What Is Missing For You?

[Carex]

@lithium

That is true, if you are in an area where all the major battles happen but if you set your game in a place which isn't a major city you can pretty much just watch the end of the world on the news.

Wouldn't it be an interesting game if you spent a year building your character like normal then at the start of the second year a giant Wyrm-spawn erupts from the pentagon, the army goes to fight it and gets destroyed until a bunch of werewolves show up and fight it while everyone watches it live on TV?

You don't have to be in the thick of the end of the world for the world to end. It would be much more interesting a story to be away from the battles as they unfold around the world in places you don't live. See how the truth coming out a little at a time shakes up the way people live life, what changes happen because of one monster attack after another.

How would humans react? Could you keep your little piece of the world from unraveling while the "Chosen" fight the larger battles?

[Kay]

@carex Isn't that oWoD in a nutshell? Though if you have your game cyclically restart annually or biannually that would be a slightly different twist. I would be concerned on how to keep the game from being turned into beer and pretzels 'nothing we do matters' on an OOC level, though, if you were looking for a more serious roleplay atmosphere.

[ThatGuyThere]

My question on the cyclical WoD game idea would be how to draw players, if I can make a character on cyclical game that has a max lifespan of one year, or make a character on standard game that I can play for 6 years (not an exaggeration I have hit the six year mark with a few characters over my time in this hobby) there would have to be a lot more bells and whistles to draw me to the limited lifespan one.

[Goblin]

Western style game, please please please.
Maybe with alternate reality so there could be supernatural shit happening, long as it's western style.

[Carex]

I would like to see a games that actually have an adult rating.
I saw first hand when super-hero games started curbing TS and violence to appeal to a younger audience the popularity died.

Now when you log in to a Super-hero based game there are 20 people idle for 6 hours and a handful of people in the OOC room chatting but actual RP rarely happens and I think a lot of that is because no one builds relationships. People just go there to have play-dates where they punch NPC's with someone who might as well be a stranger.

Maybe it was just me, but the part I liked most about MUSHing in the old days was having connections. I had friends and through them they had friends and some times people would fuck and have relationships, even virtual dates. It was escapism. Some times people would argue ICly. Some times people would get jealous or cheat on each other.

There were downsides to it of course like Colossus and Quicksilver banging their sisters but for the most part that stuff was behind closed doors.

I really think when you force a politically correct rating on a game it kills the depth of the drama that can happen on it. Not just marvel either. I've seen the same things happen to WoD games. You curb sex and violence and it poisons the game.

As soon as a staff tries to stuff human nature in a box to protect the purity of "Any children who might be playing" a game about werewolves gutting people, the game starts to die.

If you look at the popularity of different styles of MUSHes the more censored the players are, the fewer players stick around. This isn't a passing trend. It's every theme, every game that does it.

In this day and age, if someone has been online long enough to find a MU*, download a telnet client and learn how to use the commands, they probably have seen a penis before.

We shouldn't have to give up having in-depth, emotionally impactful stories in order to protect the potential innocence of some kid who probably watches Futa-tentacle-hentai porn when no one is watching.

Just put it right on the log in screen. "This is an adult game. By signing in you are testifying that you are above 18 or the legal age to see adult content in your nation of origin." then if some one less than 18 logs in it's not our problem.

[RizBunz]

@carex I agree with this lots. It's also very hard for people to play IN an era because of their present views on subject matters. The 60s, for example. It's a rough time, especially if you're of a different race, creed, and dealing with the war is another kettle of fish. GREAT era to use, but people just...forget or don't play against it. And that's disappointing.

That being said, in our prior game, we had our policies talk about these types of things. And the good ol' This is an Adult game, be an Adult to play it. Adult. So yeah, we don't shrink away from that stuff. Nor should it EVER be shrunk away from in WoD. Hello, World of DARKNESS. It's not a happy place.

[fatefan]

I'd love to see a superhero game that promoted player-based changes to the state of the world/grid. While most games say they allow it through submitted player-run plot proposals etc., there doesn't really seem to be much permanent effect (even considering the tendency of comics to reset things after some time anyway). I know that staff don't want to let completely batshit ideas go through, but the result seems to be a lot more inertial resistance to potentially interesting ideas for fear of disrupting the initial status quo.

[Carex]

@fatefan

I can't agree enough. I've played hero games so much where I execute a complicated, elaborate plan for the heroes to thwart in a very public way which should change the world at least a little and nothing ever happens.

Also, no one running a game ever goes, "Wait, the Justice League has teleportation technology? Well, America is just going to take that. If you don't want to share technology which will improve the lives of everyone on earth, then get out of America and don't come back."

