@Collective So do so. Spend as much time as a trainee as you think you should (and you're getting RP from those cute blushing nobices pretending to not watch the sparring), then when you are ready for your guy to hit the real world, grab a color-shifting cloak on the way out and graduate.
@Collective said in Wheel of Time MU(SH|X):
Though, looking back on some of the stuff we put up with, I wonder if I'd have the patience for the type of game that required hundreds of real-life hours to learn to pose slashing at somebody with a sword exactly the right way, according to the 'blademasters'.
There's nothing about this type of game that makes people have to RP this in real time. In fact it's an absolute necessity that liberal handwaving takes place else you can never have fresh Novices become Aes Sedai in-game, which does take years (way longer than training a Warder up from a trainee).
But that's no more a natural part of playing than having a medical student in a modern-day MUSH who eventually becomes a MD. Sure, it takes IC years, but the entire game doesn't need to age a few years so you can 'realistically' buy Medicine up from 1 to 4.
@Auspice The best powersets for TV are ones like Black Bolt or the Flash... extremely easy for SFX to recreate without a lot of money.
That's conversely why vampire shows (fang prosthetics + red contacts) are so much more popular than werewolves (a shit-ton of more FX).
@WildBaboons said in Wheel of Time MU(SH|X):
Time: I have two thoughts on this. Setting the game 30-40 years prior to the books or concurrent with the books. Going before the books means you to benefit from the rich theme and world building done in the books with having to deal with the actual events of the books. No Feature Characters running about or any of that, focus is solely on the players and their actions... however, it also means the game would not have Seanchan, Asha'man, or Aiel.
Divorcing the timeline from book characters and keeping some of the cool, popular factions is going to be very difficult.
For example you could fudge some things to seperate some from the book characters (Aiel can have a different reason for being active and involved, the Seanchan invasion could have a different timeline) but to explain the Asha'man without Rand you might have an issue unless the assumption is that Mazrim Taim acted alone, and you obviously can't have a Rebel Tower. You could try to offer alternate justifications for all these factions' existence but at some point it'll be too hard to keep track for many new players.
You could also do it for the day after Tarmon Gai'don ended? Rand's gone, the big names are dead or retiring... big power vacuum.... but then again you don't have the Dark One or all of those neat Forsaken to play with. Also a net loss.
I suggest placing this around book 5-7 and then just not using the book characters. They're around, they're doing stuff, but they just don't have the spotlight.
Place: The world of Wheel of Time is big. Too big for a MUSH with everyone geographically dispersed. It would make more sense to have the game centered around one geographic area with players able to make forays out into the larger world for Plot and other things.
Agreed. But again, the place will need to let the Seanchan become involved, and that's a real pain in the ass due to their overall attitude. You might need to make some adjustments there if you want them to be involved.
Similarly having the White Tower and Asha'man around each without it becoming a PvP situation every time... again, you'll need to figure something out for that.
System: I am not big on crunch, I want narrative first. My first inclination is to use Fate pulling heavily from the Dresden Files RPG where it's largely just renaming things to make the system fit and a lot of the heavy code lifting has already been taken care of with Fate.Exe from the former Exeter, however its unfamiliar/unliked by a lot of players. Another option would be FS3 where its common place for MU but would need to figure out how to deal with channeling. A third option way out in left field is Burning Wheel. I'm not familiar with the system at all, have no idea how well it would translate to a MU, but when searching for systems people suggest to use when running a WoT RPG it comes to the top alongside Fate.
I won't advise on systems but you'll need to make some design choices early. Can characters burn out due to a dice roll, for example? Are you going to allow angreal in the game?
Thoughts on the above? If I build it would you come? More importantly would THEY come?
I'd be tempted to play a good WoT game, but the series is old... so who knows. It used to be super popular for MU* though so maybe you'll get some players through nostalgia as well.
@Nein In my head you were replying to @WildBaboons' sex dungeons, which makes the response so much better.
What I'm uncertain of is whether the emphasis is on RP or grinding/fighting.
As long as the focus is on plot and posing it might even be a good thing to automate combat.
@Seraphim73 What I like about elseworlds is that while you can change the cast you are still keeping the rules.
