@HelloProject said in A Constructive Thread About People We Might Not Like:

I admit that I'm somewhat surprised that I've never been prebanned or had my own thread (we're ignoring the H!P Thread on WORA from when I went on a childish trolling campaign in 2013). But most of the bad shit I ever did was just suddenly blowing up because stress, anxiety, and general maturity issues I've had to work on. Well, I think I'm at least good on the maturity stuff now, the stress and anxiety are just kind of always an ongoing battle.

Still, it's legitimately surprising regardless.

You're not really what people think of in terms of a "real" problem player. You kind of get hit by things from an odd angle and self-detonate after a while historically, but you don't try to take the ship or anybody else down with you. So there's not much for anybody to try to talk about here, because some young new MU*er with some social quirks that are on the whole minor just really isn't a problem or all that strange.

You don't get infamous for being slightly off in this community, we're pretty much all slightly off. The kind of people who tend to get personal threads are usually -- I think -- manipulative sociopaths who have been operating for many years.

@HelloProject

You're going to want a Master Plot Document and at least one or two helpers familiar with it. It shouldn't be written solely by you, either. You can part it out further from there, but having things shotgunned around all over the place causes problems pretty damn fast.

@HelloProject

With regards to trying to determine how to make power levels / experience work, you've got quite a few choices available to you and every single one of them is going to get complained about at length. But I would actually like to take a moment to speak out for your original vision of relative evenness. This community here on MUSoapbox is extremely separate from our own, and much more welcoming of wild power level disparities because the more popular games in this community are World of Darkness games.

The late 90s and early to mid 00's was a period of time where this sort of thinking was far more prevalent in OUR community, and it produced some pretty internally toxic tendencies. Characters with special tags -- EFC, SFC -- would be wildly powerful relative to what the average PC could get, and even stock FCs would tend to be more powerful than any given original character was allowed, and character advancement tended to just not be a thing. For a good stretch the only way to actually reasonably compete with these disparities in place was to get exploitative with these game's combat systems. Our community is mostly over that.

The MUSH that you are building is a shounen manga MUSH, a genre that is notoriously bad about rendering everything but the main character of any given title Beyond Pointless. This is not, I think, a practice that you actually want codified into your game, especially since the focus of the genre is going to be Grand Old Fight Times, and fewer people by far are going to want to play Krillin if being Krillin means you're as much of a whipping boy as Krillin canonically ends up.

It's especially not a practice you want codified into your game if you acknowledge the power level disparities between things like Dragon Ball, Naruto, Yu Yu Hakusho, and whatever else you might choose to include, because even in those three the amount of escalation that occurs from one to the next is heavily tilted. (Mostly in favor of Dragon Ball, honestly.)

@HelloProject

I'm going to continue my thoughts from the HeadWiz thread here, because they are more pertinent to the general building of this MUSH than broad HeadWizzing behavior. The last post I made spoke of power levels, advancement, and disparities between source materials. Around here, most people are pretty comfortable with wild power level disparities, like I said. But -- and I've discussed this with @Benediction at length -- even though I personally enjoy being the Big Guy who can whip on groups of lesser people, it is simply the truth that it's not fun to be functionally unable to contribute to a scene.

So I'd like you to consider a design decision made by Super Robot Wars MUSH: Their mantra when constructing their theme was / is Total Theme Control. What this meant is that while they were attempting to construct a game in which many of the Super Robot Wars notes would be hit, they weren't married to the canonical lore and weren't afraid to rip it out and replace it, or otherwise change it up. The Spiral Empire wasn't just The Bad Guys, even the awful space monsters that have showed up have reason and decent rationale for the things that they're doing instead of being a generic boogeyman to be punched.

Gaijin Chaos Z isn't the story of Son Goku or of the Saiyans. It isn't the story of Naruto Uzumaki, and it isn't the story of Yusuke Urameshi or Usagi Tsukino. Those characters are all a part of the story and they're hooked into existing backstory elements but they're not and shouldn't be the end-all-be-all because it's a MUSH and not their manga.

So how do you deal with Saiyans being Objectively Overpowered? Same way SRW makes Spiral Knights not objectively overpowered: You assert Total Theme Control and just take the overpowered bits away, in this case zenkai. Why? Because it's fine for a Shounen Protagonist to have that in their manga, but the MUSH revolves around more than the Saiyans. So then, what makes being a Saiyan special? Well you know, turning into a Great Ape is actually pretty god damned cool if you ask me. Just don't have it get taken out by tail-cutting and bam, you've got a race with a Cool Power Up that scales but doesn't double their power whenever they get beat up.

Sailor Moon presents a similar problem. At the end of the day, only Sailor Moon and her omnipotence crystal really matters. But it's fine -- even preferable, I think -- to change things like that!

