Posts made by Collective

And on a non-combat note, it is quite possible to make characters who can completely alter your setting if they are willing to spend significantly on non-combat oriented stuff. I remember somebody helping me make a M&M character who could create entire islands (and we're talking Rhode Island, not Ellis Island) in minutes with his powers. Another character had the ability to generate non-damaging weather conditions on a continental scale, for fairly cheap.

Not a lot of combat use there, but most persistent online games are wary of handing players the ability to drastically alter the world.

@Wolfs said in Wheel of Time MU(SH|X):

It could be interesting to have a WoT game again, especially if it developed into having a solid playerbase and a variety of things to do.

I have to admit I have a certain nostalgic fondness for WoT games. I started them with a Moment in Tyme when (I believe) a mom and son team ran it and played them, off and on, for a decade or so.

It's a surprisingly good setting for MU storytelling, in practice.

@Arkandel

Eeeeh. (Imagine me making a 'maybe yes/maybe no' gesture here.)

'Required' is kind of a slippery concept in this context. No, it wasn't strictly necessary to do so. But doing so made it easier to get bonded to an Aes Sedai and go out and have the big damned adventures, rather than the endless training and sparring RP back in Tar Valon.

Hey, my favorite WoT MU* character was a hapless bookish shopkeep boy who ended up kidnapped by the Seanchan early into his training as a prospective Warder. Good numbers definitely make it easier to find story, but just being willing to screw up will get you there as well.

Though, looking back on some of the stuff we put up with, I wonder if I'd have the patience for the type of game that required hundreds of real-life hours to learn to pose slashing at somebody with a sword exactly the right way, according to the 'blademasters'.

With tests.

@WTFE It's a sphere gap voltmeter. And zappy plasma magic happens between the big metal doorknobs. Who wouldn't want a picture of that?!

I like to add something constructive here, but in lieu of that, I'd ask you to imagine about ten minutes of fanboy squeeing.

I would LOVE to see this happen!

@Lithium I agree. There does need to be a level of risk. Not fatal, because I'd be uncomfortable letting the RNG kill off a character unattended, but definitely something that requires an 'adventure timeout' as a consequence.

As for using it too often, that's why the rewards are not automated. But I also don't want to have to put in 20 hours a week writing new scenario bits because somebody ran 10 of them on the first day, so yeah, a limit is a good idea.

@Coin Definitely! Artisanal PRPs and Staff Plots would still be the gold standard (once I stop laughing about using 'artisanal' in this sentence) but the canned ones could give people things to do with minimum lead time and a pace they get to set, even when nobody wants to run a full plot scene.

I'm thinking of it as 99 percent mush, but with a couple of the more labor intensive things automated to allow for maximum fun. (Like quick start characters, the plot in the box idea and whatever else I can think of and either figure out how to code or get a coder to make for me.)

@Apos

The manpower thing is definitely front and center in my mind.

I'm thinking one partial solution might be a Plot in a Box system that would work something like this:

PCs get together (a minimum of two) and then hit the command that generates a random plot, with skill challenges and/or combat adversaries pulling from a list. There will be some canned 'GM narration' and some RP cues as well as a skill challenge or first combat round. There would be a pause for RP, then the players could use a command to continue to the next challenge or round of combat, etc.

At the end, staff would get a notice with a recap (and possibly log link). They would reward the participants with XP, IC McGuffins and/or plot tidbits.

It wouldn't remove the need for plot staff and people to run PRPs but it would lower the burdens of those people and let folks run their own adventures of whatever challenge type they want with rewards and little in the way of hassle.

@Coin Kinda dieselpunk (which is to say the aesthetic is more late 20s and 30s than 1890-1910) but yeah, that's basically it. Snazzy suits and beaded flapper dresses, lightning guns that can be tucked into a garter, elves and werewolves, jazz and booze and fight scenes by Yuen Wu-Ping with a soundtrack by Benny Goodman. And that's just the club scene.

@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.

@Ghost

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.

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.)

@WildBaboons I like Fate. I'm running a tabletop game using it. But I think it ends up being a bit of a pain in a MU* environment.

@Three-Eyed-Crow Dark Spires, alas, is no more. But there is a sister game set in Hawaii. Both use the Dresden Files universe, which is a bit too specific for what I'm looking to do.

@Thenomain Not quite. The genre I'm looking at emulating has some crossover in terms of power and theme to low-level supers. (Think Netflix's corner of the Marvel Universe in terms of power).

And FASERIP is flexible. TSR used it for a Conan game, back in the day. The 'Superhero' bits come from the trappings, not the mechanics.

I loved that book so much. It's a perfect snapshot of time and place. Bull deserves to be remembered as the mother of Urban Fantasy, even if Charles de Lint gets the credit, usually.

@TNP No Fate! And no capes!

I am seriously thinking about trying to find a coder crazy enough to do FASERIP for me. If you lower the descriptions of the power levels to something less crazy, it would make a great system for cinematic (or TV-based) urban fantasy, I think.

Edit: Or it's more modern cousin, ICONS. (Though that does have some Fate baked in.)

Failing that, anything BUT Fate.

@Pyrephox I wouldn't mind taking inspiration from any of those sources, but I definitely don't want to directly base a MU on any of them. I think the headaches are huge, either in blending specific themes or dealing with purists.

Also, something original can be very, very streamlined, as opposed to the baggage of something like the Anita Blake universe, which has a fairly distressing MU side effect of making the TS the plot.

Now that I've spent a month learning how to crash do basic MU* maintenance, I'm ready to start working on theme and a grid.

I know that I definitely have no interest in doing yet another X of Darkness game. That market is well-served and I don't have anything sufficiently interesting to add to that dialog.

My first thought is to run a game set in an 'original' theme. For certain values of original. I'd like to do something that is basically set in a kind of shared television urban fantasy universe. Combine elements from shows like The Secret Circle, the Gates, Supernatural, Teen Wolf, Charmed, Buffy and such into a coherent framework inspired by those shows but not directly emulating them.

There are some good games out there that let you create characters from various fictional universes, but I would like to run a world with no feature characters and a coherent cosmology to tie the elements together. A lot like how tabletop games like Monster of the Week, Monsterhearts and Urban Shadows work.

The reason I specifically list TV drama Urban Fantasy shows is that they have an episodic framework and generally low to mid-level power cap that makes them much more suitable for a MU than say, the Dresdenverse or any other number of books where the protagonists can drop mountains on people routinely.

I also have some ideas towards a 'plot in a box' kind of code, drawing on ideas from Primetime Adventures, that would work especially well in that kind of setting and be a little more engaging than the random plot generator stuff I've seen a few times.

My only worries are attracting players and staff. Does this sound like a game anybody would want to play, assuming decent staffing and plotting? Or staff, assuming a Head Wiz that isn't insane? (Mostly.)

@Coin

I do what see what you mean about the packages, but they are fair less broken than the Dex attribute. That's something you'd have to house rule to make less wildly overpowered.