Best posts made by bored

Oh, this got necro'd.

I'm still interested in L5R and would gladly help in whatever way I could with a newer game, but I definitely found that there were challenges in it MU-wise the last time around. Aside from the difficulty of a teaching a less well-known game system to new players, there's a lot to absorb in terms of the setting and etiquette and definitely a lot of challenge in getting players to embrace some of the non-western assumptions of the culture.

Re: the FFG stuff, this is a big thing I'm waiting on as a long time fan of both the RPG and CCG. But if the new RPG indeed used the system that EotE does, that might be pretty tricky for MU-dom as while not quite going full hipster, it's pretty narrative.

@Ghost said in General Video Game Thread:

@bored Some friends and I were saying this recently. Bioware used to be THE go-to for RPG video games with depth. EA kinda ruined that for Bioware. Now the age of Dragon Age and Mass Effect are over, and it's open season for some company to be the new go-to.

Yeah absolutely. In this context I was particularly referencing how BioWare essentially defined the 'companion romance' trope in modern games. Baldur's Gate 2 (admittedly these are iffy by modern standards), NWN, DA/ME, etc. And they've often been ahead of the curve for something so mainstream. KotoR had the first LGBT character in the Star Wars EU, for instance. BioWare didn't abandon it under their new management, but they lost a lot of the excellent writing, which Obsidian is carrying on.

Y'all should probably make a 5W thread.

That said, while I wouldn't take a position as extreme as @Admiral or @Ghost's, I can see where they're coming from. While the staff PCs might have been minor, but the key thing is that they played all the NPCs and the NPCs were the only people of... any influence, period. The politics/'what is really going on' were as opaque on that game as any I've run into, really, it was all stuff about the royal family's own succession and various NPCs vaguely shuffling around while the rest of us kind of wondered who was in charge and where we got our orders.

For my part, I was one of the few people playing an actual (if 2nd tier) HoH as opposed to an heir (either everyone else wanted to be young and hot, or all the 'real' HoHes were NPC), and despite his whole house setup/history/etc being about naval service, I was flat out refused being any part of the command structure. Sure, I was told I could 'earn it' (with no real clarity on what that involved), but that's a little odd when you're playing a 50-something year old supposedly at the high mark/end of his career, not the beginning. So I faffed around a little with PrPs for my family, eventually got bored and went on my merry way.

Ultimately, it didn't feel highly corrupt or anything, but it did feel like the people running the game were very self-involved and writing a story on their own, and weren't too interested in most of the PC population in the bigger scheme. We could definitely be the heroes of individual missions, but the grand scope of stuff seemed like it was 99% NPC controlled.

@ixokai said in FCs on Comic MUs:

I find this a reasonable approach -- but you have to be very careful with it. Its already really hard, for example, to fill a Charles Xavier position, and he's so important for the X-Men. The bigger the burden we put on it, the even harder it will be, I think. There's a delicate balance you have to find between them being the "job" and them playing.
For characters like Cap, or Xavier, who may be iconic but themselves can't usually solve all things, that's not so bad, but for some of your iconics they're heavy hitters in their own right.

FWIW, I usually see Cap played and he's fairly straightforward and popular, so I don't think he's in a similar position to Xavier at all.

For Charles, if an individual character doesn't attract characters, that's more of a reason to look at them than to change your overall policies. I think with Xavier, there's various issues (the physical handicap, the 'mission command' position where he's not necessarily going out and fighting, his age, etc) that maybe suggest he should just be NPCed. That also pre-emptively avoids the UH drama where you have staffers suddenly putting a character in charge of the school as Xavier's come and go. There's nothing wrong with a backup NPC in the shadows, and if someone really wants to play him, they can talk to you about it etc and he returns to NPC status if they drop him later.

Also this "PRP Runner" thing is very a concern. If Superman has to run PRP's to play, then there's a very ripe opportunity for him to basically be the center of all the plots. And that's boring. Just by being himself he is apt to solve most problems if he shows up to a plot. Who wants to show up to a plot where Superman saves the day again and again?

