MUSHgicians elements
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@derp - That scene's a favourite of mine. I think that nobody but Penny's in the right discipline to do it if you can only off-the-cuff in your own discipline, though?
@Aria - I have some ideas to make FS3 do the magic. Last time I talked about it here it got pretty blasted, but I don't think its as bad as all that, and it would allow what you and Derp are getting at.
"... you'll find the story doesn’t end how you think, and the most important characters aren’t who you expect.” - Penny 40 to Derek, The Magicians S04E07 ‘The Side Effect’
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@il-volpe If you use Ares, you also have a couple other skill system options ready-made. One of them might be better suited to a magic system than FS3. FWIW.
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@il-volpe If you use Ares, @Tat might also be willing to talk about her process of building a magic system on top of FS3.
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@derp said in MUSHgicians elements:
But improvisation can lead to really cool stuff. Like this.
Why am I not watching this show?
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@bad-at-lurking You should. There is also a truly
Les Mis moment, which I thought would be hard to beat -- but that did it. 
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I'm actually of the mind that you have to have a tight up-down nozzle on the advancement of particular skills as they relate to applications, otherwise your login rate drops because the game becomes centered around the tempting cotton candy (the easily seen statistics) instead of the qualitative quantity of a MU* (the creative writing).
Just have upgrade applications for large boosts in skill (assuming you haven't already applied for a particular side-level - not upper tier out of the gate) with certain qualifiers related to other players involved.
The one exception to this, I feel, is the economy. This one should somehow mimic Dune, wherein the hammer button (the activation switch for increasing some sort of commodity-based asset) should rely around a conflict of some sort, so the economy becomes intertwined with game politics.
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@roz said in MUSHgicians elements:
@il-volpe If you use Ares, @Tat might also be willing to talk about her process of building a magic system on top of FS3.
I think it really depends on how you want to work it. If you want a system that lets you type 'cast <spell>' instead of 'combat/weapon fireball' and then 'combat/attack person', you'll need to dig into code. If you don't care about being kind of kludgy and want to mostly rely on rolls and GM interpretation, you're probably fine. It's always easier to use a system that is basically interpreting dice according to a set of rules. (Note: I think this is a perfectly fine and even awesome way to run an FS3 game, I've done it with mutations).
The FS3 danger is that if you plan to have combat of any sort - say, adventurers slashing at things in Fillory - it gets complicated to have some people using a sword in FS3 combat to do damage, and not having a nice fireball equiv ready to go. IC improv is all well and good, but a coded system means you had to have time to configure stuff.
And magical attacks are pretty easy, but if you want to really explore the full range of magic - stunning, AOEs, healing, buffs and debuffs, etc - well. That's a lot harder to do well without code. Which is why I did the insane thing Roz describes above.
All of this is to say that when deciding what systems you're using, definitely think about how they will intermingle with FS3, if that's what you're using, especially when it comes to fighty and healing things.
There are a lot of things I've just designed a certain way explicitly because that's how FS3 does or does not work, and I think that's a lot better than designing a system you love and then trying to smoosh it in.
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@tat said in MUSHgicians elements:
There are a lot of things I've just designed a certain way explicitly because that's how FS3 does or does not work, and I think that's a lot better than designing a system you love and then trying to smoosh it in.
Yeah, I think the reason you've been so successful is because you've limited yourself to doing things that work well within the existing framework. FS3 has first aid healing - you've made a magical heal spell. FS3 has explosions - you've made a magical fireball, etc. With an original system you have the flexibility to fit within that framework. When you're trying to model something pre-existing, it gets messy, as seen in this discussion about why FS3 doesn't really model Jedi powers well at all for a Star Wars game.
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@tat said in MUSHgicians elements:
It's always easier to use a system that is basically interpreting dice according to a set of rules. (Note: I think this is a perfectly fine and even awesome way to run an FS3 game, I've done it with mutations).
I think one must do it this way to have it flexible enough to represent the source material well enough to deserve the name.
You want to be able to wing it, as in the 'Under Pressure' video clip. But magic is heavily academic and takes shitloads of practice and study.
My undeveloped thought is to say that any spell has both a difficulty and a charge requirement -- use FS3's Luck points for this but I'll have to figure out how to tweak it so you can raise your max with XP, if casting as a group everybody contributes some. If you blow all your charge at once and it's more than X points, you become a niffin. If you run out of charge blowing it a little bit at a time, you just pass out. Material components that are destroyed in the process of casting reduce the charge. Somatic/ritual components (usually "Popper" hand-movements in the source material) reduce difficulty, but you have to be able to perform them properly, so you have a Poppers skill that you don't roll to cast, but is a prerequisite. Spell requires you to chant in Scythian, you need that language at the appropriate level. Geometry for yer complex sigils. That sort of thing. So in the video clip, Quentin casts a simple mind effect to make everybody know the lyrics to "Under Pressure" and hear the tune. The group performance makes the spell that follows a group-cast, so nobody has to spend too much charge, and the group performance also serves as a high-value ritual (lots of people, coordinated with a fairly high level of precision) so with the diff lowered and everybody giving charge, they can pull it off without anyone being too badly weakened. Though everybody has to have at least a couple of points in a music skill or they can't carry the tune and it won't work.
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Using a non-FS3 system on Ares (Star Wars RPG by FFG), I've found Ares is quite versatile and easy to work with. There's tutorials and examples that go through how to add things, and there's almost surely an existing something you can borrow from.
For example, I wanted to add a statement that players make from the perspective of their character. Part of the application. I added a new command to do it, so I could make sure people didn't miss it. I'd say it was as easy to add that command as it would have been add similar into TinyMUX or Rhost (which I am way more familiar with).
All that to say... it's adaptable. If you want to do something far more free-form, it would be quite easy to do. A few dice rolls, a few pools to keep track of... easy peasy. Plus you already have all the other stuff, like forum chat app review, etc etc.
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We will use Ares, almost certainly with FS3. Anybody who wants to do some development and RP-master stuff, give a poke.