One thing I think you actually need to seriously knuckle down and think about is transformations in general, because this is one of the worst pieces of escalation you're going to have to decide on the appropriateness of. Pretty much all of the shows you're using include an endless escalation of new, ridiculous transformations with new, ridiculous attributes but these transformations are almost inevitably only attributed to main characters.

Do you rip the transformations out? What about characters who have no natural transformation (Like Krillin, or most characters who aren't Jinchuuriki in Naruto), what do you do for them? Do you downplay the transformation aspect and simply let them ascend to a higher tier naturally?

On a less individual, power-based level, how do these various settings tie into one another? How does the Dragon Ball afterlife interact with Yu Yu Hakusho's metaphysics?

In summary, you've got a lot of decisions to make. One of the best tools you could have for answering them is to assert Total Theme Control like SRW did and unapologetically tell people that there will be changes for any number of considerations, and things might not look exactly like they expect.

@Salty-Secrets said in How Do I Headwiz?:

I can certainly vouch that @Z-01 is right that evening the playing field means more interesting or secondary concepts end up played more often. While there will always be those players who go for what's interesting over what's powerful, most people prefer and in fact desire to be at the very least competitive. Very few people go for basic mortals on the games where the average is either a Vampire, a Werewolf or a Mage. Hunters tend to be popular but aren't what I'd qualify as basic mortals anymore.

In the interest of having your secondary roles filled, consider a perfectly even playing field. You already mentioned villain status being a thing, and that will make up for every hero being even. If you have advancement, then make sure that every predetermined period of time, every character who is below the played average gets bumped up to that number. Set a cap, too, and raise the cap only when you normalize the population using the played, again very important, played, average.

This is actually super easy to do in the genres that he's writing to as well, since it's pretty normal in shounen and surrounding genres for the New Hotness to set the new standard and then plateau into just being normal. Sailor Senshi get a new basic transformation and attack that utterly wrecks last season's villain but is only ok against the new youma, Martial Artists learn some new crazy technique, etc.

@HelloProject

Further things to think on:

• How have the existence of Sailor Senshi impacted things like Dragon Ball's planet conquering backstory stuff? They weren't unique to the Moon Kingdom at all, and each planet has a Star Seed. Did Frieza know of this, was he constantly battling superheroes? Be sure to hook things in, stitch them together nice and tight!

• What was the world like in the backstory, before all the Important Stuff was going on? Consider the possibility of roping in other Shounen stuff into either the forefront of your theme or its backstory. Stuff that could've happened in the distant to not so distant past: One Piece, Rurouni Kenshin, stuff like that.

• How do you feel about new themes being integrated? One of the biggest problems with games like MCM and to a lesser extent "soft integration" games like the now-defunct Super Robot Taisen MUSH is that they simply Drop Things In and let them run their course without any sort of curation or actual hooking into the surrounding worlds. Are you going to do what SRW does, and allow things to be integrated by applicants only with great consideration for whether or not it can hook neatly into the backstory of your setting?

In this regard, I actually recommend adopting a similar policy to SRW (yeah, I know, I'm singing their praises here): Allow integrations, do not allow integrations that don't bring something to the story other than their main characters, and don't hesitate to throw things out without much more explanation than, 'I just don't think this fits.'

For example: Integrating One Piece into your background gives you a fantastic set of Cool Toys you can toss around in the form of Devil Fruits, old pirate shit, and it fits the tone of things like Dragon Ball perfectly nicely.

But what if somebody comes along and wants to integrate Hellsing? It's seinen of course, but the main problem with it that all it brings to the table is vampires and a big pile of overpowered FCs, which you can get from basically anywhere. This, I think, is a prime example of something that "technically fits" but which you should say no to.

As important as it is to have sounding boards and such, I'd actually recommend not baring everything for the public to see. It's good to have mysteries! It's fine if this isn't absolutely everything, though.

@Ominous said in Which canon property/setting would be good for a MU* ?:

@Bobotron said in Which canon property/setting would be good for a MU* ?:

• Fullmetal Alchemist

That would be interesting. I am surprised no one has tried it yet.

This has been done. I don't remember the exact name of it and my application was sent using an older email account so I'd have to do some digging to identify it. It didn't work out though, just kind of petered out.

It had a very Super Robot Taisen MUSH-esque combat system. There was a guy who played a person that was totally ensconced in automail extensions of his body and thought of himself as a monster because of it.

As important as it is to have sounding boards and such, I'd actually recommend not baring everything for the public to see. It's good to have mysteries! It's fine if this isn't absolutely everything, though.

@HelloProject

Further things to think on:

• How have the existence of Sailor Senshi impacted things like Dragon Ball's planet conquering backstory stuff? They weren't unique to the Moon Kingdom at all, and each planet has a Star Seed. Did Frieza know of this, was he constantly battling superheroes? Be sure to hook things in, stitch them together nice and tight!

