Posts made by Bobotron

Best wishes. Last i spoke with Usekh they were doing a lot better, so this is very sad to hear.

@Finn

Kardis.

Does this have to be limited to MU*, or is tabletop/LARP okay?

MUSH Deaths

• Beast Wars: Transmetals - Predacon mini-dragon (we had Transmythics with mythical beast altmode, shaddup!) named Imp, who was the 'dragon' to the dragon-form Megatron. He attempted to take over the Predacons, but Megatron was smarter and used his own soldiers (really, ones acting like betrayers in order to draw out true betrayers). Imp got dipped in the lava pits for his trouble.
• Megaman MUSH - Civilian Rainbow Stallion, a music star, had been nearly convinced he was a Maverick due to a Maverick PC who was 'in love' with him. He was dragged along on a mission with other Mavericks, and, when it came down to slaughtering the Civilians... he rebelled and held the line, giving the Hunters time to evac the Civvies. Rainbow died, but all those humans and civilian 'bots lived.

LARP Deaths

• Masquerade LARP circa 2004: Played a Gangrel who ended up becoming an infernalist due to plot. He got Obtenebration out of the deal. He ran around attempting to draw in and convert, or kill, all of the 'newbie' Kindred to give the Camarilla a hard time. Eventually, a Red Alastor (played by my best friend) showed up and it was a faceoff eventually between the ancilla Gangrel and the Elder Ventrue. Epic fight, epic interrogation at the end.
• Requiem LARP circa 2006: Nosferatu Dragon who was essentially Spike as a Nos, versus creepy old man Nos Crone. Nos beatdown ensued in a formal challenge, and he was so terrifying that a number of characters conspired to kill him. He had a new axe built... and it was sabotaged by the forger. He had his connection to a ley line, which granted him extra blood expenditure, severed during the fight by one who he thought was an ally. He got beheaded by the broken axe head of his own sabotaged axe.
• Requiem LARP circa 2007: Played a Ventrue Invictus who was... rather insane. He started out as a Morality 3 human. He was paranoid and the Elysium was built with a number of escape routes like a wall-elevator and shit like Batman. His knight (played again by my Best friend) was even lower humanity Mekhet. The Carthians locally attempted to oust him by murder, and he got away... barely. And then his best friend, in order to 'save' him... staked and diablerized him. That dropped him to 0 Humanity, and they went out together. Was fun as hell.
• Requiem LARP circa 2009: Played a Gangrel Dragon, who was an alchemist as a mortal, was descended from the Unholy and generally overall bookwork badass. I terrified another character, played by a good friend at the time, so much that she went outside the city (this was part of the Camarilla/Mind's Eye Society) to get people to help her kill him, as she was not sure that she and her local allies could kill him. It ended up being really fun, even if I cried when he died.
• Changeling the Lost LARP circa 2008: Wizened Chatelaine of the Winter Court, who was super paranoid and trying to use fae powers against the Fae. He got caught in a crossfire firefight above his pay grade and died in ignominity, smothered by living darkness.
• Changeling the Lost LARP circa 2009: Fairest Treasured, while there were NO combat-PCs involved, trying to stop the Shoggoth pet-eater monster in the city. He got eaten whole by the Shoggoth.

Tabletop Deaths
Scion: Played a meatshield Scion of Brigid. He was known for tanking and being the meatshied (super pretty, super stout, real dumb). He died twice (once by getting blown up by a missile, one by holding the line for his allies while they were under attack from a Titanspawn above their pay grade), but got brought back each time because of reasons. The first time, it was his then-wife who punked the queen of the Unseelie Fae; the second time, I willingly chose Morrigan as a patron and she granted me one last chance.

@Thenomain
I think the closest 'web based' analog we have to MUs are digichats. At least, the way lots of places set them up (essentially as a grid without the 'walking back and forth' stuff). Nothing on the level of the code you've done for MUs, but integrated die rollers, sheets and such.

@Thenomain

Storium.

Multiverse Crisis: A guideline for creating/using the restat system to create your own NPC antagonists for plots without having to do anything other than reset your stats.

Transformers 2005: One of the best combat system upgrades, with a huge variety of status effects, enhancing the already-fun aspects of combat.

Heroes and Villains MUX: Trusting your players with huge amounts of power levels, without having to resort to a lot of extra 'scaling' rules or anything, on a trait-based system.

