Stuff Done Right
-
@silentsophia said:
Um. But my character's desc mentions her being busty and having curves. No one ever got on me about anything beyond a honking typo I made. Granted, yes, I play a human monk but.
shrugs Maybe things have changed. It would certainly be a change for the better.
-
I don't honestly know. There were some reasonably sexy female descs forever ago. But this place never seemed to come down on people a whole lot, far as I could ever tell.
-
Gonna throw back to the OP and say that MXT 3.0's character system was the best I've ever seen in many years of superhero MU*s. Basically, you picked out a Marvel character, linked to a page on the Marvel wiki about them, put a few sentences on a trait for people that didn't want to click through, and said what you intended to do with the character over the next 30 days of roleplay. Since superhero comics contextualize everything about character in terms of immediate action (your romance is only important insofar as the bad guy is blowing up your boyfriend or is secretly your boyfriend or both), and since there's no point in just retyping/re-editing what 1,000 comic book nerds have already distilled out of your characters' idiotic continuity, it was simply the perfect system.
There were many good follow-on effects of this system. If you wanted to see a character played, you posted about it and someone could try it without much in the way of investment. So you saw characters played that had rarely been played before. You could express clearly what you wanted from the character and everyone could see it. You could instantly put a team of 4-5 characters together, have a rollicking adventure, then high five and move on to a different situation.
It didn't last and it didn't spread. Most superhero places these days are still asking you to write long backgrounds (instead of linking to someone else writing the background) and traits. It's boring and pointless when you didn't invent the character, their background or traits - those all belong to Disney now so why pretend like I've got some control over it or that the staff does?
-
That... sounds amazing. Little investment, characters are easy to replace, there's a continuity established--I'm assuming players weren't expected to pick up and run with a previous player's ball if they didn't care to do so?
-
While I like the linking, I like little else about it. I have no idea what I'm going to do over the next 30 days. My RP is organic and basedon who he meets. It also sounds like it was a canon game and bleh. Why act out what's already been written?
But as far as traits go, sure. Redoing them over and over is a waste of time. BG though is likely to be different in a non-canon game.
-
If you don't know what you're going to do in the next thirty days, or seconds, you won't ever create an interesting scene except by accident.
To put it another way, these characters aren't in a Faulkner story. Social RP is the failure state of action-adventure properties.
-
I interpret "what are you going to do over the next 30 days?" more as an invitation for the applicant to demonstrate that they have some actual ideas about what to do with the character than as a request to accurately predict what kind of roleplaying you're doing. I'd be very surprised if staff checks to see whether your actual RP matches up with your predictions, and still more surprised to find that they even care.
I don't expect anyone to know what's going to happen with their character in 30 days, I just want to know they have something better in mind than "um, sit in the OOC room and hit on members of the appropriate sex."
-
Damn. There go all my plans.
-
@JDCorley said:
Gonna throw back to the OP and say that MXT 3.0's character system was the best I've ever seen in many years of superhero MU*s. Basically, you picked out a Marvel character, linked to a page on the Marvel wiki about them, put a few sentences on a trait for people that didn't want to click through, and said what you intended to do with the character over the next 30 days of roleplay. Since superhero comics contextualize everything about character in terms of immediate action (your romance is only important insofar as the bad guy is blowing up your boyfriend or is secretly your boyfriend or both), and since there's no point in just retyping/re-editing what 1,000 comic book nerds have already distilled out of your characters' idiotic continuity, it was simply the perfect system.
There were many good follow-on effects of this system. If you wanted to see a character played, you posted about it and someone could try it without much in the way of investment. So you saw characters played that had rarely been played before. You could express clearly what you wanted from the character and everyone could see it. You could instantly put a team of 4-5 characters together, have a rollicking adventure, then high five and move on to a different situation.
It didn't last and it didn't spread. Most superhero places these days are still asking you to write long backgrounds (instead of linking to someone else writing the background) and traits. It's boring and pointless when you didn't invent the character, their background or traits - those all belong to Disney now so why pretend like I've got some control over it or that the staff does?
