I want to do a triad pastiche MUSH, with a 25 city (one room with the option of personal player grids as a network) grid based on DC Comics character flavors, and a completely coded Kill Bill/martial arts exploitation style (exploding dice and AP building) combat system.
I'm looking for suggestions for the surface layer on top, something that integrates as the surface, the skin if you will, atop the motor functions (muscle) and setting (skeleton) of the MUSH.
I'd love a MUSH in the Turok universe (not the reboot). If you created an expansive universe for the Lost Land, with all the races playable, you could have a great game.
It would be unique, to say the least.
Alex Fleming and I both played an OFC named Rajura Doji on M3 from 2002-2004, and summer of 2004, both of us experienced extremely violent attacks from quasi-government agents.
I marked the agent on the road's face, moved in with his Air Force brat friend from the town they were from in college, watched and listened, befriended him, listened to his problems, etc.
Then a dead ringer for him ended up on Gotham as Jonathan Crane, his appropriate character. He hasn't been heard from in a while.
Did you know I look like Bullock's actor, Donald Logue, from Tao of Steve, RL?
Here's a broad pastiche MUSH, with a Romance of the Three Kingdoms faction build, an Alpha Centauri Probe Team setting, Cold War faction dynamics, and a proposed combat system resembling your average late 1990s FPS.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/6hz9sqnvvja212z/shadowcraft.txt?dl=0
I have a number of large and small MUSH concepts, including:
A Marvel NYC game centered around Spider-Man, with a combat system centered around environmental victories instead of straight hit/dodge damage/endurance.
A fighter jet combat system, for Star Fox or UN Squadron or another dogfight game, with free form IC pose range and high stakes for actually getting hit.
An extensive news file set for a spy MUSH with a Romance of the Three Kingdoms faction structure based on the Cold War and set in outer space, with a basic combat sketch of interlocking concepts.
A modern thief code sketch with five different mini-systems that connect with each other, forming a pentagonal game based on five math forms.
A combined Ghosts of Mars/Doom/Cowboy Bebop/Total Recall game set on Mars, Phobos, and Deimos, with news files written out, but no combat system dynamic elected on.
A nuclear summer theme set in Polynesia, with a unique theme encouraging an open ended futuristic piracy republic. No combat system written.
If anyone wants any of these write-ups, get in touch.
Advertise your game on Shangrila MUX, and let some of the MUSH versions of RL supervillains onto your game. You'll have to have a really dark rating allowance, and the mainstream community wouldn't like it, but this has a historical precedent.
In the comics community, in the late 1970s, early 1980s, mainstream comics were the trend, and artists/authors with unusual ideas couldn't get their work seen, so they teamed up with what, at the time, were adult comic book authors, and created underground magazines. Same thing happened in the 1950s, with guys like Klaw (a pornographic magazine entrepreneur) showing off comics made by Eric Stanton and Steve Ditko (Spider-Man, Dr. Strange).
The new players are on the adult games, it just means broadening your horizons about what it means to be a creative writer.
I've noticed that with every system I've ever played with that has a traditional statistics-derived combat system. I think it's the notion of 'game balance' that does it, where staffers are trying to avoid combat system imbalances being used to dominate the system, so they create symmetry.
We could make the meter get measured by attack, skill, or economy rolls. The more rolls you made, the higher your chances of increasing the meter, and the more 'stress burn' scenes you had, the more XP you'd accumulate for stat level. You could make a parallel system where the higher your statistic was in an area you were rolling, the lower the chance at building stress, to make the 'rampant' scenes with older characters happen less often.
From the first movie shot entirely in South Boston, Southie. The guy in the middle is Lawrence Tierney's last role, playing a thinly veiled Whitey Bulger.
portent.genesismuds.com 2075 Connect if you're interested, the purposes are just exploratory at the moment.
I've thought it over, and I've decided on a corporate-hired police hit squad dueling off against drug runner revolutionaries. A corporate security force, facing down corridos (the Spanish term for drug runner cowboys) with Marxist leanings. The corporate security force will be macho and corrupt, with plenty of weaponry and luxuries, and the drug runners will be clever and treacherous, with support among the criminal and activist community. A sci-fi element will be necessary, to distance it from real life issues.
