FCs on Comic MUs

[bored]

@social-diseases said in FCs on Comic MUs:

I think the addendum I at one point suggested for Utopia was "at the end of one of the stories, use that for the cut-off but instead of how it ends say the Phoenix Force or whatever undoes that 'No More Mutants' shit"

To be hoenst, this is already eyes glaze over levels of too much comic continuity in game. While I disagree with the sentiment somewhere further above that these games test for comics knowledge (maybe they did once, but every game I've joined recently I've apped characters successfully with no more than a quick wiki read of info on them), once you start defining things inside the ongoing continuity like that you bring in so much baggage and set a really high bar for understanding.

My preference would probably be more of a blank-slate setting. It doesn't need to be flat year one (you can have more and less experienced characters, teachers and students, whatever) but it needs to be fairly neutral on main events, pre-established relationships, etc. The one thing I really loathe in comics games is people using them simply to pantomime out the existing storylines (oh my god, is it Jean and Scott or Scott and Emma? Who WILL HE CHOOSE?!?!?! shoots self in head). It feels like you're totally wasting the purpose of even having a mush.

Have an X-school full of X-people. Maybe they're familiar people with familiar power sets and base personalities. But then let it proceed organically from there. Once you get to 'well now Jean has to go Phoenix and then her future babies start showing up and you know what that means' you've already jumped the shark. That stuff ends up being barely tolerable in comics after a while, it's 1000% eye-roll worthy when you see people trying to replicate it on a MU.

Just create an environment with mutants and let them RP new stuff. Let Jean be a telepath/tk like her original incarnation, and leave out the god level mutants you have to throw in for omg drama (and of course the 'haha my char is the stronkest!) I think this would also have the effect that it makes things more OC friendly. OC mutants with 'you get one, very clear and limited power, that's how mutants work' is a lot more doable than 'sure, just make dragon elf wizard, why not?'

[Roz]

@apos said in FCs on Comic MUs:

@roz said in FCs on Comic MUs:

I mean, sure, obviously that's a thing that commonly happens. That's also just called bad staffing. You do need good staffing to make any sort of system like this work. There's no "this system will totally work even with lazy or conflict-averse staffers."

I think it's a little contrary to what I was trying to get at originally. While you're right, you can definitely design things systematically that makes it way way way way easier or harder. Like I would rather start from the point of, 'Well, a lot of staff are conflict-averse. What system is least bad with those people?'

Generally, you'd want to design something with the least amount of decision making, with systems that resemble what choices would be made by someone fair minded. Like if every top tier FC had a set limit for how long someone could possess the character before it had to go up for grabs, and then the metric for deciding who got it next was automatically determined based on how you quantified who made me the most rp for the widest spectrum of people among. I mean sure, any of those things can be weighted unfairly too, but frankly even in systems that have really terrible weights there tends to be way less hostility because it's a little bit emotionless and detached.

Sure. My post wasn't to discount the value of having clear, stated guidelines. It's just that I don't think @saosmash's point of "well you need to enforce rules about character squatting" is so easily dismissed with "well staffers don't like doing that." You build systems that can be best utilized by a good staff. If you have bad staffers, the problem is that you have bad staffers. I get really frustrated whenever someone turns a discussion about best practices for system and policy into "I was on a game with that policy but the staffer was terrible and did XYZ." Bad staffers are bad, and we should totally discuss bad staffing, but it's a different conversation.

Policy requires enforcement. If you don't enforce policy, you're staffing badly. That doesn't mean the policy is bad.

[Ganymede]

@Sunny

Oh, okay. I see what you're saying now. Ghost said:

I'm a strong believer in the ethic that if you have 20 characters across 4 MUs, you're only able to focus 1/20th of your creative energy on any given character, and thus you water down the experience for the people you play with.

Yeah, I don't believe in that. I've got several alts spread across games. I keep Allen at New Orleans because it is a sleepy, small game with no consequences of my relative idleness. I still have Daithi, even though it looks like Fifth Kingdom is also slowing down. But on a game like BSG:U, where there's plenty of RP to be had, I've got two alts there.

That said, I also sort of believe in the idea that if you want to RP on a particular game, spending energy on promoting one alt is better than making five and trying to grab as much as you can. Mutli-sphere WoD games are the general exception to this.

[Ghost]

One alt should work fine if the scope of the game is tighter.

One alt on a game where everything is open (all marvel/dc chars) might leave Star Lord all alone in space while everyone plays at Xavier's.

But if the scope is ONLY mutants at Xavier's, one char should be more than enough.

