Best posts made by Chet

I finished the descing on my own.

I'm working on a little project with MU Soapbox member Mr.Johnson to make a Halo MUSH, which I don't think has ever successfully been accomplished before.

Mr. Johnson is on theme and plot staff, gathering the material to put a theme and player impetus together. I'm on code and theory, coming up with the actual innards of the game as to how it relates to players.

We're looking for someone to work on storyteller and grid, to play the antagonists.

The system works with a fictitious Spartan unit fighting the Covenant in different campaigns, designed by the storyteller division, with player-run NPCs and pre-assigned objectives, that will result in staff-run objectives to advance the story once proper objectives have been conquered by the players. Spartans don't have to attempt objectives, but it's necessary to move the plot forward.

Essentially, we're looking for a staffer to invent The Joker. Look at it as Johnson as Bob Kane, myself as Bill Finger, and you as Jerry Robinson.

A lot of the theory is laid out on our budding board system, log in at portent.genesismuds.com:2071 and create a character, if you're interested.

I've put together the code and theme/policy for a MUSH set in Hell, called Pandemonium MUSH. The purpose is to play a damned soul, ascending up the hierarchy, by warring with the other forces of Hell, and tapping the Mortal Realm to cause strife on Earth, to slowly enhance yourself beneath one of Seven NPC Demon Lords (each representing a Seven Deadly Sin to flavor your character).

I'm looking for beta testers, grid builders and describers, and future staffers.

I need plot support, help staff, application staff, and build staff, once the project goes green.

The code has a pair of systems: the first designed after a side scrolling brawler modified into a free-for-all system, and the second designed after a model of how I'd imagine an ideal X-Men power advancement system to be, based around becoming slowly a creature of Hell (with powers expressed through influence on Earth).

The theme is a mix of several faiths, but is heavily laden in the Catholic faith's concept of Mortal Sins, with the unusual dialect of using the Egyptian form of the Seven Deadly Sins that made it into Greece, predating Christianity (the Maccabees period of the Old Testament).

portent.genesismuds.com:2071 is the address. Post on board 4, I'll hook up with you for a chat when I can.

Be warned, this is a mature theme, there are limits, but if I molly-coddled it, you'd hardly get to play it to its full potential.

I was Damn-Yankee, and I had a Storyteller on the Unchosen side. I got recruited by Nialus and Khelkhet, off H&V.

I had a half-baked Gotham City MUSH concept project years ago, which was basically: let's take a comic book theme, and introduce a combat system, to make combat objective (as far as these things go.)

I just have a question, what's the deal with staff posing villains? Is this a gaming field encompassing trend? If you look at Gotham City, you have the best potential net of some really memorable villains (but I'm biased). I think the question is how to make villains palatable again. Comic books have been stretching apart in terms of the unforgivable background of the villain, and the purity of the hero, forever, and I think it's why comic book games have a hard time translating to a MUSH.

As an exercise, to test out my theory: take four heroes, four villains. Compare them to people you know that aren't the actual characters, and write personality sketches for each. I think, with an accurate representation of a feature, that you've laid a real person onto, you could create an entire roster of semi-original characters that would look much more intriguing to a writer. Then, the question would come down to marketing: how would you get people to play there? What's the tagline?

I've got a slim, neat spy opera theme MUSH ready to launch. I need a little help describing a modern day grid that is nice and tidy, nothing too big or outrageous, just continents, three oceans, the Caribbean, and a handful of cities as a base for each major affiliation class.

Connect at portent.genesismuds.com:2077 if you're interested. I've got the entire thing ready to launch, besides the need for some nice, simple room descriptions.

I was Nelse Jensen of Alvistaad, I got busy with highschool and left during the white plague plot.

The thing you have to remember about superheroes (I picked this up from reading a comic journalism book about the creation of Spider-Man, newsprint innards and all) is that they're written to appeal to bully personalities to trick them into poor tactics, and that supervillains are all written, in the comics, to appeal to bully victims, to give them various avoidances and escapes from the superheroes. Superdickery, the website sadly departed to us now, had all the top contenders for the writer jokes about the people they had heard about either a) trying to be superheroes, b) possible downfall routes for people that a character appealed to, or c) an in-joke about someone that a writer met that looked like a superhero.

For instance, I have chtirophobic conduct disorder RL, that's the Scarecrow, people that make sibilances (whistling, sing-songs, mutters) are sometimes sociopathic, and the chtirophobia (fear of birds) causes it to piss me off. So, I display sociopathic behavior to anyone that tries a sociopathic tactic. I avoided anything remotely resembling psychology in college, and although I got taken down by some Schulzstaffel types, I recovered by writing and going into the arts (I'm attending school for creative writing and fiction, Batman villains are written a certain way so they make you think about going into an authorship, media related, or artistic profession).

What about a MUSH designed to be a Bruckheimer action movie, with a democratic process about the setting, conflict, and sequels, where the characters carried over between 'movies'?

I've been in love with this experimental concept for some time. You'd have different categories for suggestions - setting, conflict, factions - and once you tallied up all the suggestions, people would then vote on them, while the plot-staff was running the plots.

As the 'movie' ended, the build and theme staff would be putting together the next sequel, for all the characters to carry over to, and then the process would begin anew.

Ever have the theory that the hidden meaning in Twelve Monkeys is that Bruce Willis, the time traveler, is the carrier for the plague, i.e. the vaccine in him? That's why he's traveling to these different potential outbreak sites in space and time, before he meets the virologist that picks up the first contact with the virus?

How do we know who the dirty cop is?

He buys the Batmobile and lives in Wayne Manor.

How do we know?

One of his friends reads DC Comics.

Where's the money from?

'Business ventures'.

