Bleach Gotei, Character Pacing, and You

I don't mind Option One.

The trouble comes in the mindset change that one has to have when going for that, and ensuring that it's available both to high-level and low-level players. For instance, say I have a big fight with Kionchi in (I dunno) Resetting Minds. I'm clearly outmatched, but let's say that the fight is done really well and despite my inevitable loss, we manage to provoke some amount of growth from all the characters involved due to their involvement in that scene.

Would that count as something that could be claimed under the new system?

To take another example, let's take your fight with Kasumi.

Would that be claimable under this system or not?

I realize that the options are deliberately worded vaguely in order to allow the most possibility, but I'd still like to see some examples of what could be done with this sort of system.

Pretty short point but I find milestones tedious to write. I know what my character has been doing because I'm writing it. It was brought up earlier but milestones themselves, the milestone tool not the actually event markers in a character's progression are a boon for staff and not the player.

It's true though that I can't expect people to go and thread all my threads. I just dislike writing milestones because I don't enjoy having to write summaries of what I've done, not because they are bad.

As for the proposed changes, I'm not particularly big on either of them, they both have negative impacts on different types of writers.

I disagree with your thoughts on inherited GP. In my mind, GP should be tied to the player and not the character. Let me explain my reasoning.

The world of BG is, in its current iteration, somewhat stale. What I mean by this is that there really isn't a whole lot of interesting things going on. Yes, Shun is doumg cool stuff that's helping the world become more engaging. Yes, Obsession is blowing shit up because why not. Yes, Sekai erect(Ed) some barriers around Karakura town. Miyuki's working on some things herself.

That's four players trying to, with varying levels of success, to create interesting situations that will influence the setting in a meaningful way. We NEED more people doing this, but not only that; we NEED to be able to incite meaningful conflict.

In a setting full of physical conflict - with characters that can destroy entire cities by themselves - it's very uninteresting to never see anyone die. And that's just from a storytelling perspective! From a strict player pov, BG of yore had one thing over this current iteration: players actually had something to lose, or put another way, players had more reason to care about the setting because character death was a very real thing.

My proposal then is that BG should encourage players to take risks and those risks should have equally significant rewards or consequences. A Shinigami Captain and his Lt. Decide to infiltrate LN to gather information? If everything goes well, they come back home with beneficial knowledge. If they're caught, well, they have to fight their way back home. Which would be an engaging and interesting outcome. 

"Players can do that now!" You might say. "Why does anything need to change?"

Because right now, if I take a risk with a character of let's say 4000 total GP to HM, no matter what, I don't want him/her to die. Why? Because I'll have a net loss if I create a new character -who lets say earns a base 2500 GP - and transfer 30% of earned GP from the deceased character; let's say that's 30% of 1500 GP, that's 450 GP for a total of 2950 GP. if I allow my 4000 GP character to die, I will have a net loss of 1050 GP. If I do kill off my character, I now don't have as much agency as I once did, which means I'm no longer able to impact BG as much. Which is the crux of my argument.

What's the solution? Allow me to transfer as much GP from the deceased character so that my new character comes into the world with the capacity to impact from the get go. Why, as a player who has taken a risk to make interesting things happen, should I be punished for doing so by having to write another houndred thousand words just to get back to where I was, agency wise? To me, it's only obvious that the current system is flawed.

Theres a lot more I can say about this, but I'll leave it here for now.

A thing on character death. Yeah, for characters who've built up a bit of staying power that's all good. A new player, starting character not lasting two weeks, frustrating and I admit was a bit salty for a while, but it was a learning experience. The second character in under a month threatened with perma-death right off the bat. Yeah, I can tell you that type of playing style really killed my investment and immersion. A lot. Why get invested in starting a game, or making a character when character death isn't just a real thing, but can happen the second you start?

Sure death, at higher ranks, or in story threads where there's expected to be death. Sure that works, but at least if there's a change to allow death. Give newbs / starting characters a n00b condom so they can get their feet wet before losing weeks, to months of hard work to get the character acceptable only to have to start all over again. Actually, I admit I like the way death is handled now, if only because it's fairer to people starting off.

The rest of what you said sounds good though. We do need more people inciting things, and being able to transfer GP at death is a good idea.

I'm only quoting Niji because he's the most recent one to touch on it, not for anything he explicitly said.

But, well, why are people under the impression new characters dying is a thing?  This literally does not happen with the exception of one character who grossly ignored actual literal dozens of warnings to not do what he insisted on doing.  In nearly 3 years, this has happened once.

Why is there such concern to protect new players, when the concern does not match reality?

Brokiyo said it best.

But to take the point further, if you're in trouble, your superiors should be there to protect you (if they don't suck)

I'm not really concerned with how things are now. I mean I've been told that's how things are now and I really like that. I was just worried that with a "perma-death" reinstatement, that other players have brought up isn't a good thing. What y'all have now where death is concerned is so much better than it was 5 yrs ago. And yeah that one character, he did have it coming. I mean if I'm warned numerous times 'don't do X', and I do it anyways, I'd get what's coming to me.

But I think it was a misunderstanding on the statement "Live and die freely" and others grabbing a hold of it. If death is handled in the new system like it is now. Then that's definitely not a problem.

Me me me  !! 

I don't like Milestones, doing them is sooo muuch woorrkkk. For what? 

I know when my character changes and I do things IC that fit her current state. 

You can perfectly have a story/ growth without having to through the tedious process of writing a request.

That's why a Milestone (in my opinion) is just a way to 'officially' show people what has changed for your character/ gain some extra GP if you feel like making requests. If you don't want to write them? So what? You (as a player) simply choose to cut out all the unnecessary work. That's why making it mandatory in order to be able to progress sounds really unfair to me.

