Fantasy MU*s?
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Then Dark Sun, methinks, is not for you. It's a slowly dying world, and magic is just making it die that much faster. If you want to establish a little stable village that you can defend from raiders or whatever, cool, or clean up some of the nastier crime in a burrough of one of hte larger cities, maybe, but you're not gonna have shining happy times in a world where water is almost non-existant and magic can kill living things around it to draw on that power.
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So I hear FS, Dark Sun...let me add Thieves World and Black Company. Though I'm getting far afield of high fantasy.
Gritty fantasy is like a black hole
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Joe Abercrombie's books would make for a hell of a setting, too. Somewhat low-level fantasy with bursts of OMFG-WHAT-IS-THAT in it.
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@Misadventure said:
Does the Off Screen System allow you to upgrade an areas economy, safety, stability, emergency services, quality of life, education etc?
Actually, yes. You'd have to tailor it to whatever system you happen to use, though, but the concept is sound.
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@Rainbow-Unicorn said:
@Patty It's made to cover them, as well as an interactions between large systems and small ones. You have a city (size 5), a thieves guild in that city (size 2), in conflict. Both of them have different resources. The ratings you have in economics, size, and so on are meant to go up and down. The thieves guild burns down a district in the city (it becomes size 4) and then robs the treasury (decreasing the economic strength of the city from 5 to 4, and temporarily increasing it's from 2 to 3) and so on. It uses the One Roll Engine, so it's all abstracted but the idea is that players will do things to temporarily raise their status in conflict with other groups, and it all comes down to a set of rolls between both sides that determine how things go. If you're familiar at all with the One Roll Engine, the height and width of each sides rolls determine exactly how the conflict breaks down, and each side targets the others particular resources/size/influence trying to wear each other down.
It's fantastically simple and I think works /great/ in my experience.
It's written by Greg Stolze.
Grab the Enchridion PDF. It's only $7.50 and focuses purely on the Company rules. Companies can reflect anything from the tiniest mercenary companies to empires that span star systems.
That's absolutely fascinating. Thanks, bookmarked and will check it out when it's not 2 AM.
@Ide said:
@Patty there is a decent summary here, http://www.rpg.net/reviews/archive/15/15286.phtml, search for "organizations in a fantasy medieval setting"
(edit: ninja'd by @Rainbow-Unicorn -- it does sound cool btw).
There was a long thread on WORA when SC tanked, I don't remember details more specific than 'drama'. But there should be plenty of folks here who can tell it.
Much appreciated too! If this fits with the structure of the game, then we might have something to operate some things we've either abstracted until now or just mishmashed. That being said, I'm happy with the mass combat system as it develops.
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Sweet! ES! Combine the OSS with the Region rating stuff I sent you from Underground! Yay!
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@Ide said:
So I hear FS, Dark Sun...let me add Thieves World and Black Company. Though I'm getting far afield of high fantasy.
Gritty fantasy is like a black hole
The Black Company books remain some of my favourite. I often wondered (and actually remember posting on WORA requesting) what a MUSH where the PCs are members of a similar company trapesing around the world on contracts would look like. You have your stable PCs, and your GMs handle the rest.
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That could work well with the Reign company system linked earlier. And it'd be a cinch to fast forward the timeline. Sort of like fantasy TGG (edit -- this game, http://mudstats.com/World/TheGreatestGeneration)
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One of the main hurdles about most fantasy novel-derived games is geography.
A large number of at least the most popular ones - for a reason - revolve around things taking place in different locales around their world. That lets the reader become exposed to a complex political and social web of relationships, antipathies and plot lines as they are brought together.
This doesn't translate well at all to a game. If you have things happening in say, three very interesting areas on your grid which are separated by weeks of travel (and your setting doesn't allow for seamless, easily accessible teleportation or the such) then you're effectively splitting up the playerbase by forcing them to either be resigned to the fact there are people they will rarely interact with or stretch suspension of disbelief by meeting the guy who's regularly at Castle Black one day and King's Landing the next.
