Posts made by Chet

I don't even know what it means in a literal term, it's just a term I hear bandied about, and in this context, it seemed properly British.

I don't mean beating up players, man. I mean the equivalent of a fox hunt run by a staffer, with a somewhat moderated outcome, decided by the event staffer. In a simulated environment, would you rather chase down a rabbit on a rail, or would you rather play paintball?

I just get the image of the Riddler and some outmanned goons being beaten up by Batman whenever I think about the idea of a comic book PvE MUSH enters my mind.

Besides, it's hell on event staff. The real problem is that comic books don't have defined factions in the source canon, and that's the entire carbuncle that a MUSH formula works on. So you'd have to make a few, not even the 'groups' standard, but actual organized units that stick true to the MUSH's canon inspiration. Two heroic, one villain, one support hero, is what I'd advise. Design the alternate character policy around the number and your prospective playerbase draw goal.

I'm sorry if I went off on a tangent, I'm working on sharpening up a writing tactic for use in whatever little niche writing gig I can find, I've been working on a creative writing class for the past couple weeks instead of RPing.

To put it in context: if you make a game where everyone plays PvE, you are going to run into two problems.

A) You'll attract the dicks that don't play nice when they play superheroes, and are basically there to live out their fantasies of beating people up that are from the villains theme that's made to draw them in. Gotham City is for people that are into law enforcement fairness and sociological reform and the ethics of mental illness. Metropolis is for people that are into corporate industry and truth in press and national politics.

B) The other problem is that some players play someone they want to understand, either they want to put themselves into the role of the character (that's the definition of roleplay) they've seen in a media source, or they're writing something they know from another perspective. That is your 'disguise' player. The other form of player is the aspirational player, they write something they want to become, they admire, etc. So, you'll have an entire Justice League together, but you'll have someone playing Robin that wants to take down the class smartass by getting into his mind, and you'll have someone playing Batman that thinks Batman is a really cool thing to be.

That's actually the root problem with all MUSHes that have any sort of conflict, it's very subtle, but it's where cliques are from.

But on a superhero game, where the theme is already representative of current events (for instance, how does Batman get people put in jail without legal procedure? Drug informant busts are very controversial, yet a jury usually convicts based on guilt in their opinion, not the moral mind of the case), you're making it so there's no dissenting voice.

tldr; I hate PvE, especially on a comic game.

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.

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.

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'.

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).

Select a champion and apply for Chamber, who has no nose and mouth, and is asexual, and duel him with a complex game of cat and mouse.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wQNI7q6ABnc

Going off of the discussion on another board under the Superhero MU Gut Check topic, about wanting to be involved in projects but not wanting your project to go public too early, and not wanting it to be in the design phase on an open board, what about a board to offer help for projects, instead of just posts asking for help for a particular project? That way, a MUSH team could recruit someone from a pool of interesting people.

Sort of like a Mos Eisley board.

@Tempest Then why don't we turn this whole pie upside down before we eat it, and make it a game with ONLY villains. Villainous groups only, with competing interests, all comic book characters in a particular world. Then, the staff poses the heroes as NPCs!

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?

At the risk of playing into my stereotype of RP preference, I've been thinking out the proper format for a Grand Theft Auto MUSH for years. I'm working on something similar, but with a way different approach. A purist's form would be a world inside an alternate reality of a famous city during a cultural fixture criminal underworld time period. The problem has always been, how do we prevent every player from wanting to be the main character? An original character MUSH is the easy fix, but it's a hard sell, since everyone would be mimicking the feature characters from, say, Vice City. So you'd need a MUSH everybody got to be Tommy Vercetti sometimes, but you'd also have Ken Rosenberg and Sonny Forelli and all the goons, without typecasting the entire MUSH into a video game plot.

