Spitballing for a supers Mush
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@ZombieGenesis That's exactly what I mean. It's modern day but it's 50's feel you've got robots and rayguns and the world is teetering on the edge of nuclear armageddon with the resource wars in full swing between China and the US
Edit: Could you imagine how someone like Steve Rogers would adapt to the fallout world of 2077? It would be crazy man.
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So a bit like Pixar's The Incredibles.
Ceterum autem censeo Carthaginem esse delendam
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I have zero idea why but for some reason your comment made me start wishing for a Wreck It Ralph sandboxy type game. Everyone has their own "game" and then there is the terminal to sit in. Perhaps a few communal "games" aka, hang out spots for casual rp. People can go sandbox in their own games, or colab across many games.
Anyway. I just wanted to write it and now back to your regularly scheduled thread.
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@Ominous Pretty much.
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Not quite, but inspiration towards 50s but modern, Stargirl has a little of that vibe. The household appliances and such are retro. The feel of the heroes and their gimmicks are older school (they even bring up the magic green lantern vs the ring as an easter egg).
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Point is. If I was going to do a custom world in my usual style again the way I would go about it to avoid some of the issues I've run into in the past by doing period pieces is the following.
Pick the aestetic of an era I enjoy. Dieselpunk, Atompunk, Cyberpunk, Prohibition era, whatever.
Now set it modern day. History is exactly as it was in the real world everything that happened historically happened the way it did historically we got the same movies same songs etc.
Now pick one thing to change. In the case of this 1950's feel it would be Microchips were never invented.
Remember that all the technology we have to day you need to make it still around so people don't get too confused. In this microchipless world what I would do is decide MicroSWITCHES and vacume tubes are the big thing. You have your smartphones but they're a wrist mounted device, your mp3 players whatever. Also while all the exact same movies and music exist they have that slight different feel of the world we live in the game instead of reality. For this 50's style setting it would be that sort of era of music.
This is the revamp I was going to do for 4TMU before I was advised b y half my friendslist against it. Modern day. Modern history. People know the general setting already just by me saying that. BUT everything is Diesel powered. Combustion engines for everything, monoplanes never caught on. So everything is biplanes and triplanes even the jet engines.
This gives an aestetic feel I am going for lets the game stand out from the route and overdone bog standard world of heroes but lets people have their comfort zone and an understanding of exactly what reality is.
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@Mr-Johnson said in Spitballing for a supers Mush:
Modern day. Modern history. People know the general setting already just by me saying that. BUT everything is Diesel powered. Combustion engines for everything, monoplanes never caught on. So everything is biplanes and triplanes even the jet engines.
I would honestly struggle a lot more with the cognitive dissonance of some sort of fusion of modern history and random changes to technology than just picking a consistent theme like dieselpunk/atompunk/what-have-you that you can encapsulate for other people to grok easily. I feel like you'd really get bogged down by minutiae you'd have to constantly explain, correct, and reinforce otherwise and I'm not sure I see the benefit.
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@Wizz I don't see what you're getting at with what is different between consistent theme and what I'm talking about.
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@Mr-Johnson said in Spitballing for a supers Mush:
@Wizz I don't see what you're getting at with what is different between consistent theme and what I'm talking about.
Most alt-history settings start from a common point and THEN diverge. For instance, in TSS that divergence point is 1917 (I think? Something like that.) Everything up to that point has a common frame of reference with the history and culture we all know from the real world, and everything after that point is DIFFERENT. Sure there may be similarities in how things evolve, but the farther you go from that divergence point, the more different things become.
What you described above is very different. It's modern but 1950's styled? I don't even know what that means. Beyonce exists but she's singing 1950's rock and roll? Would the MCU movies be a thing? Are there even movies? Is there an internet? My brain can't even.
"Microchips were never invented" is not just one change, because history and technology are SUPER intertwined. The world we live in would be ridiculously different if technology had taken a different path from the 1950's onward.
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@faraday That is what I was getting at it all exists but it's influenced by the style of the period. I figured it would be easier then full out divergence and new history. apparently I'm wrong.