[saosmash]

If I'm invested in a game I want two characters on it. They don't have to both be FCs but they damn well are gonna both be pcs and they're both going to be maintained at roughly the same level of activity. I frequently need two scenes at once because if a scene is slow I forget I'm rping if I don't have two going at once.

It's really just a personal preference thing and I know we have had wars about how multisceners are the worst but I promise I'm not the worst. I am sometimes mildly crappy.

[Sunny]

@ganymede

I almost always prefer two alts: I play my heavy hitter political PC, and then I play a second character for when I feel like playing but do not want the weight of the 'main'. It's why I tend to advocate for two-alt policies. For a FC game, or a super pvp focused political game like RfK was, one alt is absolutely appropriate and should be the baseline, I agree. I was just trying to squawk about 'can we not go down the road of saying serial alters are bad players' because they aren't.

[Social Diseases]

@bored

The problem with X-School is that every game has done it. I'm bored with it. I'm so bored with. It's always the school. It's always Westchester. It's always New York. And in the past ... decade? ... it's also usually been Year One by a different name. And I don't like Year One, I never have. I've never understood why people love taking a character whose main appeal seems to be who they are and proceeding to change almost everything about them.

So if I were to toss my hat into this particular shitshow of a rodeo again after all these years, I would have to do something different. And different, to me, is Utopia. It's not just a different location, it's a different feel. For people who want Mutant School, that's still there, but that isn't the heart of it. This is a city-state, and a boat ride away is a city that thinks most of the X-Men are rock stars.

On the matter of continuity...

There was a game I played on years ago, and they had what I to this day consider the single best rule that I have ever seen on a canon, in-continuity comic game:

"No one cares what Iceman did in The Champions."

If you read a good wiki entry or two on a character, if you follow that up with a good mini-series or arc or a few one-shot stories about that character -- and you can find every single comic book ever printed online without spending a dime or going to a site headquartered in Papua, and anyone who isn't a piece of shit is gonna help hook you up with some great books if you ask them -- then unless it's a character so complicated that you need to have read Grant Morrison's biography to understand what the hell they even do, I don't think anyone is going to say "No, you aren't good enough to be in our nerd club house."

Does that help ameliorate some of your concerns about getting dragged beneath the waves of 50 years worth of comic books that are honestly not going to matter all that damn much beyond 'This is where we are, this is what we're going for, this is where these characters are at.'?

I don't mean that to sound bitchy, if it does - I've re-wrote it three goddamn times and I'm still not sure the tone is positive as intended.

[Thenomain]

@ganymede said in FCs on Comic MUs:

@social-diseases said in FCs on Comic MUs:

I could probably see allowing 2, maybe 3 characters so long as those characters were sufficiently different in focus, but...

No, no, no. Not 2 alts. Not 3.

One. One alt. (Ah, ah, ah.) Especially on an FC game, which is what we're talking about.

Pedantic Note: For our hobby, “one character” and “one alt” are synonymous.

That is all.

[Ganymede]

@thenomain said in FCs on Comic MUs:

Pedantic Note: For our hobby, “one character” and “one alt” are synonymous.

So is "Ganymede's physical instinct when she sees Thenomain" and "savage kick to the gonads."

[The Tree of Woe]

The problem is that some characters are very strongly defined by events in their canon. Take Cypher, who I played.

Cypher was a plucky kid who had super-translator powers, a lion's heart, and was into a woman who was way too old for him. Then, however dubious the writing itself was, glossing over loincloth scientists and giant chickens... he took a bullet for his friend. Bang.

That's a ton of character definition in one decisive action, and sometimes you don't WANT to throw things like that out, because you see the dramatic potential in them, and in the fallout, even if in some ways it was never fully realized.

To me, that's part of the point, and why canon is not such a terrible thing.

[Thenomain]

@ganymede said in FCs on Comic MUs:

@thenomain said in FCs on Comic MUs:

Pedantic Note: For our hobby, “one character” and “one alt” are synonymous.

So is "Ganymede's physical instinct when she sees Thenomain" and "savage kick to the gonads."

This is what I get for cutting this discussion off at the pass. It is far easier to say how man you alts you have, vs. how many characters, so I approve of this Humpty Dumpty redefinition of “alt”. It fits this hobby well: Quite wrong, but we prefer it that’s way.

[Ganymede]

@thenomain said in FCs on Comic MUs:

This is what I get for cutting this discussion off at the pass.

Levity is its own punishment.

It is far easier to say how man you alts you have, vs. how many characters, so I approve of this Humpty Dumpty redefinition of “alt”.

You know what's a Humpty Dumpty re-definition? Your mom.

(Yeah, I see what you did there. It's near the end of my work day and I was up late negotiating a management agreement for a local hiphop artist.)

