POLL: Super Hero MU Gut Check
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All I want from a superhero MU is a clear creative vision.
If it's a DCU MU* make it about the DCU - put it in a somewhat specific point in continuity ("We're in early Rebirth") then chronicle what's going on IC as major things happen. If it's a hybrid between universes then write down an 101 ("we're doing MCU meets DCU when Superboy punched the wall between dimensions and...") to give the setting some degree of internal consistency.
I'm not very experienced with comic MU* but most seem quite sandbox-y and/or poorly documented - everything's up for grabs. What's the Avengers roster? Who knows! Is Robin a bratty kid or a quiet tactician? Yes! I think things need to be a bit more organised, at least for my tastes.
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I as a player would love a smaller roster. Set in NYC '(metropolis & 'Gotham') ect. Bu have it be a game of Young Justice style heros.
Nightwing, Robin ect..... Those types of smaller stories.
Have teams forming and growing, heros and villians a like.
That is my twos sense.
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I'll admit I'm going to be kind of an outlier, but I would prefer a focused theme for sure, but I'm not really a fan of using existing, or featured characters.
If something is using an established universe like say Marvel, and you're all in Hell's kitchen, I'd rather see a batch of newer heroes dealing with the struggles of being in a highly violent area, rather than having someone playing the Heroes for Hire or Daredevil.
Basically try and set up a challenge they all have to face... which admittedly makes mutants a good setting. No matter what you can do, you all have to face the same problem with constant attempts to make you register with the government, Sentinels, other asshats that resemble you blowing up city hall with their mind...
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@Ghost said in POLL: Super Hero MU Gut Check:
Don't give up hope on humanity versus We aren't going to wait to be placed into chains
#MutantLivesMatter.
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I'd also find a heroes mu game in which consent was not the system used for resolution of conflict attractive. Every single one is consent based meaning nothing bad happens unless someone chooses it too
Which to be honest most of the time the choice is made only to attain snowflake status for the day.
Due to consent I find a lot of hero mus become a situation of posing over the top of others rather than with others.
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@BobGoblin said in POLL: Super Hero MU Gut Check:
Due to consent I find a lot of hero mus become a situation of posing over the top of others rather than with others.
That's a bad players problem that you're attributing to systems. Believe me, it happens in non-consent, sheeted places too.
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In experience I find it to be more pervasive in purely non consent. This is called anecdotal evidence.
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I staffed and helped create focused, single-faction games with overarching and eventually seasonal metaplot from about 2009-2016. (X-Men Movieverse MOO had turned single-faction by the time I came back and started staffing, then Mass Effect: Alpha & Omega, then Transformers: Lost & Found, then X-Factor. The fact that there are two X-Men theme-based games in there is definitely an indicator of my support of mutants being awesome and fun for games.) It is a successful model for game creation. You start with the question of "why are the PCs interacting" and you build from there. The people I've created games with have always started asking questions early about how to focus theme, setting, and the grid itself so as to build in and maximize reasonable overlap of PCs. Thinking about ease of entry, ease of finding RP, ease of not having to try too hard to have reason to interact with other PCs, etc., are all questions to keep in mind very early in the game build process. Not to come in later when you've come up with most of your theme ideas. Use those question to help build your theme.
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@BobGoblin said in POLL: Super Hero MU Gut Check:
In experience I find it to be more pervasive in purely non consent. This is called anecdotal evidence.
in my experience, anecdotal evidence is silly and also you're still attributing a player problem to a system problem with no clearly defined (or even hypothesized) cause and effect.
#FreeFarfalla
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Oh shit. Are we about to get into an internet board logic contest? I love these things because I get to spend the rest of my day feeling like I wasted a shit ton of time. We really going to do this? You going to take he bait?
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@BobGoblin said in POLL: Super Hero MU Gut Check:
Oh shit. Are we about to get into an internet board logic contest? I love these things because I get to spend the rest of my day feeling like I wasted a shit ton of time. We really going to do this? You going to take he bait?
