Random Idea - Multi-Themed MUX
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So as I sit here 3d printing a Sword of Omens from Thundercats I'm once again shocked that there has only ever been 1 Masters of the Universe game and none for the likes of Thundercats. I was whining about this to an online friend and she reminded me of an idea I had been exploring a while ago. A place called Realms MUX. This would be a place where people could go and create their own mini-games to play on. The game itself would provide an overall infrastructure (obviously the game would be hosted there, a base system would be available for all games to use, a nexus for getting to these mini-games, etc) and then players could create, well, whatever they wanted.
Our plan was for it to perhaps be a haven for places that don't get much love but you could do whatever you wanted. It'd be a place where you could set up a game to scratch that little itch that may not be worth investing an entire game to. Or to try out an idea to see if it's worth expanding into something else. The only rule might be 'no stepping on toes'. So if you have an idea for a Buffy game but one already exists...you can't make your Buffy game. At least till the one that is currently on the MUX closes.
There are some logistical problems (naming conventions, wiki sites for the mini-games, etc) but I always thought it was an interesting idea. I just wasn't sure if it would be viable.
This seem interesting to anyone else but me?
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@zombiegenesis It's not that it's not a good idea on paper, it's that people generally speaking don't want freedom. They want things to do, and sometimes those are mutually exclusive goals.
In other words being able to run whatever the hell they want is as likely to leave them paralyzed than telling them "welp, this is a DC Universe game, go beat up Weather Wizard", you know what I mean?
Sandboxes of all kinds suffer from this, unless they're based on TS, in which case they're all sandboxes.
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This type of thing has been done very successfully a number of times over the years. The projects don't tend to last incredibly long, but I can think of at least 3 games that were a collection of minigames, AND both OGR and STC had areas for this.
We actually used to call them mini-mushes, because they were a collection of several smaller games sharing resources and the like.
The only thing I'd say is 'ugh' on not letting people run the same type of game as others. That's weird and uncomfortable.
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@Arkandel I get that, yeah.
And Storyteller's Circle was one of my inspirations. I have fond memories of that place. As for only allowing one type of game the idea is to not spread what few resources there might be too thin. Not sure how that's "weird and uncomfortable". A bad idea perhaps but...weird and uncomfortable? I find that weird and uncomfortable.
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@zombiegenesis “It’s an open forum where you can run whatever kind of game you want!
... Unless of course somebody else is running something similar, then you’re out of luck.”
That’s the part I find a little weirdly, probably unnecessarily restrictive.
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Because it implies that the games on your site are competing with one another for resources (players specifically, because the other resources you can't even make a case for 'using up'), like somebody couldn't play in both Buffy games or something. If you're setting it up that these games are in competition with each other, yeah, it's weird and uncomfortable.
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I'm just gonna work under the assumption you don't know what the words weird and uncomfortable mean at this point and move on.
The actual idea was to prevent competition and encourage cooperation and working together. Not saying it would have worked by that was my thinking behind it.
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There's really no need to insult me. This is the constructive area, and I was just offering input. I'm sorry you don't like my word choice, but yes, to me, it IS weird and uncomfortable. I wouldn't use the words if I didn't mean them. I even just explained why.
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As much as I'd love a place to run ALL OF THE THINGS that I get interested in... it... could be bad?
I dunno. It's more 'so many different systems!' than anything else, I guess.
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Back in September/October, I pondered an idea of a system played more like a social game (mafia/werewolf), where points are exchanged (losses/successes) between players on mostly an OOC level but then the results are played out over a set amount of time. The whole idea was meant to make an easy to use system to support a multi-story telling/theme place.
I think I stand in the minority but the less gamey it is, the more I would like it Being able to socialize and RP in various theme, canon or original content sounds ideal to me; if I feel a certain way I can go play in someone's campaign for a spell as needed. The one system idea at that time seemed easier than trying to maintain different systems somehow, especial more complex game systems.
Noted in other conversations, the successful past mutli-game/table/OTT/etc. places were successful while it had a thriving community driven by staff to support socializing and, in turn, playing the various mini-games/MU's.
I'd be interested, but depends on complexity of using it, both in playing in the mini-mu's and in setting up a mini-mu I think.
