at fighting to where it's a noteworthy characteristic?

I actually only read the first book and I hated it.

But the point was, for every Brons, how many normal red shirt soldiers that wanted to be the best were there?  While from your PoV, this may be your story, from the overall perspective, you are much more likely to be a red shirt than a Brons.  Not that there haven't been Brons.  Those are the names we remember, like Thrain.

[Armaddict]

Yes, let's overanalyze what he said to make it fit your narrative when the message is clearly 'It's much harder to reach being Bronn than being the normal warrior, and along the way you're with everyone else trying to be Bronn'.

Not that I agree with his wording; to me, redshirts are almost non-existent anymore.  They existed when character turnaround was such that being a 30 day warrior was an accomplishment in itself because everyone was charging off into fights everywhere, and so you had 3 characters in a row that were short lived enough to be passing memories.  Honestly, that was kind of a richer game, but that's a point that I understand there will be very vital differences on.

If you get to journeyman warrior, you're not a redshirt.  You're too survivable to be just a redshirt, and you've survived long enough to be more than just a redshirt.  Your character is special/notable to someone unless you've taken that grind so seriously that you've neglected to play any social or 'roleplaying with others' aspects at all.

[Eyeball]

What are the Byn or Gemmed except red shirts? Consistently they are brought into dangerous circumstances through no choice of their own.

You can't join the Byn and expect only to train, unless you actively avoid contracts by logging off. And if you do that, you get kicked out or become a pariah.

You can't be a Gemmed without getting swept up by Templars whenever it suits them.

Join the Byn? Die in a spider contract.

Become a Gemmed? After being commanded into a Templar's presence, die for being a witness to inter-Templar strife.

Join the Byn? Die following your Sergeant into the abyss.

Those characters were all at journeyman and above, by the way. Seems pretty red-shirty to me. In each case, you're just a pawn being moved by higher-ranked pieces.

[Armaddict]

If you think single events (deaths) determine if you're a redshirt or not, I'm not sure we're talking about the same concept.

Redshirts for me are concepts that exist purely for the sake of having someone to kill off.

If you're talking about every character being extra meaningful and having everything you want to happen happen, you're talking about an entirely different game concept.

Not to mention, that's a whole list of stereotypes.  My last Bynner got paranoid as fuck about his own troopers trying to kill him off in the sparring room and left.  The one before that breeded out hard after surviving a wild fire-gith attack.  The one before that helped swarm meks, hunted rogue mages, and died in a raider battle (yes, this one was a long time ago).

None of those were redshirts.  They would have been to any cross-sectional character who saw them for a brief second, but to the people in his clan, he did not exist solely to die, he was a living part of their day for a long period of time.

You guys have moved on to literally complaining about non-glorious deaths.  It's very self-centered for a game like Arm where everyone is writing a narrative and pushing to make it come true at the same time.

[Brokkr]

Kind of what I was trying to allude to.  Your character is the hero of their story, and have goals that are important to them and that they want to realize...

In the broader story, it is likely they are not an important person.  That is fine.  But you can't take literary references to the main, or key characters in a story and apply that to what should happen to you as far as the game.  Because it is only in your own story that you are such a character.  In the world's story, it is unlikely a particular character is (although there have been PCs that achieved that level).

[Riev]

We can alter the argument, but at this point its clear the discussion has veered to "Your argument is bad" instead of "Lets talk about your ideas".

Though I do happen to agree with the past two posts. None of us get to be big bad voodoo daddies. At most, without a sponsored role, all but the wtfomgstafffriendswow people (joking) get to be more than the lowest tier of "Officer" in a clan, and often not even to that point.

We can be big and tough, but the world will always be tougher.

The issue here is that not only are you (when engaged in combat only) required to resort to odd, not-very-IC behavior to increase your abilities, but that combat has homogenized to "Burst damage or they flee". In order to attain this 'burst damage' outside of backstab (which, coincidentally, is easier to (master) in a non-twinky way than any of the combat skills), you need to lie down in a field. Kick, bash, weapon skills, and subdue are all very slow to rise (maybe not subdue? I don't have much practice), but you can master poisoning and backstabbing in the same time it takes a Fighter to 'plateau'.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems the vocal objectors keep coming up with ways for that plateau to either not occur at all, or at least raise the gradient slightly.

I personally don't mind spending 20days played in a combat clan, rising up through the ranks until I'm a Sergeant-ish with consistent sparring, and by the end of that 20days, I'm more than "capable". I just want there to be options to improve without resorting to OOC behavior, because my character WANTS to be better, but has few options.

[Dar]

I actually only read the first book and I hated it.

How dare you! how can you play the ultimate of all permadeath MUDs and not like GoT.