Posts made by Chet

How about an adult-themed Marvel MUX set in Madripoor.

3:o)

MotM is still the Mos Eisley of gaming, for the old soldiers.

I got the Uncle Phil tossout on a couple active MUSHes (MCM and M3) while doing the Conspiracy Theory (starring Mel Gibson and Patrick Stewart, lol) plot in the psychiatric system, but I play on CoMUX and United Heroes regularly, those are good comic book MUSHes. CoMUX is the narrower playerbase draw with the slack RP requirements, United Heroes is making a showing to max out their advertising appeal with a really professional staff system and ethic, and a wide range of themes. I won't plug myself with my project, it's pretty much the hot rod from Tool Time in Tim Allen's garage at this point, hopefully I'll get the wit in my mental sails to get back into it after the summer ends and the lamented malaise of New England heat is replaced with our autumn.

We need open source code to make coding easier, like a MUSH version of Windows.

j/k

To play a Mutant OC, you really have to follow the X-Men formula and make the character's power a secondary consideration. Remy Lebeau, for example, is a Cajun professional thief that knows staff fighting, and is an expert gambler. Without the power, you'd still having a compelling character.

@Tempest That's a complex issue, playing to theme and limiting character concepts and options. If you're writing completely true to the character's canon, you're limited a writer, but I agree that you can't radically change the character from the essence and blood. Superman's essence is that he's a man that can do anything, bound only by his time and the necessity to save everyone, and the blood of the character is the mythos. Obviously, these modifications are easier to make on 'character actor' parts, like supervillains or supporting characters.

Limiting character concepts and options is also a matter of making characters that are fun for newer players (characters that have a broader, easier ingress factor to roleplay), versus characters with narrower means but more interesting ones, that can support the other players. You want your newer writers moving along in terms of the game's ethic and architecture, and that means, you need to allow them to spread their wings, with inspiration provided by the older players.

It's not a concern that you should apply with an extreme viewpoint, that's just a kneejerk reaction to people that've had bad teachers.

@Ghost That's a sociopath, you're a MUSHer, you've probably played that character before.

Sorry for being unclear!

It's a crime saga MUSH based on leverage politics, at the level of syndicate management, organizational politics, and political intrigue between roles. There are ten global syndicate cultures that rule regions, the particular personality of the culture decided by leadership (all OC). All of it is beneath the hand of the Yakuza in a global council, like Dune, with the syndicates cooperating with each other, or competing, sometimes violently. There is an economics system with NPC power accrued by roleplaying and using a coded system to establish various IC landmarks, an NPC list of staff-played characters to use as IC objectives (that you can submit to), a skill roll competition system that plays into the advancement system (that also works with the IC landmarks), and an open-ended game world that encourages creativity, world building, and clever manipulation of other players IC. It's set in the near future, 2070 AD, after the Yakuza has united the world's organized crime syndicates underneath a 'Commission', Lucky Luciano's term for an organized Mafia unit spanning many syndicates that met together to decide on matters of dispute.

It's essentially Dune meets Shadowrun.

I've been looking over Neo-Tokyo Nights, and I've decided that it's foolish to go it alone, or have a narrow idea of what I need for a MUSH development team. Plus, there's a certain paucity to insight in its design, and I feel other people's views would benefit it.

If you can offer a hand, whether grid work, thematic revision or contribution, offering new OOC or IC systems that could integrate with the game, write tinyplot drafts for potential plans, beta testers to do RP scenes to test the various coded and non-coded systems, even come up with staff political policies, I'd love your help. Even voyeurs and snarkers to keep me company would be nice. I don't want a major commitment, although you can give one if you want to, and I'm don't have a lot of time to commit anyways during the next month, but it's the beginning of summer.

I've got a little recruitment kiosk object in the main OOC room, just use that, with your requested charbit name, e-mail for me to send your password, and job offer (don't feel limited).

What I'm especially looking for is someone that knows how to market to put a nice bit of zing to it. I need an Al Gore to my Henry Kissinger.

portent.genesismuds.com:2070

Much like the son of Joseph Stalin that got captured on the front during WW2, I alter my writer's ethics as little as possible.

Chet, hero of the Soviet Union.

@Thenomain Building Nexus. H&V had one, Shangrila has one. You just add in a bit of code that works for the wiz, when they approve and link the room, to add it to the proper listing, based on the class the player applies for. Make it automatic.

All the standard hangouts work, but you need flavor for the hangout. To reference famous hangouts, you have the Iceberg Lounge, Quark's bar on Deep Space Nine, the armory on Cairo Station, or even the barracks from Starship troopers. The Iceberg Lounge is for criminals to rub shoulders with socialites and business people, Quark's bar is a place for important space-faring functionaries to mingle with Federation officers, the armory on Cairo Station is where the soldiers hang out talking scuttlebutt, and the barracks is where the Mobile Infantry relaxes. You have to have a function or purpose in mind that ties into the game theme, rather than something easy like just having a convenience store. Unless it's the Circle K from Bill and Ted.

Ravenloft is awesome, I particularly enjoy the mage system, where you have to make a pact with the Dark Powers in order to access any form of magic. I love the concept of slowly turning inhuman in various ways as a path to any form of power. A sacrifice for advancement is a concept that should be used more often in any form of fiction, D&D or MUSH or otherwise.