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@zombiegenesis said in Random Idea - Multi-Themed MUX:
The actual idea was to prevent competition and encourage cooperation and working together. Not saying it would have worked by that was my thinking behind it.
If you offer this resource as an open space where anyone can come and play the games they want to play like a million virtual tables, that's ideally what it should be. Telling someone "oh no, you HAVE to go play at this table" is a little antithetical and going to cause some discomfort, especially if a potential player doesn't really like the setting or especially the gamerunners or other players there, which is a thing that happens.
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Why not use 1 system (gonna use 2e, cause it's what I know best) and multiple themes?
For instance, on TDM, I have an antechamber for going to the grid where I planned on adding new cities or rooms in cities if needed for expansions. If the whole thing uses the same +sheet and code, why not:
Have a hub, that can split into, say, Post-Apoc and Wild West and Modern. Use +factions to divide the bboards up. You play a pc in WW, you stay in the wild west, simple to do with locks and an attribute on a sheet and bblocks and +factions. Same for the other themes.
...
Now I kind of want to do this...
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@taika Mostly because I want to play more than just that one system. Iron Kingdoms, Mechwarrior/Battletech RPG, FFG Star Wars, Exalted, L5R...
I mean, I get that we can port the general idea of a character from one to another. I figured out how to make a Circle Orboros Warlock in oWoD. Battletech could kinda work with Exalted, if you just have all the Warstriders in the world. But it's tricksy.
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The problem you're going to run into is.. who is going to code all these systems? And what will conflict with what if you're grabbing available code?
I've seen a few superhero MUs do this in the past, as well as one Transformers game that did it, and it worked pretty well. But they all shared a single codebase (so all three TF mini-MUs on that game used the same core combat system and code). It's why I'm becoming a fan of general systems like Cortex, because they are easy to skin above the same core mechanics.
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I have a site where an absolutely amazing wonderful person has coded like a million and one different systems right into it, for all the various tabletop games I and other people run. Having it all on the same server and not conflicting is about as possible as coding all the complexities of the systems in the first place. There are switches and flags and things to determine which bit of code handles a given character bit, but it's not (to my understanding) a LOT of extra steps, once you get the handlers down.
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@bobotron Obviously, because I need mushes for all of them! NEEEEEED.
Ahem. If it's more like... uh... a mush of different tabletop games, there could be a way to set which dice you use, or which +sheet is active. Or different IC grids for different games like Dark Communion/New Prospect/(other games on the mu I forget what they are), but those take different charbits.
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Oh, I'm not saying it can't be done. I was more saying 'without a dedicated coder or group of coders something like this is liable to run into a lot of conflicts if they use pre-made code'. Mostly it's a lot of making sure that attributes don't get reused (though you CAN code around that, it just makes things longer...)
@Jennkryst
Right. Those things are easy peasy to do. HEll, you can also make it so that you have one login for all your characters (though at that point you're limited to playing in a single game at any given time). -
I think conceptually there's something here, it's just not a trivial thing to put together.
Presumably the point of doing something like this is trying to leverage the community aspects of MUing and get a lot of people logged in together, to hold up activity across the various games while also providing the resource. You want people making alts across the different games and all the activity feeding across games. If not, its just an inferior option (in most technically ways) for playing a tabletop with your friends when you have software custom-built for that purpose.
However its definitely trickier than it sounds. Multiple games in one place can just as easily steal focus from each other, turning it from 'the rising tide lifts all ships' to zero sum very quickly (which is part of whats being implied about multiple games in the same system/setting). A bad apple in that community can hurt multiple games, the creepers can creep more efficiently, etc. I think youd' really need to focus on it as a positive community space first, and then curate the games you'd allow to make sure no one was intentionally GOMO'ing each other, that every game was going to be a draw TO the community (from the general MU pop) not just on other people in the community (competitive with other games).
So yeah, potentially great but very difficult to implement.
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I think if you really set it up so that it's not just 'oh, Vampire Sphere A sucked, let's disgruntled players make Vampire Sphere B'. I'd hate to say it, but having a limited amount of things that are the same genre/game might be useful there.
