@chibichibi Assuming WoD: enforce drawbacks. Paradox exists for a reason, afterall.

Assuming not-WoD... enforce drawbacks. Really, enforce drawbacks on everybody.

I think that we have a definitive majority answer here, lol.

@il-volpe said in What is a MU*?:

Hmmm. I find I feel that having a grid is a defining element of MU-ness. They were created to have multi-player Zork.

I disagree. There's several games that I would consider MUs that don't have grids, they just have lists of rooms to pick from or some similar accommodations.

@il-volpe said in Antagonistic PCs - how to handle them:

This challenges my suspension-of-disbelief a lot more than a PC acting the clown, but unlike fishmalks and superfriends, it's not a WoD-player-virtue to hate it.

The last time I played a "fish-malk" he bluffed his way into securing the Seneschal's seat.

I do miss him.

I will take a dozen fish-malks over one grim-darque supremacist.

Ancient Anguish is still around last I checked. VERY Old-school. Choas, Rangers, ect..

I definitely could not have got Crystal Springs up and running without help from Faraday. She is always very patient, especially considering that I am totally technically inept, and is always happy to help if I run into a problem. I have a lot of respect for her.

I think part of it going to depend on how much you want to maintain a consistent theme that isn't in line with modern 21st century first world normative assumptions. The more you want to keep things that aren't 'now time standard', the more of your upper structure needs to be NPCs who are very committed to the status quo. If your theme is more modern-day friendly, or you are okay with it going in that direction, more PC leadership can happen.

But, honestly? I think the biggest thing is that IC leadership positions need to be divorced from OOC leadership responsibilities if you're going to have PCs in those spots. There's a tremendous pressure on PC leaders to be 'good leaders' by whatever crazed and entitled way that other PCs define that, and it's both hugely stressful and harmful to having a game with a consistent 'back and forth' of IC conflict and drama. A 'bad' IC leader can drive more and often more interesting story than a 'good' one, IMO, where 'good' is 'tries to please everyone and not Make Trouble with unreasonable demands'.

NPC leaders have more freedom to drive RP and action by being...not great people IC. They can be drunkards who order PCs to try and do something frankly stupid, or they can have a blood feud with another faction that means people can't just 'sit down and talk out' a thousand year old grudge the way PCs are inclined to. And they can do it without taking the IMMENSE amount of OOC flack that PC leaders get whenever they make...almost any decision at all.

Introducing live speech/vr into RP sounds incredibly awkward, especially if your voice doesn't, uh, fit your character. Also it makes it kinda tricky to do awesome combat poses or describing things happening. That stuff's fine for tabletop games, but the average 'run plots and RP isolated scenes' superhero mush would be weeeeiiiirrrd.

Really I think we just need A) A new thing that lets us more or less what we do on MUs, but with better/more convenient functionality, and B) find some way for people to actually find out about that thing when/if it exists.

@kestrel said in How do *you* make social scenes fun and enjoyable?:

Generally, to be honest, I don't. I don't feel the need to force a scene to be enjoyable if I don't think it will be; I just sit it out.

I was starting to feel like the only one. 😛

When I was younger and had FOMO, I would suffer through them just so I didn't omg get left out!!!

Nowadays? Enh. I make social scenes fun and enjoyable by not showing up and ruining them. 🙂

@山口-二矢 Bwahaha, that was my first introduction to text based games, a mud named Redemption. Enter a room, woops, enemy players, text spam for the next five minutes.

I played a character whose class was conjurer. I could summon mobs from all across the mud. At one point, pretty much as many mobs as I had mana. My character could also clone herself, and equip things. So no way to tell the difference between my character and her clone.

I recall being able to break clan halls, but the text spam was unbelievable. To the point of people's dialup connections not being able to handle it. Not only could you not know what the hell was going on, people would get disconnected. It was gloriously hilarious.

They eventually put a limit on the spell. Something that should have been in place from the beginning, but it was a wiz's favourite class so... 😛

Muds were all about twitch reflex and skill. Twitch to spam spells/skills, skill for knowing which of those to spam, when to switch up tactics or when to run.

Good times in the good old days.

I don't know that I'd want to keep young heroes and established heroes separate the way some suggestions kinda sound, but having distinct group or corner of the setting for the younger heroes to have things to do independantly is probably a good idea. I really don't know that I'd put the flying demigods in the same exact town as the brooding vigilantes though.

It might be fun if some/most of the established or teamed up heroes have some degree of interest and role in the education of new heroes too, but I don't think I'd want that to be the core theme. It's nice to have room for heroes to be doing their own things, and not JUST be, like, an established peace keeping force like in, say, My Hero Academia.

@jennkryst said in Combat on a Mu:

One issue with a +attack PC command is that it falls apart when fighting NPCs, unless a object is made with stats that you can target.

Depends on how the command is built. Using @faraday's system as an example, you can set up NPCs in the combat scenario that have stats and equipment as necessary.

@sunny said in Idling all day on MU*s:

(private / public weighted votes is a BAD ACTUAL IDEA but a reasonable example of what I mean)

Why?

@three-eyed-crow NOPE NOPE NOPE

@three-eyed-crow said in Criticism: X-Men Divergence:

It's kinda shocking how much a one-sentence 'application' mitigates this

Oh, sure, I'm not at all against requiring apps for rosters. I was just pointing out that it's a system option. You can require apps for a single character, all characters, or none of them.

But if you ARE going to require apps, then you need a way to talk to the person applying. That means either getting their email or letting them make up a player bit. Either way, it requires communication on the part of staff to let the player know what's up. No amount of code can substitute for that 🙂

They just closed the Adventure! Kickstarter, Estimated delivery of 2022.

@lotherio Happy to take a look. Feel free to PM. I'll prolly have more questions as I go along.

@nessa I feel the thing for me to take away from your post there is that you know what you want, and communicate clearly about it, and that you don't hinge your RP on specific other people.

Those are big deals. The last in particular is important -- to me -- to keep in mind when I run stories and plots. My story must not hinge on Joe and Bob being available. It needs to be possible for Sally and Sue to pick up, even if they weren't there for the earlier bits. If Joe and Bob don't turn up, hand Sally and Sue their own bits of plot so they have a reason to go talk to Joe and Bob, but also that they may attack the story quandary from their own angle.

There's never too many clues to hand out. Each character will have its own interpretation of what's going on. Customise a bit to their skill set and background, and you get overlapping threads that people can pursue and argue about. Communicating plot threads down the line, away from yourself, including more people.

Most plots do end up with a small handful of people making the final decisive choices in the end -- if for no other reason then because they were the ones signing on for the final Event. But before you get there, there's a long stretch of road where a lot of RP can be had, and a lot of people can be connected. I can only speak for myself (obviously) but I enjoy getting to participate in discussions or preparations for someone else's final stand as much as I get to make the final stand; we all take turns being the hero or hogging the spotlight.

@l-b-heuschkel Oh, yeah. I'm pretty much wrapping up the one 'do your own thing' adventure where I invited others but had burned away my very last scrap of fuck before the event actually happened.

I have experienced and seen this on other games and had it seem a lot less egregious. The 'story points' thing I mentioned somewhere up-thread seems like it could solve a fair chunk of it.