Building off the generic idea of a WW2 game, how about we blend PvE and PvP into a campaign based comic book game, any time period or canon draw from the flavor of your choice? You go through 'seasons', like that lovely WoD game I saw advertised, which each 'season' inside a new area, with groups introduced inside a theater of action.

For example, you could devote the first 'season' of a Marvel MUSH to the struggle for Genosha, between the Brotherhood, the X-Men, and Genoshan slavers led by the Hellfire Club. You would lay down puzzle objectives for each group, for control of the island at the end of the theater. With a puzzle objective - something requiring a combination of staff moderation and creative use of resources (this has to be done incredibly abstractly, I've seen it go wrong) - you escape the consent issue with direct conflict involving superpowers or abilities or resources.

Brotherhood wins, Magneto controls the island. X-Men wins, mutant rights score a victory. Hellfire Club wins, Homo Superior is tighter under their control.

Then, branch into the next theater from there, with the remaining PCs that are interested in their characters, moving into a new season/theater/campaign.

The Jedi have always brought an interesting philosophical dilemma for me: is balance to the Force a null state, Jedi and Sith, or is balance to the Force someone that lives in both worlds, someone that can use darkness to redeem an evil man. I think Lucas never answers the question as a test that shouldn't be definitively answered; you're supposed to pick Sith at some times in your life, and your answer determines your friends.

Have you ever considered a Star Wars MUSH with a Jedi/Sith heavy world? You'd have to research the novels on the canon's antiquity, and discount the movie backgrounds, which would displease your more issue concerned, externally aware audience, but please the mystics among us that see art as an internal question.

I'm sure you could dig up the proper quotation from Obi-Wan Kenobi when he introduces the lightsaber to Luke to properly inspire it.

To stay on topic, to apply the spirituality of stages and internal questions to a comic book roleplaying game, you'd have to avoid the cheap route, the obviously magical characters, and go with more of an arcane setting, something like a World War 2 comic book setting with a Hellboy backdrop. That doesn't mean you need Hellboy as the draw. Something like a Marvel 1963 thing, with the mystical elements of each Allied, Axis, and Neutral power drawing on the various setting elements.

Green Lantern is a badge that won't give up his civilian life, Punisher lost his civilian life and refuses to come home from Vietnam?

I've seen this idea get adapted once, but it had great promise. Cowboy Bebop. The only problem was that it relied on the bounty hunter dynamic seen in the show. You had to get players, sometimes OOC strangers, together for a crew to even be authorized for a ship. Take the feel and universe of Cowboy Bebop, stick a crime syndicate faction like the one featured on the show, a bounty hunter mercenary faction that operated as a loose band of PCs with a bounty board, and a dedicated police force of 'space marshals', that would operate like Texas Rangers, and would be the 'hand of fate' with the two other factions.

Three competing factional dynamics in terms of order, for each type of pirate fan: authoritarians, libertarians, progressives. If you liked a military system, you'd pick the crime syndicate, if you wanted to snipe and hunt and social, you'd pick a bounty hunter, and if you wanted to make political statements, you'd pick a badge.

@Gilette The history program I attended was actually more of a foreign and domestic policy course about conspiracy theory in American and world culture. It taught you all of the weird little ins and outs of incidents in world history and American history (we had a class, History of the Grateful Dead, by R. Weir, about the relation between the US hippie scene, the drug scene, and government corporate agents, one semester). For example, a class textbook was Confessions of an Economic Hitman, which is a tell-all about the CIA, whose veracity is officially denied by our government. Neo-colonialism was the major topic back then, in the final years of George W. Bush.

To illustrate: I took a great class on pre-colonial and colonial Latin-American culture, covering their rituals, religion, and interactions with the Spanish (the Mayan prince's renewal ritual - I won't go into the details - as well as the Mexica/Azteca afterlife and its relationship to their military dominance, or the tragically maligned Malinke, Dona Maria). You can draw lessons from each of those three to apply to the cultural concepts even in the present, or shift the strategies they used to other areas, eras, even fictional timescapes.

The program wasn't a comprehensive world history, it was actually a landscape thing, if you dig me.

The most useful thing I learned was to non-bias my view of the past with my present tense geo-politics. I had a really flawed history program in my home town.

I bit (to the point of bleeding) a bully in kindergarten for stealing my comb in front of the class. I'm pretty sure I've qualified for it ever since. And I hate whistling, melody, and sing-songs that people make.

Sorry if I don't know my psychiatric terms, it's something I figured I should avoid after being a DC Comics fan. (I went into a tailspin trying to pick psychology up after college, my doctor - a neurologist as well as a psychiatrist - suggested I knock it off with the psychology, this apparently a common issue, I didn't even tell him I was studying it)

@Coin At the expense of looking like a goth kid being cornered by another goth kid in a cultural discourse, it was a joke.

@Gilette I'm only at the conceptual framework stages of the design theory right now with a number of episodic concepts I've laid out, I'm just getting into the actual literary narrative classes to retrain myself from economics and history. That was my previous course of study. I'm probably going to go with comic books as my genre, since I'm only symmetric in my abstract depth when presenting a neutral analysis. Everything else is just sales. Obama doesn't have to sell John McCain during the Presidential debate.

No, sorry, I had an insomniac night. I'll stop sharing.