POLL: Super Hero MU Gut Check
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In all fairness, I believe that I see what @Chet is poking at.
There is, on some psychological level, probably a number of theories that are probably quite interesting surrounding the love of superheroes.
What emotional or psychological elements might lead someone to attracting to Batman instead of Captain America, or the Incredible Hulk instead of Squirrel Girl? What psych/emotional elements attract or cause aversion to Dr. Doom more or less so from Magneto?
Is there something in our psychology that pits people in the Xavier camp of mutant rights versus Magneto's camp, and would a preference for either's method in a fan sense tell us anything about the fan themselves?
Whenever I hear studies about these things, I tend to approach them as interesting rather than some kind of metaphysical fact, because the approach the author of the study tends to lend heavily towards predispositions the author had to begin with. These studies tend to read to me like yet another example of a stance the author already had, kind of like how the same UFO EXPERT writes the same book 4 times...only each expounds slightly further than the previous one.
In a MU sense, though, I think it's a slippery slope to assume the psychology of the player based on their hero and villain selection. There are more factors towards why someone chooses a particular FC, including: what was left at the time, cool factor, fanboy/fangirl love, emotional resonance with character, someone asked them to pick WASP...
But could there be a reason why I am more attracted to the Green Lantern Corps than the Punisher? I'm sure there's an interesting topic there.
Delete the Hog Pit. It'll be fun.
I really don't understand He-Man -
#FreeFarfalla
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OkayOkayOkayJEEEEZ -
Green Lantern is a badge that won't give up his civilian life, Punisher lost his civilian life and refuses to come home from Vietnam?
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@Chet Personally, I think it's probably more that I don't believe in vigilante justice and spent the years of 5 thru 38 wishing I could forego my mundane job for joining an intergalactic order of peacekeepers for the betterment of all sentient creatures.
Alas, I didn't develop telekinesis and haven't been busted by a floating ring, yet.
All jokes aside, I am one to introspect and meditate often, checking myself, as it were, and am more or less one of those spiritual types. So, I'm a fan of stuff like the Jedi/Lanterns in theory.
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The Jedi have always brought an interesting philosophical dilemma for me: is balance to the Force a null state, Jedi and Sith, or is balance to the Force someone that lives in both worlds, someone that can use darkness to redeem an evil man. I think Lucas never answers the question as a test that shouldn't be definitively answered; you're supposed to pick Sith at some times in your life, and your answer determines your friends.
Have you ever considered a Star Wars MUSH with a Jedi/Sith heavy world? You'd have to research the novels on the canon's antiquity, and discount the movie backgrounds, which would displease your more issue concerned, externally aware audience, but please the mystics among us that see art as an internal question.
I'm sure you could dig up the proper quotation from Obi-Wan Kenobi when he introduces the lightsaber to Luke to properly inspire it.
To stay on topic, to apply the spirituality of stages and internal questions to a comic book roleplaying game, you'd have to avoid the cheap route, the obviously magical characters, and go with more of an arcane setting, something like a World War 2 comic book setting with a Hellboy backdrop. That doesn't mean you need Hellboy as the draw. Something like a Marvel 1963 thing, with the mystical elements of each Allied, Axis, and Neutral power drawing on the various setting elements.
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@Chet There was recently a smaller scale;tighter focus Star Wars game in the vein of Rogue One that fell through, but I think the reasons why would be better discussed in terms of how to keep plot proactive in a tighter setting
Delete the Hog Pit. It'll be fun.
I really don't understand He-Man -
Building off the generic idea of a WW2 game, how about we blend PvE and PvP into a campaign based comic book game, any time period or canon draw from the flavor of your choice? You go through 'seasons', like that lovely WoD game I saw advertised, which each 'season' inside a new area, with groups introduced inside a theater of action.
For example, you could devote the first 'season' of a Marvel MUSH to the struggle for Genosha, between the Brotherhood, the X-Men, and Genoshan slavers led by the Hellfire Club. You would lay down puzzle objectives for each group, for control of the island at the end of the theater. With a puzzle objective - something requiring a combination of staff moderation and creative use of resources (this has to be done incredibly abstractly, I've seen it go wrong) - you escape the consent issue with direct conflict involving superpowers or abilities or resources.
Brotherhood wins, Magneto controls the island. X-Men wins, mutant rights score a victory. Hellfire Club wins, Homo Superior is tighter under their control.
