What RPG SYSTEM do you want to play on a Mu*?

golgoth

Hah, all my original statement was going to do is restate what you said. He meant well, bit was mostly just him running, I believe.

When I was around, I think it peaked at about 20 players, but mostly stuck around that 5 mark.

Songtress

Scion 2nd Edition when it comes out ( admitedly more the fluff the crunch, at least until I get confirmed ness with release the crunch has been improved.).

But honestly OVA revised.

Also barring that a :Lords of Gossamer and Shadow MU* (but that'd be bad ass, game). Though if I did that it might end up like Road To Amber. (The system is neat, but overly complex)

Kumakun

Zombie thread! I was about to post something similar and stumbled upon this topic!

I have shelves dedicated to systems that I thought might survive the RP heavy persistent world environment of a MU*. I've always been curious to see what people want to be translated onto online for their games to use as a code library or something.

I have a few systems that have been sitting on my back burner for a while now:

Cortex/Cortex+/Cortex Prime - The original Cortex is fun, but much more rules heavier than the later generations. I wonder though if +/prime are /too/ rules light for the community, which leads me into:

FATE Core/Accelerated - I really /really/ love the concept of Fate. I've heard though, through from a few people who've experienced MU* play with the system that it requires a pretty heavy Staff presence to keep the Fate Point economy going. I'm not sure if that's ideal for a game with a small staff and large player base if the game were to become popular.

Chaosium Basic RPG - I really like this system. The player exposed mechanics are simple, d100 skill resolution with 'training' based increases and a pretty simple to understand D&D standard-ish naming convention. Conflict resolution in the book happens in a 'resistance matrix table' (a simple formula basically), but that's easily coded and interfaced for end-user experience.

surreality

The answer you probably know I'm going to give you, Theno: one designed explicitly for MU and not tabletop.

The conditions at a table and on a MU have enough significant and impactful differences that, over time, this has become increasingly obvious as one of the main issues for games based on an existing tabletop system.

Additionally, it means all documentation for the game can be made available on the game itself or its wiki or ideally both, without any concerns about copyright or nastygrams from game companies, etc.

Misadventure

I think that "system" means very little in an online setting. It's a decent way to describe a setting, comparing this to that so the players have an idea of how to describe something.

Read the description of games, they almost always come down to "we use randomness to represent unpredictability". That unpredictability is did you succeed or fail, which is very little like the unpredictability that makes stories or life interesting. I think players would be better served by something that says "this goes in an unexpected direction" and either provides or inspires the creation of a prompt that changes the presented situation.

I think routine is a great setup for change, or as a framework for presenting character or setting. Stumbling and waltzing on a track full of gates of success or failure is filler. It's leveling in an MMO, inevitable, unstoppable, and without meaning.

I'd like to think Players want prompts to act, to do something big or unexpected, to have to think in ways beyond black and white as the "interesting/complicated" moments of play.

Thenomain

@kumakun

Why Cortex and not Savage Worlds?

ZombieGenesis

I'd been severely tempted by some of the following Call of Cthulhu 7E, City of Mists, D&D 5E, Savage Words(Fantasy, RIfts, or Superhero), the new Star Trek RPG, and most recently Shadowrun Anarchy. There are also some more fringe games I would have loved to have explored on a MUX including Palladium's TMNT RPG and the old school Ghostbusters RPG.

Wizz

I've said it a few times over the years, but my dream:

God Wars 2's map/movement and combat systems, integrated with like an RPI's social systems. Change the mechanics behind progression and powers and skills and whatnot to fit whatever theme, you could make it modern-day or fantasy, it would be really versatile and fun.

Ganymede

@surreality said in What RPG SYSTEM do you want to play on a Mu*?:

The answer you probably know I'm going to give you, Theno: one designed explicitly for MU and not tabletop.

Honestly, the dream has been to code in a hack for World of Darkness' lines. And, honestly, FS3 is what I've been eye-balling.