[Thenomain]

@ganymede

I’m funnier when I typo. This surprises no one.

[Seraphim73]

@lithium said in FCs on Comic MUs:

No MU is ran entirely by one person, unless it /is/ a game intended to be a sandbox for a few people and if so there is /nothing wrong with that/.

Unless you're @faraday and you're running BSU without any additional Staffers, and keeping things humming along nicely at that.

I think a policy of FC's needing to /lose/ more might help.

This I think should be a policy for everyone everywhere. I would love to see PCs in general lose 20-30% of the time. Yes, that includes mine. Without some chance of failure, you don't have a story, you have posturing. I also agree with you that encouraging goals for characters is a must. Nothing like being reminded of your character's goal(s) to drag you out of an uninspired moment.

@the-tree-of-woe said in FCs on Comic MUs:

Check for intent first and foremost and treat knowledge as the secondary concern, and encourage players to learn more about their FC as they play if there are gaps in their knowledge.

Totally agree with this. It seems to me that most apps for FCs should be about what you want to do with the character, not what you know about the character.

[bored]

@social-diseases You're kind of missing things if you think that post was 'you need to run Xavier's in Westchester', and you're specifically failing to read if you take it as a suggestion of strict year one. It can be set anywhere, if you want X-colony, that's fine. As I said, you can have characters of different ages and experience levels. But the timeline really needs to be something fresh and self-contained to the game. At the point where you find yourself typing 'Well So and So's Run is canon' you've already made a game that caters to only the narrowest set of pedantic comic nerds and your game is already doomed to be a repetition of the same RP you see everywhere, that's usually also just a rehash of comic stories.

What I am saying is that you really need a specific to game history of limited defined scope, a fresh starting point, and a commitment to unique rather than re-hash concepts going forward, at least if you want any kind of hope of unique RP. Otherwise you get all kinds of problems as various people bring different degrees of continuity understanding with them, and it's just constant iterations of the same plots, and particularly really Speshul Snowflake-y plots that are only barely tolerable in the comic format and totally eyeroll nonsense when you have to put up with them on a MUSH.

Seriously, I would bet money that the only people who are remotely interested in RPing around Jean/Scott/Emma/Madelyn/Rachel/Nate/Cable/Hope nonsense are people who want to play those characters to be the de-facto center of the game world.

[Tempest]

You need to run Xavier's in Westchester.

[Apos]

@roz Yeah but I'm talking about it in so much as thinking of practices that limit points of failure and make it easier to maintain, so I do think of it as bad policy because it's demanding without any significant advantage to it. It's just highlighted because bad staff make it more likely to fail, and it could be avoided entirely with something more robust.

[Social Diseases]

@bored

It's cool, at the end of the day we just disagree. I like canon places, those are the ones I always had the most fun at.

If you decide to do a game like you're talking about, I'll be more than happy to help you with anything you need in terms of timelines, news files, etc. Standing offer to anyone who makes a comic place and wants help in that area.

[bored]

@social-diseases I guess I'm sort of confused what you're looking at as the alternative, particularly since you were largely talking about timeline stuff. You want a timeline but... you also want it just to be a mish-mash of various comics supporting every possible character? Are you actually planning on researching every one of those comics across multiple lines to figure out which characters are playable in what state? Or are you going to leave it to the players?

The UH take of 'everyone just uses whatever comics they want' gives you such a cluster fuck of realities that it's basically impossible to RP any further continuity in. People's very existence ends up retconning facets of others characters, etc. This is what I'm talking about resolving. Creating a definitive timeline (which is what it sounded like you wanted to do) is necessary for any kind of real consistency in RP.

[ixokai]

@faraday said in FCs on Comic MUs:

@lotherio said in FCs on Comic MUs:

Not to call her out or drag her in, @Faraday has, just prior to AresMUSH go-live, consolidated a lot of standard global features and add-ons that players have come to expect and enjoy all in one location as a Softcode Core.

Heh, that's been around for close to ten years.

Since @Tempest asked in the train wreck thread about a sandbox setup -
here you go - Zero to Faraday Softcode. It has FS3 and other stuff built in but you can get rid of them with the +uninstall command. It doesn't have +traits, but that's easy enough to do. Maybe @tangent or @ixokai has that quick and dirty version I threw together for Marvel63 when it first opened.

I don't have it anymore readily, because we migrated off that platform onto my own awhile ago. (RhostMUSH, all code besides bbs/jobs by me)

That said, I've taken M1963's database, wiped out all the characters and grid and saved it as a sort of empty starter DB that I can give to someone if they want it.