Requiem for Kingsmouth: An interesting Territory system, which granted not-insignificant benefits for controlling territory, as well as supporting and pushing status, even if it was fairly obtuse.

@Arkandel
I went back and reread and realized I misread. You're meaning 'as long as they're not in use, anyone can grab them for a scene and play them within the guidelines of the character' setup. I was looking at it from the concept of 'this player can get this for long-term off of a roster, and play within the guidelines of the character' angle. But yeah, the big concern is consistency of presentation.

@Jennkryst
Mummy's one of those weird 'transitional' partially-2e compliant, whereas Beast and Demon are 2e complaint by default.

@Seraphim73
I will subscribe to your newsletter, but in particular...
RE: Active BBoards - I think one thing that bboards could be set up for, is perhaps, 'area' bboards. We do factions, groups, etc. But what about area news/updates? Like, my game is set in NYC, and so I could do a bboard for each Borough... have characters who live/exist in that borough attach themselves to that bboard and get more detailed info than a general New York Times or Word on the Street/Rumor Mill bbpost.

@Arkandel
You actually touched on something I had been dancing around bringing up in my head. Rosters of 'setting NPCs'. Not just mooks and enemies, but (to use a vampire example), the Primogen, Prince, Seneschal, etc. Things you want to be consistent. But at that point, you'd have the same 'NO FCs!!!!!' people screaming about it, despite the good it would do to be like 'here are the guidelines, here's the process to GET this PC, you cna have normal PC and custody of this, just ensure you follow policy X on 'history and updates' or whatever.

EDIT TO ADD: On Transformers 2k5, Transformers: Genesis and Beast Wars: Transmetals (to a lesser extent) facheads (and in this instance, this is what the above rosters/FCs would be, essentially) were sort of 'mini-staff' and involved more deeply in staff processes. I wonder how that would work on a WoD or WoD-esque game, where the players of those things are custodians of them and beholden to use that to support/advance the game, not their own OOC agenda.

@surreality
Correct. Which is why automation won't work with 99% of RPG systems. Big reason why I'm going a different direction with setup and code for HotB.

@surreality
Yeah, I just edited my post a bit. But automation definitely helps with some of the trust issues, since, unless a player has the capability to silently change their stats (and wiz-restricted attributes make that much more difficult), particularly when it comes to combat/conflict, and so you can just be like 'code's doing it's thing, let's play'.

@tragedyjones
In an ideal world, this wouldn't need to be something that has to be said. Trust should go both ways, and the default should be to trust, unless someone has proven themselves untrustworthy.

@Arkandel
Re: Player STs
Yeah, but how do you break the cycle of trust that @surreality and I were talking about briefly? The players need to have some sort of buy in, and not just some tangible reward benefit.

• Automation of some of this can be achieved. For example, Megaman MUSH had a 'restat yourself temporarily' as an enemy setup, as does/did Multiverse Crisis. When you made changes to your stats, it told the room, so you couldn't do it in the middle of combat without being VERY blatant about the cheating. And at that point, you have no real compunction of 'cheating' on rules since the system is automated, and you have simply 'the scene' to be run. NPCs that are grabbable, logins, however you want to do it. Lists like game rosters. Stuff like that can add to the trust of a scene runner.

Re: PC Rivalries
What do you do to incentivize a PC rivalry so that it doesn't turn into killytime? Having rivals is great and awesome, but it seems like people have no conception of escalation and process other than 'you insulted me, I'm going to blow you up now!' This also becomes harder in a non-factionalized game, where your rivals/enemies may be within the same group as you, and doubly hard in a game where PK is fairly trivial. Perhaps...

• Remove non-consensual death. Especially in games where it's hard to kill something that the players are.
• Have to have them 'work up to it' through a pre-defined list of escalations, but non-con is still a thing. The MES LARP group did something called 'He Had to Die (https://games.mindseyesociety.org/vampire-the-requiem/us-requiem-chronicle-he-had-to-die-pvp-system/)' which was an (optional) list of 'here's some guidelines of what shit leads to an acceptable PC death'.

@tragedyjones
I'm not sure why that ISN'T a default policy. IMO, that should be. Is it that endemic of 'OH I DON'T TRUST ANYONE OOC' of the WoD MU* that 'hey we need an ST/Narrator, you know the rules, you wanna help?' is verboten?

