MUs That We Would Love To Make (But Won't)
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@pyrephox I agree. I think one of the fears staff has with being too open is players making sweeping changes to the grid and/or theme. I'm experimenting on a private game with players being able to claim an area or organization for a plot. For example, the current plot centers around college students stuck in a summer program being stalked by a slasher. It's confined to the college and the characters that are stuck there for the summer. The players can do whatever they want within those confines. I'm hopeful it works well.
As for tools I'm providing them(I'm not actually taking part in the plot to have it almost completely "staff" free) we use a modified version of the Storypath system as presented in They Came From Beyond The Grave as our backbone and for system related stuff. They have disposable NPCs they can use in scenes. And, as said, free reign to do whatever with the summer college crew.
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@faraday said in MUs That We Would Love To Make (But Won't):
@pyrephox said in MUs That We Would Love To Make (But Won't):
you'd have to have staff who are willing to be realistic about the number of people they can handle
I mean... given that it takes an entire writer's room to generate that level of plotting for 6-10 characters on a weekly basis, I'm thinking the number of players a small staff can support is going to be pretty darn tiny. Well below the minimum threshold required to sustain a MUSH.
I think what you'd need is just a MU community willing to support each other - letting others take turns with the spotlight, running NPCs, all with the expectation that when it's your turn, they'll do the same for you.
Yeah, it's a pipe dream, but it'd be nice.
I'd be on board with this, but I'd like to see it as a community site where player can join and contribute to public themes/stories or players can do other story ideas. Like Gateway and other social places where folks could have separate spaces (or grids in the old days, a quota to make a grid for their 'mini mu*'). So if I'm feeling space cowboy for a month, I can run a few stories in Space Trucking Wranglers spaces, players can join with a generic sheet and play along. Then if Fred is feeling Vampire Vikings in York (860s near the beginning of Danelaw), we can change sheets to play that game. I did play around once in old FS3 to have it switch char sheets by area to do something similar but never went anywhere with it. But a community where folks could contribute to giant world projects where contributes continually add content, or folks can run smaller stuff in personal worlds for players that want to play along. Just rambling again.
ETA: I did look at doing this with a simpler system too, PACE diceless RPG. Which is cool quick little sytem. Folks take two traits to describe their character - like Angry Biker. The assign a point total to each from a pool of 7, Angry (3) Biker (4). If in the adventure they are in a situation the can use either one, they use that number. Example: A door is locked (rating 2), the Angry Biker wants to get mad and kick it down (Angry 3 beats door 2). But then there was the +/- bank, if door was 4, they could take counters to break it but with so many -'s they take a failure.
I'm just a surge protector doing my job, sir.
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@zombiegenesis Oh, that's cool! When you're able or if you're willing, I'd love to know how that works out at the end of the experiment - what worked really well, what some of the challenges were.
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@lotherio I think you could really embrace this with Ares. Say Player A wants to create a setting, they submit a synopsis to staff who approve or reject it or whatever. Say they approve it, they can add the setting to the demographics for people to select(so the directory sorts characters into the right tabs) and the player could either create an actual grid or, and I don't think people do this enough with Ares, create a series of wiki pages describing the setting and locales where RP could happen. Since Ares allows players to define the location of the scene as the scene is created having an actual grid isn't necessary really. You could go gridless or support a minimalist grid or have a full grid if the player was so inclined.
I had been tempted to do something like this once with comic universes. DC, Marvel, Image, whatever. Each separate but everyone on one game.
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@lotherio We have done something along those lines on Keys insofar that every player who wants to can set up a reality of their own and make of it what they will. It seems to be working okay.
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I kinda wonder if there'd be any legs to a Dark Souls MU; speaking of 'From' games.
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@squirreltalk said in MUs That We Would Love To Make (But Won't):
I kinda wonder if there'd be any legs to a Dark Souls MU; speaking of 'From' games.
Dark Souls is already enough of a frustrating experience for me.
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@squirreltalk Man, don't tempt me. Especially with the RPG coming out next month in the U.S.
