Fading Suns 2017
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@HelloProject is right. I will say that this very perspective (or lack thereof) is what convinced me that pursuit of my non-WoD game was pointless. I mean, musoapbox is a good resource, there are very good people here... but it seems that WoD conversation gets orders of magnitude more attention than non.
I thought I was alone in that feeling.
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@HelloProject said in Fading Suns 2017:
If you want to do something, do it. Who cares if people on MU Soapbox won't play it, you can still get like 50-100 players without a single person in this area of the hobby wanting to play it.
I'd care because there are a lot of people on this board who: (A) don't play WoD games exclusively; (B) play in a lot of other genres; and (C) have experience and knowledge of issues that I may be unfamiliar with. If the concerns are great enough that someone won't play, I want to know the basis of their concerns because they may be legitimate.
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I'm more inclined to play a space game than a WoD game honestly. I know there are others. Sure WoD gets a lot of traction conversation wise but there were other games that got a lot of traction. The 100 got a lot of traction until it imploded, there's the BSG game, ARX, etc.
There's lots of desire for not WoD... please god not another WoD game lol.
Make what you like, make it good, get good involved staff, run things, it'll grow.
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I'd love an SF game.
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At the moment my wiki is f'ed up but Chime will get to updating it at some point and I can get all of that posted. Otherwise, I am working about on the Dune game. I won't really make any announcements about it though until I really know when it will open. Being out of country the last few years and working on graduate work has really stifled it. Lets hope I can get it going this summer.
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@Ataru Does that mean we can ride sand worms?
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@HelloProject If you play Fremen yes.
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Can I play a firemen woman who was stolen by the Benefit Gesseritt and has returned? Because it's too cool to not play a prodigal daughter of such a wild world, who must return to stills units and leave the silks and satins behind.
Oh wait wrong game. Hmm Fading sun's, not quite as intruiging but close enough to dune -
Interesting correctos.
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@Ataru said in Fading Suns 2017:
@HelloProject If you play Fremen yes.
Gordon Fremen?
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Look, just start building the game and invite people to play while it's being built. It will either explode in popularity, or just explode. Either way means that you either didn't waste any time or didn't waste too much time, and everyone got some well-needed fun in the process.
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Case in point, Star Crusade, which launched with serious issues hanging over from previous games, no systems in place, no wiki, etc, just a grid and some cool theme write ups on the website. It did not even have coded character generation.
The game then exploded, before imploding, but the interest absolutely is there. Even with such a bare bones set up the game was hitting 50+ average separate players connected during peak times within 2-3 months of opening.
On which note I do have some maps/theme stuff written up for a Fading Suns MUSH and also a paid up MUSHPark server, so if anyone is serious about wanting to run such a game I am happy to help and also keep the lights on.
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It would have helped if Firan players weren't OOCly trying to dick each other over and pretty much hijacked the game with their bullshit.
And also that it wasn't run by a literal plot thief.
Otherwise, Star Crusade had everything going for it.
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I do not know, I mean the 'there was no character generation' thing was fairly horrific. Staff hand statted characters, there was no standard system for this meaning it varied wildly on 1) Which staffer, 2) Their current mood 3) A completely obscure combination of how much the player hyped their character's abilities in their background coupled with their age and even their description. Certain staffers adamantly refused any efforts to 'balance' this! They wanted some characters to be utterly pointless whilst others were huge badasses. 4) This took fucking forever and meant staff were not doing anything else, also burnt out.
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@HelloProject said in Fading Suns 2017:
It would have helped if Firan players weren't OOCly trying to dick each other over and pretty much hijacked the game with their bullshit.
And also that it wasn't run by a literal plot thief.
Otherwise, Star Crusade had everything going for it.
It wasn't 'The Firan players.' Custodius was someone Paulus knew from long beforehand on prior FS games, and the fact that he happened to have joined on Firan in the meantime was pretty irrelevant. Plenty of us came from Firan who were not total dickholes (even if you want to include me as a total dickhole). Despite Paulus' claim that the old problem people would be on some kind of careful probation, Custodius got not just a Count, but a Count who was closely tied to the vastly more powerful NPC villains (and thus immune to them attacking, like they did to everyone else) while simultaneously being the son of the Top Leader Guy of the PCs. So there were some very unrelated to Firan issues there.
But you know what? That wasn't even the big problem. The amount of damage Custodius did... was pretty minor? Like, I can't think of much he actively did, beyond not getting fucked over the way everyone else got fucked over. The favoritism was obvious, he got plot focus, no real threats internal or external like everyone else did, but that was about it. Aside from self-aggrandizement, he didn't DO much.
