Guys have so many options for being 'special' in the Wheel of Time that not being able to make a Channeler character isn't a hardship at all. Everything from Gleeman to Illuminator to Dreamer to Wolfbrother to Warder or Thieftaker, nobles, scholars, rogues and such.
Seems pretty reasonable to me. I mean, they didn't say anything about former assassins turned social studies or shop teachers. It's all good.
Speaking of learning Ruby, because I do want to take another run at an Ares game, I've started trying to learn it and this tutorial has been extremely helpful, thus far.
It's a four hour mini-course, broken up into 6-12 minute lessons. So far, so good, in terms of teaching the most non-code savvy person in the world how the concepts and language work.
Personally, I find wikis really useful for rounding out the character and the world they are in. Obviously, if a game's wiki or somebody's page asserts that information on it is strictly OOC, I don't use it. Nor do I ever use information regarding supernatural stuff/powers/etc unless I've seen those or had them described to me, ICly.
But, that having been said, wikis are basically a really good organic substitute for 'common knowledge' and office/school gossip. In the real world, we find out all sorts of things about people. Who has a reputation for being popular? Who is kinda bitchy? That quirky guy down in accounting? Total Jesus freak. The IT manager? Dude is a leather daddy on his off time!
And the same goes for neighborhoods, businesses, etc. As a substitute for background information immersion that we all get, wikis work fine. (Though I'd encourage people to lie on them about minor things, because office gossip often gets it wrong.)
The problem with an OOC masq taken to the extreme, banning personal pages, is that you raise the bar for engagement with every single person to silly levels. Okay, Joe Gangrel, who is hanging in a coffee bar for ...reasons... should be a man of mystery. (And odd smells.) But Stacy, who works in the same building as you and is dating Officer Marcia, the cop on the beat in your neighborhood, should not be tabula rasa.
@Kanye-Qwest Not much of a Dynasty, really. Han only had the one kid and he's kind of a douchebag. Plus, if you read between the lines, Leia and Han split up because he always shot first, IYKWIM.
@Selerik said in What Types of Games Would People Like To See?:
Sigil, but instead of D&D it is BESM.
I read that as 'instead of D&D, it is BDSM' and my first thought was, "Well, the Lady of Pain would be thematic."
Apropos of nothing, I don't think I've even seen anybody, male or female, properly (and probably hilariously) RP the indecision, triumph and relief of well-executed stealthy ball scratch that you manage to make look like anything else and thus not look like a barbarian in mixed company. Hard to pull off in real life, more so in text.
Wiki at least, in my opinion. I need some flavor and setting to sink my teeth into and my aged, decrepit eyes hate theme rooms on MUs these days.
@Auspice said in Embracing Rejection:
@Prototart said in Embracing Rejection:
@Auspice said in Embracing Rejection:
@Prototart said in Embracing Rejection:
if you wanna go, like, BnB detail
[flashback intensifies]
yeah, i still have most of a moondragon app i wrote for somewhere that's done in, like, basically clinical writing and has a bunch of page-length traits
I spent like 3 weeks working on an OC and then never actually played because the app process burned me out so bad
I have been there so many times. Write, apply, revise, revise, revise, approval and ... by that time my passion is dead so I'll find some trivial reason to just not play there.
I am working on a MU right now and thus thinking on the nuts and bolts of running and playing on one. For me, OOC rooms are a very mixed bag, with a moderate slant towards the negative.
My go-to examples are with superhero games and the weird queen bee cliquishness of most OOC rooms, wherein somebody playing a female character (usually a highly sexualized one) decides she owns the room. Lots of flirting with the objects of the player's desire, lots of in-jokes and scene analysis, etc. New players, or players with characters that person doesn't want to type fuck are generally ignored or given fairly unsubtle hints to shut up around her majesty. It's especially jarring when the welcome channels are actually welcoming, but your first interactions with the players are not.
But beyond that, I remember back when Fallcoast had this guy (and my apologies if anyone reading this IS that guy) who would spend 24/7 in the OOC room talking about how his were-spider could and would kill and eat your character. You would log in with a new character, somebody would ask what you are making, and the dude would explain how his character was going to murder yours. Every time. For hours on end. With page references. Over the years, I made a dozen characters on that game and that dude was doing the same shtick all day, every day, forever. He's probably still there. And I watched it scare off a few new players.
I agree that OOC communication and a sense of community are a good thing, but I tend to find the idea of policing an OOC room for politeness and a general lack of predatory behavior (sexual and otherwise) distasteful and a little exhausting just to consider.
Oh no! The peasants are rising!
(Which, given the amount of yeast cultures the average one plays host to, is hardly surprising.)
I find it it odd to see the idea of 'there are going to be too many Lords and Ladies on this Lords and Ladies game, soon!' Also odd is the idea that other people just not pursue in character and out of character goals in order to make sure another set of players have enough IC money to pursue their own goals.
It's realistic, but not fun.
