Kinds of Mu*s Wanted

[Bobotron]

@Lithium
Well, you can softcode out turns in the 'order of operations' kind of thing; I've done it before. Just make the commands to do stuff advance the turn if it's something that would do so.

You could do mechs by having statted objects with controls though that can be unwieldy; it's what we used for Exosuits and mechanical armor and stuff at Transformers and Megaman games. Something like a 'mode change,' where the mech stats are stored and switched to the main stats grabbed by the combat system when piloting, is easy to do.

[Lithium]

@Bobotron

I mean I personally am not a good enough coder to code an actual grid that remembers where people's mech's are, is easily customizable for terrain, and the like. Heck it might not even really be feasible, I just don't know.

So I'd need a coded vehicle system, that could move only so many hexes, handled torso twists, and turning, etc. That's what I meant, so that range was hard coded, difficulties, hard coded, otherwise you get into the guessing game of:

How far am I from the bad guys?

We see that a lot in WoD for example, but it's especially important to mech combat with different weapons having different ranges, with different modifiers.

[Bobotron]

@Lithium
OH, you want THAT level of hex design. I misunderstood your intent.

[3543thrh67]

Humm. I dunno if I'd enjoy a mu* with that level of vehicle control.

[Three-Eyed Crow]

As the Serenity thread reminded me.

A Firefly MUSH not run by Mal and Inara/broken in many ways would be tops.

[Usekh]

7th Sea
7th Sea
7th Sea
A good Fading Suns game
Any one of the Warhamer 40K RPGs

[Lithium]

@Usekh said:

Any one of the Warhamer 40K RPGs

The problem with Warhammer 40K is everyone is meat for the grinder. Even space marines. They're all meat meat meat. The setting is also so frikken huge, how do you make it work? Do you set it on one planet? If so, what kind of planet? Is it a hive planet, a death planet, a planet with Necrons just waking up underneath the major city? How do you handle the human/xenos interaction? Or do you make it human only? If it's human only how do you handle psykers, mutants, genestealer cults, chaos, and everything else?

I'd love to see a good Warhammer 40K game myself also, I just don't know how to make it functional.

[Usekh]

@Lithium Have you read the RPG's? They do a better job of making it less meat-grindy.
But yeah it is a huge setting, and very small group focused. One possibility would be embracing that in a grinder type game like the World War games that were running for quite some time.

[Lithium]

@Usekh I've only cursory glanced over them to be honest, I mean I understand how it'd be possible in TT I mean on a mush wide setting.

For example:

In ShadowRun the PC's are usually a single runner team. On a MU* you've got runners, mafia, gang bangers, cops, fixers, faces, so on and so forth. It makes the game get diluted because there's not a single team focus anymore. You hope you can find a single team to run with but it never seems to work out that way. So nearly every run you go on you end up going with different people, which makes it hard to build a collective story and history between the PC's which makes it MUCH easier to just kill someone who pisses you off...

Which is the same issue I see with a Warhammer 40K MU* and it's a dilemma I am working on trying to solve myself for my own game so thoughts appreciated

[WTFE]

Space:1999.

There. I said it. You may mock as you will. I still want one.

edited to add

My character would be one of the guys responsible for scratch-building the Eagles to keep up with the exploding ones.

[Usekh]

@Lithium Not to mention the -vast- power disparity between Inquisitorial Acolytes, Imperial Guard, Rogue Traders and Space Marines. So first thing would be to pick which game to focus on I suppose.

It is late so my brain is a little fried so take this with a grain of salt but obvious first step would be to pick which game to focus on. I just had a thought that Deathwatch might work best, as teams may shift about based on the needs of the mission. Of course not too much to do in downtime, although the RPG game does present them as more than biological robots.

Could have a rogue trader flotilla, with folks as fairly junior crew members. Basically something with a hierarchy that -really- frowns upon killing off other allies.

So Dark Heresy is probably not your best bet, as killing the acolytes of other inquisitors is not that uncommon.

Just some thoughts, sadly I don't have a great solution for you.

[Coin]

@Lithium said:

@Usekh I've only cursory glanced over them to be honest, I mean I understand how it'd be possible in TT I mean on a mush wide setting.