The actual problem was simply Paulus and Lextius' staffing of the overarching military plot, which involved a lot of lack of clarity, arbitrary decisions, and things almost always going badly for the PCs no matter how well we planned, what stuff we had, etc. And as much as they were assholes (or at least definitely Paulus), I won't even put it all on malice. That's the kind of fallacy we get into as MUers, assuming evil intent where stupidity and shitty staffing is usually 99% to blame for everything. They weren't sure of the numbers, weren't sure how different toys would actually work in practice (hence the issues dealing with Antonio's assault lander or Hassan's artillery thing that could literally shoot the entire map). It was always the standard 'GM upset that their stuff gets solved too easily' response: 'Oh, you have this toy that makes our threat trivial?' 'It doesn't work for some reason.' 'Oh you finally won a decisive battle? You get betrayed and the battle causes no meaningful casualties so its a net loss.'
So that was the big problem. That, and how Paulus was more interested in doing his private Jakovian demon TS plots with all the female Decados players than actually running a game
Every other criticism, valid or not, was no more than standard MU BS, people bitching and sniping and whining about wronfun RP or so and so having better toys.Yeah, maybe @Apollonius shouldn't have been given a leader either, or Antonio was a twink-statted god compared to everyone else, or there was a Sexy Party once in the middle of a WAR!?!?!, or X or Y Count had too many OOC friends in faction Z (everyone was equally guilty of this)? All of that stuff was pretty minor compared to the war staffing. And it's stuff we see on every game.
So.... I don't see any reason not to do another one. The interest is there. Just don't be Paulus, don't hand out a bunch of twink-statted counts (at least without people paying for the titles like the rules say you do), and you'll probably have a game.
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@bored More than likely someone could do away with all the special stuff priests, psi and magic users in general have and make a straight up, super gritty, super bloody space fantasy* game.
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@deadculture I mean, I have no issue either way. The special stuff is fine as long as people are paying for it in cgen, which is exactly the same issues for Psis, Nobles, etc in FS. Granted it might not all be balanced, but at least normally if you're not getting that fancy garbage you're getting extra tours etc to make up for it.
But I agree any space fantasy thing could probably work. FS is just Dune + 40K. So you could do Dune (as mentioned) or 40K (in any of its many varieties - I got to play some Deathwatch recently in my VTT and had fun burninating heretics) or whatever. Unique theme generic FS3 wouldn't even bother me that much, beyond the usual system gripes that a half-decent coder could probably fix.
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@bored That and Paulus literally stealing plots from multiple people.
And there were definitely entire groups of Firan people secretly plotting to dick each other over because they hated each other on Firan. This was a literal thing that was happening behind the scenes and was kept pretty well hidden. I didn't even know wtf the drama was even about, because I didn't play Firan, but I know for 100% sure due to multiple people's expressed intent, that this was going on.
Watching people pretend to like each other OOCly in order to get into the position to ICly fuck them over because they actually OOCly hate them was some pretty sociopathic shit. Can't imagine what the behind the scenes were like on Firan >_>.
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@HelloProject
My point isn't that it didn't happen, it's that it was nothing special compared to any other game, including every WoD game ever. People play with their friends (shocking) and when the setting includes hierarchical political divisions and PvP, you naturally get people teaming up with their friends to fight their other groups of friends. That will and does happen 110% of the time, it wasn't anything special on the game or what killed it. Like, name something along those lines that killed the game.
I'm guessing you can't. Because what killed the game in the long run wasn't any of the petty PvP politics stuff (arguably, that actually kept it going, or at least active - do you remember the 10 hour council meetings?). It was the war shit. I quit after I gathered like a huge coalition to win that big battle... and then had him pull off the 'betrayal' thing (that we actually saw coming and made precautions against, but he just ignored those) along with then declaring the big battle meaningless and nothing gained by winning it. Antonio got tired of having to fight the entire Kurgan fleet solo while it blissfully sailed past the capital, Custodius' shit, etc and basically took the longest possible path possible to attack him directly. I dunno exactly why @Apollonius quit (or I forget) but I assume it had to do with some of the same military issues (I was his vassal) and lack of any ability to really move forward with his Jakovian shit because, you know, Paulus was too busy TSing in the 'White Room.'
People mostly gave up because the war stuff was uneven, unfun, unpredictable, and ultimately seemed unwinnable, except when it was a total cake walk. It was just not that fun after a while.
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@bored I don't know about "any other game", since that shit seems pretty unique to WoD and that specific Fading Suns game, and I'm assuming Firan.
That was some toxic shit of the highest caliber and is in no way normal nor should it even remotely be considered normal.
I can't comment on the war stuff since I wasn't involved in that part of the game, aside from the plot I got stolen wholesale from me.
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Sociopathy was not in any way unique to the Firan players, although, yes, to thrive in Firan you must have had a modicum of sociopathic behavior or you'd get the stick more often than not. Nevertheless, what killed SC was inconsistency, and the seeming casual abandoning of certain plots.
Does anyone remember the 'chocolate mousse' incident?