Then, branch into the next theater from there, with the remaining PCs that are interested in their characters, moving into a new season/theater/campaign.
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@Gilette said in POLL: Super Hero MU Gut Check:
Also, I'm just going to say that you shouldn't need to retrain from history to narrative as history is all about narratives.
Funny. Two days ago I posted a comment to a historian waxing philosophical about the "science" of history: "Of all forms of fiction, history is probably the most compelling read."
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@Ghost said in POLL: Super Hero MU Gut Check:
@Chet There was recently a smaller scale;tighter focus Star Wars game in the vein of Rogue One that fell through, but I think the reasons why would be better discussed in terms of how to keep plot proactive in a tighter setting
Was that the Fate game, or another one? Because if it was the Fate game, I'd just attribute its failure to Fate being terrible.
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@Tempest nah, d20 Saga, Fires of Hope
Delete the Hog Pit. It'll be fun.
I really don't understand He-Man -
@Ghost said in POLL: Super Hero MU Gut Check:
@Tempest nah, d20 Saga, Fires of Hope
That was the one that didn't allow Force Users, yeah?
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@Tempest It allowed Force Sensitive, but no Jedi class.
Delete the Hog Pit. It'll be fun.
I really don't understand He-Man -
@Chet said in POLL: Super Hero MU Gut Check:
The Jedi have always brought an interesting philosophical dilemma for me: is balance to the Force a null state, Jedi and Sith, or is balance to the Force someone that lives in both worlds, someone that can use darkness to redeem an evil man. I think Lucas never answers the question as a test that shouldn't be definitively answered; you're supposed to pick Sith at some times in your life, and your answer determines your friends.
Have you ever considered a Star Wars MUSH with a Jedi/Sith heavy world? You'd have to research the novels on the canon's antiquity, and discount the movie backgrounds, which would displease your more issue concerned, externally aware audience, but please the mystics among us that see art as an internal question.
I'm sure you could dig up the proper quotation from Obi-Wan Kenobi when he introduces the lightsaber to Luke to properly inspire it.
To stay on topic, to apply the spirituality of stages and internal questions to a comic book roleplaying game, you'd have to avoid the cheap route, the obviously magical characters, and go with more of an arcane setting, something like a World War 2 comic book setting with a Hellboy backdrop. That doesn't mean you need Hellboy as the draw. Something like a Marvel 1963 thing, with the mystical elements of each Allied, Axis, and Neutral power drawing on the various setting elements.
Gotta lol @ this. Let this be a reminder to everyone that if you're going to talk at length about things you really need to understand them. Your dilemma is a false one.
Lucas has actually flat out stated what balance to the Force is. It's all light-side, no Sith. Dark side is a cancer, it's always bad, and you don't say balance is having 'a little bit' of cancer. Until TFA was released, there was no 'light side' in any of the films. There was just 'The Force' and 'the dark side of the Force'.
The EU conception of things like Gray Jedi is just that, an EU thing. Usage of the dark side in the movies is about as simplistic as you can get: if you use this power, it turns you into a hateful old man and kills everything you know and love. Using the power of lightning summoned from your infinite hatred "at some times in your life" does not make anyone a brooding anti-hero. It's evil. SW mythology and morality is very simple.
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@Ghost See for me the moment a MU fails, is because it has levels.
Level based systems are inherently segregating /and/ have a finite cap (usually) which means eventually people break the game for everyone else.
Hello! Long time listener, first time caller...
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@Lithium I think it would be interesting to have a level-based game where everyone stayed more or less in the same level band as time went on.
Like, at the start of the game everyone is in the level 2-4 range, and stories revolve around rescuing cats or beating up low-level minions or cleaning up after a more powerful NPC like you're the Sorcerer's Apprentice. Then time passes and people advance and new characters come in at the current level range, and the scope of the game shifts so that after a year or so everyone is level 7-9 (or whatever). Now the stories assume that everyone's an experienced adventurer and things are about exploring unknown regions or being an elite strike team for the government or whatever. Then some more time passes, and in another year or so everyone is level 14-16 and the game is about traveling the planes and overthrowing tyrannical nations and fighting the Lich King. And then the game ends and maybe a new one restarts in a different setting.
You'd have a game that would evolve from street level to epic, but it would evolve for everyone, and all the characters at any given time would be close enough in power (well -- in level, anyway) that any group of them could plausibly do something together.