It basically depends of course on the reasons you picked whatever setting for in the first place but IMHO if it was for the cast of characters itself then probably it wasn't a great pick for a MU*.
But if it's to keep WoT's channeling system, Sanderson's : Allomancy/Feruchemy/Hemalurgy, maybe Butcher's Dresdenverse creature types... then you can definitely get away with a whole lot and still get a treasure chest full of toys to play with.
@Thenomain It sounded catchier than players.
(You'll say staff are players also, pfft)
@Lithium Double post: T13 is nothing once you are geared (I do it runs in under 4 minutes on average and can pretty much AFK myself through) but GR80+ is a bitch.
@Admiral That sounds awesome... except for the EA part 
@Runescryer Staff are the problem in the situations you describe. People are the symptom.
@Wizz Where would you put them? He doesn't need to go for the cities, just visit graveyards and such. Can you imagine how many somewhat fresh corpses there still are after the War of Five Kings? 
I totally read the thread title as "Turn Off Girls", and I thought hey, I know how to do that!
@surreality AoS is amazing. That last season was by far its best - I feel it's gotten a bad reputation because of the original first half of a season 1 which was very much monster-of-the-week-ish, but it's so good.
Oh and...
@Lain The Night King rides the Night Dragon, obv.
Is it just me theorycrafting or should the Night King not even bother much with fighting the North at the moment? He has a flying mount, so what's keeping him from travelling all over Westeros at the sites of all these battles and every graveyard he can find to resurrect everyone who's ever died, creating a bunch of fresh armies to wage total war across the entire continent?
@darksabrz I'd offer to powerlevel you (it's so fast) but I don't think console and PC players can multiplay cross-platform.
Necros were fun! I'm kinda losing interest in mine since I'm stuck around GR80ish and the rewards are no longer driving me, but... at least two (maybe three) different end-game builds gave me stuff to do for a while.
@Runescryer said in High Fantasy:
@Ominous The big advantage to WoT is the same advantage of LotR: a wonderfully detailed and awesome world to play in.
The big downside to WoT is the same downside to LotR: All that detailed world-building was done to cater to a small group of characters who pretty much do every awesome thing possible, so there's nothing really for the players to do that could recapture that epic tale feeling you had when reading the series.
The only real option is to create an alt-universe, IMO
There are ways - and there have been games which took advantage of them - to get around the issue. The easy way is to set it in a different era; go back fifty years and go at it. Unless you want Tarmon Gaidon to happen within the MU*'s timeline you don't even have to worry about the prophecies, since they will eventually come true anyway, or you can have them be about something else.
On A Moment in Tyme we did something similar at some point - we thought plot was getting a bit stale so we created a What If? alternate timeline where Lews Therin Telamon wrestled control and took over Rand's mind at an early point, which basically meant we tossed the events in the books out and just did our own thing. @Seraphim73 might be better able to tell if that was successful or not since my perspective was from driving this, but I recall people having fun.
IMHO any game based on original material needs to unshackle itself from the exact events and characters as soon as possible. The focus needs to be on the PCs, not what the canonical protagonists are going to do; they can still be used for the cool factor now and then ("OMG I'M IN A ROOM WITH LUKE SKYWALKER OMG") but if it's overdone then that, too, becomes trite and loses its coolness factor.
As for WoT, it has a great magic system where both male and female characters have super amazing yet different things they can do, a complex and detailed magic system, built-in politics and a bunch of interesting NPC enemies you can have to spice things up with some paranoia as well as brute force.
@Thenomain A robot @Ganymede might be, but no one has ever accused it of being asexual.
@Kanye-Qwest I don't know what his plan was. The guy always had a plan, but what was he trying to do?
Even if everything went the way he wanted he got Sansa to kill Arya and denounce Jon. Let's also say the northern Lords went along with this.
It still left him with a huge horde of ice zombies about to come down and kill everything, he's just basically removed the most competent and experienced leader who can fight them, and there are two more Queens (and I guess a King with a huge fleet) on the board with far superior resources than his own who aren't the undead hordes' first target to deal with afterwards.
What's the endgame? Chaos isn't a magic hat, you still need to stack the odds in your favor.