Thenomain

@zombiegenesis

Do you think City of Mists would be sustainable? The front loading of keeping things balanced, a typical Fate Core problem, feels exacerbated here.

faraday

I don't know if it counts as a "RPG System", but I find Storium's mechanic to be pretty interesting: You have a fixed number of Strength and Weakness cards that you can play on challenges.

What I like:

Each card propels the challenge towards a conclusion that furthers the story in some (hopefully interesting) way. It's not just "Oh, you failed? You die."
You're compelled to spend your Weakness cards eventually because you have a limited number of cards in your "hand" and they don't refresh until almost all of them are gone.

What I don't like, though:

The challenge outcomes are railroaded into "weak", "neutral" or "strong" outcomes, so it's not as freeform as most MU situations.
Cards are not rated, so you can't have two people with a "Strong" card and still have one of them be stronger than another.
When your hand runs low, sometimes you're arbitrarily limited in how you can respond to situations. Like, you think this would be the perfect chance to show off your "Stubborn" weakness, but crap - you already played that card.

So it's not a perfect system, but I think aspects of it would be interesting to adopt to a MU game.

ZombieGenesis

@thenomain I think it could be if you have the right setup. I think you'd have to set certain expectations with players. The funny thing is both City of Mists and Worlds in Peril are kind of setup for how MUers RP, freeform RP anyway. They just create light skeletal frameworks so you know the limits and abilities of your character. Even so, I shied away from doing both because of how easily it would be for a player to abuse said systems.

That said, I think it could be sustained. Sure. Modern-day noir fantasy, the possibilities for stories is limitless. I think you'd just have to set the expectation that your character won't change too much once you've made it through c-gen. Not on the level of a WoD or D&D game I don't think anyway.

Kumakun

@thenomain said in What RPG SYSTEM do you want to play on a Mu*?:

@kumakun

Why Cortex and not Savage Worlds?

Because I've been doing a lot of talking about Supernatural recently. Honestly, I haven't read Savage Worlds in years. If I remember correctly, it had a card-based combat system like Deadlands. I wasn't sure how well that would translate into MU* play. Savage Worlds: Rifts recently came across my radar though, which has been tempting me to read the system again to see how it's changed.

Apos

@wizz said in What RPG SYSTEM do you want to play on a Mu*?:

I've said it a few times over the years, but my dream:

God Wars 2's map/movement and combat systems, integrated with like an RPI's social systems. Change the mechanics behind progression and powers and skills and whatnot to fit whatever theme, you could make it modern-day or fantasy, it would be really versatile and fun.

I'm going to need to read up more about this since it's piqued my curiosity, I keep seeing mud players mention God Wars and it seems to have a devoted following

surreality

@ganymede said in What RPG SYSTEM do you want to play on a Mu*?:

@surreality said in What RPG SYSTEM do you want to play on a Mu*?:

The answer you probably know I'm going to give you, Theno: one designed explicitly for MU and not tabletop.

Honestly, the dream has been to code in a hack for World of Darkness' lines. And, honestly, FS3 is what I've been eye-balling.

This is more or less the antithesis of my dream.

Sooner or later, someone's going to get litigious or bitchy about the amount of content replicated on games or wikis.

People have to acquire books and learn a truly staggering number of nebulously worded mechanics that can be interpreted by reasonable people in a variety of ways and house-rule the hell out of a great many things to clarify, let alone adapt.

I love the concept, the setting is great, but it's designed for tabletop, and the problems that arise when not in a tabletop setting are far too significant for me to want anything to do with WoD games these days, unless they are tabletop games (or small online tabletop games on roll20 or similar).

Ganymede

@surreality said in What RPG SYSTEM do you want to play on a Mu*?:

People have to acquire books and learn a truly staggering number of nebulously worded mechanics that can be interpreted by reasonable people in a variety of ways and house-rule the hell out of a great many things to clarify, let alone adapt.