@ZombieGenesis said in Heroes & Villains MUX:
Found a bit of good news this morning. Apparently last year, for fun, I coded up a FASERIP style system in Ares. I think I can modify this for use on H&V pretty easily. At least that's my hope.
FASERIP you say?
Oh, never mind why the dogs are barking. That's just my ultrasonic fanboy squeeing. It will subside momentarily.
I'd love to see either, but ...yeah. Grownups would be nice.
The Mercyverse would be especially interesting, but you'd have to write the hell out of theme to get people to understand that submissive and Omega werewolves are different things in Brigg's work, neither of them sexual in nature and probably not as suited for their snuggle party and hurt/comfort fic as the players attracted to that kind of character might think.
And there is nothing to say that big villains can't arise in the 4th Age.
Slap some homages to The Black Company in there and come up with some new Forsaken-lite types who draw their power from a tainted Ter'angreal or skipped over from a mirror world or something.
Yeah, you know it's a concept that works for you when you've already come up with three or four broad character concepts and the game doesn't even have a public wiki/address yet.
Um, not that I'm confessing to nerding out to that degree, mind you.
The Teen Wolf/Mercy Thompson interest check and my own experiences on MUs that were based on various media properties have me thinking about something I don't see much of in the MU world. Which is to say, MUs in the style of a genre, but not tied into any one media mythology.
Having played in games based on various urban fantasy series, from City by the Bay and Windy City to Devilshire and Let the End Times Roll to Dark Spires and that Dresden game set in Louisiana (I believe), the latest attempts at Supernatural and Shadowhunter games to the two 'ultimate crossover' games that popped up in the last few years, I've come to believe that a direct translation/adaptation of various properties is actually kind of limiting. Most of these shows only fill out their mythologies as far as they need for a given monster of the week episode, if they think about it at all.
On the other end of the scale, games like Mythara: At the Crossroads, which attempt to reconcile everything from Charmed to Teen Wolf under one roof, suffer from having no cohesion or tangible overarching theme to unify the various spheres and keep a game going. Not to mention, in a game where you have FCs, a lot of the play is going to be about having those FCs fuck. No judgement there, but it's not the sort of thing that attracts and keeps a wide player base.
I find myself wondering if a game that is inspired by a given genre, like TV Urban Fantasy might be a good way a go. Taking elements from Buffy, Teen Wolf, Charmed, Bitten, Dresden Files, True Blood and the rest but written from the ground up for a cohesive cosmology and setting, so the parts work together and your various spheres wouldn't be unevenly developed. I think all of those shows have enough things in common to be there own genre and have their own genre conventions, unique from even the literary versions some of them have.
Getting rid of Feature Characters and the various ways writers destroy their settings in the final seasons of a given show seems like it would open up a lot of fun for the players and using a broad setting but narrow theme could provide enough narrative framework to attract a population and keep a game going.
On the other hand, if what I'm proposing sounds like World of Darkness Lite, that's because it functionally is. WoD without the quirky and very distinct cosmology and mythology of those games and with a more 'monster of the week/big bad of the season' and 'Scooby Gang' focus.
Note, I'm not proposing a game yet, just wondering if anyone has any thoughts about something like that being viable or if it's been done and why that did or didn't work.
I like FATE in both flavors, as a tabletop game. But I hesitate to use it in a MU environment because the nature of the system requires a large amount of cooperation and goodwill among players and a fairly close eye from a storyteller to work well.
Unfortunately, MUs don't often have the type of players who will foster that environment and storytellers don't have the kind of time required to make it work.
And the variety of characters is surprisingly broad.
For the military types, sure, the first team was Air Force, but that doesn't mean that that a given team can't have a Marine commander, an Army medic, etc.
For the civilians, you don't need to resort to a Daniel Jackson clone. Brilliant machine learning chick just out of MIT who specializes in linguistic software? She and her tablet might work. Or your 'freelance treasure hunter' who is given a chance to avoid Federal prison in exchange for his expertise being put to use in a top secret program. Or your twitchy 'Yeah, I didn't believe in this shit, either, Until the Andes operation' spy type, who might have come across a piece of alien tech in some ruin somewhere before. With disastrous results.
Obviously, I'm just talking about Stargate as a whole. I have no idea what this particular game will find acceptable. But the setting is open to a lot of fun concepts, even with just earth folks involved.
I've been reading Rebecca Roanhorse and Ilona Andrews lately, so I'm starting to fall in love with post-apocalyptic urban fantasy. The idea that magic came roaring back and wrecked our society before we could finish doing ourselves is a fun concept. And there are tons of avenues open that 'traditional' urban fantasy (as much as there can be tradition in a genre about thirty years old) can't explore. And no veil/masquerade.
I don't see the point of coded travel systems, to be honest.
In the media that you're trying to emulate, travel time happens at the speed of plot. Unless the journey IS the story, having to herd cats and maintain interest while everybody is stuck in a tin can doing mess hall RP is an extra layer of complexity nobody needs.
