What MU*s do right

Catsmeow

In fact, I'm going to make a topic.

Post what a game did right. NOT A PERSON. No names just what was good about the game. No drama llamas or bad stuff.

Like Game XYZ had the best resource system because....

Doesn't matter if the headstaff TSed everyone and we all hate her. Just a list of good things we have seen. No sucking up. Just factual. Maybe we'll be able to coordinate that information to work on future games.

PS. Sorry if this might exist. I didn't see it but you know...

SG

Rifts Lost Dominion has a fantastic website CG. While I was going through it, I was wondering why that sort of thing is not more common.

Ganymede

Go to BSG: Unification. Check out the Ares system @Faraday did. Putting some work in to make a game unique is impressive, and I look forward to seeing what else she's got planned.

Then, go to the game. Check out the BBpost where @Faraday asks where the players think the campaign ought to go.

Also, check out the BBpost where @Faraday acknowledges the players that picked out dress uniforms for the various other military factions that existed before the Colonial Navy was formed.

What MU*s do right: asking for and, to some extent, following player input on things.

Any game resting solely on staff to invent and run things is going to flame out fast.

surreality

...I was just thinking about a thread like this for kudos for specific people, so much your way for this one, and I may be brave enough to do that later.

Reno1: Making a rule that said, in straightforward language, "Do not make staff care about your TS." This required a change to the way weresphere had been handled in 1e compared to 2e and was guesswork, but frankly, "Do not make staff care about your TS" is a rule I would really like to see propagate. I commend this rule heartily as it was very much a discouragement to starting drama on this subject, and that is very, very much worth all the internet hearts ever.

Shangrila: +kinks is a brilliant idea. Forget the content, because one could fill in whatever content they wanted into the code framework, and focus on the purpose. Giving people tools to help find exactly what they're looking for, and avoid the things that make them uncomfortable, entirely on their own, is genuinely helpful.

Ganymede

@surreality said in What MU*s do right:

... "Do not make staff care about your TS" is a rule I would really like to see propagate.

Talking about TS and propagation at the same time tickled me in a way that made me say oh yeah that's nice.

Arkandel

Arx. Their @randomscene take is very good; instead of giving a handout to new players' XP, they make them more desirable by basically enabling all newbies to give extra XP to those around them. Essentially every newbie is a walking nexus of RP as people flock to cash in.

It could use some tweaks - you can 'waste' your two weeks if you happen to not be very active right from the start, and people often went to newbies' scenes but didn't really do anything with them, for example - but it's still a stellar idea.

Meg

Arx: secrets and metaplot that is driven by interaction with the world and other players, rewards for RPing with newbies.

XMM: structure of plots that let players lead them and keep them organized. There would be a teamlead that would step up OOCly for that role and would keep things on track and moving forward. Professionalism of staff on a level I don't often see. (And as these people became like, my closest friends, I think this is going to come off biased, but seriously. Every staff interaction was very professional, transparent. What you saw was what you got; they didn't spill any staff information to outsiders. Every staff interaction was logged so every other staff knew exactly what happened; there couldn't be any staff-shopping.) They also adjusted staff interactions with feedback really quickly when a way they were handling something was coming off in a way they didn't mean.

Second Pass: the ability of the players to directly affect the world as it changed due to external forces as well. Both proactive and reactionary actions saw things happening to the world.

Bobotron

Multiverse Crisis: A guideline for creating/using the restat system to create your own NPC antagonists for plots without having to do anything other than reset your stats.

Transformers 2005: One of the best combat system upgrades, with a huge variety of status effects, enhancing the already-fun aspects of combat.

Heroes and Villains MUX: Trusting your players with huge amounts of power levels, without having to resort to a lot of extra 'scaling' rules or anything, on a trait-based system.

Requiem for Kingsmouth: An interesting Territory system, which granted not-insignificant benefits for controlling territory, as well as supporting and pushing status, even if it was fairly obtuse.

Jennkryst

Say what you will about voucher-based items, Shadowrun Denver has a highly nifty system. While players cannot themselves edit the items on them once they are created.... in chargen, you have the ability to make things like this:

========================> Item #1 for Aurelia (#1711) <========================
Item Name: Porche Winter
Quantity: 1.00
Cost Per Unit: 57500
-----------------------------> Item Description <------------------------------
Hand Speed Accel Body Armor Sig Auto Sensor CF Load
4/8 250 15 3 0 1 0 1 10 315

Seat Entry Fuel Tank Econ Chass ECM ECCM Cost
2* 2d+1t Gas 150l 5.40km/l Sport - - 83,000

Both Bucket Seats come with Advanced Passenger Protection Systems

Other Features
Turbocharging 2

... which looks much more impressive when the text is mono-spaced and lines up right. Also: colors.

Lotherio

I don't know, I'm a dork ... But Battletech 3065 was impressive. It only simulated mech battles. But you got into one object, a pod, loaded up a mech, then it put that on a grid. Basically it stored your mech stats and map in another object. Then coordinated a lot of players, 30+ in each battle in the big ones, to utilize basically 10-15 potential technical screens from map to your current hex to ammunition and you char sheet, while running a tic every second or two that updated your info and position fast enough for everyone to call on updated stats and positions every second.

