Spitballing for a supers Mush
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@Ganymede Anecdotally, I haven't really come to believe this. I think there are about the same numbers and it's mostly the same people. I think comic games are driven by two opposite desires of wanting lots of people to scene with while also having open chars they like and want to play. Almost like a scale. And the cycle repeats itself as soon as something, usually staff drama, upsets the balance cart or someone pissed off makes a new game with open chars that have enough to to justify jumping ship. I was thinking back to older supers games and there wasn't gobs more people overall playing those things, to my recollection.
Edited for spellin
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The word "dying" is probably not the word I should have used, but what I meant to describe was "dying interest" in that kind of game.
The Super Games I've been on have largely been consent-based and/or trait-based. I have tried -- I could have tried harder -- to break into the community. But to be fair? I don't know much about modern comics save for what I can peel off the internet. I feel as if this puts me behind the 8-ball on these games.
That aside, it seems clear to me anecdotally that having the same people is a bad thing. No matter how many good players a game has, the bad ones will drive off newer or established players unless staff steps in. And staff, in my limited third-party experience, seems awfully reluctant to do that, perhaps because it's the same community over and over.
So, suppose for a moment that Mr. Johnson, or anyone, is looking to build a new community of players. If you want to do that, I would suggest creating a new model or paradigm. Maybe try out some other games out there that have lasted a while and see what works on them. See whether that could work for your comic game.
I have rarely regretted stepping out of my usual World of Darkness box. The limited time I have played on super MUSHes tell me that there are a lot of good players on them who may be willing to slip into a new model or paradigm for the opportunity to play a superhero.
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I think that 'stagnation' is a better descriptor for the state of Super MU's than 'dying'.As pointed out before, it's largely the same group of players moving from game to game as new ones open and the characters they want to play open up. I confess to being guilty of this as a player....
But, I suspect that the stagnation is a reflection of comics fandom as a whole. The fandom at large doesn't like change. They don't embrace new idea and concepts easily. I could discuss he whole negative-reinforcement cycle of the fandom-creator relationship, but that's a tangent that isn't going to positively add to the thread & topic.
For what my opinion is worth, I think what's going to break the Super MU stagnation is focusing on quality of the game experience over he quantity of players. A large player base is fantastic and rewarding, certainly, but you're not going to get it overnight from an entrenched audience that''s resistant to new concepts. Getting the kind of player numbers that you're looking for, who embrace the game's ideas/concept, will take months, possibly years, to grow. You just need to have a lot of patience and a staff willing to do a lot of heavy lifting from an event/scene perspective until the game reaches that critical mass of players and the PRPs become self-sustaining.
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@Runescryer said in Spitballing for a supers Mush:
I think that 'stagnation' is a better descriptor for the state of Super MU's than 'dying'.As pointed out before, it's largely the same group of players moving from game to game as new ones open and the characters they want to play open up. I confess to being guilty of this as a player....
But, I suspect that the stagnation is a reflection of comics fandom as a whole. The fandom at large doesn't like change. They don't embrace new idea and concepts easily. I could discuss he whole negative-reinforcement cycle of the fandom-creator relationship, but that's a tangent that isn't going to positively add to the thread & topic.
For what my opinion is worth, I think what's going to break the Super MU stagnation is focusing on quality of the game experience over he quantity of players. A large player base is fantastic and rewarding, certainly, but you're not going to get it overnight from an entrenched audience that''s resistant to new concepts. Getting the kind of player numbers that you're looking for, who embrace the game's ideas/concept, will take months, possibly years, to grow. You just need to have a lot of patience and a staff willing to do a lot of heavy lifting from an event/scene perspective until the game reaches that critical mass of players and the PRPs become self-sustaining.
It's also the disease of status quo. people are so worried about their precious FCs being taken down a path a future player might not like (or even sometimes staff just don't want it) that they get all up in arms about it(*). You can't app anything significantly changing the normal way shit works because "what if someone else is upset".
