Space Lords and Ladies
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@bored
My point is that in the last decade I have only heard of two places that managed that sort of sustained effort.
The Reach leading up to an during the End of the World plot and RfK.
You keep responding with it being possible. I agree however given the current mush demographics which you mention , I am saying I will believe in it happening when I see it. -
@Apollonius I believe he is referring to some of your loud behavior on Star Crusade, and then the day you logged in as a guest to post that little poem excerpt.
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@ThatGuyThere said:
@bored
My point is that in the last decade I have only heard of two places that managed that sort of sustained effort.Your lack of familiarity with many, many (many?) games is your own problem. You can claim that every game ever (other than 2!) is/was nothing more than a relationship simulator and no thematic RP has ever happened anywhere, but uh, it's so far removed from reality that it isn't worth engaging with.
Can we talk about @Packrat's game and not imagined 'omg people will have relationships all the timez?!' woes?
@surreality said:
@bored said:
PRP-only games also require next to zero staff work, so there's that.
Not so true as I'm sure a lot of people wish it was. This isn't actually the case at all.
Well, sure. I admit to some hyperbole. All games are some work, and there are other factors, like manual vs automatic CG/XP, etc. But relatively speaking, there's a pretty big gap.
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To be constructive and pull it all together, I don't think the focus of the conversation was to give examples of shitty players or situations (much less start arguing with each other), but the point was to discuss how to take a new game with an existing MU genre (L&L) and make it successful.
So, I think there are a lot of strong opinions about what sort of consent should be provided, and a lot of opinions on how to put the right roleplayers in the clutch IC positions. I think what we've learned is that a lot of these players have both good and bad experiences, and what ALL MUers are looking for is to recapture the good past experiences and to revisit the energy on when it was good.
In the end, I wish a lot of luck for your space Lords and Ladies game, and I think it's a genre people are excited for. If I were you, I'd comb this thread, or ask specific players, what they felt worked and didn't on any of the Lord's and Ladies games, and use that information to help drum up a game scheme that will be successful.
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@deadculture I admittedly have no time or interest in staffing for a game other than as a theme manager and metaplot writer regardless of how people feel about me. The most successful times I have been staff have been when I am left to my own devices to write up things or run adventure-style plots and not have day-to-day adjudication of player requests. I was just not sure why my name popped up. I wouldn't volunteer to staff in any hypothetical game that Packrat stands up and I think a snowball has a better chance in being asked to be staff by Packrat.
I'm still waiting to see if this project advances or gets mothballed and forgotten as vaporware. This wouldn't be the first time. As I said before, the standing recommendation is to stop fretting about mechanics and theme and just stand something up, playtest it a little in a soft open, and then move forward. Getting the game started is 60% of the work and where most new game ideas seem to fail.
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@bored
Not every game ever in fact I can name plenty that weren't but I am talking about now.
If I am so uninformed and wrong name one from the past decade.
Also I see nothing wrong with relationship simulators or sand boxes you seem to be the one with a negative attitude towards them. I am simply saying that is what exists. And likely they exist because that is what people prefer.
As far as Packrat's proposed game. I wish him the best of luck but based one the one other game I have seen him staff, Star Crusade, I know what I think it is likely to become.
I played at Star crusade, it had a lower ratio of plot scenes to social scenes then most of the sandboxes I have seen. -
Every time I think about trying to get a FS game opened, which I dearly love, I'm reminded of how much old bygone crap I'd have to wade though. (Hell it was bad enough ON Star Crusade with people still complaining at each other from some other FS game they'd played with each other like...at least 5 years earlier?) I mean that is par for the course (I remember the same exact thing happening on all the Shadowrun games) but I'm an old cranky bitch now and I think it would be too tempting to engage a 5 strikes you're out policy for using who was an asshat to you on some other game as a reason why it's okay for you to be a dick now.
Everyone does that now and then, but jesus. -
I would love an FS game. Sofia was one of my favorite PCs ever.
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@ThatGuyThere said:
If I am so uninformed and wrong name one from the past decade.
Any game that... wasn't completely focused on personal romance and babies? Name your actual standard here so you're not shifting goalposts on me later.