See, what I meant was that the adaptation would substantially narrow the scope of what each power could or would do. Specifically, I was thinking that Vampire could be adapted to FS3's mechanics with a lot of tinkering.

Why the hell would I want to do that, right?

Because the World of Darkness is an interesting concept and setting. The Vampire world presented in Old World of Darkness has all sorts of lovely permutations in it.

Sure, there will be purists who will scoff at how limiting that might be. And there will be people griping about how all of the intricacies and nuances of powers like Dominate and Presence may be reduced to mere bonuses to actions. I get that; I do.

But these are pretend-fun-time games. That's the strength of MUSHing, and what separates it from MMORPGs and MUDs. We have to presume that players are going to be interested in playing make-believe. And, if that's the case, all that you really have to do is describe what a certain level in Dominate or Presence can allow a character to do and create a mechanical roll for it. Faraday's code does the second part very well, so all that matters is how well one does the first part.

faraday

@ganymede said in What RPG SYSTEM do you want to play on a Mu*?:

And, if that's the case, all that you really have to do is describe what a certain level in Dominate or Presence can allow a character to do and create a mechanical roll for it. Faraday's code does the second part very well, so all that matters is how well one does the first part.

I applaud the concept of making a "WoD Lite" for MUSHing, but FS3 is really probably not the right vehicle for it. It is scaled for mortal conflict, and once you go beyond the "best of human ability" level, the dice just get silly and your rating 20 vampire is really not much better than your rating 13 vampire. Plus it has zero concept of "powers" built in. Even if you went to the considerable trouble to add that, using powers to augment abilities (as many WoD powers work) again runs into the same dice issue as the 20/13 example. So I really just don't think the math works.

Genesys' traits system or Cortex's assets system both would probably model super powers better - and both are provided (in minimal form, at least) as AresMUSH plugins.

Ganymede

@faraday said in What RPG SYSTEM do you want to play on a Mu*?:

It is scaled for mortal conflict, and once you go beyond the "best of human ability" level, the dice just get silly and your rating 20 vampire is really not much better than your rating 13 vampire.

I know. But, as you've told me before, you're working on a basic package, and a skilled coder can adjust it as needed. I'm counting on the latter to assist.

For example, if you limited the available ratings on Action Skills and Attributes to 5, the maximum human ability for, let's say, Melee would be 10. If your Vampire had Potence 5 (with Potence being coded in as another Action Skill), the combat engine could be adjusted so that it adds a PC's Potence rating to Melee attacks, and, in turn, bend the odds in favor of a vampire expert against a mortal expert substantially. Celerity could be added to opposing defense rolls to make vampires harder to hit than mortals. And Fortitude could be added to armor to make vampires tougher to kill.

It's just a thought for the moment. I had more thoughts on a game like Final Fantasy adapted to FS3, which may be more interesting and productive. I've a jumble of notes at home.

Plus it has zero concept of "powers" built in. Even if you went to the considerable trouble to add that, using powers to augment abilities (as many WoD powers work) again runs into the same dice issue as the 20/13 example. So I really just don't think the math works.

Wizz

@apos said in What RPG SYSTEM do you want to play on a Mu*?:

@wizz said in What RPG SYSTEM do you want to play on a Mu*?:

I've said it a few times over the years, but my dream:

God Wars 2's map/movement and combat systems, integrated with like an RPI's social systems. Change the mechanics behind progression and powers and skills and whatnot to fit whatever theme, you could make it modern-day or fantasy, it would be really versatile and fun.

I'm going to need to read up more about this since it's piqued my curiosity, I keep seeing mud players mention God Wars and it seems to have a devoted following

GWII itself is suuuuuuper grindy, but the aforementioned systems are really cool.

Combat is AP-based and built around combos, unlocked by different styles that have special moves and such and it's a lot of fun; it's worth making a quickstart character and just trying it out.

Haven

Something in space.