POLL: Super Hero MU Gut Check
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A few other successful, or possible, smaller-focus settings:
- Transformers
- GI-Joe
There have been Transformers games for a while now. I haven't played them personally, but there always seems to be one hanging around, which I feel may also be a point in favor of tighter focus; smaller scope.
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@Ghost said in POLL: Super Hero MU Gut Check:
It's a great setting. Everybody matters so long as they have an X-gene. They are all at stake.
I would actually love to see this happen, but yes, mostly if not entirely with OCs and FCs being plot fodder/available for use in scenes as NPCs by anybody in most cases, despite the 'not my bag as a genre' vote.
Part of my lack of love for the genre is PC FCs, historically speaking. I am just not a rosters or FCs allowed for PCs kind of girl, and never have been. Just never could get into the head of somebody else that somebody else created very well. (Compound that with the occasional superfan of FC X who knows all the things and either expects you to know them as well the moment they log in on FC X, or worse, jumps your shit for not playing FC X according to their personal and sometimes wacky interpretation of FC X... it's just two specific kinds of aggravation I just never had a lot of patience for in pretendy fun time. After accidentally using a name somewhere that I thought I made up and was apparently used in some game or another that I'd never heard of on a non-adult MUX and getting no less than three people paging to tell me how much they'd masturbated to that character growing up, I just... yeah.)
This is just harder to do since you probably have to get pretty fine-grained in examining powers and what they do, if they're going to all be more or less custom to each OC.
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In the mid-2000s there was a very (40+ player) successful X-men game based on the cartoons of X-men Evolution. It was limited to just the Brotherhood and Xavier's (although I think unaffiliated were in there as well.)
The more focused the game, the more impacting things can be on the micro level. Too many games are these giant monstrosities where what happens doesn't really matter. I'm assuming this is springing from the United thread. But even marvel 1963 which I've dabbled on is the same. More focused on # of players online then impact of story.
We have enough games where the big picture doesn't change, would love to see something with a new focus.
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@BobGoblin
One of my favorite MUSHes ever. They did an Unaffiliated faction near the end of the MUSH lifespan. It did a good job of making focused plots, and there were some plots that changed things on the MUSH scale.This style of thing would be my ideal for a MUSH. Take a cue from the X-Men: Academy X/New X-Men books and focus on the school.
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@Tempest said in POLL: Super Hero MU Gut Check:
Staff has to be willing to get the RP ball rolling, not just to build a game and expect people to show up and breathe life into it on their own. And that means potentially running multiple +events in the first few weeks (maybe months) of your game until people are hooked enough to start doing it on their own.
I think this is the real issue, 100%. Even after players start running their own events, staff should continue doing this and breathing life into a changing world.
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Here are the issues I see with this poll:
- Clicking "yes, I totally prefer a small, focused setting" is easy. Does this convert into actual players playing, though? I've seen lots of games that were, in effect, "designed by WORA" and ... success has been "mixed" to put it politely. Because it's easier to babble on a forum than it is to get boots on the ground in the game.
- The thing with small, focused settings is that they have small, focused appeals. So you put the foot down and make it Gotham-only focused on the Bat Family and associates vs. the various Gothamite villains. And I have absolutely no interest whatsoever in Gotham and Goathamite RP. So yes, I agree (hypothetically--I will not say which way I voted) that a small, limited, focused roster in a subset of a larger setting is my preference. Just not the one you chose. I want X-Men vs. Brotherhood. Or Justice League. Or My Little Pony. Or whatever. Which reduces your pool.
At some point I think that any tightly-focused game like you're proposing will have a problem of keeping a player base.
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What if we stopped operating under the presumption that MU's should have an infinite or undetermined life span and instead look at it and say 'we're going to have a year's worth of activity' as a goal?
Nothing lasts forever. Except World of Warcraft apparently but I attribute that to making a deal with the great Satan.
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That would be quite nice, actually: tacit assumption that a MUSH has a beginning and an end and, presumably, a story arc that fills it.
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@BobGoblin I don't think people should build something they expect to last forever, but creating a well-built and supported game world is a pretty impressive amount of time and energy just to get things to the point at which you can open the doors, especially if it isn't something somehow cookie-cutter. (Anywhere by Night, L&L take 5 this one's just in France instead of England... etc.)
I don't fault people for wanting something that requires that much work to have some measure of longevity.
'At least survives as long as it took to build' is a sad minimum expectation, but some games apparently don't even get that far. While not 'forever', if it took me six months to create a game, and it only lasted half that long, I would not be happy about it.
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You can make it episodic. The main building work is done once. Then you have little tweaking sessions in between episodes.
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@WTFE I am not a fan of the 'single metaplot' thing with a single story arc for that reason, yeah. You can keep a game running nicely with seasonal story arcs, much like any given television series tends to do. But you're back to having something designed with potential to last with that choice alone, too.
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Of course it takes time to make a game.
Just like it takes time to do anything else. At the end isn't that the whole crux? Is it worth your investment of time to make a game that may or may not flop horribly (and let's be honest probably will?)