Seems to me like you're the one chomping at the hook.
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Of course. I'm stuck in development meetings for work and bored out of my mind. If I hate my life why not spread it?
HOWEVER, to clarify for the meg
I believe the reason I see this more prominent in consent games is because of the type of player that open systems appeals to. Again from experience, when there is no real risk of negative consequences other than self imposed ones it encourages a different mentality than one that has checks.
To further as I stated I'd like to see a heroes game that used some kind of system for checks rather than solely consent largely in part to see if it would alleviate this problem. So yes. It is a player issue but I believe it's a player issue because the system appeals to that sort of player.
In fact I'd be curious to see how much of our player base overlaps between pure consent and checked consent games.
In discussions with my circle of associates (I don't have friends clearly) about the topic of heroes mu the consensus with them is that the lack of structure system is a problem. This is both from people who play open consent heroes games and those who refuse to. So I'm not pulling this topic from my ass but rather bringing up something that I've had discussions with no less than 8 people over.
Tldr someone should try a system for heroes games that involved some kind of check consent rather than purely open consent
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@BobGoblin I don't disagree with your basic tl;dr and I think your cause and effect is well-reasoned.
I also don't want to be doing what I am doing at work, too. But I don't really want to get in a logic-off. Just you put on your sassy pants to reply to my legit criticism and so I put on my sassy pants to reply back, and this is how two people end up sitting here in sassy pants.
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I don't wear pants. Don't pretend to know my life
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@BobGoblin said in POLL: Super Hero MU Gut Check:
Of course. I'm stuck in development meetings for work and bored out of my mind. If I hate my life why not spread it?
HOWEVER, to clarify for the meg
I believe the reason I see this more prominent in consent games is because of the type of player that open systems appeals to. Again from experience, when there is no real risk of negative consequences other than self imposed ones it encourages a different mentality than one that has checks.
To further as I stated I'd like to see a heroes game that used some kind of system for checks rather than solely consent largely in part to see if it would alleviate this problem. So yes. It is a player issue but I believe it's a player issue because the system appeals to that sort of player.
In fact I'd be curious to see how much of our player base overlaps between pure consent and checked consent games.
In discussions with my circle of associates (I don't have friends clearly) about the topic of heroes mu the consensus with them is that the lack of structure system is a problem. This is both from people who play open consent heroes games and those who refuse to. So I'm not pulling this topic from my ass but rather bringing up something that I've had discussions with no less than 8 people over.
Tldr someone should try a system for heroes games that involved some kind of check consent rather than purely open consent
IMO, it's only a problem because it doesn't fit their view of what a good and entertaining game should be, which is probably not a universal constant.
I've played in all sorts of game, both with stats and those that are pure consent, and while there are certain people that only play one or the other, my experience [anecdotal, but extensive enough that I could probably apply some experimental methods and processes if I were so inclined (which hahahaha fuck off, I'm not)] is that those people willing to cross these system-based genres are perfectly willing to realign to the new paradigm and play within those rules.
You're always going to have drama and I have found that while it's true that consent games tend to have a much lower rate of 'haha, I KILLED YOU' drama, both from assholes PKing people and from people wanting to avoid a legitimate PK (however you measure that within context) because consent means the subject is moot, I have also found that consent games tend to provide sometimes much more satisfactory story and generate much more trust between a storyteller and a player. I have, in no particular order, been allowed to kill, maim, imprison, torture, clone, replace, brainwash, and a host of other things, other player characters (as an ST) in consent games because they trusted me to tell a good story and because they knew if it got too far, when they said 'this is too far' I would find a way to accomodate that limit. Statted games don't have this, and it's as much of a problem as your alleged problem stemming from a 'lack of structure'.
Yes, consent can be abused, but let's not pretend that it's some flaw that can't be overcome, or that adding stats and taking that consent away fixes a problem without opening up a huge fucking door for a host of other problems.
It's all about what makes you comfortable playing and the people that you surround yourself with.