• What was the world like in the backstory, before all the Important Stuff was going on? Consider the possibility of roping in other Shounen stuff into either the forefront of your theme or its backstory. Stuff that could've happened in the distant to not so distant past: One Piece, Rurouni Kenshin, stuff like that.

• How do you feel about new themes being integrated? One of the biggest problems with games like MCM and to a lesser extent "soft integration" games like the now-defunct Super Robot Taisen MUSH is that they simply Drop Things In and let them run their course without any sort of curation or actual hooking into the surrounding worlds. Are you going to do what SRW does, and allow things to be integrated by applicants only with great consideration for whether or not it can hook neatly into the backstory of your setting?

In this regard, I actually recommend adopting a similar policy to SRW (yeah, I know, I'm singing their praises here): Allow integrations, do not allow integrations that don't bring something to the story other than their main characters, and don't hesitate to throw things out without much more explanation than, 'I just don't think this fits.'

For example: Integrating One Piece into your background gives you a fantastic set of Cool Toys you can toss around in the form of Devil Fruits, old pirate shit, and it fits the tone of things like Dragon Ball perfectly nicely.

But what if somebody comes along and wants to integrate Hellsing? It's seinen of course, but the main problem with it that all it brings to the table is vampires and a big pile of overpowered FCs, which you can get from basically anywhere. This, I think, is a prime example of something that "technically fits" but which you should say no to.

@Salty-Secrets said in How Do I Headwiz?:

I can certainly vouch that @Z-01 is right that evening the playing field means more interesting or secondary concepts end up played more often. While there will always be those players who go for what's interesting over what's powerful, most people prefer and in fact desire to be at the very least competitive. Very few people go for basic mortals on the games where the average is either a Vampire, a Werewolf or a Mage. Hunters tend to be popular but aren't what I'd qualify as basic mortals anymore.

In the interest of having your secondary roles filled, consider a perfectly even playing field. You already mentioned villain status being a thing, and that will make up for every hero being even. If you have advancement, then make sure that every predetermined period of time, every character who is below the played average gets bumped up to that number. Set a cap, too, and raise the cap only when you normalize the population using the played, again very important, played, average.

This is actually super easy to do in the genres that he's writing to as well, since it's pretty normal in shounen and surrounding genres for the New Hotness to set the new standard and then plateau into just being normal. Sailor Senshi get a new basic transformation and attack that utterly wrecks last season's villain but is only ok against the new youma, Martial Artists learn some new crazy technique, etc.

@HelloProject

I'm going to continue my thoughts from the HeadWiz thread here, because they are more pertinent to the general building of this MUSH than broad HeadWizzing behavior. The last post I made spoke of power levels, advancement, and disparities between source materials. Around here, most people are pretty comfortable with wild power level disparities, like I said. But -- and I've discussed this with @Benediction at length -- even though I personally enjoy being the Big Guy who can whip on groups of lesser people, it is simply the truth that it's not fun to be functionally unable to contribute to a scene.

So I'd like you to consider a design decision made by Super Robot Wars MUSH: Their mantra when constructing their theme was / is Total Theme Control. What this meant is that while they were attempting to construct a game in which many of the Super Robot Wars notes would be hit, they weren't married to the canonical lore and weren't afraid to rip it out and replace it, or otherwise change it up. The Spiral Empire wasn't just The Bad Guys, even the awful space monsters that have showed up have reason and decent rationale for the things that they're doing instead of being a generic boogeyman to be punched.

Gaijin Chaos Z isn't the story of Son Goku or of the Saiyans. It isn't the story of Naruto Uzumaki, and it isn't the story of Yusuke Urameshi or Usagi Tsukino. Those characters are all a part of the story and they're hooked into existing backstory elements but they're not and shouldn't be the end-all-be-all because it's a MUSH and not their manga.

So how do you deal with Saiyans being Objectively Overpowered? Same way SRW makes Spiral Knights not objectively overpowered: You assert Total Theme Control and just take the overpowered bits away, in this case zenkai. Why? Because it's fine for a Shounen Protagonist to have that in their manga, but the MUSH revolves around more than the Saiyans. So then, what makes being a Saiyan special? Well you know, turning into a Great Ape is actually pretty god damned cool if you ask me. Just don't have it get taken out by tail-cutting and bam, you've got a race with a Cool Power Up that scales but doesn't double their power whenever they get beat up.

Sailor Moon presents a similar problem. At the end of the day, only Sailor Moon and her omnipotence crystal really matters. But it's fine -- even preferable, I think -- to change things like that!

