I deffo don’t have time to review rn but in general I would say to focus first and foremost on making a fun game and worry less about labels
you can always be conservative in your labels but they mostly exist to let players know what to roughly expect from your game and so as long as you’re accomplishing that you could call it anything
it’s only when players feel lied to that they are upset
I’m a major fan of negative utility roles, if only because I think they’re less common to appear than most roles for self-evident reasons. For a rolemadness I think they’re fine, but maybe give them an interesting way to interact with the setup as a miller might.
False backups seem fine as a precedent for the sake of not-confirming backed up roles, but they’re just glorified VTs in a rolemadness so I’m not altogether sure about that one.
I feel like… I have lost my way as a setup designer. I don’t even understand what is fun and not anymore.
At least I know a bit about balancing, but I can’t explain it too well. Perhaps they have become too ingrained? Maybe I already know how to make fun setups, but I don’t realize it?
I swear I am not trying to passively attack the players anymore in the latest setups I have made. (At least, they aren’t direct punches to the gut; they’re more like a long hook that you can avoid if you know where to look at.)
What is fun, I wonder…
I hate taxes and i’ll do everything in my power to avoid paying them
that’s silly
paying a reasonably large chunk of what you make to the organization that enables you to make anything in the first place is extremely natural and although it is the case that that money won’t be spent in the 100% most efficient manner ever, let’s be real you yourself aren’t 100% efficient either so like it’s whatever
The government is a parasite that just wants my hard earned money. Honest labor. And they wanna steal it. Not fair! Its extortion!
at the end of the day services like electricity, internet, healthcare, roads, plumbing, infrastructure, money, food, and way more are all extremely beneficial and the costs they incur do need to be covered somehow given you and everyone else does in fact benefit from them
My experience with jobs has had nothing to do with the government
(Re: organization that enabled me to make anything)
My experience has just been employer → me
yeah but that’s not how that works
how did they pay you
how did you get there
does your work use electricity? water? land?
all of these things are managed by your government, and the employer that is paying you is only able to operate, hire you, and pay you because of the groundwork laid by your government
Mmn… As for me, negative utility roles are fine as long as they are given a compensation. “Unless it meshes with other roles and the setup as a whole”, having pure negative utility roles “does not look appetizing” to me.
A bit of a topic change, but when it comes to being a fan(atic), I am a fan of “agency”. I feel like either Achro, Proph, and/or Luka have thought me this in the past dozen months, but as of now I no longer like seeing pure passive roles in my setups. I want people to actually do something; “press buttons”, “visit people”, “make choices”.
It’s so fun giving them choices which “may or may not matter”. I want my players to think outside the box, and abandon -what I believe to be- their common sense. I want them “to learn about me”.
this is pretty universally true worldwide, although the implementation details can vary wildly from place to place
at the end of the day society has a cost and the money to cover it cannot come from literally nowhere
the people doing the work on those things need to feed their families too
Then why does my employer also need to pay taxes? Not for their personal income in the role of an earner themselves, but like, the fact that they employ people makes them subject to being taxed extra afaik. Where did that come from?
you pay taxes on the parts of society that you benefit from
they pay taxes on the parts of society that they benefit from
they also pay you to do work for them
this is honestly pretty straightforward
again implementation details can make a large difference and often leave systems very very far from ideal but at the end of the day the overall concept of taxes is pretty natural if you’d ever like to benefit from literally anything you can’t do with your own two hands
If the government does a very shoddy job at utilizing said money, lets say they are X% efficient at it
Do you think there is a threshold for X where its so low that it becomes justifiable to want to dip out of the tax paying system due to the minimal benefits?
yeah
however in that scenario you must understand what you’d be giving up to do so because it’s probably a lot more than most people think about