That's exactly what the goverment should do. The heroes have limitless energy devices, teleportation and super-computers that could be used to cure all diseases but the goverment never takes it.

You think we wouldn't? We kill thousands of people a day because there is oil in the ground we haven't gotten yet. Teleportation technology alone is worth magnitudes more than oil.

Hell, that could be a good theme for a game right there. The Justice League becomes outlaws on earth because the U.N. demands they share their tech and they refuse. Force them into hiding instead of the spotlight.

[Lithium]

There used to be an adult game that was based on super heroes, where fights always devolved into sex.

I don't remember the name of it, but I do remember one of the intro things was something like big bad ass villain telling the wonder woman type of character the following:

"To the victor goes the spoils. Now bend over."

Never actually played there (Wish I had, it was a fun premise for a sex game) but my plate was too full at the time.

[Carex]

@lithium

In a way that is just as much a game for children as the games with no sex in them. It's just a game for adult-children. That's part of the problem. We have a choice between games where everything is about sex or nothing is about sex and no games where people just act... normal.

You have sex when it's appropriate for the relationship. The relationship should be the end goal, not the sex. If all that ever happens is sex, it's just as much a cartoon as Gummy Bears, only on the other end of the spectrum.

(Enjoy that theme song)

[Lithium]

@carex Uh there are plenty of games for adults who do have adult relationships when it is thematically appropriate for the characters to do so. I don't know why you would think we don't have games for adults.

The idea that any game is a game just for 'children' is pretty insulting really.

[fatefan]

@carex So a kind of reverse version of the premise of The Authority, in which a JL-like team attempts to coerce the world to become a better place by making sweeping changes? (Unlike similar stories about the Squadron Supreme, the Authority arguably ends up making things better for some time...)

Also, I suppose Jupiter's Legacy might be a similar starting point, too, kind of (rogue superheroes fighting against an evil genius and his army of privileged super-beings)...

[Roz]

@carex I am confused at your statements mostly because I feel like the games you describe as not existing are -- all of the games I've played in the past several years.

[Sunny]

@roz Yeah, the only games I can think of that do what he/she is speaking of are like, a couple of Harry Potter games because of their source material and genuinely wanting to stay on the level of the books/movies. I mean, I think there was a Disney game for a while that tried very hard to enforce people being G rated (and then closed abruptly iirc when they finally realized it was not going to happen), and the occasional outlier will TRY it...

Wait! Tenebrae has no-private-rp rules! That is a modern game that persists even though they do have rules along these lines. So it is done, I just maintain that it's rare.

ETA: @Carex -- have you looked into Kushiel games at all?

[Lithium]

@sunny Tenebrae also suffers from an extreme lack of anything going on on the grid at all, as people idle around waiting for people to run 'adventures'.

[Pyrephox]

@lithium It's definitely a different culture, but at least when I was playing there, there were /always/ adventures being run. Often multiple plots a night all week. There wasn't a lot of grid play, but it was hard to say there wasn't things to do.

Admittedly, the lack of grid RP and...ways to naturally connect the many adventures to an ongoing personal-oriented plot meant that I tended to drift away. But I enjoyed all the time I was there, and when I reached out to people for grid RP, I could usually get a scene or two.

[Sunny]

@lithium said in What Is Missing For You?:

@sunny Tenebrae also suffers from an extreme lack of anything going on on the grid at all, as people idle around waiting for people to run 'adventures'.

I am not fond of the policy decision and the impact it has on things, but that's from a perspective of what I like and enjoy. It is actually working as intended for the staff there, from what I can tell. They are running a D&D game, and have a solid idea of what that looks like, and have received the result that they want. I don't disagree with you, though.

[ThatGuyThere]

Tenebrae was a weird game for me. I did not last long there because while finding adventures was not hard there was no real connective tissue, it was basically like showing up to a gaming store and joining in random RP every few days. It could be fun at times but I wondered off quickly because there was nothing to really make me care.

[Pyrephox]

I think it goes to show that there's really a lot of space in MU*dom for diverse cultures and visions. It's a different way of conceiving of the game space, but if you groove with it, it works really well, and has remained in play for...decades? at this point.

[Apos]

@pyrephox said in What Is Missing For You?:

I think it goes to show that there's really a lot of space in MU*dom for diverse cultures and visions. It's a different way of conceiving of the game space, but if you groove with it, it works really well, and has remained in play for...decades? at this point.

Yeah I think that there's a pretty wide scope of different types of games that would appeal to people. If someone would enjoy a type of game, no matter what kind of game that might be, if they are willing to put in the effort to run the same kind of game they'd enjoy, chances are other people will be into it.