@KDraygo said in Star Wars Republic d20 SAGA - (Prequel Era):
I think the recent exchange of posts paints a very bright warning sign on Star War games in general. It is too easy to turn a cooperative RP game into one where people chase stats and try to buff their characters to insane levels so they can stomp on other players. Cooperation goes out the window, it becomes a cold war of stat and gear building until that eventually turns into a nuke launch by all sides with the losers royally pissed.
Now, twenty years ago, that might have sounded like fun to me because when you get that 7D, you're like ahmg this feels greeeeeeeat! Get an 8D? Holy shit, I just cast Lvl. 8 Cock of the Infinite on myself, fucking awesome. 9D??? I steal yo soul and cast Lightning Lvl. 1,000,000 Your body explodes into a fine bloody mist, because you are only a Lvl. 2 Druid. It certainly made the player feel good like you're stomping on a bunch of lemmings without consequence or it took crazy amount of coordination to counter you. There is no cooperative RP there, no building of bonds between players to enrich the story of the setting and each character, even if it is between a good character and an evil character.
Star Wars is probably one of the hardest genre to create a MUSH on, especially if you open it to the entire galaxy, allow cross faction and PvP, allow Force powers since that multiplies their character strength. It's been over a decade since I've played on one of the old, really large Star Wars games like Minos Clusters or SW1 but those were the glaring issues at the time.
I absolutely agree with you. It's been a journey filled with tons of learning experiences for me. This theme has the ability to attract a lot of amazing people, but along with it, a lot of very competitive people too. Figuring out how to get all these different kinds of people to work together cooperatively OOCly is a real challenge, you can spend over a week explaining the vision of cooperation, give and take, and mutual fun, get the impression that people have bought into it, and only to find out in the span of four hours that it was all lip service acknowledgement.
There is a thriving Star Wars MUSH community with multiple factions though, so it can be done, and I'm sure their community members are happy with each other in general, otherwise how would it have gotten so big? I just got to keep the toxic tendencies of the MUSH community, and I know you guys got a generational jump on me at this but if we've done this for a few years I'm sure the list of toxic tendencies that we've seen are more or less the same, away from the community or minimize the impact of it to the broader player base. Which I am doing, and will continue to be doing. Mistakes will be made along the way, I'm sure, but will learn from each of them.
I like a place where the staff does their best to provide story to everyone, and not just only to their favourite faction and friends, and work with the players to get them used to trying to run plots of their own.
I like a place that is striving for a community culture that's OOCly about working together to make fun happy times, even though ICly they're competing against each other.
I like a place that aims to be character and narrative driven, and curbing the proliferation of hyper-optimized combat sheets with min/max stat builds of 20s and -1s, and strange character backstories that requires you to make mental gymnastics to accept but make most people question if they're still in a Star Wars setting after seeing it.
I like a place where the admin doesn't play favourites and acts decisively instead of pretending the community is a AAA gaming company, when it's really like a virtual home everyone gathers together to RP and people are expected to act like well-adjusted adults in a social setting rather than a Karen whenever things don't go their way. The admin knows this is just fun pretending time, the value of being a friendly host, and the necessity of well-behaved guests.
I like a place where players can speak to the admin with suggestions or concerns, and knows that while the admin may not necessarily agree or implement everything heard, an honest thought will be made on the matter.
I'd like to believe that there's more people here on the MUSH community that jives with that same train of thought as I do, because that's the kind of community I envision establishing and gathering together people who share that vision and values. If it turns out I'm in the minority when it comes to these style of thinking, and I can't reconcile it, that's fine there won't be enough people to keep the community going and it'll go as all things naturally should go. However, I'd like to believe that there's enough of us out there who has went through enough years of the list of toxicity in the MUSHing community, that we want to try something new without those same toxic elements following us, or at least not all of them.
