@Admiral said:

Why not just use the old CP2020 system? Wasteland did fine with it.

Also there is numerous references to Cyberpunk in Fallout. A few of the games mention dermal armor and wired reflexes, and you have Androids and other robotic based characters. Hell one of the guns in Fallout 2 is the exact gun from Blade Runner.

For a really simple set of fantasy rules, old school play style, Microlite20 is a pretty solid simplification of D20 3.5. The main rules fit on a page. There are full conversion lists for spells and monsters, and plenty of extra classes if desired. There are also optional spell casting systems, to use with or instead of the base system. Spell points, health points, Vancian casting, build a spell, runes its all in there. And tons of write ups for various game settings. FREE. 2000+ pages (repetitious) pages.

I think I remember that plot... and the frothing... and laughing hilariously to myself over the bitching about it. But I also know Dyaria's player and immensely enjoyed watching him just 'old man' everything in the face.

I haven't played on an SF game in a very long time. I'd definitely try it out so you've got one more potential player if you do open.

@Jennkryst said:

I'd have thought being able to swap bodies (and thus alter every skill on your +sheet) would be a bigger concern. In my imagined EP mush, there would be actual money, and your rep would limit what can be done with it, rather than actually be the money.

Well yes, that's a problem, but if you know about that problem from Step 1 you can make sure to tell the system: "Look for a sheet location on the character object. If there is no sheet location, look on the character object." Then have every stat lookup and set code read from/set to there instead. For example: sheetloc( %# ) instead of %#.

The system to switch sheets may be a problem, with its limitations and considerations, but now we're just coding a +shift or +desc system.

It's a solve-once problem, one sheet 8 times, instead of 8 systems. (Possible exception of the bodyless/AIs; I'd have to check.)

@Pondscum said:

You're looking for this:
https://github.com/wyrdathru/TheCreationist.
https://github.com/wyrdathru/TheCreationist/releases

It was Daranos' player that wrote the program and I'm not sure if he's still supporting it/working on it or not. It was much better than A2A however, which was the standard 16 colour one which everyone used.

I know Daranos' player reads this forum, so you could put maybe put a shout out for him.

Thanks for chiming in, @Pondscum !

I was slowly pushing toward adding in support for different MU* engines and automated colouring via patterns and rules, but since I've barely touched any text-based games lately, it's been less of a priority.

@Tempest , I used it on Windows 10 recently but only for the briefest few seconds. If you (or anyone else still using it?) have any problems and/or feature requests, just nudge me on MSB or log a ticket on Github.

@Usekh

That is one of the things that always got me, folks running around with stats like Int boosted to 8-9 permanently. Maybe my interpretation is wrong, but at that level trying to deal with normal people would be frustrating at best.

If you consider that 5 is supposedly the limit of purely human ability in terms of Intelligence, one would assume that would be true of even people with Int 5, given the frequency with which extreme intelligence seems to come paired with one sort of social dysfunction or another (whatever its source).

Since nobody's really interested in enforcing that either, it'd be difficult to make a case for doing it towards those with Int 8-9. There's also the argument that if you have enough Mind to bump your Int to 8 or 9, you also have enough Mind to recognize and adjust yourself not to suffer those dysfunctions at the same time. Edit: Which is one of the reasons it's so much of a pain to push for mental attributes provoking Disbelief. People are rarely using their Int 9 to do anything a normal person would actually disbelieve.

Have you ever run into players that are content to run things on their own or with their friends, but get hung up on the fact that they are not allowed to do anything other than slice of life or bar RP without having to get someone's nod of approval?

There is another side of the fence on this. I've been among and RPed regularly with people across various MU*s/MOOs who are happy to run things for themselves and others, but have their enthusiasm and ideas snuffed out like a match in a wet napkin by staffers who have, plot-wise, stuffed them into a little box they only open when the ST/GM gets around to running something. (There are those players who don't seem to be able to rub two braincells together to come up with anything to do other than TS and bar RP and wait to be taken by the hand and lead down the garden path to be sure, thus facilitating the need for STs/GMs, so I'm not saying planned plots are a bad thing at all.)

I realize this is a little bit of a sidetrack to the main thrust of the argument, but I always thought the reward of roleplaying is fun. XP always seemed like something you did to gain levels and thus be powerful enough to kill others - fun for some, but generally not fun on a MUSH, especially when it takes more than thinking up a name and grinding levels to get a solid character.

Whenever I see XP systems at the door, I tend to assume that the goal of the game is to gain power/level to inflict my story decisions on others, as this is usually what happens.

I dunno. Perhaps that right there is the crux of the XP problem.

@Sunny said:

Brilliant. Thank you. I wish I had some big long reply, but just thank you. I'm going to chew on it for a while. If you have any other brilliant ideas, I am all ears. 🙂

Well, the bitch of the matter here is making it in a way that scales up so you don't either burn out to a crisp trying to keep up with the requirement of all those people wanting those background tidbits to mean something or making them be some inert piece of trivia in their +bg somewhere that barely does anything for them. After all if it doesn't generate RP what good is it?

You probably want to crowdsource this shit. Like, let people pick their poison from a list ("this is what's available for you guys"). Some of them will pick individual tidbits ("sure, my PC spent two years in that ultra conservative catholic school") waiting to be paired up with others pretty much at random and others might create as a unit ("we got really drunk that one night and broke into Native American museum"). Then try to organize - but not run yourself - that unicorn of all PrP arrangements; plot trading.