My solution is to pick a city that doesn't have a game devoted to it, in the proper time period, and make it into a game with the proper trappings. You'd need a summon locker of vehicles to steal, a property system, a capability of giving out missions in exchange for IC cash (perhaps everyone would earn cash from a mission, and everyone could give out missions, but giving out a mission wouldn't cost cash, since you'd be getting it from your 'set'), a locker of weapon hardware to spend IC cash on, NPC bystanders being endangered or deliberately targeted as a modifier for collateral (or for Respect), skill building, and the famous Wanted rating, which you'd have to heavily modify from the game. Maybe Wanted Stars, which would build up from mission pay level, NPC deaths, vehicle theft, the firepower being discharged, etc., would open up the possibility of player health damage from NPC police pursuit, with the Wanted star increase odds stacking the longer you spent Wanted, and a Busted possibility raising the higher the stars went, playing against the skill levels your character has.

The concept is arcade-like, not realistic, which would have to be a design aesthetic.

You need some sort of relevant theme conflict, even inside a single Sphere, that doesn't involve the actual source material. Otherwise, you're all hanging out at bars. Like, in that first sphere, the burgeoning populist movements, both from inside New York and from overseas, resisting the corporate corruption and the police crackdowns.

One planet, draw it from the classic mold of Tatooine or Corellia or Coruscant, depending on the level of development you want, and have it be sort of a Wild West format, where people pass through town. That way, you can have OOC vacations, character introductions, characters leaving with the possibility of return, combat and intrigue, and the element of space travel. It needs to be a nexus planet of some type, either for criminal intrigue, hiding out, smuggling, science, politics, etc., depending on what you decide fits with your plot.

The best system, I find, is a campaign system, like they had on SW1 back in the 1990s/early 00s, where the center of action shifts between planets depending on what the plot staff has to work with in terms of player interest, player type, and active PCs.

For adapting science fiction to a roleplaying game, you'd need to combine the technological issues with plot device levers. So, if you want a roleplaying game featuring the introduction of power armor (EXO Squad), you need the armored suits to occupy a significant portion of the theme. Beyond that, it would be the question of the suit's effect on man, in the way you write the theme and interaction. Claustrophobic themes, for example, or fear of homelessness for the theme of space exploration, for something involving the 'jumpsuit' power armor suit you see on occasion in fiction. Warhammer 40K performs both of these themes well, in its depiction of human culture in the Space Marines, since the selling point of the theme is the power armor itself.

Take a cool idea, not necessarily something futuristic (Dr. Strangelove, directed by Kubrick, covered nuclear weaponry), then for each idea, analyze that way you'd feel using it, both consciously and subconsciously. The rest is art.

May I recommend the system they use at CoMUX, ANSI highlighted locales with dark exits leading to them, representing landmarks in each room? It would simplify your grid, and make it a lot more cozy.

Years ago I read a definition, on a writer's website, of science fiction being termed as 'man vs. science' as the primary conflict, if you trust highschool equivalency literary theory in regards to the lever point of a story. Not necessarily something like Terminator (although it counts), with humans battling machines, but more in the vein of sapience's interaction with technology, even sapient technology, as defined over at Megaman MUSH (which opens up the meta-issue, what is the nature of sapience?)

At a friend's roleplaying game, who was doing a fresh take on the Megaman genre, she noticed a phenomenon where 'Tumblrettes', as she called them, rushed the game, started up activity, then migrated away en masse when the plot started to pick up. I don't think it's an deliberate conspiracy, but it's the fad mentality that takes down a lot of games. The thing you have to do is be careful where you advertise. I, for example, don't want to advertise on a game with a lot of anime fans, because my style clashes with anime, my inspiration is drawn from a lot of American science fiction literature with completely contradictory ideas about warfare, the government, theology, etc. I draw from Herbert, Clarke, or Heinlein, that's a different playset than, say, someone that wants a utopian soap opera.

I'm working on a project right now that's ostensibly cyberpunk, although it's slowly morphing into more of a politics leverage server. It's original theme, if you want to log in, the address is portent.genesismuds.com:2070 . Don't expect it finished any time soon, only got a little over half the grid finished, and I'm having an impediment with the final implementation of a major element. (Feel free to volunteer for grid describing work, I'm open to it.)

CoMUX. Can't recommend it more highly, if you're looking for a DC/Marvel game with a high quality of writers, and lenient idle times for OCs.