D&D 5E
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@runescryer Re: Dragonlance, I think post War of Souls in the 'true' Age of Mortals is actually pretty playable. Though I prefer to ignore the events of the Mina trilogy >.>
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@livia Possibly. It's also possible that I'm a bitter old fan that hates how the original Heroes of the Lance got treated in the later stories.
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@runescryer Oh me too. But Age of Mortals is playable.
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D&D is better at hack-and-slash style games than RP heavy games. If we're talking settings, though, Planescape and Birthright are awesome and I would love to play on either. Ravenloft would be good too. Dark Sun already has a MU*, Armegeddon, so you would be competing for players. Midnight would be interesting, as well.
Ceterum autem censeo Carthaginem esse delendam
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... I admit Planescape is the most interesting of the settings suggested. It mirrors a lot of what I would do with a custom / original world.
I'm a strong believer that a MUSH lives an dies by what happens between events; finding RP when no one is doing something is extremely vital. A central, neutral city that is a portal away from whatever adventure / plot / event people go on....
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@ominous Armageddon looks to be a full-on clone of Dark Sun: just change the names of places and people around. I think that there would be a greater demand to actually play in Athas (so long as all the Troy Denning nonsense was retconned/thrown out so players could actually do epic stuff instead of NPCs having already done it), than in a thinly veiled retread. Again, just my opinion.
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@runescryer said in D&D 5E:
@ominous Armageddon looks to be a full-on clone of Dark Sun: just change the names of places and people around. I think that there would be a greater demand to actually play in Athas (so long as all the Troy Denning nonsense was retconned/thrown out so players could actually do epic stuff instead of NPCs having already done it), than in a thinly veiled retread. Again, just my opinion.
I personally have no real interest in Dark Sun. Well, I would be interested in playing it vaguely if it were not a monomaniacal MUD, but that's it. The role/status of magic in the setting isn't something I find fun.
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I'm a strong believer that a MUSH lives an dies by what happens between events; finding RP when no one is doing something is extremely vital. A central, neutral city that is a portal away from whatever adventure / plot / event people go on....
I'll give you advice you already have.
The setting is almost inconsequential; it's important that it's done right and that it's picked well, but not what it is.
What really matters is execution; how it actually turns out on your grid. That starts with you - staff - being excited and letting it stir up your creative juices, because if you're not into it we won't either. It ends with everything else from the code base to the +events you run being enough to occupy your playerbase and get them involved enough to invest their own time and effort.
Nothing else matters. You can probably pick a generic fantasy realm and stick us in it, but if it's done well we'll love it. You can also hand-pick the most unique suberb idea-on-paper ever right out of beloved published material, but if it turns out to be flat and uninspired it'll be a frozen wasteland of idlying sockets.
Tl;DR - pick what feels right to you, then give it depth and a soul. The rest will come.
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For D&D go with original. That way you don't have to worry about people trying to do stupid stuff like finding big npc's or whatever that are very famous.
That's my 2 cents. D&D games can thrive in an original setting unlike some others.
If I had to pick a published setting though it'd be either Dark Sun, or Planescape... with a secret love for Spelljammer.
Hello! Long time listener, first time caller...
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The trick with a D&D MUSH is to figure out a good way to break out of the mold for which the game is developed; namely, adventuring.
Although a good dungeon crawl or quest for a party of happy-go-lucky thrillseekers can and should be part of it, unless you can somehow fully automate this sort of thing it won't really be sustainable, simply because DMs don't grow on trees. It's the same issue most WoD MU* who tried to do the same thing ended up having to face; if your players depend on someone sending them out to do a thing, or facing NPCs, someone needs to run these NPCs and that's where things will go badly.
What you can do is use the system thematically but offer more meat and potatoes to your playerbase. I proposed L&L in a different thread because that does work by providing foils for players - each other - but by combining these elements with D&D tropes you could tap into something special; hunt for items, research spells, track down material components, you have all sorts of carrots for your PCs to chase as opposed to just XP.
- 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 That's pretty much Birthright: D&D with a Lords & Ladies meta-plot and mass combat system added in. You can choose to have your character be a descendant of a divine bloodline or just an 'average' adventurer. Even if you are part of a bloodline, you don't have to be a landed noble and can just adventure.Every three game months, for those playing the political/power game, there's a 'turn' taken to resolve rulership events like espionage, trade, troop movements, war, etc. And if you're off adventuring, that's one of three 'actions' you get for the 'turn'. Holdings are gained and lost through these Domain Actions, and it's possible even for players that come in late to the game to participate and thrive, as long as they play smart. It's pretty much D&D 'Game of Thrones' before GoT was even written.