Plot trading is ... hah. It's not easy. I very often see people offering but it very rarely happens. So you'd need to be on top of people, motivating them any way you can at all - XP, recognition, extra access to staff plot, anything - to run stories for each other. Basically the idea (in this context, pending further refinement) would be to give players control over another unit's metaplot; that'd include a write-up of just what it entails (what did those drunken idiots steal? what did it do to them?), some loosely defined NPCs they can use (the now-retired teacher with a worm inside their skull, the former school janitor now working for an asylum) and let them go to town. Hopefully.

Basically you can't do too much to encourage plot on this level. Player-ran plot is the only thing here that scales up, where almost everything else does not.

Running plot is a lot of work. It just takes so long and there are so many bored players around. If they take care of each other that's great, but if you need to do it for them... well, you might as well book a spot for that asylum, too. 🙂

The less time you spend on MU*s the more you enjoy the time you spend on them.

roll20 API to a Mu* interface, side-by-side == I'll be in my bunk.

Storium harkens more to where we came from, when we were essentially turning the "Choose Your Own Adventure" books into a multi-billion dollar computer game genre. They're going back to the books, taking cues from the Fallen London engine, and mixing up something new.

I don't know where this pissing match disagreement of ideas came from, but I found invoking both "roll20" and the "Storium" to be along a path more right than Evennia. I will let the server nerds argue server shortcomings.

@The-Tree-of-Woe said:

If you want to read trashy, violent smut and smutty, trashy violence, that's fine and more power to you, but don't wave it around like a fan and tell me misogyny and rampant, cynical misanthropy capped off with a woman being raped by a garden weasel are barbed and insightful social commentary about catholicism.

I have not read Ennis in years and quite liked him for a laugh or three, but this is such a perfect description of my ex's relationship with Ennis, and indeed, art in general, that I am really annoyed that my upvote button isn't working right now.

edit: Ahh, there it goes.

@RDC said:

It's pretty impossible to separate whether WC's system was good from whether the staff was good; it was a very subjective system. I think, IIRC, that Surreality says the system was adapted from one she proposed for a game before WC existed? She said that they bastardized and ruined her original concept without permission if I'm remembering right. Anyway, the system was pretty horrible. It was broken in some real obvious ways.

If it was adapted from the system created for Manifestation: Hong Kong, yep, that one was the horribly broken bastardization of mine. It sounds like it got worse from there, and it's hard to get worse than 'look we don't understand this crap we just want to write up spiffy powers to make us the specialest snowflakes so we can get on with our lesbian fairy sex, so here we're going with this version that removes the benefits of the system and leaves it horribly broken so we can get back to artificially inseminating one another with our magic nymph tongue-tentacles'.

I wish I was kidding. I'm not kidding. 😞 I'm not even kidding a little.

Edit: Oh -- and no, the creator of Windy City (whose RL name I know but I don't know what name she used on WC so I can't name the name here, sorry!) did NOT have permission to take the system written for M:HK, broken or not. 😕

Addendum on this one: The combat system wasn't my nightmare. I just had a core stat block at the time, without the combat system in place. I don't remember who did MHK's, so I have no idea what happened from there. (It may not even have had one to speak of; I don't even recall if MHK and the game it was based on were 'consent games with stats' or not, and they may very well have been.)

@Olsson said:

@Derp

It was a plot consisting of 11 scenes involving 13 seperate PC and ended with Patrick making a deal with them after a series of assaults against important officers within the Free Company, and killing the Leaders second-in-command, which forced them to abbandon all activity in North America.

I mean I am European so my scenes aren't in the ideal time for americans, but that's bigger than most plots and I guess I'd count it as attention.

Anyway, I am derailing at this point I guess.

Nah, it's important to get shit like that out there. People often assume that their personal experience is indicative of the larger state of things, and it's often not the case.

I'm with you on GURPS, @Thenomain. In the '90s I had a bunch of friends who were all about the GURPS and tried to turn every possible setting or campaign into a GURPS version. I stopped gaming with these friends for close to a decade because of this seeing as I, you know, absolutely fucking hated GURPS.

It's a point value system that can't decide if points measure utility or difficulty. It is, thus, incredibly hackable to the point that I described GURPS character points as "measuring nothing but how much your character costs in GURPS character points".

It has all the complexity and slowdown problems of "crunchy" systems without any actual verisimilitude, arguably the only real benefit of using a system heavy on the crunch. (An epic Usenet flamewar with this guy led to Yet Another GURPS Patch in Yet Another GURPS Supplement because he was so stung by accusations that GURPS was unrealistic way back when.)

The genre books often pretty much just rewrote the game rules almost from scratch, keeping only a tiny core of the game rules alive. The result was such that it was often as much work as learning a whole new (better suited) game system over learning the GURPS variant in use for a given genre.

But I am le tired.

Uh.... so this is interesting. This is my game (renamed to Umbral Shards). I will say this, though, that the Risk file was one of the first I put up out of notes and such... and then had several conversations on here about the very same thing. Given the vehement opposition in conversation, I might likely go back and either rewrite it, or just scrap the idea because, well, subsequent conversations right here.

With that said, I haven't had time due to work to do anything but code on the place.

@HelloRaptor said:

I didn't say we'd cross off 90% of stuff, thus leaving 10% behind, just that I'm only 90% sure we'd cross off 100% of everything anyone does on these games.

100% - 90% = 10%, duh.

(Joke with Raptor. It's super-effective.)

Yeah, I know what you meant, frat-boy.There was a game, Metro perhaps, which had a specific category for "Victim RP" where you could pull out an NPC just to be messed with and, well, victimized. It makes my skin crawl, but I can't deny that it was quite popular.

This sounds badass

@spasticgoat said:

@BetterJudgment said:

By my memory, several bottles should have been finished by now.

Considering how much you've been drinking, I'm questioning your judgment.

I don't (can't) drink at all. Of course, that I'm here and perfectly sober is good reason to question my judgment.