Why can't someone apping Barbara Gordon decide to take the name Batwoman? Just because someone might wanna play Kate Kane? Hell, why can't Babs become Nightwing? Just because someone might want to play Dick Grayson? These are examples of extremely minor changes, too; you could do a lot more for greater impact.
If staff (and the culture in general) were willing to go with it, you could find a balance between an FC and an OC Superheroes game.
And if people dropping FCs and picking them up is a problem, apply Multiverse Theory. It's not that hard, and it definitely isn't out of theme with comic books in general.
(*) Never mind a large percentage of people wanting to just rehash the same plots (often from comic books themselves) with slightly altered bits to conform to whichever characters are around in any particular game. I'm guilty of it, too, occasionally, but some people it just feels like they are literally following the comic book storyline like a script and get super aggressively defensive when you try to stray.
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@reversed said in Spitballing for a supers Mush:
So you could go multiversal and say "oh, a wizard did it, Babs is different now," but that comes with the risk of people putting less effort into engaging with people other than their own tight circle, because if they do all of this totally epic shit with someone who plays Oracle and then the next player is like "actually, my Babs only just became Batgirl last week and was never Oracle," what can you do other than shrug?
Or staff can tell the new player "sorry, that's not how it works" and if a new player has a problem with the broadstrokes of a story continuing, then too bad.
Also, this presumes people put a lot of effort into engaging with people other than their own tight circle, which is so rare it might as well be a pipedream; and when they do, those other people tend to become part of that tight circle, anyway.
"Excuse the hell out of you. He's a bag of dicks. I'm a carefully curated box of cocks." -- to @GirlCalledBlu upon being misrepresented.
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@reversed said in Spitballing for a supers Mush:
@Coin said in Spitballing for a supers Mush:
Or staff can tell the new player "sorry, that's not how it works" and if a new player has a problem with the broadstrokes of a story continuing, then too bad.
That would be my preference, for sure. I'd rather have a staff interested in and engaged by maintaining a cohesive game world than just "ah, at long last, another game I can play Pepper Potts on and do the same stuff -- it's like being young forever!"
I mean that's why you go multiversal. If the person has that big an issue, they can play the character from a parallel universe -- and deal with the ramifications of that, and fit into the world. And if they wanna play Babs as Batgirl but Cassie is Batgirl, then too bad.
Though honestly, at this point, there could be a dozen Batgirls, Robins, Nightwings, whatever. Shit, just have everyone play Logan and put a number after their name, who gives a fuck.
"Excuse the hell out of you. He's a bag of dicks. I'm a carefully curated box of cocks." -- to @GirlCalledBlu upon being misrepresented.
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@Coin said in Spitballing for a supers Mush:
Though honestly, at this point, there could be a dozen Batgirls, Robins, Nightwings, whatever. Shit, just have everyone play Logan and put a number after their name, who gives a fuck.
This was how Project Infinity handled it. IIRC, there had been like five different Spider-Mans, but they maintained a continuity at the same time to a degree, so even a freshly-bitten Peter Parker pulled through the wormhole right out of high school had to be aware and at least acknowledge that another much older dude calling himself Spider-Man had already been webslinging around and that people would recognize the costume.
And honestly that was pretty fun. It gave you something really different to navigate, not that you were forced to play out the same exact relationships or storylines but that someone who was essentially you had at one point.
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This all sounds like a nightmare for me.
But a comic game would be nifty, I think, if it adopted HorrorMUX’s model of having roles. You need an Ingenue? Plop in Starfire. A Mentor? Hank Pym or Reed Richards. An evil mastermind? The Riddler. And you sort of let players take one role only, and play that PC, through scenarios.
It could go multiverse, but it limits overlap.
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@reversed said in Spitballing for a supers Mush:
Also, if anyone ever does show up on your superhero game wanting to play Uncle Ben, you should probably ban them on principle, because nothing good is ever going to come from keeping around a person who thinks playing Uncle Ben sounds cool and fun.
