Fires of Hope: A Star Wars Story
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Perhaps in your shoes, I would think that, too... but it's not the case. If my information has been more general than specific, it is largely because it's been years since some of those events happened. It is presented as a warning to players and potential players, and not an attempt to ruin their fun.
As for the game, I haven't played or even visited it, so I only know of one person who is staffing there, which I learned through posts here. Given that it's a SAGA game, I doubt I ever will look into it. But I bear Hssiss himself no ill will, and if he has put together a game that people are playing and enjoying, without the problems that plagued the last two SW SAGA games of his that I played on (one of which was Star Wars: Dark Times, just for clarity's sake; the other was Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic), I wish him well. Dark Times was an unpleasant experience all around, which is one of the reasons that the initial post threw up warning flags for me. The issues that killed that game deserve to be avoided, and it sounds like they are taking some steps to do that. Bravo.
Hssiss was known to hang out with a group of other game players/runners that were involved with those other two games; they tended to move as a group, with others sometimes getting involved over the history of the games in question. Two of those staff were particularly problematic, in both those games and other games, both older and newer. Current names are impossible to give, as they changed them every time they went to a new MUSH, but they moved as a pair, usually took jobs as facheads over two major factions at war with one another, and catered heavily to one another's alts in one another's factions to facilitate advancement, all to achieve dominance of their respective factions (on one game, one of them routinely PKed potential rivals to her position, on a game with little to no PVP as a general rule). They tended to play favorites among players in their orgs, to the point of excluding other players from RP and/or advancement through various means (forced lesser rank/status in orgs they controlled, no opportunity for advancement allowed for various reasons, allowing advancement only through RP that they alone judged, etc.).
There was more, and worse, and I regret that I can't call more of it to mind right now. At one point they were poaching players from Star Wars: Unsung Heroes, where they had once worked as staff, via a coded message that popped up when a new player connected, stating that UH was not very active and suggesting that they visit Star Wars: Generations, their own game, and provided contact information for that game. Some time later, likely not long after Generations closed, one of them lost a staffbit on Star Wars: Generations of Darkness for an unspecified offense (only the second staffer to lose a bit in this way, and likely for similar offenses), and they both quit the game immediately after. I lost track of them after that, but I hope very much that they are not involved in this new game of Hssiss's, for the sake of the game and the players.
As for SAGA, it is a separate matter; I hate it because of what it is, and what it brings to a MUSH. It's not terribly relevant to my point, however, because there have been more SAGA MUSHes than the ones Hssiss has been involved in, and it is possible to have a successful SAGA MUSH, no matter how I may feel about the system. Mostly I've addressed others' comments about the system because I was wondering how much they agreed with my own experiences with it. Thank you to anyone who has spoken up about this.
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@Ganymede said in Fires of Hope: A Star Wars Story:
@Warlander said in Fires of Hope: A Star Wars Story:
So plan carefully and do lots of system research if you want to play a Force User. Or anything else, really, since the system seems to demand great attention to detail.
This is what sort of put me off of SAGA. I literally spent hours and hours to make a PC, and, in the end, still overlooked some parts of her.
There are also a number of people who are very knowledgeable about Saga who are quite happy to help out with Chargen, from doing a sanity check at the end to building an example of what the character might look like based on what you've described to them and then providing it for you to tweak as you like.
One anti-twink benefit of Fires of Hope is that there are no rolled scores. All ability scores for all PCs are done with a 30-point build, so you don't have to worry about running into someone who rolled a 55-point build (as happened back on KotOR, and probably Dark Times too).
There is definitely some twinkery, but honestly, knowing that you don't have to compete with a min-maxed Jedi actually takes some of the edge off--when you don't have to squeeze in every +1 to try to get past a Block or Deflect lets you actually spread your character out a little and breathe. Like I said, there's definitely some twinkery--there are a couple of melee folks who absolutely murder any low-level competition in particular.
@Warlander It sounds like you've had problems with myself and my wife (Bantha and Twirrl on KotOR), but that you've also conflated us with other people. I can assure you that while we both play on Fires of Hope, I am not a Staffer, and she is only in charge of the Wiki and building, as noted earlier in the thread. I don't want to distract too far from discussion of Fires of Hope, but many of your accusations are simply untrue (there was a single PK by her on KotOR, for instance (edit: Sorry, two, I was just reminded, one was pretty unavoidable with a non-Force User threatening her Sith Lord and refusing ICly and OOCly to be imprisoned)), while others may be a matter of point of view. Additionally, neither of us has ever been on Unsung Heroes, and Generations of Darkness was certainly not our game (that would have been Kitty and Ataru)--I staffed there briefly before leaving the game amicably.
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In terms of Star Wars SAGA I really wish someone who wasn't Vaapad would do an Old Republic game.
You can pretty much play any crazy thing you can dream up. No weird restrictions due to theme or a convoluted notion of theme.
Everyone has access to an endless source of conflict and no type of story could ruin the delicate balance of oppressive Empire and struggling Rebellion. The conflict is an actual faction rather than something like the Borg or the Taung or the Yuuzhan Vong.
High point buy. The option of a prestige starting level.
<wistful sigh>
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I go the other direction. I say LEGACY ERA.
- PLENTY of Sith
- For the Yuuzhan-Vong haters, they live in secret ghettos and are universally hated
- Imperial Knights for the win
I don't wanna step aside from this game's advertisement, though. Seems to be a lot of great people at Fires and you should check it out. Seems one of the better SW offerings I've seen in a while, and I think the early days of the Rebellion is a good, lesser-touched setting.
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This looks like a fun game. SAGA is a bit complex but you start at level 4 so it shouldn't be a problem. I've never really seen a game that only had Rebellion and Civilian factions and was based on a single planet; that should be interesting. The conflict will mostly be with NPC Imperials and between the Rebel factions, one of which is regular rebels, the other being a more extreme mercenary element like Saw Gerrera in the most recent Rogue One movie.
I don't know why this guy is crapping on it in the advertisement thread. Obviously he has incorrectly conflated staffers here with staffers who did something like 10-15 years ago (Unsung Heroes was at least a decade+ ago, who remembers this crap?)
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@GentlemanJack said in Fires of Hope: A Star Wars Story:
This looks like a fun game. SAGA is a bit complex but you start at level 4 so it shouldn't be a problem. I've never really seen a game that only had Rebellion and Civilian factions and was based on a single planet; that should be interesting.
I haven't played on Star Wars games much but in the little that I did it sounded really counter-productive to have the playerbase fragmented in so many ways; having a bunch of different planets and two major factions which essentially can't interact with each other most of the time without it coming to violence seemed like a bad idea.
IMHO this is a good approach, at least on paper.
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I'm kind of curious about why other options were open if they wanted to do it as a spy focused rebel game? Like, I remember when X-Men Movieverse became X-Factor, so they shifted focus of the game onto a single organization. I think it worked very well. That's probably all they have to do if they wanted to start again.
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If you want a single-focus game, you have to be pretty hardcore about telling players to app within that focus (I have learned this lesson from frustrating past experience). I personally don't see this as limiting. It's being clear about the kind of stories you'd like to tell and what you'd like to provide for players. I don't actually like games that try to be ALL THE THINGS and, unless they have a huge playerbase, I feel like that attitude becomes self-defeating.