@tragedyjones

It's a constant question because everyone has a different opinion, and there is no 'one size fits all' answer for all games. Your answers depend on your staff, your players, your goals with the game, and everything in between. It has to be tailored to the experience you want out of the game.

Here are my thoughts, and what I like to see and anecdotes from my game history.

• Grid Design: I come from a history of games where huge grids were the norm, whether that be an entire Earth/planet grid built out like a RISK board (Transformers, Megaman), or large cities (superhero MU*s) or a combination of both (Multiverse Crisis). We used those things as guidelines. I feel like a mixture of easy to make (and destroy, or permanently add to the grid) temp rooms plus a minimalistic 'here are expectations' grid is the best option.
  This has to be tailored for your expectations of the game but also, what the staff plans to provide as utility. Myself, I'm a fan of a) minimalistic 'overworld' grids, which have 'here is what's going on' and b) more descriptive 'internal' grids, like inside of a mansion.
• An End to Bar-P: That requires 1) staff oversight and 2) player buy-in. Your problem with this is going to be 'who is going to constantly run the things that are not bar RP'? And where do you find things to run? Again, this requires tailoring to the genre and the game itself, and having staff willing to a) run things for the playerbase, and b) trust the playerbase to run things. This is where some of the massive overhead being bitched about in the random bitching thread comes from.
  When I ran Megaman X MUSH, we (both players and staff) ran stuff like 'random robots go out of control' or 'Mavericks need <X> resources, let's go steal it' alongside bigger things (Repliforce coup, revival of Sigma, etc.). Beast Wars: Transmetals had a steady stream of 'resources are needed, let's go find the thing' or 'new character introduction sparks RP by dint of being a fight between the factions for the new Transformer (even if the application dictated the faction)'.
  You have to be able to find something within the genre to run, and have people willing to run it.
• Homework: Again, tailored to the game. I come from a background where none of that was required, but we did it because it was fun to share logs. We did IC reports posts because, well, the other Maximals deserved to know the Predacons blew up the minitank prototype, but you got a sweet new flying Maximal out of the deal. We did... stuff... because we felt it added to the game based on the genre. I think if you can't get effort out of your players for OOC aspects of the game, you're going to have apathetic players who don't really care about the IC area. But I am weird, in that I view the players of a game often as more family/community, and try to treat it as such.
  Making Things Matter: This is the difficult one. This ties into the 'homework' issue above, and to be honest, this is one of those 'you need to trust the players' aspects, especially if you have a small staff. Perhaps, in the case of a WoD game, make sure people get a bennie for helping to report that stuff?
  Having records submitted was one thing we did at MMXMUSH; factions submitted AAR reports as part of something the players just... did... in that circle of MU*s. And we updated grid descs, room holders, etc. from the info there. But we also made it very clear to the players that 'hey, we are staff and not omniscient. Did you do a cool thing? Send us a log and alert and let us know so we can update stuff'. Treating players as part of the game, and asking them to help (not requiring, but asking) goes a long way to fostering community.

@WTFE
That's super cool.

@WTFE
The art placards at the bottom are REALLY nice.

@tragedyjones

Dragonlance is a D&D setting but it's very different from typical ones, especially in the early sections.

@ZombieGenesis
There was an MotU MUSH a long time ago, and it tanked hard because of lack of interest.

@surreality

There there. It'll be alright. VHD MU* would really need some type of actual coded combat, rather than just die rolls. Honestly, the old Megaman/Transformers-style 'lots of effects and modifiers' angle and doing them up as choose/build your own would work for the sheer amount of stuff the Barbarois can do. Merge with and control matter? Check. Redirect damage? Check. Stick a dude in shadow stasis? Check.

OH, ALSO. Nightbreed for OWoD.

http://bjz-backup.droppages.com/archive/nightbreed.html

@surreality
Vampire Hunter D is one of those guilty pleasures of mine, but I couldn't see how it would work unless you set it, say, during the height of vampire aristocracy, or a small area where a vampire controls a lot of territory and has room/openings for vampire underlings. But there's tons of awesome stuff with all the crazy shit that serves vampires. Barbarois can do ANYTHING.

Something based on Penny Dreadful, using the literature of the times in a mash of craziness. Like the Defenders of the Earth cartoon was all those comics like The Phantom, Flash Gordon and Mandrake the Magician.

HRM.

• The 100, with better implementation and SLOWING DOWN of stuff.
• Falling Skies, blowing up aliens and each other!