Empire State Heroes Mush

[ZombieGenesis]

@Alamias I never looked into it to verify what the player was saying to me so I can't say how accurate this is either way but, apparently, the character was involved in some storyline where he rebuilt a spaceship with no help from anyone else or something. They said or hinted at that Roy was some secret genius who tried to downplay his intellect or something. I don't know. It just seemed off to me and I offered a compromise of him being genius level intellect but being just below Tony Stark and not even that was enough. It was above Tony Stark or I was 'ruining' the character.

It's stuff like this(which I dealt with on a daily basis on H&V) that I use levels and limits on my hero games. That way you limit the ambiguity that can come up in ability debates.

[Phase Face]

@ZombieGenesis My experience has been that having a staff that's willing to say 'no' to things that are clearly out of bounds for what's reasonable for a given character is enough to prevent cases like what you're describing. Harley 'has' taken a punch from Superman and not died, but Harley is pretty obviously not actually a brick on the level of a Kryptonian, and any charstaff would be well within their rights to just say 'no' and let the player process that as they will.

There's nothing wrong with using a system of some kind - whether it's loose and informal, like the numerical benchmarks HeroMUX used, or an actual game system like M&M or FASERIP - but I would disagree that it's the only way to manage players wanting to push characters in these ways. There are definitely players who will make problems of themselves when faced with those kinds of limits, but - like you point out - this can and will happen with numbers, too-- and numbers introduce a risk of 'power creep' over time, if the staff isn't careful about maintaining consistent standards.

This can get trickier when trying to compare characters who genuinely are in a similar niche and at a similar level of power, of course. Thor, in the last ~decade or so, has pretty regularly been written at a level of power that'd be at home with a Kryptonian character; should he be as strong/invulnerable/etc as Superman on a MUSH? Should he be slightly weaker because he's a powerful weather manipulator on top of the strength? Do you account for the fact that there's no real Kryptonite equivalent for him? That kind of thing.

(For the record: I would probably lean towards 'yeah, whatever; he has other flaws, and at the end of the day, there can always be something that disadvantages, distracts, or otherwise prevents him from being some kind of nuisance in the course of play, even if it's just a really fuckin' big robot. Also, if he's a dick about it, nobody will play with him, same as any other character.)

There will always be some people who try to push the envelope, codified system or no. I feel like you would have to take the extra step of having a system and also taking away players' ability to set the numbers in that system to have a real shot at curbing it (though, even then, they'll probably ask). That said, though, most players I have dealt with - and my experience is definitely not deep or expansive, but it's what I've got to run on - will just take a 'no' and revise accordingly. I did dozens of apps on HeroMUX and can count the number of players who really dug in and gave me shit about being asked to tune their stuff to be more reasonable on a hand.

@Auspice @Alamias

During my last stint of charstaffing, I had a 20-something Damian Wayne cross my desk who insisted on having pretty broad sorcery abilities, enhanced physical capabilities, and either full or partial control of the League of Assassins following a dip in the Lazarus Pit.

[Auspice]

The only scenario I can even remember where Harley took a hit from Superman was in Injustice and she had taken one of those superhuman pills at the time.

...I wonder if the person who apped had just seen like, a panel and didn't know the whole story around it.

Because in my experience... if you can provide full justification for a thing, Staff is usually OK with it. I apped Blink once and initially got pushback on her range of teleportation (Staff wanted to say Blink had less of a range of teleportation than Nightcrawler) and I referenced the comics showing that she's gone as far as the moon. We settled on 'okay she can get there someday but she isn't there yet' because I had multiple storylines showing her range/ability.

Not just a vague 'no it totally happened this one time' type of thing. And as someone who has staffed on a comic game... That'd be what I'd expect. Okay, you want this and say it's legit for the character? Great. Give me examples. I wanna see it. And a one-off single-page reference doesn't count because sometimes weirdness happens for sake of story (or how many times have things been because of some third-party's interference? and not the character themselves? :D).

@Phase-Face I think the weirdest part of that to me is the sorcery part. Physical capabilities, okay. Association with the League, okay. Dip in the Lazarus Pit..... ehhh, depending on the reasons why and the story - I'd poss. give it. I'm not a huge Damian fan to begin with, but..... it's the sorcery part that kinda makes me ???

[Roz]

Handling apps for superpower stuff is honestly just the worst. I hated it so much.

[ZombieGenesis]

@Phase-Face To be clear I'm not saying a system is the only way to manage players. I'm saying it's the way I choose to manage players. Every game has to find their own way but once they settle on that method they have to be clear and consistent in that methods usage. Which seems to be the overall case with Empire State. At least from what I've read in this thread(I don't play there).

And most people on H&V were GREAT. Don't get me wrong there. My overall experience with H&V was really good. But, for a time, we were getting one of those players a day that tried to push things just a bit too far and would not listen to reason when we tried to tell them otherwise.