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@runescryer said in D&D 5E:
@arkandel That's pretty much Birthright: D&D with a Lords & Ladies meta-plot and mass combat system added in.
I've heard of it, and it sounds like fun, but pretty much doesn't cut it; there are specific reasons why D&D 5th Ed specifically is a system I'd be interested in.
Which isn't to say of course an interested game runner couldn't still borrow some ideas and even rip off themes if they can be successfully applied to the MU*.
- 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 There's a 5e conversion doc. And it's not exactly hard to port 2e to 5e.
Nice things about the (semi-official) conversion doc:
- Point system attribute generation
- If you want to play as a bloodline scion, you have to allocate points to a 'Bloodline' attribute to determine how strong the divine blood is within you. So, bloodline characters get a few nifty abilities, but non-blooded characters start off with better stats, in compensation.
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Once @pax is done with her exploration room system for Evennia, a game that automates adventuring would be totally doable!
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I would be wary of including too much Lords and Ladies into a D+D game. Though I say this as someone who does not like lords and ladies and would in theory be interested in a D+D game. Despite the similar settings the focus on the games are different, Lords and Ladies at least in the iterations I have seen focus on the higher levels of society and political matters, where as D+D is about adventurers (who can come from all parts of society but tend to function on it's edges) and action. You might be able ot combine them as two separate spheres sharing a location, but with out this you will end up having one half becoming the dominant style of play.
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@kanye-qwest said in D&D 5E:
Once @pax is done with her exploration room system for Evennia, a game that automates adventuring would be totally doable!
The trick is having enough templates for the exploration/adventuring system to actually generate variety.
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@thatguythere said in D&D 5E:
I would be wary of including too much Lords and Ladies into a D+D game.
Just to clarify, the L&L angle was just my quick pitch for what other kinds of content could be provided to keep things going on a D&D game even in the absence of DMs. I'm not by any means saying it's the only way to generate more hooks for players to occupy themselves with, though.
@kanye-qwest said in D&D 5E:
Once @pax is done with her exploration room system for Evennia, a game that automates adventuring would be totally doable!
A hybrid between a MUSH and a MUD would work really well for a D&D game, honestly. Something where a ST plugs in an adventure ("guys guys, the village is under attack!") plugs in a difficulty level which with D&D rules it's extremely easy to automatically generate an appropriate challenge for, then the code takes over. By taking all the gruntwork out of the equation and letting DMs just pose things I think more content would become available - hell, you could even give stock or randomized adventures for people to play out, which could still be awesome.
Also, a pony!
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One thing I do think D&D 5e works really well for is avoiding overtuning encounters when you have coded combat.
There's a problem that crops up on Arx where you have to eyeball a group of adventurers when making a coded combat mob, guess how hard it should be, drop the mob, and then potentially watch the mob steamroller them (when you didn't WANT the mob to be quite that deadly)... or watch them steamroller the mob (when you wanted the mob to be a challenge).
5e Challenge Rating is a well-understood mathematic; by having your mob spawns based on challenge rating, you could easily look at the party present, go, "Okay, they're these spread of levels, that means for an encounter I want to be hard but survivable, the challenge rating of the mobs should total X." You could even have code to calculate the encounter difficulty for you!
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@kanye-qwest said in D&D 5E:
Once @pax is done with her exploration room system for Evennia, a game that automates adventuring would be totally doable!
A hybrid between a MUSH and a MUD would work really well for a D&D game, honestly. Something where a ST plugs in an adventure ("guys guys, the village is under attack!") plugs in a difficulty level which with D&D rules it's extremely easy to automatically generate an appropriate challenge for, then the code takes over. By taking all the gruntwork out of the equation and letting DMs just pose things I think more content would become available - hell, you could even give stock or randomized adventures for people to play out, which could still be awesome.
I think you have to be very careful with how much automation you put into adventures/stock+randomized adventures, or what you're making turns from being a platform for playing the RPG online into an online videogame using the D&D rules.
IANAL, bu I suspect strongly the latter might get a C&D and/or licensing demand.