Literally, one would call 5 screens every 10 second, many used the old multi Windows and stacking of clients to see them all at once instead of fast scrolling. All players doing this at once through the vast amount of data being updated and utilized at that speed was always impressive for a text based environment like a Mu*.

Whoever did those early Battletech maths did it right.

Jennkryst

@Lotherio said in What MU*s do right:

... Battletech

I've always kind of wanted a Mechwarrior RPG game with +sheets and +rolling and typical mush things... but with BT MUX type combat.

Lotherio

@Jennkryst said in What MU*s do right:

@Lotherio said in What MU*s do right:

... Battletech

I've always kind of wanted a Mechwarrior RPG game with +sheets and +rolling and typical mush things... but with BT MUX type combat.

This would be great, one or two tried in mid to late 90s, but low player base from what I recall. But I'd play this.

faraday

TGG's combat system, designed by @EUBanana, was amazing. The whole "high death toll" and "short campaigns with new chars each time" thing wasn't quite my cup of tea in many ways, but I loved it anyway. It was a unique game with a unique atmosphere that I haven't seen before or since.

Seraphim73

@faraday said in What MU*s do right:

TGG's combat system, designed by @EUBanana, was amazing.

Yeah, I've always been intensely curious as to how things worked behind the scenes (only having read a couple of logs). Looked like there was a whole lot going on (and maybe like FS3 was a 'simpler' version of this system?).

Jim Nanban

@Seraphim73 I've seen the code...

faraday

@Seraphim73 said in What MU*s do right:

Yeah, I've always been intensely curious as to how things worked behind the scenes (only having read a couple of logs). Looked like there was a whole lot going on (and maybe like FS3 was a 'simpler' version of this system?).

Yeah, there was a lot going on. It was real-time. You had to wait a number of RL seconds before you could move or act again. Poses had to be very short because if you took long to pose you'd miss your chance to act and probably die. Pose order? Pfft. You snooze, you lose - and probably die. The NPCs were real characters, which meant if you wanted to have a battle with 7 Turkish badguys against your PCs, you needed to have 7 MU* windows open.

And yeah like @Jim-Nanban says, the code is just.... WOW.

As an aside, I wouldn't say FS3 is a 'simpler version'. FS3's combat can trace its lineage back to Battlestar Pacifica and Babylon 5 MUSH before that - long before I'd ever played on TGG. That said, I'm sure TGG's system influenced later editions of FS3, at least sub-consciously.

SG

@faraday said in What MU*s do right:

You snooze, you lose - and probably die.

I still remember poor Lt. Pith taking one in the forehead while offline and 3 trenches away.

WTFE

United Heroes has managed to take a genre I'm usually a poor fit for and give me more laugh-out-loud fun RP in the past couple of weeks than I've had in the couple of months before it. Some of the things it gets VERY right are:

The scene system. It records poses (and only poses) and stores them for recollection later. It is, of course searchable. You can list scenes you own. Scenes you appear in with another person, or scenes in which two people have appeared. And once they get the wiki stuff integrated (the code has it; they haven't got the Wiki prepared yet) the scenes will be auto-posted to the wiki complete with tags naming people involved, and nicely formatted for the reader. Finally, scenes can be paused, relocated, and restarted at whim. And when you restart them, you can replay what happened before as a memory refresher.
+pot (POse Tracker). For those of us on unstable connections this is a Godsend. Oops. Disconnected. Need to reconnect. Takes a while. Instead of asking someone to page and/or repose what I missed, after figuring out what it is I missed in the first place, I type +pot and get the last few poses replayed for me. (Independent of scene. If I'm in a scene I could use +scene/recall for the same effect.)
Approvals. Ruby@United Heroes has stated that her official policy is to get the damned apps done as quickly as possible. This is to the point that she's frequently reading the apps as you go through the system and issue the commands. There have been times when people have submitted their apps, posted in +Public that they're now just awaiting approval -- and the approval announcement (on the bboard) was sneaked in BEFORE THEY SAID IT.
Approvals (redux). They have approved a lot of weird characters that at first blush don't seem to fit, but whose presence has made the place a hopping joint full of creative play. Kudos for not being The Comic Shop Guy when dealing with characters! The theme is magnificently eclectic and weird, and it gets more eclectic and more weird as time goes on ... and yet still hangs together.

Gilette

@WTFE

I really need to get over there! I just need to get my butt in gear!

Wizz

Devilshire's app process stuck with me back in the day because it was a delightful experience. I had worked really hard on the character's background, and while the staff had some (constructively) critical things to say about it before they set me loose, they started with "First of all, we love this."

I can't speak for anyone else's experience of the game and admittedly I had come in towards the end of its run when their volume had to be lower, but I had had character concepts and backgrounds I had been really passionate about before on other games and left CG feeling distinctly like staff had basically just run my BG through a spellchecker and done a mandatory "does this dude go on for three pages about clown rape" speed read before leaving a bland "ok go" job comment and throwing me to the wolves.

I really can't say enough about how appreciated it is as a player for staff to actually get involved if they ask for some sort of background. If you're going to ask for it on a game, do it because you genuinely enjoy reading other people's work and want to help them improve their craft, not because it's just a Thing Games Do.