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@Mr-Johnson I wouldn't say 'wrong' - maybe you can make it work somehow with some more detailed theme files. The first thing that comes to mind is something like the modernized Romeo + Juliet (the Leo one). Some folks dig that kind of mashup. My brain just has a million questions.
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It's not that you're wrong, we're just suggesting that when you say (for example) "Marvel Steampunk," that conjures a very specific aesthetic, culture, time and technology that people are already familiar with because it's pop culture. You can easily find pictures, fiction, movies...it's all over, and it is more or less consistent.
When you talk about a general "50's aesthetic, but everything is modern" you obviously have a very specific image in your mind, but that translation is going to be pretty wildly different for different people -- for example, I wouldn't have pictured diesel biplanes and microswitches and whatever else. You'd have to constantly be explaining to people what exists and what doesn't exist, or how it's different and why.
If you wanted to oversimplify and just be like, "ok literally everything is the same, just imagine a retro style," that's kinda fun I guess, but I'm not sure I see the point in a text medium.
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@Wizz No no the biplanes thing was my solution for the 4tmu* which was trying to go for technologically advanced interwar period because that's an aesthetic I adore.
The idea is using it less as a full unique thing and more as a bit of a flavor to things. Honestly a lot of it is my attempting to still do what I love doing. Wacky twists on more traditional settings without getting the same problems I run into of people lost and confused. That's honestly part of why I started this thread. To try and get feedback, and I suppose understand things a bit better
I have some very specific boxes that I personally like being ticked. The 50's ascetic, the prohibition era aesthetic, Wild West, and cyberpunk all being things I adore.
I'd love to be able to build a world that lets other people explore concepts I personally have my heart set on but I understand that time and again I seem to run into a major issue with not being able to hit the sustainability thresh-hold where we get active players perpetuating stories that keeps the server alive.
I'm not saying I'd want 40-100 players all rumbling about all the time. honestly I'd be over the moon with 20 players running through fun little stories while I do my best to deal with the meta plot.
I know that the ideas that are nearest and dearest to my heart, those ones to which I hold this burning undenyable passion are not what other people enjoy, and if I'm only getting 4 or 5 players I may as well continue just running them as tabletop adventures as I have for years.
I am trying to find some way to assauge the issue of people being confused on the setting no mater how much I write up and flesh the world out.
The solution that's been put forward by most the people who know me is this generic modern day sort of thing with more subtle twists. The twist in this particular case is twofold; The Wider dimension at large, and the attitude the general populace have to powered individuals.
Players are entering a world where the only experience society has with powered people is heat vision burning down population centers, sonic booms in nighttime attacks on major landmarks. The unpowered folks of the world banding together to stop a greater threat that even with the combined might of the worlds governments, the combined effort of all our greatest technology, with even the atom bomb could only weaken him to a point he could be captured.
I hope that'll be enough of a twist to stand out from the crowd but I'm noty sure. It's also not just a twist for twists sake but a story I'm passionate about running players through and sharing the world that kind of outlook could take.
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@Ominous said in Spitballing for a supers Mush:
So a bit like Pixar's The Incredibles.
This is what I was picturing. Though "The Incredibles" largely conjures up its retro aesthetic with visuals. It's really important to the animation but I don't feel like it played all that much into the story. I'm not sure how you'd approximate something like this in text.
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So, I get the idea of what @Mr-Johnson is saying/pitching here. Getting back to his idea of a Fallout MU, at some unspecified point in the Fallout Universe, pretty much the post WW2 50's, the world took a 'step back' and used atomic technology to fuel technological advancements that benefited society, much like the science fiction of that era and earlier had proposed. And, the aesthetic of the world remained stuck in the 50's, because reasons.
There's a few problems with this general concept, though (even with the Fallout series, not just the MU pitch)
- It's internally inconsistent. We 'step back' and devote to technological advancement through atomic power, but we still build nuclear arsenals and there's still a Cold War between 'Yanks' and 'Commies' going until 2070 when the nuclear war breaks out between the US and China. So, there's really no 'step back' moment.
