Nightlife RPG vs CoD
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So I'm starting to feel the itch to run a game again and I want to break out of my comic book mentality. I'm a big horror RPG fan and have wanted to run a supernatural horror game for a long time. My first instinct was to use Chronicles of Darkness, focusing on Vampires and Werewolves. However, I have an old RPG called Nightlife, which also tempts me.
The advantages of Nightlife include it being a very easy system and there are a ton of creature types you can be that all use one unified system. My question is, if someone opens a horror game does it need to be WoD/CoD? Is that just what the community expects or would something like Nightlife have a shot of catching an audience?
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@ZombieGenesis I think players are open to different experiences, and I know quite a few players who are pretty burned out on WoD. I think if you're passionate about running it and you've got stuff going and make it easy for players to find stuff to do then you'll get plenty. You might not get 70+ per night like you will on a WoD game, but you won't get the problems inherent to 70+ people a night, either.
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@ZombieGenesis IMO WoD/CofD have endured in the MU population simply because there are coded systems that are reusable. It is/was easy to reuse/rebuild/repeat dozens of times over. It might actually be worthwhile to the playebase to introduce some new blood in terms of gaming systems.
Having said that, also keep in mind the amount of people who don't want dice resolutions and are mostly going to utilize the space for "relationship roleplay", so it might not be worth the time and effort to encode an entirely new system.
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It is also possible to hijack a system like CoD to catch the different feel off another setting. I dont mean lets play The Originals as if they existed in the WoD, rather use the CoD stats and resolution mechanisms, and use Merits or Powers to track the abilities from the desired setting.
Its not for every game creator, but its different enough for the players to notice, and most arent that invested in the particulars of any rules sytems enough to object to the hybrid.
I have a waggish sense of humor.
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@Misadventure That's an interesting idea. Something I'll have to chew on.
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@ZombieGenesis I know there are some people that don't want to do FS3, but honestly I think it's the best system altogether for the MU crowd. Here's why:
- You could take the FUCKOFF HUGE AMOUNT OF TIME required to code in anything from Cortex to Modiphius 2d20, which would probably feel like progress, but in my experience a lot of players don't give a fuck about dice because they never consent to much of anything, don't like their characters dying, create a new post every 4 months about how "social dice enable rape rp", and none of the system stuff is required for the revolving door of "in-character(kind of?) romance roleplay" that seems to be the target of most players on most games
- THEN once you've coded this new system, you become subject to people finding vulnerabilities in your code (that they exploit) or you wind up with people min-maxing and hacking the system. As a staffer you will spend a lot of time either fielding issues with people breaking the game with their unbeatable dice combinations, leading in players from the previous bullet point having issues with the min-maxers and "dice intimidators"
- Both of the prior two bullet points will result in people getting upset with speed of character approval or "complaints" about staffers either giving favoritism to some players by the system where others have their character's denied due to a ruling on how the +sheets are run, resulting in the ever-exhausting "but if you don't approve this my character is unplaaaayable and I'll be incapable of playing anything else because my spirit will be crushed." Boom. Your game becomes a topic on the ever-progressive and inclusive chat board run by nice people who wield bullying in the name of riiiiighteeeousnessss and you've just spent 1 year coding for a game that's going to be cooked and abandoned in...5-6 months?
Anyway, I don't mean to be negative, but now that I really think about it, I don't think coding a dice system is worth your (or anyone's) time in this hobby, anymore. The average shelf life of any given game is less than a year/year&Half. Why spend an entire weekend in the kitchen preparing a gourmet meal for a bunch of people who will complain about it or not even notice it? Then, in the pure spirit of so much online roleplay, it will come down to "sure, but can I use it to write fuck scenes?"
Just use an existing code base, add your theme, and spin up a wiki. Being realistic about "Effort-to-Output" will keep you Sane. Ares provides that framework in a way that'll work until it doesn't.
Delete the Hog Pit. It'll be fun.
I really don't understand He-Man -
@Ghost I hear what you're saying and believe me, I get it. I gave a lot of thought to FS3. In the end, however, I was worried that it just wouldn't handle supernatural creatures well. I toyed around with using Advantages as sort of supernatural powers but it just never quite felt right.
It does offer a lot of convenience and, as I said, I've considered it heavily I just worry about how it would deal with things like vampires, werewolves, and other supernatural creatures. I thought about utilizing attacks and armor and what not to simulate some things and other stuff could just be RP fodder but I worried about player buy in, you know?
I think Faraday herself even discourages people from trying to use FS3 in such a way. I know there are supernatural games out there that use FS3 but I don't think they do it in the way I'm intending(a WoD/CoD alternative).
I'm open to ideas, however.
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@ZombieGenesis Some of the other plugins could also work well. Someone already coded a Cortex plugin and a FATE, and one or two others I can't remember. The audience that is super duper into FS3 isn't necessarily the audience that would come in on a game with any other system.
FATE might work well; you could probably look at how the Dresden Files used it to modify it for Nightlife. I see many similarities between the wiki write-up of how the Nightlife system works and how Dresden handles the loss of humanity and stuff.
That said, a quick readover of the Nightlife system certainly indicates it has enough in common with WoD/COD mechanics to make it a doable changeover.
I'm also not quite as cynical as Ghost about coding the system you like, or about how people want to RP and what they want to RP. If you are good at code, like the system, would like to use the system, then I'd say as a counterpoint to his valid points that after awhile if you're going to make a game at all, you gotta do what pleases you and lets you make the game that you like and that you're passionate about playing and running. That's part of staying sane, too.
