Posts made by Bennie

Inigo Montoya

I love BITN. I want to get more RP going on that isn't in private homes.

@HorrorHound said in Kinds of Mu*s Wanted:

The Witcher-esque Mush. Kplzthx.

I would pay to get that set up and learn how to keep it running and keep the door open long past unhealthy, like 10 years later, for a chance at a Witcher style storyline. People in convergence end up in another planet on the universal stack inhabited by everything we used to suggest was fairy tale fantastic. Aw hell yah. Dragons and Gryphons and Unicorns and Crones oh my.

@Thenomain said in What would a superhero game need to be/do to bring in a new player base?:

What kind of superhero comic are you going for? State it, stick with it, and explain it. What's the difference between New 52 and The Maxx? They're both superhero comics. The original Superman or Iron Man are very, very different than they are today.

So are you trying to get new players to the Superhero genre, or existing Superhero fans new to the game?

Yeah, most comic geeks want to know Silver Age, Golden Age, and so forth, too. Some folks like the WWI Mystery Men period better than they like the rough and tumble 1970s with its politics and commentaries on race or socio-economic struggles. Some folks prefer even Justice Society of America over the Justice League, because such fine lines are important to them.

I remember a fun Marvel system that used colored markers for fun ways to succeed at any given heroic act. It represented how much of a reserve your character had and how many you used represented how willing your character was to tax themselves with their abilities, means of attacking villains, or how much they defended themselves. Basically you just selected those numbers from your pool and compared them to determine who succeeded and who failed. Rather like bluffing in poker. How much you succeeded depended on how much you won by in a comparison. In some cases, take the Hulk using strength, the obvious answer is: he can win by a lot!

Then to do ordinary things, you set the threshold of the challenge, and the hero just spent that many markers to succeed, and again by how much. This meant that if Spider-Man went around saving hundreds of lives in a single night, by morning he could be pretty taxed. It would be possible he just would have nothing left in the tank to deal with the Abomination and Titania.

The entire system was appallingly simple, but at the same time a lot of fun because of the comparisons and factoring time. Did Mr. Fantastic really expend himself so blatantly? Or was he doing just enough to succeed so he would have a little something left when he had to try and track the signal controlling the Doom Bot he just defeated?

Furthermore, to keep from murdering everything, attacks could be pulled so that they did knock-out instead of health damage. So even Cyclops could shoot a tank with his ruby beams and not necessarily murder a squad of soldiers. All-in-all, it would be a fun thing to code for a MU* environment, where you simply allocate for your turn, with perhaps an emit that tells the room that they have finished their allocation (thusly they couldn't sneak back and change them) and then everyone using a second command to reveal their choices, resetting the character so they can make new allocations the next turn.

Fell out of contact with Kenneth @ HM and wondering if he has been in contact with anyone.

I was pretty skeptical about BITN but I have to admit it is pretty darn fun. There have been new players all last month. I hope more players give it a shot.

I always thought it would be interesting if some of the old MUD coding was adapted to MUSHing. For example:

If the game handled things like Wits + Composure in a few minor ways. When you enter a room, you get a description, but what if you got an extra section, or paragraph? So for example the main description might describe the location in general terms but then you might see:

(Wits + Composure: 2 Successes) You notice behind the bar a security camera with an ample view of things. The red light on it gave it away. It doesn't seem unusual for a bar in this part of town to have closed circuit security. After all, things do become a little more upscale North of 10th street.

In another example, while most players do not even set an @desc per se. The same could be applied when looking at a character:

(Wits + Composure: 1 Success) You notice the telltale bulge of a concealed handgun in a holster at the small of the back right at the belt. In fact, you notice just under the hem of the jacket in front the glint of what must also be a badge clipped to the belt too.

Once upon a time, just having something set, like Heightened Senses as an Attribute = 1 on a character would enable a host of extra tidbits like small sentences of enhanced information that a Werewolf or a Vampire with Auspex might receive. With new games likely for Exalted and Mage on the horizon, seeing a sentence here or there for those with various extrasensory purchases, even Mage Sight (which I assume exists still), would go a long way toward shaping the game's culture, but most especially if they are labeled for what they are. If the game says you get this info because you succeeded in gleaming that information.

I'm not so sure the solution to limited Staff time is really, I can see it all day and night on push notifications on my phone and constantly be tapping out job instructions to players on my hobby game...

That would be cool to add to a Wiki like BITN. I see they use forms. But being able to click on the map addresses, and fill out a few form lines, and produce a small, formatted entry on the wiki, and update players on RP that you divulge has taken place there. (There was fireworks on the beach on 4th of July.) That would be kinda keen.

Screw it. Stargate MUSH. The new wormhole only goes to an Urban Fantasy address. Worlds forever linked. One normal, one very similar... with monsters.

Create a Sanctity of Character rule and people can get beheaded and roll into a new Highlander. Beheadings for everyone! Wednesdays are Whack Nights, where everyone beheads in a big group. Saturdays are ReSubmit Saturdays, where you party in the OOC submitting new Highlanders for the next week.