Crazy, maybe. It'd have its own set of challenges, I'm sure, but at least it wouldn't have the level segregation parts.
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@Autumn said in POLL: Super Hero MU Gut Check:
@Lithium I think it would be interesting to have a level-based game where everyone stayed more or less in the same level band as time went on.
I've thought a lot over time about level progressions and I'd be interested in seeing how that sort of approach actually worked on an existing game. My take is that without the carrot of progression a game would feel stale and the players less motivated to stay active or do things; if you've been playing for six months and by just logging on I am either at the same point in the power curve or will catch up in the next two weeks it just feels... sandbox-y to me. At that point isn't it better to go with a level-less approach in favor of something more generic, removing a layer of abstracted complexity for a more freeform approach?
But just because I don't like it on paper it doesn't mean it wouldn't work, so... curious.
- He who takes offense when not intended is a fool. He who takes offense when intended is a greater fool.
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@Arkandel I've always had a similar feeling ... but then again, a lot of people seemed to really like it when the Reach took a similar approach.
I think it would be important to leave, as the Reach did, space for the most hyperactive and motivated players to trailblaze, and also to not bring new players in right at the top of the current power curve. So if the level range is 5-7, say, the most active bunch would be level 7 and would be the first to reach level 8 when the time comes; and the newest and least active would be level 5, and the majority would be level 6.
You could have a "flashback" feature where, when a new player joins the game, she starts at low level, and her first few adventures happen in the game's past and at progressively higher levels, like we're getting an introductory montage. If you kept records of everyone's sheets at each level, you could even have her adventure with retro versions of existing characters to establish backstory, to solve the problem of "but what if there's only one level 2 character on the game?"
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I like multi-tiered approaches to this problem. Then again that's just my preference.
So for example there's an overall "soft cap"; oldbies can go over it but at a rate of diminishing returns. Then having different ways of advancing toward that cap for those below it - a small but steady trickle of automatic XP, running/participating in PrPs, activity-based incentives like +votes or what have you, etc.
There's just a room somewhere in between newbies catching up too fast that invalidates investment yet not quite where dinosaurs dominate everything from their silver thrones so that it takes many months if not years to get anywhere close, and it's what I'd target.
Oh, and a sidekick system would be nice. Maybe that's similar to what your 'flashback' feature is? Some MMORPGs have tried it with varying success.
- He who takes offense when not intended is a fool. He who takes offense when intended is a greater fool.
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@Arkandel In games with less steep and less step-y power curves, I think a more gradual approach would make sense. (The Reach's approach, after all, was extremely gradual -- arguably too much so by the end of the game when the end state was closing in on 1,000 XP.) There are probably some level based games that have both of these features -- I just tend to associate the term with the Dungeons & Dragons model, where the gulf between a level 2 character and a level 10 character is so vast that they might as well be playing separate games. It's less an issue of catchup and more an issue of how I can provide the player base with stuff to do; that task is a lot simpler when someone who wants to run an adventure can run up a flag and be assured that everyone who responds will be close enough in level to one another that they can form a workable group.
The Flashback idea was sort of a spur of the moment thing, so the details are still on the hazy side. What I wanted was a way to work new characters into the game a little more organically -- they don't just pop into existence fully formed at level 15 with the expectation that existing characters will trust them on adventures against world-shattering danger. Instead, they'd play some fixed number of adventures at gradually escalating level, so maybe they have one at 3rd, 6th, 9th, and 12th levels, and then they come into play at the "low" tier of the current game level (15-17, in this example). Then I realized it would be a lot easier to get players together if a game had something like the WoW retro-raid feature that automatically scales your character and ilvl back to the point where something like the Auchenai Crypts is an appropriate challenge instead of a joke. Which led me to the idea of just snapshotting every character's sheet whenever they level, so you can easily roll back to the days when you were 5th level to do Flashback adventures with new characters.
What I like about this is that there's something for everyone. People get to establish backstory with each other in a low-stress environment (the older characters must have survived the adventure, after all, if they're still alive in the present), and staff doesn't have to get headaches from the people at 16th level complaining because they're running stories for the newbies again. And, importantly, the characters always exist as peers -- there never needs to be a situation where someone's irrelevant to the story because he's too low or too high level.
It does introduce some problems; even if you don't let existing characters die in flashbacks, there's still the possibility of some truly epic continuity snarls. But if you're doing pulp high adventure, that's probably not high on your list of worries.