He/Him
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@Devrex Yeah, I think Nightlife is a straightforward, fast-paced system. It plays like Call of Cthulhu, especially if you tweak it just a tad. I think it's one of those systems you can use to enhance your RP without the mechanics getting in the way. I could be wrong, of course.
The one major drawback would be no web-based c-gen. Then again, most MU's don't have web based c-gen. It would have a web-based sheet and a simple roll system for the scene system, but that's it. So, time investment is minimal.
I've been poking away at it, at any rate. We'll see.
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@ZombieGenesis All good points.
Now I knooooooow I'm a fucking broken record about the whole "it can be a MU or a TTRPG but cant be both"...but I think you're like me, ZG, in the sense that you're primarily a TTRPG player that leans more towards playing the MUs like a bunch of people playing the system/setting from the TTRPG. I like game systems. I like the classic feel of dice and I like resolutions being decided by dice rather than freeform/argument.
If you can code it? Go for it...but have you also considered maybe running games through https://startplaying.games/ ?
You could charge for VTT session games and run a roleplay server on discord, so you'd get the best of both worlds.
Delete the Hog Pit. It'll be fun.
I really don't understand He-Man -
@Ghost I am very much a fan of RPGs and TT stuff. I'm also a huge fan of narrative storytelling. My sweet spot is when the two meet. That's why I love Ares, the web portal allows me to partake in MUing/storytelling at a casual pace. I often don't have time to dedicate 3 or 4 hours to a session but I can get a pose out every hour or so generally. It's a struggle just to hook up with my regular gaming group nowadays, unfortunately.
Being an adult and having a job and responsibilities seriously cuts into my gaming time!
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Weirdly, my TT group messaged me this morning asking about "that MUSHing" thing I do and wanted to give it a try. So I'm working with them at the moment to get their feet wet on a game.
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@Ghost Yeah that's also my vibe. Very much the "Let's play a big TTRPG." Or as I sometimes say, "MUSH lets you be in the book, and that's what I want to be doing."
Granted, when I storytell on a MUSH I don't want to kill players. I'm willing to have lots of things happen to my character, but a) creating a character on a MUSH and getting it approved is a much bigger PITA than creating a character with friends on a table and getting my GM to say 'go for it,' and building up the web of in-character relationships it takes to get involved in anything is a similar PITA, much bigger than just rolling up a new character and b) death isn't the most interesting thing that can happen. But I also like systems and am about story. I think what MU* brings is the ability to create deeper characters and deeper character ties. So I don't really care if people want to use it for relationship RP. Relationships are part of that.
I think it's more important to set the expectation up front and on paper for what sort of game it is, as well as what the philosophy and approach is. It's a spectrum, and telling potential players where, on that spectrum between TTRPG and social-MU* the game is meant to be, can be helpful.
He/Him
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@Devrex could just be my newness to TTRPG but I find rolling a new character much harder there than chargen on a MUSH. Most MU chargens handhold the whole way through and you have MU staff to help you out if you're stuck. Whereas with TTRPG (at least the one I'm doing), you have to constantly refer to the rules book and there's So Much Math. Pretty much nothing is automated. You have your DM to help you out, true, but I don't find it nearly as easy.
That said, TTRPG feels 'easier'. I'm not sure if I can quantify that yet. But the actual RP part of it feels like less effort to me, somehow.
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@Hella Depends very much on the system. Pathfinder is very crunchy, so I don't generally run it. Crunchy systems can make chargen a PITA, yes.
The difference is that my DM is there, helping me, and is my buddy, and will probably get me into a character by the end of a conversation/session 0.
On a MUSH, I could wait days or weeks to get that character approved, especially if I'm struggling through the system. So, on a tabletop, if I have to roll a new character, I have lost an hour, and my four friends will go out of their way to help me establish my new character in the story.
On a MUSH, I'm now looking at being bored out of my skull with no way to participate for what could amount to half a month. Maybe one or two friends will actually interact with the new character as quickly as they interacted with the old and create a background that lets you jump right back in as an old friend or whatever. You're going to have to go through the same tedious small talk getting-to-know-you RP that you already did with the other 38 people to get re-invited into stories. So you lose a much bigger investment of time and energy. Which is why I don't think it's necessarily fair to get frustrated with MU*ers for not wanting to lose characters.
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@Misadventure said in Nightlife RPG vs CoD:
It is also possible to hijack a system like CoD to catch the different feel off another setting. I dont mean lets play The Originals as if they existed in the WoD, rather use the CoD stats and resolution mechanisms, and use Merits or Powers to track the abilities from the desired setting.
I believe that CoD was made to do this, but I also find it hard to remove CoD from the material it was meant to handle. Morality checks, for example, don't really come into play in a Mass Effect setting.
I like FS3 and Faraday's code because it can crunch through combat quickly. If I had my beans together, I'd finally learn to set up a game through Ares, write up my files, and start that Mass Effect game I've always wanted to.
Unfortunately, I'm old. Life interferes. And as much as I want to immerse myself in a world that is constant and ever-changing, I just don't have the time. I'm not happy with it, but, for the moment, I am content.
“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.
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@Ganymede said in Nightlife RPG vs CoD:
Unfortunately, I'm old. Life interferes.
I feel this so much. I'm lucky if I get out a couple of poses a night, these days.