For example:

In ShadowRun the PC's are usually a single runner team. On a MU* you've got runners, mafia, gang bangers, cops, fixers, faces, so on and so forth. It makes the game get diluted because there's not a single team focus anymore. You hope you can find a single team to run with but it never seems to work out that way. So nearly every run you go on you end up going with different people, which makes it hard to build a collective story and history between the PC's which makes it MUCH easier to just kill someone who pisses you off...

Which is the same issue I see with a Warhammer 40K MU* and it's a dilemma I am working on trying to solve myself for my own game so thoughts appreciated

This is pretty much the same issue all the games have. It's largely because pretty much every roleplaying game out there focuses on a "party". they call them different things (runners, coterie, ring, cabal, crew, pack, whatever) butthe game is designed for a cohesive group narrative that we lose almost entirely on MUs. It's especially difficult to build a stable and engaging group for roleplaying on MUs. And you can't get out of it by playing a system that doesn't use that, because even if you built it yourself from scratch--there's a reason the systems are almost universally built that way: it's good for the narrative focus of the game and story.

It's not really a Shadowrun issue so much as a MU issue in general.

[BetterJudgment]

@Three-Eyed-Crow Given the number that have tried and failed (five besides the Blither Twins' game, with two essentially stillborn), I don't think it would work. Maybe it's that the ensemble playing necessary for being part of a wacky crew is just too hard to manage.

[The Tree of Woe]

An Amber MUX that focuses on the theme and genre of Zelazny's books instead of reorienting toward a Firan-style High Fussiness in Amber.

And uses code that wasn't extracted from the guts of mosquitoes trapped in Amber.

[thebird]

Apocalypse themed. (Preferably without roaming Walking Dead zombies, but some mutant something is fine)
Anything Mad Max related. (I'm obsessed these days, and may need an intervention...)
A Changeling only WoD2 (when it comes out).
Or, just a Changeling only MU* that works.
Something sci-fi/space related that isn't themed from Star Wars, Star Trek, Battlestar etc (none of that steampunk space stuff) something original...

[Sundown]

@BetterJudgment said:

@Three-Eyed-Crow Given the number that have tried and failed (five besides the Blither Twins' game, with two essentially stillborn), I don't think it would work. Maybe it's that the ensemble playing necessary for being part of a wacky crew is just too hard to manage.

Did they really fail because the theme was somehow too difficult? I find that hard to believe, it's not any more complex than WoD. Mushes sometimes don't work out because of a multitude of other reasons. If a batshit insane couple managed to pull off a Firefly place, I don't see why it wouldn't work otherwise.

[Three-Eyed Crow]

@Sundown
There have been a handful of them, but a lot (like Big Damn) seem to have failed for a lack of actually getting off the ground than anything else. Or tried to emulate Serenity in terrible ways (was it Gorram MUSH that had all the terrible 'economy' systems or am I thinking of another place that existed for 5 minutes?)

I do think @BetterJudgment has an unfortunate point, in that what people actually want to play is a 5-10 person crew, so doing a large-scale public MU* is an inherent problem with Firefly.

[Sundown]

@Three-Eyed-Crow
Yeah, I remember Big Damn, lots of people were hopeful about that one and then it fizzled out. But I thought that was because of RL and whatnot.

I just don't see how playing a ship's crew is so different than having Werewolf packs, or coteries, or any kind of clique that forms just because people are people. I don't see why that would be the reason a game fails. You said it yourself, Gorram MUSH failed because of a terrible economy system, not because it had small crews.

Serenity mush worked really well in that lone regard.

[3543thrh67]

I wonder if there were things to do on planets if the longevity of a Firefly mu* would work better. And if there was a set number of ships allowed and a new one added after each ship has X sized crew. I was on Serenity for a long time and it was pretty boring if you didn't have a crew.

[SuperKato1K]

I've seen Fading Suns mentioned a couple of times and I totally agree... done nicely, that would be so much fun.

A gritty, urban WH 40k game... more Eisenhorn-esque than Space Marines.

A non-twitchy CBT game, pre-Clans.

A grittier, darker, more localized (i.e. doesn't take place across the entire galaxy) Star Wars setting. Perhaps a couple of systems along a trade route, or an out of the way mid or outer-rim sector. Militaries would be limited (though would have their uses), the Empire would assert itself more commonly through the activities of Imperial intelligence apparatus, business connections, etc. (Disclaimer: I've been slow-building such a game... always build the game YOU want to play, right?)

Lots of other cool ideas on here, many of which I'd give a shot, but these are the one's I'd be particularly interested in. At least this week.