Actually...
With the comics retcon that Peter's parents were government agents who died on a mission, it's possible that Ben Parker could have been an agent as well. Specifically, a SHIELD agent. One who helped gather evidence and smash a HYDRA cell. After Peter is orphaned, Ben retires from SHIELD to help raise his nephew. Years later, SHIELD uncovers a plot by HYDRA to get revenge on some ex-agents and replaces Ben Parker with an LMD for his protection. The LMD Ben Parker is the one that gets killed, and Ben, realizing that his family is safe from retaliation so long as HYDRA thinks he's dead, stays hidden away.
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@reversed said in Spitballing for a supers Mush:
@Runescryer said in Spitballing for a supers Mush:
@reversed said in Spitballing for a supers Mush:
Also, if anyone ever does show up on your superhero game wanting to play Uncle Ben, you should probably ban them on principle, because nothing good is ever going to come from keeping around a person who thinks playing Uncle Ben sounds cool and fun.
Actually...
With the comics retcon that Peter's parents were government agents who died on a mission, it's possible that Ben Parker could have been an agent as well. Specifically, a SHIELD agent. One who helped gather evidence and smash a HYDRA cell. After Peter is orphaned, Ben retires from SHIELD to help raise his nephew. Years later, SHIELD uncovers a plot by HYDRA to get revenge on some ex-agents and replaces Ben Parker with an LMD for his protection. The LMD Ben Parker is the one that gets killed, and Ben, realizing that his family is safe from retaliation so long as HYDRA thinks he's dead, stays hidden away.
no
lemme know if you ever play on a comic book mu so I can come app ben
<.<
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@reversed said in Spitballing for a supers Mush:
@Runescryer said in Spitballing for a supers Mush:
@reversed said in Spitballing for a supers Mush:
Also, if anyone ever does show up on your superhero game wanting to play Uncle Ben, you should probably ban them on principle, because nothing good is ever going to come from keeping around a person who thinks playing Uncle Ben sounds cool and fun.
Actually...
With the comics retcon that Peter's parents were government agents who died on a mission, it's possible that Ben Parker could have been an agent as well. Specifically, a SHIELD agent. One who helped gather evidence and smash a HYDRA cell. After Peter is orphaned, Ben retires from SHIELD to help raise his nephew. Years later, SHIELD uncovers a plot by HYDRA to get revenge on some ex-agents and replaces Ben Parker with an LMD for his protection. The LMD Ben Parker is the one that gets killed, and Ben, realizing that his family is safe from retaliation so long as HYDRA thinks he's dead, stays hidden away.
no
"Pete, Pete it's me. They didn't kill me, Petey. I'm outta hiding and it's time to really put the screws to these HYDRA fucks, buddy. Let's get 'em, let's really-- remember what I said, Peter? With great power comes the great responsibility to fuck shit up." * Cocks shotgun*
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After taking feeback onboard, doing some self reflection and just looking at what I want I've come to a decision.
I am going to try a game concept that I've wanted to do for ages but been afraid to do. Shadowrun Superheroes.
Is it an idea everyone will like? Of course not. Is it a good idea? Hell no. Do I want to do it? Damn right I do, more then almost anything else in mushing.
Set it 2050, toss down my usual DC and Metropolis grid get some clear easy to understand baselines for what people can and can't play. Dragons running megacorps fantasy creatures hardwired internet cyberaugmentations.
Again, it's a terrible idea but I am going to at the very damn least write it up.
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@Mr-Johnson Okay. That? That sounds a lot more interesting than generic modern-day superheroes. Keep me informed?
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I have long thought Shadowrun would be a great setting for supers, yes.
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@Mr-Johnson said in Spitballing for a supers Mush:
I am going to try a game concept that I've wanted to do for ages but been afraid to do. Shadowrun Superheroes.
I am here for this.
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Bring it on.