2)It ignores societal changes that accompany technology. Everything is basically 'Leave It To Beaver', but with robots and clunky wrist computers.There's no mutual influence of society and technology upon each other, outside of a general consumer demand for 'more convenience'. Society has been frozen for about 120 years, which is hard to justify outside of 'it's just this way because'.
Now, this works in a game series like Fallout, because the primary focus is survival and shooting. Also, the universe is meant to be a satirical comment on the 50's-early 60's consumer culture. The past is barely sketched in enough to support the game's style. It works great for a FPS, but on a game where the primary purpose is role-playing, it leaves a lot of details lacking.
I think this is the issue when designing a game around a particular aesthetic: you have to have a slightly logical reason for the aestetic to exist beyond 'it looks cool'.
Let's take a look at a successful game with a strong and clear design aestetic: Shadowrun. It boils down to 'cyberpunk + magic', but FASA worked the lore around the concept in order to explain it and how society has changed and reacted according to the in-game history.
Bottom line: things don't just exist in a solitary vacuum. William Gibson created the idea of cyberspace, and that influenced how the Internet developed into what it is today as much as the physical technology of ARPANet. We have dedicated scientists and technicians working to create matter/enercy converters because Star Trek postulated the possibility with transporters and replicators. If you're proposing a dieselpunk/atompunk/raypunk/whateverpunk aesthetic for a game, there needs to be reasons why the world exists like this. And that means creating details that may make creating the gme more of a chore than a pleasure for you.
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It just needs to be internally consistent. We don't actually need the answers to the questions, but YOU, The Storyteller, does have to have the answers / know the big picture, because otherwise the little picture / little pieces the players get don't make sense.
It's like the parable of the blind people and the elephant and everybody touching it has a different idea of what they're touching, right? But if that's your game, it always has to be an elephant -- if you have a hippo today, a zebra on Tuesday, and an elephant on Friday, the picture your players walk away with is NEVER going to make any sense.
The answer can be anything from "aliens" to "global conspiracy" to "you are actually in a simulation" or whatever, right? It's just that there has to be an answer there, and every single decision you make has to be consistent with that answer, whether or not you share that with your players.
Once upon a time, the 'answer' that never hit my game's grid was 'Set is asleep under the city. Yes, that Set.' It informed EVERYTHING, but touched nothing we actively did directly.
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@Sunny I'll be honest man the reason 4TMU was the tech that it was and the style was the discovery of a crashed UFO that contained a hyper advanced Diesel Engine and people just based all their tech around that and didn't really know how to improve upon it significantly enough to really make a suitable replacement because it was just SO efficient on the fuel to power ratios.
Add in the story I was running with CHECKMATE and their conspiracy to destroy the global climate in a way that would allow for the takeover of their alien overlords, and the Society For A Brighter Tomorrow effectively strong arming the culture to conform to THEIR ideal of tomorrow through assassination and mental domination through subtle propaganda campaigns and blackmail, and you had the world the way it was.
I have thought about a lot of this stuff and I do have it in the wings I just haven't really gotten the chance I need to share a lot of that stuff with people.
I was actually inspired in that regard with fallout. If you follow the lore you actually find out that the reason that the society regressed back to the 50's style was actually government intervention and a series of intentional reforms and actions by the united states government to attempt to push back the Chinese communist influence.
Wholesomeness regulations were implemented forcing what kinds of media could be made and they effectively through forced control, assassination, and government regulation FORCED culture to stagnate because anything BUT cultural stagnation was met with extreme force because it was scene as communist influence. McCarthyism cranked up to 100.
Further in fallout the Microchip was NOT invented resulting in technology relying further on Microswitches and vacuum tubes which again I basically took wholesale for the 4tmu idea.
Nuclear energy was big, but it was the discovery of alien technology that ultra propelled american technology into the absolute forefront and made them confident enough that they could put the decency laws into effect. With china stealing some of that technology and reverse engineering it. Eventually the culmination of these technologies would be the microfusion core which would have ended energy scarcity entirely. One core able to last approximately 250 years before needing to be recharged.