"Excuse the hell out of you. He's a bag of dicks. I'm a carefully curated box of cocks." -- to @GirlCalledBlu upon being misrepresented.
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It's all about what makes you comfortable playing and the people that you surround yourself with.
This right here. Hence why again I'd like to experiment with some variety to see if that would change things up
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I will note, however, the time I got treated the worst by a Staffer was the time I did say 'woah, too far' on a consent original-theme superhero game. >.> Like cussed-out 'omg how dare you not appreciate me' level.
But I used to be all about consent. Like once upon a time, I was like, a good 75% consent / 25% dice/stats person. Gimme story, gimme people who would work out story and telling it together.
...and then the assholes and their inability to ever see their character fail even once. Then superhero games and shit like 'Well, I don't care about your evidence from the comics. In my opinion, <Soandso> is and always will be the most powerful type of <character>, so you have to lose.'
And yeah, you get this on statted games, too, but at least there you have the system backing up your player STs. On non-statted games, player STs crumble even faster. I know even starry-eyed me was unwilling to ever venture outside of her circle of friends.
Saying the quiet parts out loud since 1996.
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@Auspice said in POLL: Super Hero MU Gut Check:
I will note, however, the time I got treated the worst by a Staffer was the time I did say 'woah, too far' on a consent original-theme superhero game. >.> Like cussed-out 'omg how dare you not appreciate me' level.
But I used to be all about consent. Like once upon a time, I was like, a good 75% consent / 25% dice/stats person. Gimme story, gimme people who would work out story and telling it together.
...and then the assholes and their inability to ever see their character fail even once. Then superhero games and shit like 'Well, I don't care about your evidence from the comics. In my opinion, <Soandso> is and always will be the most powerful type of <character>, so you have to lose.'
And yeah, you get this on statted games, too, but at least there you have the system backing up your player STs. On non-statted games, player STs crumble even faster. I know even starry-eyed me was unwilling to ever venture outside of her circle of friends.
It happens, yeah.
But then on statted games you get OTHER dramas that you don't otherwise.
I also think, based again on personal experience that I could make into an experiment but won't, that the kind of person who would do what they did to you is the kind of person who, on a game with stats, would rules-lawyer the fuck out of everything just to get their way, for instance, or otherwise be a shitty person.
It's not really the context that's to blame, it's that person (those people) being shitty.
For all its faults, UU (where I got a big dose of my superhero gaming done) was good about consent and also about losing/winning in a balanced way.
We had the one Joker who always wanted to get away even when doing the stupidest shit, and we put a stop to THAT right quick.
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I will note that I am a supporter of dice-assisted resolution and have found that super hero MUs with the diceless, cooperative systems work really well so long as everyone involved is role-playing in a relaxed, reasonable state. However, not all players operate the same, and have seen people abuse the diceless system.
TL;DR: diceless works so long as everyone is cooperative and copacetic, but unethical players will use said lack of dice to their powerpose advantage.
Delete the Hog Pit. It'll be fun.
I really don't understand He-Man -
@Ghost said in POLL: Super Hero MU Gut Check:
I will note that I am a supporter of dice-assisted resolution and have found that super hero MUs with the diceless, cooperative systems work really well so long as everyone involved is role-playing in a relaxed, reasonable state. However, not all players operate the same, and have seen people abuse the diceless system.
TL;DR: diceless works so long as everyone is cooperative and copacetic, but unethical players will use said lack of dice to their powerpose advantage.
Diceless, but more specifically consent, since there are diceless systems with rules for resolution (such as Nobilis and Amber) gives an equal amount of consent power to every person present, which in turn gives more power to the more forceful OOC personality, which again, is a problem of people, not context.
Those same forceful personalities are the ones that end up staffing on statted games and getting their view of the rules (beneficial to them) established as the ones to follow.
"Excuse the hell out of you. He's a bag of dicks. I'm a carefully curated box of cocks." -- to @GirlCalledBlu upon being misrepresented.