So that should be resolved before the game opens.
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I was thinking about that yesterday @Arkandel when I was reading the Eternal Crusade wiki and they mentioned their 'dramatic time' (I think the gist is: illogical travel is OK as long as you're not running around with armies), which is functional but not interesting to me game mechanics wise.
So, could a kind of monthly travel budget system work, where every PC gets x number of travel points every RL month, and you can spend those as you see fit, but obviously traveling greater distances costs more points.
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This is why you have a fantasy MU* in a large city, the way the ancient game 'Ennersea' had, and then you do plot-room stuff for places elsewhere.
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@FiranSurvivor said:
Clearly I need to get off my ass and make that Witcher game if Fantasy is so in demand.
Yes. Yes you do.
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Secondary thought: what about a game based on Codex Alera series?
That's always sorta been my 'white whale' dream MU, personally. Well, one of them, anyways.
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I think the problem with a Codex Alera MU* is that the 'cool stuffs' been done by Tavi, at least a bit. You'll have to create some way of people have Major & Minor furies, or something.
I didn't enjoy the series. The Concept was AWESOME but the series no so much.
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@Songtress I always thought Tavi was the one person who did more with less, since up until the last two books, he didn't or couldn't do jack with his furies. He always came off as a tactical genius than anything else.
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I love the concept of Codex Alera. Jim Butcher talking about it is hilarious.
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@Ide said:
I was thinking about that yesterday @Arkandel when I was reading the Eternal Crusade wiki and they mentioned their 'dramatic time' (I think the gist is: illogical travel is OK as long as you're not running around with armies), which is functional but not interesting to me game mechanics wise.
So, could a kind of monthly travel budget system work, where every PC gets x number of travel points every RL month, and you can spend those as you see fit, but obviously traveling greater distances costs more points.
That works fine for table-top when all the important characters (the PCs) are normally in one place but not for MUSHes.
It won't do any good; those IC weeks you are spending travelling must be accounted for. If you played with Bob today and with Jim tomorrow but they are far from each other how is that to be justified? Either there's teleportation of some sort or... well, it can't be.
(I mean, the alternative is that you don't play for days/weeks at a time while travelling, which is absurd so I won't discuss it
)- He who takes offense when not intended is a fool. He who takes offense when intended is a greater fool.
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This broad setting thing was an issue at Castle d'Image. They tried to open up a city for "rogueish" RPG, but it was on the other side of the IC country from the titular castle. And nobody was there when it opened (obviously). And nobody continued to be there because everybody and all the action was at the titular castle and its environs and they never managed to quite get that critical mass of people wanting to play in the city. Eventually it was just another ghost town part of the grid that only newbs wandered into by accident.
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@Arkandel said:
(I mean, the alternative is that you don't play for days/weeks at a time while travelling, which is absurd so I won't discuss it
)That can sort of work if everyone agrees to it, but it has repercussions. On Elendor, there were actually "tent" objects that you'd put your character in, and an admin would move those objects to locations on the enormous grid depending on travel time and dramatic incidents along the way. So, when you logged in, you'd be in a particular place, and that's where you played. I saw this work pretty well once. At other times, though, RP would peter out along the way and back in the home area, and I'd bet that just added to the slow bleed of RP that eventually killed the game.
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@BetterJudgment said:
That can sort of work if everyone agrees to it, but it has repercussions. On Elendor, there were actually "tent" objects that you'd put your character in, and an admin would move those objects to locations on the enormous grid depending on travel time and dramatic incidents along the way. So, when you logged in, you'd be in a particular place, and that's where you played. I saw this work pretty well once. At other times, though, RP would peter out along the way and back in the home area, and I'd bet that just added to the slow bleed of RP that eventually killed the game.
Good grief. That's one of those ideas which sound great on paper and are probably horrible in practice. For a smaller playerbase it's utter death to finding someone to play with.
- He who takes offense when not intended is a fool. He who takes offense when intended is a greater fool.