I'm in the early stages of creating a game with my combat system, now modified for Grand Theft Auto, with an action movie feel for the codebase simulation being a screenwriter or actor, instead of being a video gamer or pen-and-paper tactician.

I've got 20 cities (including Bullworth and Carcer City), five rooms a piece, with a shifting powerup system (and Wanted Stars), a plot system as the economy (with money), a method of earning grid space, and of course, a gang war system I have yet to code.

I'm going to set it in 1983, with all the corporate splendor, conservative talk show caustic sarcasm, urban misery, and international intrigue of the Reagan years. From the slopes of Aspen to the hardcore scene of Boston, I plan on including it.

If you're interested, drop me a line. I plan on including as many Features as possible, started at the beginning of each game, modified to start in 1983 for each plot.

I need room description writers, profile writers, and theme writers.

Video games are a bubble market, albeit one with a very low overhead (paying for employees). Once you make the game, you can sell it infinitely at a favorable market rate, but much like 'apps', the market is slowly flooding. There's going to be some weird redistribution of careers, so try to pick up a second skill you can apply elsewhere, like the storyboard portion (that's a communication degree with a creative writing nod) or the journalism portion (also communications) or marketing (that's an associates).

Just remember the theory if you need it.

Spider-Man was invented by Steve Ditko as an enemy of The Fly, an old superhero back when the formula wasn't pervasive. The Fly was a geek fighting for world peace, and Spider Spry was an evil heel wrestler type fighting him. The Fly took off on a fantasy fan spectrum, kind of like you see with the more passive readers that read stuff like Tolkien or Rowling, not the hardcore fans. But Spider-Man takes Spider Spry, the nerd that gets jacked, and gives him an ethical trap: if this character appeals to you, Peter Parker, you put on the suit and get beaten up by all these villains that outgun you.

Case in point: In Kevin Smith's Mallrats, Stan Lee comes out of the closet as having written himself into Dr. Doom.

I'm working on an alternative to the Marvel 1963+ server, which I see as an anti-racist view of American culture from the perspective of the ideal. This is a pragmatist's view of business management of American institution, the street culture that America operates by, from the pragmatic perspective.

I've couched it in Grand Theft Auto, with 10 cities (10 percent of the grid described, Newark and Salt Lake City), with 13 seed factions and subfactions formed by player action in code. The code is a new form, in an alpha stage, and I'm working on the theme files (I've got five factions, one city, in the theme file, I have to write policy files and command files, plus any type of theme relevant).

It's called Grand Theft Auto: Rockstar Wars, and functions from the level of the high level broker down to the common criminal, with many complaints addressed that I've had over the years to my concepts.

The factions are: Freemasons (Government - Security), Krysha (Democrats - Commerce), Yakuza (Republicans - Tradition), Mafiaso (Catholics - Immigrants), Triads (Maoists - Schools), Aryans (Bikers - Veterans), Cartel (Sandinistas - Privateers), Outfit (CIA - Mercenaries), Punjabis (Middle East - Mercantile), Yardies (Panthers - Information), Lunatics (Freelance - Diplomatic Immunity), Journalists (White Market - Fixed Commodity), Law Enforcement (Black Market, Fluctuating Commodity).

It's an open-play world, I'm primarily looking for plot staff, and if you want to get involved with grid description (there are ten cities, five cities per room, on a room roster grid accessable from login), I'd love it.

Just connect as a guest or create a character, my wizbit is Moriarty, talk to me or send me a @mail. (portent.genesismuds.com:2077).

It's literature, not gaming.

To explain it in MUSH gaming theory, imagine setting up a whole faction full of FCs for bad writers, then having it run by someone who enjoys toying with them.

Compound the issue by giving them all unbalanced combat statistics with holes in their defenses, so you can't hack and slash to win.

I've only seen it done once, that's Duo's Robot Masters at M3. You still get to play at M3, but in a training wheels faction for writers to interact with the rest of the MUSH and build confidence in writing.

A superhero is a role model that traps someone for being a virtue signaling individual (you always choose popularity over your real opinion). A supervillain is a sociology case study in a disordered personality that, if written properly, got that way because of some childhood stressor, and had a causal incident, sometimes at the hands of the proper superhero, to becoming evil.

If you want something similar, study a serial killer's background on Wikipedia. A serial killer is an extreme case that's easy to understand, and both the state's various organs, and people that could become one, often study them to avoid the pitfalls and stay away from the electric chair or incarceration.

So, to use the writing trap (this is common in some cultures, for instance a Shakespeare tragedy is a common drama prank on some poor schmuck, the individual that performs the trap is a victim of MacBeth syndrome and tries to rise to power, the play is about Shakespeare's observation of the phenomenon in England) on a MUSH, you would create a faction that is for people that always do what the theme says is popular, then give them all a major flaw that they have to overcome in their characters, to teach them to make an unpopular decision.

The save move (this is something like an biography about a famous historical figure being given to someone in need, such as Ulysses S. Grant's biography being given to someone in rehab, or the detective Vidocq to a criminal) in faction building would be creating a faction that appeals to players with behavioral issues, to force them to cooperate in building something constructive for the MUSH, instead of just wandering around in hairbrained schemes.

I have a project right now, just a little original project I've been wanting to make for around a decade now, that's just a RL setting of real life Buddhist gangs, with the political election rigs for the Republican Party and the Jesuits replaced with martial arts combat. I've got everything in place, just need to build a small grid. Nobody wants to play at my games, there's always something obtuse about the design.

I'd love to get together on a Suicide Squad game, where everyone plays government-indentured villains from different countries.

I was working on a sci-fi crime saga game in the near future, but I put it on ice, I hit a developmental block in my work ethic. The code was nearly complete, and the grid is about half-described, but it was a mammoth work, and I was doing it alone. If anyone wants to help, I can resurrect it.