@thatguythere It's not exactly sailed as just put on hold. We're busy with our golden goose that is our Fallout game, so Genosha isn't lost, it's just on the back-back burner. Should things flow well and there's extra time in our lives, we might do it as a side project anyway! At that time, I'll just post an advert and see what happens.

@thatguythere They are listed here on a non-April-First announcement, so... maybe?

The problem with "not judging a book by its cover" has always been that judging the book is what the cover is fucking for, lol.

Immersion means when I am addicted and CAN'T STOP even though I tell myself I can. I CAN'T! THANKS A LOT, @Apos

addict

But for real, as long as there's a vivid world, a compelling story, and a character that fits into it all, I consider myself fully immersed.

I finished the descing on my own. 🙂

@thatguythere I do indeed believe that we're failing to communicate. Or, perhaps, we just have opposed points of view and that's fine. You feel the need to have prior RP setting something up (if I'm not mistaking your point now), I'm fine assuming the events happened off-screen and using them to build story going forward and hook my character into ongoing plot.

I do agree with you that inventing NPCs or locations just to kill/destroy them in an attempt to garner a reaction from PCs usually falls flat unless the players want their characters to feel the impact, in which case they can certainly create reasons to feel it.

Oooh! I didn't know about that. Thanks for sharing!

@arkandel I use git on a daily basis, and while I used to be the hardcore "I will use the command line, for it gives me POWER over ALL ASPECTS of creation (or at least of this source control repository)!" type, I have come to like the visual representation that Fork (my current favorite) will show me of branches and commits. I vastly prefer the nice graphical format to the older school git log --graph --pretty=oneline --abbrev-commit

@coin

The Tick’s punch has a SKILL of 20 but a PRECISION of d2.

Hitting a mook is Difficulty 5, making his Skill Overflow 15. He rolls a Precision of 1 on 1d2, so while he still hits because Difficulty 0, but he has 15 points of Too Successful to deal with on the precision failure.

You are only Too Successful when your Difficulty is 0 but you fail a Precision roll.

The building is toast.

Arthur has a fly SKILL of 5 and a PRECISION of d8.

He’s getting shot at by The Beehive’s beehive-hairdo canon bee gun. 🐝 Difficulty is 6, minus 5 makes it 1. Arthur rolls a 1, but simply fails and has to make a crash landing in the middle of a sting barrage.

Yeah, I can go with this. If the lack of critical failure bothers anyone, make it the difference between the Difficulty and the roll.

I am super late to the party.

Have you looked at the RPG 'Victoriana'? Classism is baked into the theme and they managed to make it baked into the RPG.

@arkandel I think that the player of any character who could threaten the vision that Staff has for the game should get some version of The Talk, whether it's recognized in chargen or after. If you're planning a long-term war game, you can't have someone wipe out the enemy in a single strike. If you're planning a hardscrabble survival game, you can't have someone creating a utopia in the wilderness. If you're planning a politically-charged CvC game, you can't have a someone whose first choice of actions is to murder their opponent.

This doesn't mean that the characters can't exist--so long as the players recognize that they will never succeed in their goal (okay, the last one still needs to be hit in the nose with a newspaper and told that that's not what the game is about).

I have no problem with PC action changing the story Staff originally came up with (they should, or else you're just playing on a train game), but they shouldn't change the theme Staff originally came up with, unless Staff is all behind it. I feel strongly that Staff gets to decide the type of game they want to run and to take every (ethical) action they want to in order to run that sort of game. After all, they're the ones who created the game. (Generic) You want to play on a different type of game? Find that game or make it. I think that I understand what @Apos is saying, and think that it's important to make it clear as Staff that (generic) you are saying "your idea/character is not welcome here for reason X" rather than "you are not welcome here."

I also totally agree with what @Pyrephox said--discuss the situation OOCly to avoid the player feeling like they're picked on when their IC actions fail repeatedly.

The 1890s version makes me think of Arcanum. And I really, REALLY love that game. So I'd have to pick that option, even though I'm not totally against the first option. They both sound good, but giving me flashbacks to Arcanum make me like #2 more.

@coin said in Canon/feature characters:

Power balance - can OCs be as powerful as FCs?

Absolutely a decision that needs to be made by the game developers as soon as possible (and I would say before even beginning to work on this stuff). It will heavily decide who will be interested in your game and who will be absolutely turned off. Neither answer is wrong.

See, in most original works this doesn't matter at all, because newly appearing characters' power levels can flactuate tremendously but it's done with the intention of being used in a specific way - usually sporadically or in mostly their own book - or with an end goal in mind. So for instance you could create someone like Sentry who's more powerful than Thor or the Hulk or Lobo who could exchange punches with Superman and it's not a bad thing; it just depends on how they are used.

The thing is though is that on a MU* it does matter.

At a glance sure, a lot of OCs are going to be Mary Sue kinds of characters, but so could FCs; you could play up Superboy or Wolverine as whatever idealized perfect avatar for your personal empowerment fantasies as you like.

It's really the frequency of their appearances that can throw things off. Lobo isn't normally showing up everywhere, and the fact he'll steal the spotlight like oh-my-gawd is sort of baked into the character so if you're reading a book he's staring in that's probably because you explicitly bought the book knowing what you were getting into.

On a MUSH we know how messy things get - and the power level itself is only one of the issues, but I'm not sure they're due to the FC/OC disparity either. I mean sure, Thor could solve every problem Daredevil has ever had - he could stomp on the Hand pretty handily (hah-hah), but so could a cosmically powered OC.

If there are issues there should be one of three reasons:

The high-end characters, FCs or OCs, are restricted to the lucky few. Call me cynical but that's probably the most common reason.

The FCs are just played badly - and I mean 'badly' by whatever yardstick you choose to judge that from. Maybe Iron Man is played by someone crappy, maybe he's always shagging up with Black Widow, maybe he's a villain. Dunno.

The setting feels off because OCs are way more important than FCs. I can kind of see that if Batman and Superman are constantly outshined by DeathsquadRIP and Fragolas it could rub some people off the wrong way.

TL;DR: I think the power gap itself should absolutely be determined and made clear very early on, but also it probably doesn't matter too much on a day to day basis unless other things are malfunctioning.

@faraday said in Choosing a MU Server:

But this speaks to a core philosophical difference between Evennia and Ares. Ares is designed to be a 'MU in a box'. There are a bunch of things you can configure easily, but if you want a radically-different +where display, or to completely remove the BBS system, it's going to take some code surgery. Whereas Evennia is more of a blank slate. If you like Sparks' BBS you just install it. Or you can use some other BBS. Or make your own. In this regard it's more like the old servers. Harder if you just want something that works out of the box, but easier if you want to go off the beaten path or just do something your own way.

This is true. Part of that philosophical difference is that Evennia is not specifically targeting MUSH-style gameplay the way Ares is. It's one of the styles Evennia can support, which is why it defaults to a more blank slate game-content wise. Evennia is (text-)game-style agnostic and could (and is) used as a starting point to make any form of MU*, from MUSH-style to very code-heavy MUDs and even IF or Rogue-like games (!). Ares is more focused, so as @faraday alludes to, if the kind of game Ares offers is your cup of tea you are going to get more stuff out of the box and probably get started faster. With Evennia, more assembly will be needed.
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Griatch

I'm moving this to our new Game Design section, because hey! 🙂

Just letting people know that we launched, you can join the game at portent.genesismuds.com:2075 Just in case somehow people saw this thread and missed the advert.