This all seems very gentle handed, but I feel like the sandbox and sandboxing exists for a reason. If I, and 3 other people, want to have a more meaningful evening once or twice, adding hoops doesn't make that happen. It just forestalls it happening. And in truth, it is just a way to weed out the unwanted. "Only someone really dedicated is going to 'do all this' so we have nothing to worry about now. We'll have dedicated players!" It's a weeding process, honestly.

The truth is, a lot of games have all these processes, submissions, tracking, and so forth, but the reality is most players are going to quietly sidestep all that and attempt - with the least amount of effort and investment - to find a solution that lets them return to "I, and 3 other [friends], want to have a more meaningful evening once or twice". Which means, for all your tracking and effort, you're missing all the unsubmitted material that people simply hide.

It's sort-of like learning to read when it's banned. People will likely, with the lights down low, sitting in the quietest place they have, read a paper that has been passed around with the fish deliveries for the last six months. Least amount of chance of being caught, most amount of reward, just a few quality moments spent together. It's a weird way to reinforce bad behavior, creating checks and balances that require monitoring of people's sense of privacy.

Now, the opposite is being freer. Most freer games that have an open policy and little reinforcement are likely imo to find that players are much more open, inclusive, and interested in keeping others, and Staff, up to date on the pitter patter of trickled storytelling. Which means, in the end, that you've created a space for people to have little trouble getting in, getting involved, getting active, and the benefit is they're excited afterward to involve you in what happened, because their sense of pride in fun well had is replacing their sense of being invaded and controlled, so there is no need for them to feel the need to be sneaky.

For a while I had a written world building I did for a game set in essentially an ice age, after the apocalypse. A few movies came out and sort-of quelled my desire to move forward on it. But it started with the whole wars, and pandemics, and breakdown of society, the rise of community, and eventually the rubber band snap of nature that led to an ice age, pushing man to roughly the development of 10,000 BC. Tribal, hunter gatherer, post apocalyptic, our tech on occasion, world that was open in map enough so as to allow people to create sand boxed cultures but small enough geographically they would all interact through things like trade.

The benefits of the setting were:

A chance to take 'culture' into the future. One tribe might be very animistic and another might be very scholarly trying to rediscover the long distant past. New players or just new character builders can choose from many, and hopefully very different, origin points.

Perpetual conditions. What the tribe has built as a method of living, or as a homestead, somewhat stays, even as characters die or go idle. If you have created a lush valley in the icy world, built around a spire that looks unmistakably like the Space Needle, it gets passed on.

Familiarity. Because it has now tech (that has survived for thousands of years when in an ensured stash), you don't have to change many rules, just the Availability/scarcity.

I like zombies more.

Oh the horror! The horror!

@somasatori said in Dune Coda Stuff:

I... I love you.

And I immediately go from Dune to You Only Live Twice's secret service code phrase.

I'm suddenly picturing the caravan in Reign of Fire driving around on highways while shooting zombies who get too close.

Speaking of zombies. I am enjoying this book series, the Remaining by DJ Moles. Guy is part of a program that has bunkers dotting North America and they basically get paid to live somewhat rurally and quietly and just present a normal face to their community. But sometimes, just sometimes, they get an alert that they have to go into their bunker and they stay there for however long and follow prescribed rules about when to leave.

In the book, the man hits the surface after a bacterial infection has killed much of the population, and left the rest as hyper-aggressive and predatory. They're not stupid. They are animalistic and territorial and have a pack mentality with others infected. And as such they do things like attack one part of a fence while breaching the fence on the other side of the place uninfected are holed up. The predators are just plain fun to read.

But still in all, a nice bread and butter setting. Generators still have a bit of diesel left. Building an enclave to hole up in, and making sure people are treated before the disease progresses to the brain and causes the damage that results. People still being able to use a car, or truck, or weld if you can find the utilities to do so, hey great. So it has a lot of creativity, like chain link fence building during the day when the predators are mostly inactive.

Long story short: It can be a fun setting to have characters moving around. Let them move in their own groups, or link together however they want. They all really just need their 'default room' which they can desc how they like, be it a highway, or a house, and let them 'survive'. Storytellers occasionally throw stuff at them. Have the highway group roll through the town where the other group are hole-up in a house. Let them organically link, or even clash. Above all, have fun, in this failing world.

@SunnyJ said in I will design you a MUX:

Requiem for Rome is best Requiem.

Would love! I do think, though, that you would have to accept a certain 'enhanced reality', like a Ridley Scott movie or how Breaking Bad does things (yes, it is real, but... 'cinematic'), so to avoid people who REALLY love historic acuity from butting heads with anyone who is relaxed about it.

Yeah. Inspire it by Requiem for Rome. Historical accuracy is eye-splitting most of the time in my experience.

@lordbelh I think you would do swell writing a Rome game. I would pay to open that game, honestly. And I think the new rulebook would make it perfect for Mortal with flavor. In fact, bringing it out of the purely supernatural world and placing it much more squarely in house against house, senator against senator, conspiracy, religion, and so forth, rather than zapping one another with Psychic abilities, would imo make it even better. (Although I wouldn't balk at a werewolf, or some Infrastructure, or a vampire here and there 'behind the scenes'.)

Hurt Locker seems to have some nice items to include as well, what with sword and board and spear fighting and phalanxes.