[bored]

@Alamias said in Empire State Heroes Mush:

@ZombieGenesis said in Empire State Heroes Mush:

justify things like Roy Harper being smarter than Tony Stark and Reed Richards.

Red Arrow? Arsenal? That Roy Harper?

Smarter than Richards or Stark?

Have I really been out of comics that long that this is even a question that has to be addressed in the first place?

To be fair/comic nerdy, this is probably based on his version from Red Hood and the Outlaws (which, yeah, people mostly hate, but it was a thing). In this version, Roy was a kid tech whiz that Ollie brought on to help him with gadgets, and he designed most of the trick arrows and things.

By later points in the series, he's not only building robots to defend their secret base and lecturing the crew on Starfire's warship (which has... you know, FTL/teleporting across space level technology) how to improve their own engine performance. He shows up to one fight looking like this:

Comics are weird.

[surreality]

@bored said in Empire State Heroes Mush:

Comics are weird.

...and clearly not subject to encumbrance rules. It's... I am in gawping awe of that image.

[bored]

@surreality Being generous, I'd say its at least some kind of homage to the 90s and all the Liefeld era of guns & pouches, but its sadly possible it's 100% a serious, straight take. This is also a book that got wide coverage for Starfire's presentation verging on pornography, albeit several artists earlier.

[surreality]

@bored I was just thinking, 'it's like they replaced all the pouches with Folger's Weaponry'.

[Lotherio]

Two cents. If its multi-verse, crossover, any comic any version ... then I don't see why people can't fathom Roy Harper being a genius, its pointed out he was pretty dang genius in one run. I don't see why people can't fathom Hulk Hogan being Superman Strong either.

That said, I think the best tool for comic genre staff would just be to make/work with players to establish what is feasible (if staff want to avoid saying no or making concepts seem ridiculous, just make the charbits for people to grab to app into).

I imagine it would be helpful for players to grab a character off the shelf (roster), already stat'ed and just bring up some back story for the version they like. It could even have a few notes (Any Steve Rogers but the one from this verse/timeline/whatever). Would help folks decide if they want to take it or not. Takes out a lot of the negotiation, well in this 12 issue run, this character was better than god-villain.

[Ganymede]

@ZombieGenesis said in Empire State Heroes Mush:

That's how that player envisioned Roy Harper, as a super technological genius that outshined Tony Stark and Reed Richards in that area. That was his perception of the character. If we had no system in place that codified what he could do imagine that player in a scene with Tony Stark whose player has a very different take on just how smart Roy Harper is. Roy Harper corrects Tony Stark on some advanced technological thing, Tony's player starts going OOCly 'Huh?', and the debate begins about whose vision of the character should take precedent.

Staff's vision takes precedent where there's an approval process. There's no reasonable argument to the contrary.

To be frank? There's no reason to believe that Tony Stark can't be wrong. Tony flat-out denies what Scott tells him in Endgame, until he actually looks into it. Tony thinks he can pick up Mjolnir, and is dead-wrong there. So, why can't Roy be right about something, and Tony wrong, even if it is technological? For me, I see the issue as Roy's and Tony's players' fixations on their visions, and their inability to recognize that how an advanced technological thing works may be completely irrelevant.

In my experience, things get messy and argumentative when the stakes are actually fairly low. But if the stakes are low, they really don't matter much, do they? Players that get into these sorts of arguments invite an eye-roll from me.

But that might be why I'm getting along fine too -- because I'm not arguing.

[bored]

@Lotherio The problem seems rooted in the fact that they want the playerbase draw of a 'multi-verse, crossover, any comic and version' game... but they only really respect the Marvel side story-wise. That's fine for broad theme, setting (ie NYC vs. Gotham and Metropolis), story direction, etc. It's a problem if you're inviting people to play DC characters but tell people they need to be explicitly weaker than any Marvel analogue (with special exceptions for a possibly staff-buddy Batman, iirc from earlier in the thread). On any game like this, no one should be getting superlatives (smartest, richest, strongest, etc), really - you should just have a tier of 'top tech characters' that hey maybe will RP together. Weird idea.

I think the Hulk Hogan/Superman thing is a whole different problem, basically of trying to use a narrative system approach with players that are looking for simulation-style information. Whether it would or wouldn't work for a game, I can't really say, but it's a somewhat nontratditional approach, at least in MUing, so I can understand players having difficulty with it. 'Why is his +4 better than my +4' is a valid question (even if it has a valid answer).

[Alamias]

@bored So they turned Roy Harper into a Trucker Hat Wearing Guy Gardner wannabe techno genius?

[Lotherio]

@Alamias said in Empire State Heroes Mush:

Trucker Hat Wearing

Is that what that is, I thought it was a fuzzy vodka drinking hat to indicate he was a leader among the proletariat.

