Space Lords and Ladies

[Ganymede]

@Derp said:

If you want to make a Lords and Ladies in Space game that still has some action and appeal or whatever, consider making a game set in the Pitch Black universe. Necromongers game could be pretty awesome.

That's low-science-fiction-fantasy. And it's pretty awesome. Also, take inspiration from the Aliens series.

[Derp]

@Ganymede said:

Aliens

Seriously, that's pretty much all you need to say to get my interest. Such a fanboy.

[Misadventure]

Well, the Alien franchise does have a Queen. I am not sure if I would call her a Lady though.

Insert image of xenomorph wearing Elizabethan finery, ruff included.

[Ganymede]

@Misadventure

This picture is my response to you:

[Misadventure]

@Ganymede OMG, you are such the stickler! FINE. Lord it is.

[Vorpal]

Inviting the queen for tea is a major faux pas. They don't do too well with dainty teacups.

[Packrat]

Witness the terrible majesty of my spreadsheet based economy system drafting!

[bored]

@Packrat

You're obviously TSing yellow, look at all that shit they get.

[Packrat]

@bored said:

@Packrat

You're obviously TSing yellow, look at all that shit they get.

Yellow's player is just great at creating RP and has worked hard for all of that.

[Misadventure]

Yellow YOLO
Don't know how you do the voodoo that you do
So well it's a spell, hell, makes me want to

[Ghost]

I'd hate to be the naysayer (I'm not trolling, I swear), but this is an awful lot of detail and work to go through for a player base of LordsAndLadies players whose main interest (as it usually is on all of their games) is to find and maintain TS.

Sure, you might capture 3-5 players who are really into the theme and space combat, but dozens of LaL games have shown that the plot falls by the wayside in favor of TS, safe (non character threatening) roleplay usually involving romance, and a metric fuuuuuuckton of ball/coffee/tea/nightclub scenes.

You can come up with an amazing idea, systems, theme, combat, maybe even a new codebase, but at the end of the day, the MU community rarely changes. Every new game will draw in the same crowd (plus or minus the people who decide they can't join the game because of some ancient feud against a staffer or another player) to take a peek. The LaL frequent flyers that are on every other LaL game will come to take a peek, and their characters will fall under the same boundaries of behavior that they partook in on their other two-dozen LaL characters: To seek and maintain TS, safe roleplay, and a metric fuuuuuuuckton of nightclub/tea/ball/banquet scenes.

You're better off using an already existing codebase (FS3), speed-creating a wiki, and hoping that whatever detail you've put into the theme enraptures at least ten people enough to participate in the core metallic while your 20+ other players continue to do the same shit they do on every other LaL game.

In short? Don't overdo it. It's not worth the effort given the shelf life of most MUs nowadays.

[Misadventure]

Oh you can totally entangle players in a variety of progression/investment/reward schema as long as you link what they want to do to what they have to do, and what they are rewarded with.

[Ghost]

@Misadventure not to be contrarian, because I love your opinions, but in my experience if you require players to jump through hoops to get their TS, they will simply do it anyway, or vacate for a place that won't make them justify their TS.

You see, it is my opinion that on most MUs, TS>Plot for most players. Ive seen hundreds of players quit plot, or games altogether, due to a lack of TS. So the trick is convincing people to partake in RP and plot alongside their usage of mushing as a terrycloth monkey that is providing them sexy relationship time not present in RL. To convince some players to set aside their hunt for attention and/or sympathetic romantic roleplay, you've got to make it worth their while, and most people are NOT lacking complication in their lives...which is why TS wins.

Like I said, I don't mean to be a troll, I just feel that it's better to understand the hobby's player base before exhausting onesself on hectic coding endeavors.

[Apos]

@Ghost I don't really think it's so much player bases as the way a lot of games are designed. It's not so much that there's very few players interested in deeply plot driven stories or intricate themes or anything like that compared to a huge amount that want to ignore it for TS, in my opinion. It's that the former is very reliant on GMs and highly active staff or an incredible code base to keep active, while the later is like, 'Well. Nothing's going on. Guess time to make our own fun' which will inevitably happen in between stories or when waiting on GM responses.

YMMV, but I met very few people that were like, 'Just going to ignore everything going on in the game to have my social rp with the one person I like' and a ton that just did that while waiting on things to happen. I can think of, I dunno, maybe 40 or 50 players I know in the later camp and I think that'd be enough for me to get a game going.

[Misadventure]

@ghost I am wire ST who gives baby-objects.

[Ghost]

@Apos I've been on a number of LaL games and I've been privy to a bunch of side-pages from players about how staff hold them back or will get involved with plot if it doesn't change their character without approval. Perhaps it's the group of people I came across as opposed to yours, but a lot of people I knew on the LaL circuit were very focused in their "LordA-and-LadyB" story. For them, THAT was the story on the game; the story they were the star of, and they guarded those relationship arcs so vehemently to the point of roleplaying them in secret, lest anyone tell them ICly that they couldn't take place.

[faraday]

@Ghost said:

You see, it is my opinion that on most MUs, TS>Plot for most players.

With the exception that I would say 'romance' rather than limiting it to TS, I tend to agree. Even on the Battlestar games, which had a heavy action-adventure bent and plots constantly, the vast majority of RP was around relationship drama. Nothing wrong with that, but I think you ignore that status quo at your game's peril.

[Kanye Qwest]

So pardon my hobby ignorance, here, but what exactly qualifies a game as a "Lords and Ladies" game?

[Misadventure]

A game where the spotlight characters are all privileged enough to afford all sorts of trappings of wealth to enable and augment their romance, marriage, babies play arcs.

I see it as a play style, agenda, or goal, and for those who hold it, the rest of the game are interesting intrusions of background events and people (some of the time) that aid in the sense that they aren't just completely playing out things per their whims.

[Ghost]

@Kanye-Qwest Think Game of Thrones. Lordly Houses, their children, knights, and house retainers, and their alliances/Wars/politics for or against other lordly houses. Usually set to the backdrop of some war where X number of houses unite to fight y number of other houses.

However, the term Lords and Ladies also implies the style of roleplay: Make a Lord from "House A" that is attractive and popular, meet a Lady from "House B" who is attractive and popular, and get her heels into the air a lot.