Topics created by Collective

To go off on a tangent, I actually have an interesting theory about these Christopher Nolan movies. I read some of a book by Marc Dipaolo on comic book literature, and I compared it to the Nolan movies, and I realized that the Gotham City the three movies sells us isn't American symbolically unless you compare it to the Soviet Union in the 1980s, but invert the goals of all the major villains. Ra's al-Ghul is a businessman, capitalist, or labor organizer that wants to fight socialism, Scarecrow is an intellectual or professional that knows psychology or ethics or logic that wants to fight corruption, Zsasz is a scapegoat, Joker is a survivor of a political pogrom, Harvey Dent is a victim of his own regime, once a hero, and Bane is a soldier returning from Afghanistan that realizes what life is like, both in terms of how the rest of the world views the Soviet Union, and how much they desire for freedom. If you look at that, with the characters inverted, you have a Bohemian Grove theory present, called the Effigy. Being that, (and the Bohemian Grove is involved in Hollywood and music, since at least as far back as the Grateful Dead), if you take a fictional villain and put someone in their place, you'll empower people that are easily swayed by popular culture (normative individuals, not Byronic individuals, the 'specialists' as Stalin called them) by making them feel socially adapted and adjusted by targeting regime enemies.

It's a controversial theory, and I'm not sure if it's really what's on screen, but it would make for a good sub-strata theme (the 'feel') for this art deco Manhattan MUSH, if you want to brush up on your late Cold War history.

Wasn't there a game once based on the X-Files?

Take the X-Files feel, and apply it to the game. I've toyed with the idea of having a single villainous faction (which sets the tone of the game, and you can cycle these at a long running enterprise of a MUSH), and having two heroic factions with cultural differences. This would not only unify villains, so you'd have a single backbone for conflict, and form them into a unified clique that would be forced to roleplay (tis the nature of the villainous beast), but also split your heroes to prevent the size of the traditionally popular opposition from overwhelming the villains.

Add in something in the cultural difference between the heroes that creates an opposition that evokes interest in both social and intrigue roleplay, and you've got yourself a winner.

Following the government conspiracy theme: A paranormal syndicate as the villain, a clandestine investigation agency with tight government control as one hero faction, and an underground resistance made up of individuals burned by said villains as the other faction. The paranormal syndicate would create the backdrop, the investigation agency would be attempting to check the resistance, and the resistance would want more alarmist measures that the government agents would have to control.

You'd have the level of the syndicate trying to influence both the government, and hunt the resistance, while the agents would be fighting the syndicate and trying to protect/reign in the resistance (for their own good), with the resistance trying to evoke moral empathy for their cause from the government agents and be participating in dramatic actions against the syndicate.

I don't always code, but when I do, I code in Rhost.

As said above, I agree with @RnMissionRun. I love the challenge of rethinking code and building it myself from scratch, so I loved the Rhost codebase for the power and security of it. Most people do not have the ability to do that, because they want their game up and running as fast as possible, hence SGP and other code packages that are drop-in and go.

@faraday To be fair, we have not seen it here yet, but we used to see it all the time on WORA.