[Alamias]

@Lotherio That's what it looks like to me. I could be wrong.

[ZombieGenesis]

Things seem to be going into an argumentative direction and I'm not sure why. Someone asked "why would anyone use a stat/level based system" and I gave the reason why I use one. For me and my game, it was the best way to set expectations for how strong/smart/capable characters can be. For one, in my experience in more "hand-wavey" trait-based games you get a lot of argumentative players who try to justify whatever they can whenever they can. Second, for a multiverse game you can't simply use other characters as a baseline.

If it's a single universe game you can get away with saying things like "Strong-O is roughly as strong as The Thing or She-Hulk." In a game that is purely Marvel that approach makes sense and most players will be able to know what that means without needing attributes or levels or benchmarks.

In a game that combines multiple game universes, things need to be balanced and benchmarks need to be set so that players know where characters like The Thing fall strength wise. For H&V I went through a process where I compared both universes for various things and leveled them against each other. For example, I'd say something like "Who are the strongest characters in DC and Marvel? Thor, Superman, Wonder Woman, The Hulk, etc. Okay, so these should represent the upper limits of strength on H&V. They have all been leveled and balanced against each other setting the top standard of strength for the game which is to say Rank 10(able to lift a mountain)." And I'd go down the list from there.

I've also played on games where characters were not balanced against each other. Superman was listed as being able to lift and exert trillions of tons of force while The Hulk was limited to 100 tons. To me, that doesn't make sense and was the reason I left said game(Marvel characters were treated as second class citizens).

Anyway, I'm not saying my way is the right way and that others are wrong. It's just one answer to the question "why use stats/levels instead of a more freeform system since everyone knows these characters anyway?" In short, the reason is two-fold; as we've seen in this very thread perspectives on characters can vary wildly from person to person and sometimes you need to set a standard that may not be immediately intuitive to the playerbase.

[bored]

@Alamias @Lotherio Oh, the trucker hat is real for sure.

That they added to his n52 costume even before they'd settled into the tech genius part. First RHATO cover:

***=As I realize these are huge***

click to show

[TNP]

@Cupcake said in Empire State Heroes Mush:

I fell off the game radar when the metaplot introduction of the Kree got taken over by one of the X-Men, while in the meantime the Inhumans had been plotting and planning and basically this was their moment...to have the rug swiped out from under them.

Wrong game.

@Coin said in Empire State Heroes Mush:

I just... don't get that. Even if you limit actual sorcerers to power levels below Strange's, Fate is a god powering a mortal magician. It's... not the same.

Exactly. And that's why he's banned. (He wasn't banned five minuted ago but only because no one tried to app him so he was overlooked. But he is now.)

Really, there's only one reason why anything/anyone is banned: we don't want them. We don't want to try to adapt a god empowering a mortal sorcerer into Marvel. So, banned. Ambush Bug is banned. Why? We don't want more than one fourth wall breaking character on the game and one that is just this side of farcical. Banned. Eternals are banned. Some of them are of a power level that easily fits the game: Starfox/Eros for instance. Doesn't matter. We don't want to deal with Eternals, we don't want to have to evaluate every Eternal that someone thinks can fit or be made to fit. We don't want to /argue/. So, banned. They're not even in the same Solar System.

@Roz said in Empire State Heroes Mush:

Handling apps for superpower stuff is honestly just the worst. I hated it so much.

sighs Yessssssssssss.

[Ghost]

@Ganymede said in Empire State Heroes Mush:

I’m still lost as to why any of the above matters, regarding power levels.

On a game which seems to be based on traits and consent, how are power levels material in everyday RP?

Superhero games can be weird if the wrong players get the wrong characters, even if it's consent-based. Doubly so if there's no system defining win/loss, conflict resolution, etc.

I think sometimes the wrong players go for the most powerful characters that can do (in theory) almost anything, because when the game is mostly "talking it out", the concept that said Omega-Level mutant can travel through time to correct failures or Dr. Strange can literally rewrite the universe to hand himself a win is stuff that does get argued over from time to time.

I remember a guy playing the "most powerful telepathy in the universe" once who basically held an entire scene IC hostage so that he could ICly take his "girlfriend character" (who he was Oocly harassing) out of the scene. Dont get me started, I know staff shoulda slammed down on that (they didn't), but it's an example of how the wrong player can take the wrong power concept too far. Especially in this case, where the player was also staff.

That example I just gave was one of the more surreal experiences I had mushing, because while ICly this guy was using his character to ICly be a "forceful boyfriend" (she leaves with me or everyone suffers ICly) trope, oocly he was doing the same thing (you will suffer this ooc drama until she leaves with me).

[Prequell]

@TNP said in Empire State Heroes Mush:

sighs Yessssssssss.

Then maybe you shouldn't be doing apps on a supers game?