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@ganymede said in MUs That We Would Love To Make (But Won't):
@squirreltalk said in MUs That We Would Love To Make (But Won't):
I kinda wonder if there'd be any legs to a Dark Souls MU; speaking of 'From' games.
Dark Souls is already enough of a frustrating experience for me.
Fine, fine. Bloodborne it is.
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Dishonored. There could even be a L&L Masque of the Red Death section.
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@faraday said in MUs That We Would Love To Make (But Won't):
I mean... given that it takes an entire writer's room to generate that level of plotting for 6-10 characters on a weekly basis,
It doesn't, really. They generate a whole screenplay and then some. A GM generates a plot-pitch and then ad-libs the thing with the 'actors.' Also, a satisfying little MU one-shot where your PC is there when an NPC robs the liquor store is about as much story content as the little pre-title-credits opening sequence on a teevee show, but is four hours of MUSH entertainment and probably a happy two week's worth of staff-run action for those characters who did more than watch.
@pyrephox said in MUs That We Would Love To Make (But Won't):
I think something like this could really use a spotlight-focused metacurrency.
Yes, yes, yes.
I think many games could. Another way to do it would be to give people points -- Abelard and Brigid spotted the ocelot and devised a trap for it, and Camille tried to scare the ocelot away from the trap without A and B seeing her. They all get three star points. Darius, who was passing by, saw it all but kept Camille's secret, and gets one. On staff version of WHO and in jobs lists, character names are colour-coded by proportion of stars/votes. Many votes, few stars and GMs know at a glance that the character's active but under-spotlit.
"... 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 said in MUs That We Would Love To Make (But Won't):
A GM generates a plot-pitch and then ad-libs the thing with the 'actors.'
No, what was being described (in the "Doctor Viktor has an addiction problem" example) was a far more in-depth plot--spanning multiple days or weeks, involving several people running multiple PCs and NPCs, all centered around a single PC. It really is more akin to a TV show's writing staff generating a multi-episode plotline.
Most MU staffs simply cannot sustain that level of effort for multiple people on a continual basis.
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@faraday Ah! Yeah, the problem with the medical drama is that they tend to focus on an 'NPC', the patient, who must be appealing and knowable in some way -- requiring many of hours of GM time on a MU -- or there's no investment in the story and one starts to notice how medical dramas are really, really repetitive. This is a lot to ask of GMs, even if it's one NPC and the team of PC doctors.
"... 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 Exactly. I'm not saying that would apply to every setting, but the "modern-day procedural" (all the medical, cop, lawyer, fire shows) was specifically the context of the discussion you quoted. Adapted to a MU environment, those kinds of shows would all have a central feature of being very GM-intensive in terms of storylines (inventing crimes, medical cases, and what have you) and NPCs.
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Or, GMs could not be the only source of plot and let players run their own stuff, make up their own cases to run for others, come up with their own NPC patients with X or Y illness for PCs to solve, etc. Then GMS only have to focus on big, world-changing stuff like a helicopter crashing into the hospital helipad and taking off the arm of Doctor Romano (I'm looking at YOU, ER).
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I had another idea to run a game set in a time loop where character death was pretty regular, and each character's timeline (all major events from approval to death) would be thoroughly recorded.
During each loop, the events already established would play out, unless actions were taken that would definitively change what the involved characters were doing.
Then I realized that the amount of work that would require would burn out 10 MUs worth of staff faster than a moonshine fire.
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@misterboring Depends on the length of the loop.
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@betternow Yeah. Really, it doesn't strike me as more GM-intensive than any other GM-intensive sort of theme. It's not an wind-em-up-let-em-go sort of thing like Soap Opera and a lot of Lords and Ladies games, but it doesn't seem more daunting than other multi-faction MUs.
And yeah, PRP. It might be easier to get people to do them, since you could simply lift a scenario from any prime-time-drama matching the faction and probably nobody would notice or care.
I would guess it would be less likely to have that PRP discouraging factor of not being sure you're familiar enough with the game-world.