Uh sorry for the slight ramble, but the point is I HAVE thought all this through in a fair few regards. I've also done my research into how other people have thought this through which is nice and honestly how I get most of my information. An old slogan comes to mind: Plagerize from so many different sources that it becomes a new idea, because there is no such thing as a new idea.
Now all that said and out of the way I legitimately just want to make a game that can as I said get to that magic threshhold and keep it there. The bright side is that I'm disabled I got plenty of free time to do it. The downside is I've got terrible health so sometimes I vanish to deal with hospitalization.
I've pretty much repeated myself on everything else really, but yeah this is for spitballing figuring out some ideas that would work.
I know some folks are saying that, in DMs as well as on here that their issue in particular was not feeling there was a progressing story to join in on. I would say the issue I was told more often of as I was actually running it was people who were well to put it blunt unwilling to learn the setting and leaving as a result dropping our playercount.
My other staff can attest to this. It was a constant issue we had to deal with. People joining in and just going "uhhh I don't what how?" and no mater how much I put up explaining it the thing never clicked.
Now of course this could very much be me being a really wordy bastard. I know I use way too much text to say way too little, however if I'm using something that fits for the most part more in line with a more familiar world for people? It might work better.
Honestly another one of those things I've always wanted to do is Earth-2 where it's set at the late phase of the golden age. So 1960's or so, but you've got the Earth-2 continuity and characters and that feel, but over and over I get told the same thing.
We don't want historical settings we didn't LIVE in historical settings we don't want to learn. And that really breaks my heart. There aren't enough people who ARE willing to learn a custom setting like that which is more interesting. At least in the cape biz as I've seen so far.
What it really seems people want is: Modern day. Multiverse.
Nothing else 'sells' DC only games even with an active Dev team don't sell. Marvel only doesn't sell. The market has shown over and over that people don't REALLY want anything new.
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@Mr-Johnson said in Spitballing for a supers Mush:
Honestly another one of those things I've always wanted to do is Earth-2 where it's set at the late phase of the golden age. So 1960's or so, but you've got the Earth-2 continuity and characters and that feel, but over and over I get told the same thing.
We don't want historical settings we didn't LIVE in historical settings we don't want to learn. And that really breaks my heart.
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Nothing else 'sells' DC only games even with an active Dev team don't sell. Marvel only doesn't sell. The market has shown over and over that people don't REALLY want anything new.Honestly man? At this point in time, with the current events IRL especially but also the general decline of interest in the hobby over the last...decade, you might not ever get this magical self-sustaining number you want no matter what you do. That's just a risk you face in putting effort into opening a game.
In that case, I would suggest you stop focusing so hard on what other people want from a game and just make the game YOU would want to play in. Your passion for it will shine through, and other people who like the vibe will come play, and you'll wind up having a much better time and a lot more fun than if you were forcing yourself to just slog through some generic blah that has already existed a bajillion times and draws the same nasty, boring players playing the same characters.
Will it last? Maybe not? But again, there's just no guarantee it would anyway.
Just my two cents.
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I have to second @Wizz. Make the game you want to play. Keep an eye on making it accessible for other people to play in your game too - settings with One Big Badass are fun for the badass but not much fun for anyone else who has to deal with them, for instance - but build what you want to play first and foremost.
I generally don't get involved in Comics games because I like the grim and gritty antiheroes rather than the four-colour deities, and Frank Castle in a world with Superman is... yeah. But a dieselpunk setting with no Superman? That actually sounds interesting.
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@Mr-Johnson said in Spitballing for a supers Mush:
Nothing else 'sells' DC only games even with an active Dev team don't sell. Marvel only doesn't sell. The market has shown over and over that people don't REALLY want anything new.
I think the market shows that it's dying because it's the same shit with a different covering.
I really liked 4T, but the game ground down for me because the players, by and large, didn't appear to be doing anything. My time online is too limited to just wait for things to happen. And nothing really did.
“It is better to live doing the things that you like. It is foolish to live within this dream of a world seeing unpleasantness and doing only things that you do not like.” -- Yamamoto Tsunetomo.
