@sunny said in How should IC discrimination be handled?:
ETA: Is it really that big of an OOC ask for you (generic) to not use that particular word in reference to my PC?
To judge by this thread? Yes, yes it is.
And to be honest, it's pretty disappointing.
Thank you for the honest and enlightening reply.
@surreality said in Interest/Volunteer Check: Major Multisphere Chronicles of Darkness:
Just throwing my yearning for 1980s Los Angeles into the mix. 'cause that's one hell of a dark setting.
West coast vampires in the 80s were prone to pathos. And inexplicable fashion choices.
Agreed on both counts. I'd totally hang in an abandoned subterranean hotel for my faction's super-secret club house.
And another nice bit would be L.A. in the 80s would still have craploads of Deco, Modernist and just plain odd buildings and homes around.
FASERIP Marvel.
I've long thought the system is exactly at the 'sweet spot' for online use. Fast, simple, easy to intuit, nearly infinitely moddable and on an online game, even having your luck pool and experience pool be the same thing makes more sense and lets you hand out Karma on a weekly basis knowing many people will use a good chunk on it to succeed at something immediate as well as saving some up.
It's also setting agnostic, if you change the granularity of the stats.
Three thoughts:
I think that simplifying the Gaians as 'squeaky clean' is a bit, well, simplistic. They are still engines of eco-terrorist destruction. And have more reasons to be pissed off than they did 25 years ago. We're on the brink of a global extinction event, just killed the Great Barrier Reef, etc. The thing people forget about zen masters is that there are plenty of historic examples of zen warriors.
Good call on the Git. Given today's political climate? Nope.
As for the Silent Striders, I loved them back in the day, and I think they would actually fit into the GoF slot now that it's open pretty nicely. Not as barbarian berserkers, but as cold-eyed, professional mercenaries, well-versed in secret little wars, running with the intelligence community and the Glasswalkers, still tied to Africa and Middle East because those are places mercenary armies work and are often based. I'd think of them as the scary-ass ninja army big brothers of what used to be Blackwater.
The Game Stagnancy and Activity thread was really useful to me in helping me understand something I'd seen but couldn't articulate yet about 'successful' MUs. The idea that they have what that thread ended up calling a tight theme, but I'm going to refer to as a 'focus' so the two things are not blurred while I'm working on the idea.
For my own project I sat down and tried to figure out what was theme, what was a focus and what the setting would allow and encourage players to do within the theme and focus. A quick overview of the setting can be seen here.
This what I have thus far:
Theme: Shadowrun meets classic pulp.
Focus: Survival in and of the city.
Setting: Manhattan in a permanent Art Deco age.
IC Challenges:
Mistrunning - Retrieving artifacts and supplies across the tunnels and bridges and the celebrity lifestyle that comes with it.
Urban Exploration - Many buildings, basements and tunnels are in ruins, home to monsters and loot.
City Politics - Getting between Tesla and City Hall can be dangerous. Or the Nightfolk and the Fairies. Or the block unions and the guilds.
Gangland and Mystery Men - The gangs of the city and those who combat them when City Hall doesn't.
Obviously, players could choose to indulge in all or none of those challenges, as they see fit. The theme leaves a lot of room open for service people, business owners and hangers-on, but the focus of the game in general will be surviving the dangerous environment of the city itself while providing for personal and collective survival. (Via mistrunning, exploration, etc.)
I think I have enough flexibility in the setting and theme that the focus of the game can change over time, if the player's actions move things that way.
Does this seem solid? Am I missing elements that might make it better? Is the the focus still too broad? Or the challenges? Feedback and critique is good. (Also, 'This is a really dumb idea for a MU* and I'd never play this' is an acceptable critique. I'm still not sure if the idea is too far away from what's popular to gain players at all.)
@Chet Good stuff. and yeah, that sounds like something I need to do, thanks for the idea!
I am also planning on putting together 'quick' character creation as an option where the new player can just select a broad category (gunner, duelist, combat mage, medium, for examples) and get pre-genned skills and stats without having to wade through a complex character generation their first time around.
I want to allow for the possibility of PVP, but I think PVE is probably more stable in the long term. To that end, the idea is run events twice a week or so with big, global threats but not a ton of depth, in addition to whatever more intricate plots we have going on. Kind of a monster of the week scenario, but magnified to a larger threat. Zombies from the tunnels, giant vampire bats from the abandoned skyscrapers, that sort of thing.
I'm not sure what I'd do to prevent people from holing up. The only games I've seen that have avoided the problem are the ones without private spaces, like the BSG games and the late 'The 100' mush.