For example, I hate making requests. I could have made more of them, but for me it's way more fun to write a topic with someone than work on a request. *stares at her started requests from 4 months ago* 

That's why I think that there should be a choice, like there is now.

I hate milestone, while I enjoy role playing, writing up all my character's progress is just so tiring and time consuming. While I have never done any milestone yet, I have seen what others wrote and I am so not looking forward to write one, even with the reward of expending my GP base. I will write one, if my story or an arc reach an end. Until then, I will only look at is as a mere option rather than a necessity.

Ruby
That's fair.
I mean, I definitely think players should be awarded, especially those who played out their characters successfully and decided to start over.
What I tried to say was that if those players decided to start over, new game, etc., they should start from the bottom like the new players.

Maybe I worded it wrong, I'm sorry.

I didn't mean inherited GP as a whole, I guess, my fault for a bad choice of words. I meant the gp inherited from retired characters, the ones with a finished story, should maybe be cut out... @~@ While we keep the inherited gp from dead characters, so if your characters does something stupid, gets screwed over or similar, you do get "a second chance".

And look, we all want to do big, important stuff, make a difference, stir up trouble, etc. I think the most fair thing would be to start from the bottom like everyone else (please don't be mad, I'm not trying to say that people who used their inherited gp didn't work hard for it, or anything else).




Or just completely disregard my replies as they aren't of any help. I am not trying to instigate anything, just shared my thoughts on what I've read so far. >~<

No need to feel that way, Mel. As you can see, plenty of people do agree with your five centiments in this matter.

I do agree with you on the matter of inherited GP from retired characters: a finished story is its own reward. The way I see it, there's really no need to fuel the same players over and over with GP just for making their characters come to a non-abrupt end. It just serves to propagate the power positions of people belonging to a certain group, which definitely does not help the people who grow their character from the ground up without using super GP growth manure. And as Mel said, most of us want to stir up things, do big things and have an impact. Promoting a certain number of members to maintain the power to do that partly pushes the people who have to try to do that from their base away and inhibits the majority of the user base through using the justification that they deserve it for being "a good influence" (which is pretty disputable too).

This isn't necessarily something I feel strongly about, as I've likely remarked on previous occasions, but I like the suggestion presented by Mel here.

Also, just a note at the introduction post. It's riddled with rhetorical devices and tries to box you (the reader, hi!) in to thinking that the two alternatives Justin presents are the only two alternatives to solving this "problem". I'll complicate matters more and say that it's possible to just disregard them entirely or take aspects from them that you think would be useful and present suggestions of your own. There are other ways of doing things than the ways he wants things done. Then there's always alternative three: do nothing, if we feel as though what's presented here is attempting to change things for the worse ("if it ain't broken, don't try to fix it").

When I write these sorts of threads, I write them in a very directed manner that seeks to funnel discussion in a particular direction. It's typically very, very successful and that's why I use many rhetorical devices in all of my posts. I rather like the outcome of this thread, for instance, so that's another notch in my win column.

For instance: Many people don't find any major changes to be outwardly necessary. At the very end of my opening post you'll notice that I pointed this possibility out very deliberately, but left it off to the way side and therefore away from most people's attention. The fact that people still doubled-back says volumes, and that's a good thing. Exactly what I wanted to see.

Regarding Carryover GP, though, I'd like to say that it's been a very great success on Bleach Gotei. It creates a system where players who stuck around and finished a story (even among the posters in this thread, consistency, volume, and deliberate structure are things rarely found hand-in-hand) are rewarded and anchored in Bleach Gotei. They have an investment here. If you have $200,000 in a bank that you lose if you switch banks, you're much more likely to stay at your current bank even if you find a slightly more appealing alternative. Do we not want to keep said players?

Furthermore, to insinuate that a finished story is in any way a tangible reward? That's a very personal value assessment and one that I would laugh in the face of. I get nothing out of finishing a story except, of course, another bill of 400,000 words for, apparently, the privilege to continue doing what I do on a Bleach RP forum but on a character that hasn't run their course. I'd find the accusation that I like that to be incredibly condescending, as a matter of fact. I can't even imagine who would. Give me the brass tacks, please.

Nor does reality support, in any way, the notion that players who do not have consistency, volume, or structure in their play will suddenly acquire those traits just because other characters don't have a lot of GP. This was, simply, never the case before we had Carryover GP. The same players who lagged behind back then, struggled, and ultimately got no where? They're still doing that today, if they're still around. Zero change.

I imagine that, as Hazuki brought up, the only "change" that will come of this is the explicit, official clarification that character death on Bleach Gotei must be a strictly consensual thing or, otherwise, have overwhelming justification for it -- the "absurdity" clause, as some people have referred to it. This is largely the intention now, the spirit of the law, but not the letter of it.

I don't know about this, I like to compare BG to a game.

Lets say you are playing a RPG game of some sort, one that you really like. You will grind and grind through the story and once you defeat the final boss and save the princess, the game will come to and end.

Once that is said and done, you make a new character and start over, trying new things and discovering something you missed on your first run or something like that.

Oh god but when the first game took me three years I would probably rather shoot myself in the face.

I'm not interested in those things, I'm interested in what I can accomplish and what I can get done. I've always loved, for that reason, the RPGs where you get to restart but KEEP all of your items, stats, etc. That's extremely compelling to me.

Try 13 years and only just now getting to a finished product. The kind of reward high you get off that is unreal. But that's a risk of roleplaying; some stories finish, some do not, others need a different environment.

More on topic; I'm of mixed feelings on retirement GP myself. One solution could be something similar to the race change we do; 1/4-1/3rd of that retirement GP claimable every 6-8 weeks rather than taking it as a lump sum.

Will respond to the rest at home later.