IMO one of the flaws that takes place in this community is not enough planning and design go into the game itself, and too much throwing shit against a wall and hoping it sticks does.
It takes time to make a game.
But a chunk of it is probably wasted time due to poor execution and time management. In the end; I still believe too many games have no plans. This whole thread in fact is a result of a discussion about another game which from the posts there seem to indicate it has no plan beyond existing.
I think that's my drive. I want a game that has something more to it then it exists.
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@BobGoblin A built in expiration date isn't going to solve that problem, though. Only the real work part -- some hardcore world building and planning -- ever will. But that's the same for something with or without an expiration date, and it's definitely something people need more of if they want a game to stick around a while. It's no guarantee that it will, but the lack of it will stall something out with a quickness.
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What I'm thinking of would definitively cut down on a lot of the world-building aspects, though. In that you'd do them once.
Waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay back in my prehistory, there was a professor at my university who ran RPGs. (Chivalry & Sorcery, to be precise.) He had a huge world built up based on history with the serial numbers filed off. The amount of work he'd poured into this was epic.
But he only did it once in bulk.
Each year the players would go into his world, play weekly sessions in his game to the end of the school year, and the campaign would wrap up. The next year the campaign's players would be in the same world with a new overarching situation to deal with and ... the exploits of the previous year's players were now the history and/or, as the campaign moved on in RL years, mythology of the current crop.
The additional work he did between school years was minimal. Not trivial, but easily single-digit percentages of the overall work he'd put into making the setting in the first place. The bulk of the stuff he'd made could be taken verbatim into the next year. Some of it had minor changes made to it because of events in the campaign (town X is now in nation A instead of B, that kind of thing). And he wrote the histories/legends from the standpoint of the major culture.
This gave a living, breathing setting, a sense of continuity for those of us who played more than one year, and a GM who wasn't overwhelmed by the huge burden of world creating each and every game season. I think this concept could be adapted to MUSHing quite easily. And indeed kinda/sorta was with @EUBanana's various war games.
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@BobGoblin said in POLL: Super Hero MU Gut Check:
IMO one of the flaws that takes place in this community is not enough planning and design go into the game itself, and too much throwing shit against a wall and hoping it sticks does
Kind of like the Cards Against Humanity card:
_________ was neither the MU we needed nor wanted
Every now and then we see a MU advertisement that is more of a probing for interest, which I think is a smart idea. I see a lot of games go into development, a lot of work goes into standing the MU up, and then the people who put a lot of hard work into this labour of love find out that for some reason (issues with staffing, setting, system, lack of interest, etc) the MU flops.
The way I see it, some of these issues can be mitigated in the development process prior to putting any money or wikispace down. However, with a poll, any yes votes are players who will more than likely give the game a stab when it comes out.
Delete the Hog Pit. It'll be fun.
I really don't understand He-Man -
@Ghost I don't know, Ghost. Maybe! I feel you also lose a lot of the razzle dazzle when you reveal a game beforehand, and instead of the 'WOW LOOK AT THAT' factor, you get a 'Hey! That game finally launched, cool!'
Also, I too often see ideas that never go further than that. I am betting there is a segment of people who don't really get hyped for a game -at all- unless the game is actually close to launching, or has any indication that it will for sure be launched.
Lots of pragmatic/cynic peoples 'round these parts!
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@SunnyJ said in POLL: Super Hero MU Gut Check:
Lots of pragmatic/cynic peoples 'round these parts!
^ This.
People will seize on some random, incredibly minor thing that is perfectly normal and works fine across vast segments of the hobby, and will decry it as a sure sign of the end of the world as we know it. (Think of the 'it will destroy the game if there's a bar only one sphere can access!' from my cautionary tale of a thread as an example of what I mean by this, if you need to, @Ghost.)
In short, be willing to call out ridiculousness as such when you see it crop up in this particular form. It's a skill that will never stop being put to use, that much is certain. (Sigh.)
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I don't have a preference, but I do have interest in superhero games. Your poll is flawed!
But.
I did have this idea a while back (I even posted about it here at some point) where it's basically the MU version of the TV show Young Justice ... (sort of).
Basically, you pick a universe (let's say DC; because it's easy). You start Year One. Superman. Batman. Wonder Woman. Green Arrow. Black Canary, The Flash. You know, your basic initial roster. They can have been superheroes for anywhere between a month to two years. Keep it small.
Play for a determined amount of time. Probably six months is good.
Skip ahead five years. Open up the roster for sidekicks/younger heroes. Now you've got Robin, Superboy, Wonder Girl, Speedy, Kid Flash, blah blah blah.
Play for a determined amount of time. Probably six months is good.
Skip ahead five years. Open up the ros--etc, etc.
And the skips can also serve for people to mix-and-match cool backstories they can play with each other, flashback to, whatever. They can even say 'man, in those intervening five years, my character was brainwashed, or went rogue, or betrayed them, or whatever'.
There's a lot you can do, and the skipping can shift the status quo hard and renew interest.
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@BobGoblin said in POLL: Super Hero MU Gut Check:
In the mid-2000s there was a very (40+ player) successful X-men game based on the cartoons of X-men Evolution. It was limited to just the Brotherhood and Xavier's (although I think unaffiliated were in there as well.)