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@bored
Not a sandbox and not about relationships. So it would simply be one that had mostly staff plots and a majority of the rp was not focused on relationships. -
Were there any games that WERE focussed solely on babies and romance?
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Star Crusade? I mean, this is how bad your argument is, that the most obvious and relevant to the thread game invalidates it. The only way you think that game was about those things is if you base your whole opinion of it on Cirno's trolling.
I think you're mostly confused by the fact that most people RP a lot of relationship stuff, but on a healthy game that's something that goes alongside plot, not something that replaces it. They can even (and should, in the best RP!) happen at the same time: your goal to save the world matters more if you care about the people in it, right?
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@mietze There's just too much baggage in all MU*s that have a particular theme that repeats. Think about the baggage that comes with nWoD. If you thought FS players were bad, some nWoD players come with blood feuds. I suppose FS comes a close second. My recommendation is to create a totally new themed game that has similar conceits but different structural elements. A lot of the issue lies in players willfully repeating their mistakes in an FS game. Certain players playing certain archetypes and factions over and over and over again, certain players acquiring IC positions of power over and over and over again, certain players rising to OOC positions of power over and over and over again.
I think that @bored and @ThatGuyThere are getting entrenched in the discussion of pretty princess marriage and babies simulator. Whatever. The tl;dr version is that staff needs to keep activity up with fun stuff in the game story line (adventures! murder! politics! ripping my eyes out of my eye sockets as we steer our ship into a black hole to hell!) or people will default to things that they readily understand (well, sort of... insofar as men living in their parents' basement and never having been touched by someone of the same/opposite sex perpetuate their notions of romance, marriage, and children).
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@Apollonius said:
(adventures! murder! politics! ** ripping my eyes out of my eye sockets as we steer our ship into a black hole to hell! ** )
Bold Mine.
+1 for Event Horizon reference.
Apparently, the Bold tag doesn't want to work for whatever reason. No idea.
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@Apollonius said :
@mietze There's just too much baggage in all MU*s that have a particular theme that repeats. Think about the baggage that comes with nWoD. If you thought FS players were bad, some nWoD players come with blood feuds. I suppose FS comes a close second. My recommendation is to create a totally new themed game that has similar conceits but different structural elements. A lot of the issue lies in players willfully repeating their mistakes in an FS game. Certain players playing certain archetypes and factions over and over and over again, certain players acquiring IC positions of power over and over and over again, certain players rising to OOC positions of power over and over and over again.
Frankly I doubt that making a new 'Lords and Ladies in Space' game that will appeal to the same group of players is going to get you away from those repeated behaviors. I've seen someone play a Hazat... and a Lion, and a Castille, and a couple righteous christians on RA, etc. Custodius reused the same PBs. Heck, I came off Firan playing my Griffon High General... to play Karl
So, nah, this won't fix things. @Packrat should make the game he wants, for sure, but avoiding FS isn't going to avoid FS repeat offense behaviors.
(Reposted in the right thread because lol how those reply windows follow you around)
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@bored I know you're talking about me because I played a Lion, a Castille (or will, pretty fucking soon) and a Hazat.
@silentsophia And yeah, Sofia was fun to play with. There was a whole lot of almost getting killed together that made it worth it.
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Maaaaybe
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Well I now have a working desktop and so am able to work on the thing properly now, though I have been doing some work on systems and setting every day.
Fundamentally this is going to be a slow burn however – somebody mentioned how one of the big issues with Star Crusade was that the systems for everything kept changing and that is absolutely true along with the fact it was a huge problem. The game was rushed out the gate because people were eager to start playing and ultimately that was one of the big factors that killed the game.
It was like.. I do not know, attempting to finish building a car whilst driving it along the road at full speed with all the resulting slowness, fuckups and induced frustration that entails. The equipment list was never even finished during the whole time the game was running leading to bullshit like one baroness fighting a duel with a Kurgan who used a Shocker Weapon without most of the players even knowing this was a thing (they were really cheap and basically anyone can buy such a thing in regular Fading Suns).