In the words of my recently abandoned UH EFC, I say thee 'meh.'

If you want to be a star of the show character, you have to be willing to do things for others. If in attempting to do things for others you only end up doing things for yourself and people complain about it? Then you shouldn't have that character. It really isn't hard, and staff can afford to be a little stricter with the big guns if they're a little looser with everyone else. That's why I suggest a fairly loose standard for everyone else paired with the strict standard for the iconics. If a player literally cannot bring themselves to play anyone but, say, Rogue, but also won't run anything that isn't about themselves (gee, we've not seen that happen recently, have we?) then you probably don't actually need that player. Be firm, and they'll probably content themselves finding another high-power bombshell to TS on. If they leave, no loss.

Oh, setting wise, L5R has about a million options. It's about as rich as Game of Thrones in terms of the thousands of years of history and cast of characters, some of which are defined in minute detail (any of the CCG eras, or the Heroes of Rokugan campaigns, both which had month-by-month histories playing out in real time), some of which are lightly sketched (the stuff from Imperial Histories, for example), and some just barely alluded to. My game used an alternate timeline where all the Thunders died (except maybe Kachiko, cuz lol Scorpion?), leaving a lot of the clans with leadership conflicts, a search for a viable Emperor without Toturi, etc (basically to get at it being a little more warring states).

Coming up with stuff I'd want to make a game about is the least of the problems. Mostly it's the system plus the things that plague all historic games (ie, sake house RP isn't quite the same thing as Coffee Shop RP), made worse by some of the non-western assumptions.

Player-created main character RPGs have always been a great place for the industry to find an 'in' here, I think. We can be honest that The Witcher series would have struggled to find the funding, audience, and success it did with a black female lead. But creating your own? It doesn't face that obstalce. Hilariously, it's actually more economical in many cases to make everyone bisexual, because then you don't need different interactions (and voice lines) dependent on the MC's gender (edit: or maybe at the most, you might need to record multiple pronouns, but those are... literally some of the shortest words possible). Trans characters should be pretty easy in this model too, and fundamentally, it's not forcing anything on the player. You can play what you want.

I thought the CDPR stuff was encouraging when it broke the first time- I guess we'll see how it goes, but it does show that it wouldn't be hard for them to do it.

Yeah, reading more, the PC Hawkes is just.. I don't know why you'd bother. And hering 'they're working closely with staff' and 'they're not going to be the focus of the game' in the same breath just sets off all kinds of alarms. Frankly, I just don't believe it. It's the same thing staff says on every one of these games, and on every one of these games, it turns out to be BS.

The worst thing about it is there's no reason to do it with Dragon Age. It really isn't a setting that relies on a singular messiah the way Star Wars does, and yet (some) games manage to do Star Wars without playable Skywalkers.

@ixokai said in FCs on Comic MUs:

@bored said in FCs on Comic MUs:

I don't find this attitude productive, personally.

It takes a certain mindset to run plot. It takes certain mindset to run plot your character is in and not consume it yourself. These mindsets aren't exclusively what I think a good iconic character should be played as.

To tie, "plays iconic character" to "able to run good plot" together is something I don't feel comfortable with.

First, as a couple people already kind of clarified, 'plot' is a bit of a short-hand here and note that I talk about 'doing things for others' in more general terms as well. If you have ways as an iconic-player to meaningfully to contribute that isn't strictly a 'PRP', such as creating regular team RP at the base, that's a reasonable alternative. It's just hard to give quick terminology for those alternatives. But you're not creating stuff for people, there's a problem.

You seem to want to limit this to the very fewest number of players (ie only to strict 'faction leader' types), but this is the attitude we tend to see on these games by default, and the behavior we see by default is camped characters, Spider Man having coffee once a week, and the people who do run things quickly burning out because there's not enough of them. This is just the tragedy of the commons in MU form: meaningful (non 1-on-1 relationship) RP is a public good, and unless you create structures to obligate people to support that public good, it is quickly exhausted.

