MUs That We Would Love To Make (But Won't)
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@wizz
A war.
A revolution or rebellion.
The rise or fall of an empire.
Diplomatic relations and allies.
The arrival of magic.
The conflicts between conspiracies.
A change in technology, or economics sources.
The economic and social changes of a society.
Being conquered/invaded.
Building up a military force, a township, a new state.
Shifting alliances of a senate, Merchant Houses.Probably more than one of those at a time.
It's a great deal of work, but I think the main barrier is that most players don't want an environment that can change significantly, especially if some of that will be not completely under their control (eg maybe they could mitigate a situation, but not control it completely. Maybe something bad happens to most or all, or a rival benefits more from something.) It wouldn't have to be fast change, but results would have to have weight.
I have a waggish sense of humor.
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Another barrier would be keeping everyone in the loop on what's actually happening. A lot of people don't read all the logs, for various reasons. I've long been an advocate of a 'scene summary' +bboard where you're encouraged to put up the cliffnotes of a finished scene (Character learned this, did this, developed X opinion of character Y, demolished an enemy convoy, etc) but staff never seems to like the idea when I pitch it. In fairness I don't know how many people would actually think to use it.
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@squirreltalk On TSS we do a "Reels and Radio" update every few weeks or a month that is a listing of major worldwide news items including major PC actions as well as events that can spark scenes (or at least brief discussions in scenes, like how The Hobbit came out during game-time). Pacha over on Crystal Springs does even more: a weekly update on all the gossip at the school. Unfortunately, you're right that it seems like a limited number of people contribute to such items/use them -- but there are Staffers who are interested in similar ideas.
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An example:
Players are vampires acting as patrons of a city or kingdom where there are other supernaturals. They deal vie for both survival and the direction of the place while dealing with and allying with outside forces.
The Birthright game setting.
A newish planetary colony as seen in Firefly, with or without off world influences. (Blue Planet could also work).
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In my experience, those never do the job. They rarely have OOC notes explicitly stating what potential RP/avenues of investigation have opened up, and they don't talk about PERSONAL things that happen with characters, just things that the public would know about.
If you know that a character has come away disliking an IC friend of your character, you might want to have a scene with them where your character learns that, and maybe tries to convince them otherwise or just argue with them or something. That's not going to make the IC news, you know what I mean?
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@misadventure said in MUs That We Would Love To Make (But Won't):
I think the main barrier is that most players don't want an environment that can change significantly
While I get that some folks would rather have more mutable settings, I don't think of it as a "barrier" in a negative sense, but rather a guardrail.
MUSHes are more like TV shows than most other forms of media. They're designed for longevity. For the good ones, careful attention needs to be paid to the elements of the setting that provide the fuel for the stories. Messing with those core underpinnings can blow up the entire show.
You don't often see TV shows make massive changes to their settings, and for good reason. Of course, when they do - it can be epic, but it's just so disruptive to storylines, sets, etc. that it has to be done carefully and deliberately. Not just because Bob the writer (or player, in the MU analogy) felt like doing something different on a boring Saturday.
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the wall, from solar opposites
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@squirreltalk I agree that the Reels and Radio example doesn't really fit what you're talking about, but Crystal Springs does a great job of this -- Pacha collects rumors from all sorts of folks via request, checks scenes themselves too, and then puts together a full group of rumors about RP that happened over the last week.
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Orpheus.
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@catsnake said in MUs That We Would Love To Make (But Won't):
Orpheus.
White Wolf Orpheus or some other Orpheus?
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@derp The former. I remember playing it when it released back on White Wolf's offical game/chat New Bremen many years ago.
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@catsnake said in MUs That We Would Love To Make (But Won't):
@derp The former. I remember playing it when it released back on White Wolf's offical game/chat New Bremen many years ago.
I'd be down for a good Orpheus game.
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A Star Wars game where no one is under 40. You lived through the collapse of the Empire and rebel or loyalist it sucked and you had to make it work and now the First Order is here and ugh, these fucking kids. While they go around having their climactic angst-ridden one on one battles or whatever you're out there keeping the galaxy running, thwarting evil, being evil, smuggling, trying to build something that's going to survive the god damn collapse of the First Order why do they keep thinking something better is going to come around maybe we should kill all the engineers that major in death stars.
Sure the kids have their showy battles, but you're doing the real quest work/world building.
And everyone can be jedis, whatever. Lightsabers for all!
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Or maybe a slightly-AU game where the Rebellion didn't manage to destroy the second Death Star and so the war went on for way, way longer than anyone expected, and simple attrition and a lack of new blood means there's only old grizzled guerilla fighters left in a losing battle?
GET A LIL GRIMDURK UP IN THOSE STARWERS
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@quinn said in MUs That We Would Love To Make (But Won't):
A Star Wars game where no one is under 40. You lived through the collapse of the Empire and rebel or loyalist it sucked and you had to make it work and now the First Order is here and ugh, these fucking kids. While they go around having their climactic angst-ridden one on one battles or whatever you're out there keeping the galaxy running, thwarting evil, being evil, smuggling, trying to build something that's going to survive the god damn collapse of the First Order why do they keep thinking something better is going to come around maybe we should kill all the engineers that major in death stars.
This idea is delightful to me, especially since the thrust of the movies the First Order appears in seems to be, "People would rather repeat history than learn from it."
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@quinn said in MUs That We Would Love To Make (But Won't):
Sure the kids have their showy battles, but you're doing the real quest work/world building.
Roll dice to see whether you affect the local, system, or galactic economy.
Gain XP through set-backs only or witty journal entries posted up for posterity.
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@greenflashlight Actually, there's some very valid in-canon reasons for the rise of the First Order. Sure, it's explained in the books, rather than the movies, but it's all still canon,
After the Rebellion defeats the Empire and establishes the New Republic, the model the new government on a highly de-powered central government. Think the Articles of Confederation after the Revolutionary War. The New Republic has little real power other than to settle disputes between the member systems. And military power rests with the individual systems protecting themselves. So, suddenly, there's a huge rise in piracy and organized crime without centralized military and law enforcement powers.
Some people in the Core Systems start saying, "Hey...sure, the Empire wasn't perfect, but at least I wasn't having to pay protection money to thelocal mob and my shipments were fairly safe from piracy..." Thus, the First Order faction was born out of a call for renewed power to the central government and a desire for law and order over freedom.
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I have but one desire, and that one desire is:
GRISHAVERSE.
Between the worldbuilding and the magic (ahem, small science tyvm) system, I think the play would be amazeballs.