If somebody is say a military leader and wants to meaningfully RP around that they need to know what troops they have and have a good concept of what this can accomplish, without waiting two months, then finding that everything suddenly changed because of whatever reason. If being a Space Baron is to be meaningful with meat to people plotting and politicking then I want something solid to support that which will hopefully remain mostly unchanged so that people know where they stand. The alternative is Space-Marriage Simulator 5000.
One of the mechanics I am tweaking is that a character mostly gains social currency (Prestige) by spending money and the most straight forward way to do this is to maintain an outrageous lifestyle:
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Maintain a multi floor penthouse apartment in the most desirable location, two dozen servants/staff, a dozen bodyguards, a couple of fancy transport craft. Charter small and comfortable spacecraft as required.
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Throw in a holiday residence or two, increase staff, maintain a small personal shuttle.
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Have a luxurious space shuttle and Scarface scale mansion surrounded by acres of parkland, expand a holiday home to have tens of miles of hunting/parkland or own an orbital residence.
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Maintain probably five dozen personal staff, host extravagant salons and parties every week, a literal platoon of bodyguards and security experts with their own transport.
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Travel everywhere with a hundred or more minions and hangers on in considerable luxury, chartering extravagant transport or using an owned air/space yacht, own luxurious residences on multiple worlds along with even favoured followers having personal space vehicles. Personal security force is militarily significant and has useful intelligence applications.
1 Being the basic level required to maintain one's social standing as a Space Noble, costs are exponential but at higher levels this can be ameliorated by owning a proper Space Palace. Basically the idea is that people should not be trying to maximise their resources by living frugally, spending money on luxury is strongly encouraged especially given it lets you handwave stuff. If you are spending for level 5 lifestyle then want to know about your rivals machinations? You have a couple of intelligence analysts and some bodyguard/spies already! Are you shot by an assassin using a flechette gun loaded with exotic poison darts? A good job you have three doctors on staff. Does somebody need to get to Acheron 5 really quickly to deliver the secret plans? You have this fast racing yacht prepped and gleaming on the landing pad even if you never mentioned it before.
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I would argue on Star Crusade but I will give it to you.
I am not taking my ideas on Star Crusade from Cirno's trolling but from my experiences there.
Star Crusade had rules that changed on a monthly basis on some things, staff that freely admitted after the fact they told people different OOC versions of "the truth" to create friction both the IC and OOC kind, (IC friction good, OOC friction bad.), and a chargen and advancement system so broken that how effective you were depended almost entirely on who got your app. Now I got lucky and had a statistical bad ass but I had multiple people show me their sheet which were pretty gimped, and the pace of advancement was glacial for if oyu got gimped in cgen you stayed gimped. Now to your points I did have a few adventures but all in all found less plot RP then I am finding at Fallcoast.
Honestly Bored if that is what you consider a positive example of anything we are far too far apart for further discussion to have meaning.
Though I do hope you find nothing but games like Star Crusade in your future, yake that as either blessing or a curse whichever you prefer. -
The character advancement and approval on Star Crusade was just nuts, it did not work on Dark Between the Stars and I have no idea why Paulus felt it would work on another game.
I mean I actually quite liked the backgrounds merits, synergy bonuses, etc, even the slow advancement, but that did not work at all combined with it being completely arbitrary as to if you were capable or just some random (or even outright incompetent) person. Anyone who got statted by Augustus in particular was just screwed.
Attributes were also hugely important (given equal or more weight to skills) and the secret? Physical attributes were in a large part set according to how people had written their descriptions combined with their physical age. People who made female knights and had them petite were really shooting themselves in the foot given how important Vigor was in combat and given that even attempting balance was apparently anathema a lot of them did not get given Dexterity to compensate. People who made six foot plus athletic types in their twenties did pretty well though, older than 30 or so and people tended to not get a Dexterity of over 6 regardless of if they were fighter pilots or master duelists.
Also anyone who went for obvious cybernetics was just given them basically 'for free', if anyone had ever gone for a Lithe Wire system with visible external cabling they would probably have just gotten the flat +3 dexterity bonus as long as it made any sense. I know Paulus approved some broken as hell Changed and gene modded characters, though their players (or it might have been been the one player?) were more interested in sexytimes than achieving anything.