Even this is still a horrible basis for a game to me. I want some crunchy dice rolls or /something/ beyond taking what someone else has written and trying to RP out someone else's character.
Heck even FATE would be better than a system with no definition at all other than nothing much more than what amounts to AoL Chat RP.
At least that's how I view it. Some people like that style of thing, but I am one of those who want system other than handwavium.
-
@JDCorley said:
There were many good follow-on effects of this system. If you wanted to see a character played, you posted about it and someone could try it without much in the way of investment. So you saw characters played that had rarely been played before. You could express clearly what you wanted from the character and everyone could see it. You could instantly put a team of 4-5 characters together, have a rollicking adventure, then high five and move on to a different situation.
That sounds pretty fantastic, actually. Making people write a background for Hawkeye when there are a zillion official of them around is plain dumb. And doing soft resets on the character when he switches hands, given how fluid comic-book continuity is to begin with, should be a blessing - then if he had been sleeping with Black Cat all that time because fetish, well it's gone now when the new guy takes over.
No, it's a great concept.
-
This actually makes an.absurd amount of sense for a Superhero game.
-
This is why I think an Exiles-style game where people play exiles from different universes, sometimes even mish-mashed a la Amalgam would be great. Just only allow a certain number of "versions" of the same character (like only three Wolverines, or three Iron Men) at a time, give Storytellers the latitude to create, run stories in, destroy, and otherwise do whatever they want with parallel universes and worlds with their own continuity, and let people explore variations in theme and history for characters they like to play but may want to play differently.
I still want to play a Matt Murdock who gets runover by accident by the Waynes after his father is killed, adopted, and then he and Bruce are totally twinsiiiiiiiiiies.
Except Matt is Batman and Bruce is Daredevil. Or maybe Bruce dies and Matt is Devil-Bat.
Oh, how I miss the ham and cheese of the Amalgam universe. SIGH.
ETA: maybe Matt gets adopted by Bruce and he and Dick are twinsies instead, and then when Bane fucks Bruce up--on behalf of the Kingpin, why not!--Nightwing and Daredevil get into brotherly fights over who gets to be the next Batman and Matt is all, "I'M LITERALLY BLIND, HOW DO YOU EVEN HAVE AN ARGUMENT" and Nightwing's just like, "Oh Em Gee you've been playing the blind card since we were ten and it doesn't even actually affect you likeit does actual blind people you're the worst!"
-
@coin, fuck Eldritch make this happen.
I'm a rodeo clown.
-
"Excuse the hell out of you. He's a bag of dicks. I'm a carefully curated box of cocks." -- to @GirlCalledBlu upon being misrepresented.
-
@Coin said:
@tragedyjones said:
@coin, fuck Eldritch make this happen.
Will you be the Bruce/Dick to my Matt?
No. I don't much care for Batman or Daredevil...
I'm a rodeo clown.
-
@tragedyjones said:
@Coin said:
@tragedyjones said:
@coin, fuck Eldritch make this happen.
Will you be the Bruce/Dick to my Matt?
No. I don't much care for Batman or Daredevil...
Then why should I put any effort into this?
-
Because Heroes for Hire.
-
@Autumn You are pretty much on target with what the intent was. For example, you could say something like "I'm going to bounty hunt some bad guys while jumping off things on a motorcycle, and make out with a hot feller" and that is all the description you need. We're not talking about a list of scenes or anything.
-
The main reason I would be against a 30 day limit is that I need at least 3 to 5 scenes before I have a feel for the character, even if it is a published one I have followed for 30 plus years. These days 2 to 3 scenes a week is about my average so by the time I was comfortable with a character I was playing I could easily be halfway through the term I had as a player.
I can see a lot of upsides to the system but that right there would make me avoid it, since the same cost factors also go into getting th feel for a character on another game that I could hthen have also long as I wanted. -
I'm gonna pull a bit from my tangent in the SR thread, and what was one of the first mini-threads within this thread. Don't be afraid of code and automation. If you're smart in how you use it, and how it works into the framework of your game, it can be a great boon.