You can shrug at this, but the problem will still be there, slowly killing the game.

I agree, if you want a certain type of character that tends to be the center of attention, you need to be willing to encourage and allow others to shine in their moments.

But I don't agree this means that they need to run plot.

I'm also not sure what third way you're implying here. Either you're a person who promotes and creates story, or you're a person who largely consumes it. And while there's nothing wrong with consuming, you need the creators for your game to function. If staff isn't doing it, players need to. And you need to motivate them somehow. Do you have a better (or even alternative) way to do this, or is your 'solution' just to throw up your hands and hope it happens? See above.

And I'm not even talking about huge, complicated, far-reaching storylines. Just that if you can't emit some of the Sinister Six out causing problems, I don't think you have any business playing Spider Man (who notably, doesn't really have a 'sit and lead meetings' alternative RP option, either). And if you don't have the attitude that you can participate in a scene you're 'running' without totally god-moding and invalidating anyone else, you're also not the sort of player that should have these characters. It's not even fucking hard.

Whether you're a plot runner or not, having Super Man show up to a scene and pose 'Supes zips around faster than light, ignoring all the enemy attacks, and punches everyone unconscious' is fucking horrible and shows zero comprehension of how to RP comic tropes. Just don't do that thing.

I dunno, I figured the tropical diseases and cannibal pygmies were part of the appeal!

(* I don't know that there were actually any diseases, but there definitely were cannibal pygmies)

Huh, I hadn't even seen the $1 xbox beta thing. Seems like a good time to try it out and there's a couple other good titles on there I don't have on steam (albeit not enough that I'd want to keep it).

Hopefully it's obvious I'm using normal language under the assumption of a reasonable-person reading. I'm not one of the lawyers here. So I mean I don't mind some wiggle room on either side, rather than some hard line stance on smaller details of staff may never do X or must always do Y. I'm also not trying to make a sweeping declaration about all MU*dom nor all staffing or ethical issues (some of which I'm a bit more grimly pragmatic about than my optimism here would indicate).

Merely, circling back to my original post, I do not think it is a big stretch for staffers to consider and then avoid the simple pattern described there as a first step, best practices kind of thing. People will still alt cheat and staff power abuse and clique and gossip and harass and every bit of shitty behavior we've observed through approaching two decades of the hobby. But I think if people paused to think about this (or several other issues) when starting a game, it would go a long way, especially because as I note several times, I doubt much of this is intentional malice so much as careless lack of self-awareness.

@prototart said in X-Men Game:

For like 90 percent of chars there really isnt a giant ton of stuff you just like absolutely have to at all times remember

I mean for Colossus the points are idk something like

• was a villain for a little while
• died to cure he legacy virus
• got brought back to life by aliens
• cut off a alien's arm

See... that's already what I'd consider a close to 'eyes glaze over' list when it comes to stuff you need to know, as well as excessive amounts of drama in a background as opposed to happening IC. Like, anything where you have to talk about mega world-shaking metaplots and having died already... I think that's too much.

I know people are going to split on this somewhat, and that's fine, but for me it's just not interesting to have a ton of that stuff messying up your BG, to the point where the stuff that happened off-grid is actually more dramatic than what will happen on. And yes, I realize there's biases that come from certain characters needing more of the continuity to be their coolest, most powerful selves... imo it's also more interesting NOT to start them that way, because it gives people room for growth.

@tempest said in X-Men Game:

That's actually a really good list.

I'd 10000000% bump Magik and Wanda to Iconic tier though, purely based on how sought after they are on MU. They're easily among the most popular female FCs.

Hope (edit oops) just needs to be removed from everything ever. She's a dumpster snowflake.

Yeah I'd put all the 'Summers children from future' in that category, although maybe you can make exceptions for Cable? I've said it elsewhere but I really don't see the need for every X-game to be the same story all revolving around the same single person every time.