One thing I think you actually need to seriously knuckle down and think about is transformations in general, because this is one of the worst pieces of escalation you're going to have to decide on the appropriateness of. Pretty much all of the shows you're using include an endless escalation of new, ridiculous transformations with new, ridiculous attributes but these transformations are almost inevitably only attributed to main characters.

Do you rip the transformations out? What about characters who have no natural transformation (Like Krillin, or most characters who aren't Jinchuuriki in Naruto), what do you do for them? Do you downplay the transformation aspect and simply let them ascend to a higher tier naturally?

On a less individual, power-based level, how do these various settings tie into one another? How does the Dragon Ball afterlife interact with Yu Yu Hakusho's metaphysics?

In summary, you've got a lot of decisions to make. One of the best tools you could have for answering them is to assert Total Theme Control like SRW did and unapologetically tell people that there will be changes for any number of considerations, and things might not look exactly like they expect.

@HelloProject

With regards to trying to determine how to make power levels / experience work, you've got quite a few choices available to you and every single one of them is going to get complained about at length. But I would actually like to take a moment to speak out for your original vision of relative evenness. This community here on MUSoapbox is extremely separate from our own, and much more welcoming of wild power level disparities because the more popular games in this community are World of Darkness games.

The late 90s and early to mid 00's was a period of time where this sort of thinking was far more prevalent in OUR community, and it produced some pretty internally toxic tendencies. Characters with special tags -- EFC, SFC -- would be wildly powerful relative to what the average PC could get, and even stock FCs would tend to be more powerful than any given original character was allowed, and character advancement tended to just not be a thing. For a good stretch the only way to actually reasonably compete with these disparities in place was to get exploitative with these game's combat systems. Our community is mostly over that.

The MUSH that you are building is a shounen manga MUSH, a genre that is notoriously bad about rendering everything but the main character of any given title Beyond Pointless. This is not, I think, a practice that you actually want codified into your game, especially since the focus of the genre is going to be Grand Old Fight Times, and fewer people by far are going to want to play Krillin if being Krillin means you're as much of a whipping boy as Krillin canonically ends up.

It's especially not a practice you want codified into your game if you acknowledge the power level disparities between things like Dragon Ball, Naruto, Yu Yu Hakusho, and whatever else you might choose to include, because even in those three the amount of escalation that occurs from one to the next is heavily tilted. (Mostly in favor of Dragon Ball, honestly.)

@HelloProject

You're going to want a Master Plot Document and at least one or two helpers familiar with it. It shouldn't be written solely by you, either. You can part it out further from there, but having things shotgunned around all over the place causes problems pretty damn fast.

@surreality said in MU and Alternate Channels:

@Meg I think in the case you had specifically, I'd call it too few staffers available rather than laziness, but there are some times I've seen lazy as the cause. Sadly, sometimes 'too many' staff creates the same problem, since no one is sure who has the responsibility to do this, so you have lower tier staffers afraid to say anything without approval from on high, and upper tier ones thinking the lower tier staff will handle it.

Sometimes, things really are so black and white there's no conversation to be had. ('Is VASpider/Rex/Jeurg', for instance, at least to me. <cough>)

This can be a pretty complex issue in my experience. One of the biggest reasons I've personally seen that an investigative or preventative conversation might just not happen, or not happen in a timely manner, is that the person who needs to be talked to will inevitably emotionally exhaust you in the course of the conversation. Sometimes deliberately, sometimes not, and people just aren't very understanding of it when you try to draw boundaries with these people because it's easy to portray it as just clubbing whoever you're trying to handle.

You deal with that enough times and you stop wanting to try to engage people like this if you can avoid it. Somebody who can actually engage all the various personalities and their quirks regularly and get stuff like this done is a god damned treasure.

EDIT: Not suggesting that @Meg here is one of those people, I have no idea what happened with them.

@HelloProject said in A Constructive Thread About People We Might Not Like:

I admit that I'm somewhat surprised that I've never been prebanned or had my own thread (we're ignoring the H!P Thread on WORA from when I went on a childish trolling campaign in 2013). But most of the bad shit I ever did was just suddenly blowing up because stress, anxiety, and general maturity issues I've had to work on. Well, I think I'm at least good on the maturity stuff now, the stress and anxiety are just kind of always an ongoing battle.

Still, it's legitimately surprising regardless.

You're not really what people think of in terms of a "real" problem player. You kind of get hit by things from an odd angle and self-detonate after a while historically, but you don't try to take the ship or anybody else down with you. So there's not much for anybody to try to talk about here, because some young new MU*er with some social quirks that are on the whole minor just really isn't a problem or all that strange.

You don't get infamous for being slightly off in this community, we're pretty much all slightly off. The kind of people who tend to get personal threads are usually -- I think -- manipulative sociopaths who have been operating for many years.