What's the opinion?
I just ordered Knightfall, and I read the first issue, featuring Bane's creation and first hunt for Batman. I had an epiphany when I read it, and I think I saw the entire problem I've had the entire time I've MUSHed.
Who here would be interested in getting together and making some sort of police commando concept, with the police commandos being realistic for a macho, corrupt department, facing off with an invading crime syndicate?
I'm completely open to theme, structure, code, anything. Just let me know if you have any ideas or interest. I'm thinking something 1990's DC Comics in general attitude.
I really enjoyed playing Hien@M3, I basically got to write my entire repressed id, both online and in real life, into a singular character. Every car trip stuck in traffic translated to a dickhead comment and every interaction with a rude classmate translated into a ninja stunt. He was compared, in personality, to the comic book character Deadpool, so I think I did a good job at writing a child overman.
Read a sample from the writing of a famous theorist you enjoy, and put the writing 'tic' in your work. I was a fan of Karl Marx in college, and I used is double - clause a lot.
I.E: The Penguin looked askance from the young hooligan - he was used to such men coming up with such trifles - and moved his arm around the man's shoulder, preparing to bring him in on the real secret of Gotham City.
It gives your writing a bit of flavor, that commonly repeated eccentricity, especially if you're unconsciously using the author's ideas in your work.
I usually quit a game because of a combination of these two factors: a) conflict between factions shuts down, and b) coffee chat roleplay takes over. I personally don't like a game without a competitive feature IC, especially when it compartmentalizes the playerbase into book nook circles. I'm hesitant to say 'cliques', as a clique doesn't really fit the description, and that's more a future roleplaying circle to create a MUSH based around their shared interests, so it's somewhat beneficial.
I was thinking, something along the lines of: you have a stealth skill, that can be used for silent or hidden maneuvers, that you can specialize for stealth kills, and you have a parkour skill, that you can specialize for burglary. You can combine stealth and parkour for rapid action stealth, and you can combine the specializations for assassination.
That's for a D&D game. That is as a raw ability chart. You can use statistics, meanwhile, for stealth to ratchet upwards for hiding, to sneaking, to camoflague, with a parkour skill representing climbing, jumping, and entry. You can combine the two skills at the proper levels upwards to get different capabilities.
Using traits, would be something along the lines of a rogue trait allowing amazing maneuvers, a thief trait allowing urban stealth, and a martial artist trait allowing physical feats of perfection. You could combine those together for various types of functions in game.
It would be up to you if you organized them by class, or did away with the class system entirely. This could apply to a mythological creature game like WoD, forgive me if I can't produce examples.
The same theme as D&D or WoD worlds, but with a different rule system?
I've begun to feel that WoD and D&D don't quite translate well to a MUSH where newbies have to adapt to a new system that would normally require extensive research and immersion before trying to come into another genre. The two systems are built for face-to-face, and now you're trying to adapt them for online play. I know D&D since I was a kid, and even then, I can't get into even the best D&D theme. WoD, meanwhile, I dig the culture, and I'm into the entire lore of the worlds as a history major that knows a little bit of the psychology and philosophy behind some of the WoD character sets, but the rules bog me down.
The rules, I think, are the problem. Why do we have all these separate statistics and variables, like one of those annoying spreadsheets I hated for D&D as a kid, or WoD's multitude of different, unique abilities?
Why doesn't a system for a game, even emulating these things, take a few basic yardstick statistics, abilities, and traits, and allow you to combine them together, or specialize them along one line, to create various metrics? Even better, you could add a system of resistances to this system for the various elements, for game balance (the entire attack weakness mechanic I'd pass on, that's more of a specific game trait).
It would be sleek to look at, intuitive to learn, and would have depth for a veteran.
Groups of character class/species/specialty/utility/prominence to upgrade through, in exchange for a consensual character death, when proper XP/AP is accrued? You'd need the proper type of AP judgment, however. For instance, exchanging XP for scenes would fall into the category of more face time, whereas experience with the combat system would be specialization. Or how about a system where the more you contribute to larger plots, the more you work your way up in terms of ritual importance?