Like, can we recognize that this is a MU, and that there's reason to create interesting story for everyone, rather than having one family of God-messiahs that everything revolves around?

@Sunny I really wish I could play all of it as a single player game. The quests and everything are (or were!) the kind of thing you expected out of BioWare SW, but I never really enjoyed the MMO parts.

@Lotherio Right, I don't really mean that I imagine you'll make the game about the Evil Muslims, but I think it can be really awkward to RP a topic where PC bigotry might well be highly encouraged by the setting. People will inevitably take it too far, causing some cringy OOC-ness for the people around them as they wonder how much of it is IC. For others it might be uncomfortable for any number of RL reasons (Iraq/Afghanistan vets, people impacted by 9/11 - I qualify for this one just as a demonstration of how common the demographics are, even if it isn't really going to bother me- or any number of other incidents, etc).

So yeah, I actually say you'd be better off doing an alt-earth and playing around with it a little more. Establish a specific cultural/tech level (not just 'movies') and give examples. They don't need to be hyper realistic but if you let people go with 'whatever fits cinematically' you'll still get people picking vastly different periods and friction over it (this happened on RA).

Regardless I'm sure I'll show up to play and I'd probably help out if you wanted it, but I think the alt-earth thing is almost certainly the best way to go.

Honestly I don't know how you escape the continuity. Even if staff doesn't quiz people on it themselves, there are going to be players who know it in and out, playing on the assumption of everything in it, etc. How do you resolve that?

Re: Apps, I don't even know why a lot of games bother with some of the stuff they do (like making everyone re copy & paste wiki writeups). Unless you have stats, detailing out powers is BS anyway, so really the only relevant thing is just your take on the char, maybe some ideas of goals, future storylines, etc?

WRONG THREAD.

So... real history with all the real world links and the potential pitfalls that come with it, but pretending said real history is all daisies and roses with vague, highly subjective and yet harshly-enforced rules about players not taking their religious war too far and being mean to each other? It sounds like you've basically taken the worst possible sides of both of this in your compromise.

As ever, I'll still probably check it out, just because there's not much L&L these days.

@ixokai

This is one of the primary reasons I keep suggesting that, even if one wants to use a particular point of comic timeline as a setting (ie the one for Utopia, which provides an interesting point for RP), there are still some pretty gnarly hitches that come with trying to cling purely to 'continuity' as your only guideline for managing the game, including defining people's powers as 'whatever they are at that point.' Because that one's a pretty deep rabbit hole.

Do you look up the appearance nearest to the cutoff point to see what they're capable of at that particular moment in 'time'? What if that author happened to write a pretty de-powered version of the character compared to other nearby appearances? What if the character hasn't been around a while? What if they get more powerful pretty soon after? There are some pretty hilariously high and low watermarks for certain characters (e.g. Magneto who can literally only float ferrous crap around vs. Magneto who basically controls all EM and most matter).

This is why I tend to favor both fresher starts and statted systems, as they limit and constrain. People naturally gravitate toward the most powerful versions of things: you rarely see Rogue without Carol's powers (even if it makes no sense), Jean as not-Phoenix, people without their second mutations in general, etc. If you say everyone is a baseline version of the character set, that's fairly easy to work AND stat from, while everything on top of that requires increasing scrutiny and unfortunately this can add to annoying app-bloat.

Would it be viable to have the House of M/Decimation/Necrosha stuff all involve a certain degree of 'resetting' people? It doesn't work for any/all characters, but it's a thought.

Obsidian is the Phoenix that rose from the ashes of EA-diablerized BioWare so it's not too surprising seeing them keep knocking this stuff out, really.

@ixokai

I think you misread my comment about the single planet thing, although it's understandable as my sentence was ambiguous. I meant that, given your setting is totally divorced from anything in the movies, it makes no sense to get movie characters into things.

I didn't mean that I didn't get the motivation for picking a single planet, but for shoehorning in Luke Skywalker when we never see him do anything on Corelia anyway.