The more focused the game, the more impacting things can be on the micro level. Too many games are these giant monstrosities where what happens doesn't really matter. I'm assuming this is springing from the United thread. But even marvel 1963 which I've dabbled on is the same. More focused on # of players online then impact of story.
We have enough games where the big picture doesn't change, would love to see something with a new focus.
While this might sound weird or hypocritical from me since I run one of the larger games, I strongly agree. I enjoy storytelling smaller, very impactful events for characters, but due to the scope I really don't get to do that very often, and instead I need to focus on the very wide ranging changes that have the largest impact on the overall game world and prioritize things that change the narrative for the most characters.
To be honest, I think it's very difficult to run a FC focused game in a comic universe that doesn't have a lot of stasis pushback against any attempt to have dynamic changes. I love comic settings, but the draw of those games when they have FCs is the desire to play (and play with) recognizable characters, and it is -not- the world, meaning that derivation from that is intrinsically offputting to anyone but the people directly involved in the stories. Pretty much any significant change to any character runs the strong risk of being alienating to anyone that would find the game appealing, and without significant changes you have stasis. So you could do like World of Reboots, where you run a series of alternate universes, let whatever happens to FC happen for a year, then reboot over and over again, so someone coming into the game fresh isn't wondering why Batman's been dead for 3 years, Superman is now a regular guy, Lex Luthor reformed, etc.
I personally find established intellectual properties a giant headache to work with as settings or characters and would rather not because of that stasis effect.
some fucking idiot who people only like because he's good at taking credit for the work of everyone under him, just like every other fucking L&L headwiz.
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@Apos said in POLL: Super Hero MU Gut Check:
@BobGoblin said in POLL: Super Hero MU Gut Check:
In the mid-2000s there was a very (40+ player) successful X-men game based on the cartoons of X-men Evolution. It was limited to just the Brotherhood and Xavier's (although I think unaffiliated were in there as well.)
The more focused the game, the more impacting things can be on the micro level. Too many games are these giant monstrosities where what happens doesn't really matter. I'm assuming this is springing from the United thread. But even marvel 1963 which I've dabbled on is the same. More focused on # of players online then impact of story.
We have enough games where the big picture doesn't change, would love to see something with a new focus.
While this might sound weird or hypocritical from me since I run one of the larger games, I strongly agree. I enjoy storytelling smaller, very impactful events for characters, but due to the scope I really don't get to do that very often, and instead I need to focus on the very wide ranging changes that have the largest impact on the overall game world and prioritize things that change the narrative for the most characters.
To be honest, I think it's very difficult to run a FC focused game in a comic universe that doesn't have a lot of stasis pushback against any attempt to have dynamic changes. I love comic settings, but the draw of those games when they have FCs is the desire to play (and play with) recognizable characters, and it is -not- the world, meaning that derivation from that is intrinsically offputting to anyone but the people directly involved in the stories. Pretty much any significant change to any character runs the strong risk of being alienating to anyone that would find the game appealing, and without significant changes you have stasis. So you could do like World of Reboots, where you run a series of alternate universes, let whatever happens to FC happen for a year, then reboot over and over again, so someone coming into the game fresh isn't wondering why Batman's been dead for 3 years, Superman is now a regular guy, Lex Luthor reformed, etc.
I personally find established intellectual properties a giant headache to work with as settings or characters and would rather not because of that stasis effect.
One of my other comic book MU ideas was an Exiles-based game (still mixing DC and Marvel and maybe others) where basically, versions of characters got dragged in, but never really the "original" versions.
And I especially like the idea of Amalgam-style mixes. Like Dark Claw (just to name the most famous one).
I'd probably do something like, 'max 3 versions of a superhero at a time' and that version is basically 'yours'. You created it. Try not to copy anyone else. You also basically get run of your 'universe'. So if you're Matt Murdock, the Batman of Earth-02AH45(WHO WAS ADOPTED BY THE WAYNES AFTER HIS FATHER WAS KILLED IN A BOXING MATCH IN GOTHAM AND WAS BRUCE'S ADOPTED BROTHER WHEN THE WAYNES DIED SO DOUBLE THE TRAUMA FOR BLIND MATT) (and the first character from that universe), you also basically get veto on things that happen there (as long as they aren't multiverse-spanning effects that affect the entire game. Plus, that character is yours, so you can take a vacation or hiatus, come back, whatever. No fear of leaving for a bit and then having the character be played by someone else.
Course, if you're playing Elektra and you and Matt are a thing and you leave for a while, when you comes back, you may find that Matt is getting it on with another Elektra.
Or with Bullseye. Because he's a good guy in his universe. And also both are gay now. WHUT.
And then the game is basically running around different alternate realities fixing shit, because the Panopticon is like 'ERRYTHAN BROAAAAK'.
You might also not even be always at the Panopticon--maybe you're just "on-call".
I mean it might not be everyone's cupa, but it's mine.
You know. Just, let people run wild.
I also really like Matt Murdock as Batman with Bruce Wayne as something else idea. Sue me.
"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.
