@thatguythere Sure, totally. But that jadedness applies to everyone (barring close BFF ties). A PC/NPC divide has nothing to do with it. If your character's that jaded, they'd be just as jaded to a PC biting it as a NPC. Killing off more PCs won't help.
@seraphim73 Totally. And, I mean - I get it. As an audience, it's hard to make yourself care about RedShirt#72. As a player, you don't want to be all maudlin all the time crying over the latest NPC that bought it. But I think if you want to capture the wartime 'feel' you just have to do it. Killing off PCs isn't some magic bullet either. For every really 'impactful' PC death on TGG (and there were some, sure), there were a whole bunch of other ones that registered about as much as Redshirt#72.
@three-eyed-crow Yeah, the combat system doesn't say "you're dead" but staff can always implement whatever house rule strikes their fancy and tune the lethality numbers to whatever level of deadliness they like.
But I think that players should work harder too to react as their character would to NPCs being killed. Your character knew them, lived with them, hung out with them, and then watched them get killed right before their eyes. Even if the NPC never had a name before that scene... ICly their death should matter to the characters.
@lotherio said in FCs on Comic MUs:
Not to call her out or drag her in, @Faraday has, just prior to AresMUSH go-live, consolidated a lot of standard global features and add-ons that players have come to expect and enjoy all in one location as a Softcode Core.
Heh, that's been around for close to ten years. 
Since @Tempest asked in the train wreck thread about a sandbox setup -
here you go - Zero to Faraday Softcode. It has FS3 and other stuff built in but you can get rid of them with the +uninstall command. It doesn't have +traits, but that's easy enough to do. Maybe @tangent or @ixokai has that quick and dirty version I threw together for Marvel63 when it first opened.
@jennkryst Hope it's useful. I basically wrote that code off the cuff on a quasi-dare, so I can't vouch for its quality
@ghost said in Which canon property/setting would be good for a MU* ?:
You had me at Colonial Marines.
@bobotron said in POLL: Super Hero MU Gut Check:
So it's down to staff to remind people 'hey, these are things you can do if you're not a hit it; they're there!' You'll never make someone do then, but FFS, when did MU*ers get this f'ing passive?
Sure, give that a try. Maybe it'll work out better for you than on the three or four games I've tried it on.
@bobotron said in POLL: Super Hero MU Gut Check:
People played non-combat characters and found stuff to do for them during combat scenes and plots. It also helps if your coded systems have stuff for non-combatants to do, like buffs, healing, etc. So you get a little less 'useless' feeling out of it.
Like @Ghost says, you can be creative about non-combat combat scenes, but a lot of it comes down to what your players want/expect. FS3 has several built in buffs (suppress/distract/aim) and heals (treat/really) and I can count on my fingers the number of times I've seen them be used across multiple games. Buffing/debuffing often feels useless even when it isn't. And the overwhelming majority of folks would rather burn a luck point or soldier on than 'waste' a turn to be healed. It saddens me on some level (especially since I play a medic who never gets to actually heal anybody) but I've come to accept that's just the way it is.
@thenomain I haven't played much on superhero games, so take this response with a grain of salt... but I'm going to venture a guess:
In a superhero game you've got the comics/movies/etc. as a guide. Whatever words you use to describe Cap's shield, people have a common frame of reference for what it does. Less so with Fate stunts. I imagine it's more of an issue with original characters on superhero games.
Aren't superhero games mostly consent and/or PvE, so the traits are wholly secondary anyway? That's very different than trying to use Fate to regulate conflict.
Some people just like statless games. Others like stats and dice. Fate is kind of a werid middle ground that tries to do both and I think that makes both sides dislike it to some extent.
@Lotherio said in New MUSH 'Game' Mechanics:
Going right here to skills less variable. Is that a bad thing?
I don't think it's bad at all for 6 to beat 4 most of the time. My problem actually is that with the vast majority of RPG systems (including FS3) ... that's not what happens. My character with 7 dice beat freaking everyone in a marksmanship contest on BSGU even though most had better skills than her. And while such flukes do happen occasionally in RL (David vs Goliath type upsets) they happen entirely too often in RPGs/MUs for my liking. Over 1000 rolls the 6 will win most of the time, as it should. But over the 3-4 rolls that happen within the course of a single contest? The dice are just fickle. Some systems are less fickle than others (D20 is particularly awful that way) but they all suffer from the same basic problem.
The PACE system limit is the two descriptive words.
If simple and fast is your goal, that's great. I'm not knocking it, it's just not my personal taste. Even if you never rolled a single stat, I think it's important to pause and think about what skills your character has and why. That goes beyond two words for me.
My biggest question/concern is, does it matter if two players just oocly transfer there vote points directly, do it in silly fails, or do it in combat fails?
It matters to me. It feels like unfairly gaming the system and going against the spirit of what you're trying to accomplish. If the idea is to reward failures by increasing the success on meaningful rolls, it should reward failures that matter, not "ha ha I tripped and spilled my drink, go me." But that's just IMHO. YMMV obviously.
FS3 always had that feel of some roots in Fudge to me.
Anecdote - FS3 only exists because I found the chargen and dice mechanics in FUDGE not quite to my liking. The initial version of +combat came from BSG:Pacifica, which used FUDGE.
Since we're tossing around ideas (might be useful for the OP, or not)... When I explored a system like this for Diceless FS3, it went something like this:
Chargen works as normal, getting skills and attributes.
Your base performance is based on your attr + skill +/- modifiers +/- a small random factor. The random factor introduces a tiny bit of variability without the "OMG I just rolled 11 dice and botched!" groan factor.
So let's say Cate's 7 points in Pyramid entitles her to 1-2 auto successes, whereas Tavo's 11 points in Pyramid entitles him to 2-3 auto successes. Barring any special situational modifiers, Tavo will win or draw against Cate 100% of the time based solely on the auto successes.
You can buy additional successes with luck points. Say, 1 success per luck point, up to a max of your skill rating.
In combat, you could just run with your defaults, or you could spend a luck point to get, say, 3 points to split between attack, defense, and initiative. For example: combat/luck 2=attack:3 defense:2 initiative:1 would spend 2 luck points and give you 6 points to spread around. Luck points go further in combat just because there are so many dang rolls.
To make it fair, luck points would just refresh for everyone evenly. Say, 10 per week or something. You might earn a couple extra bonus points as OOC rewards for cookies or running plots or whatever, but not enough to really tip the scales unfairly.
I hadn't worked in a mechanic to deliberately 'take a fall' because it seemed like it would be too easily abused in trivial situations. "I'm going to miss this Raider because I know 3 other people are shooting at it" or "I'm going to trip on the balcony because it's funny and I know there are no real consequences".
All of those numbers need to be balanced of course - they were just a first draft. But I do find the idea of making skill performance less variable appealing.
@Lithium I think that depends on which version of the game you're using. But either way, cyber and magic both obviously give you an edge over someone with neither, but that's true of all forms of combat. I haven't seen melee be any worse off than anything else in that regard. But then, our group came up with these elaborate Shadowrun martial arts house rules that made the rounds way back when, so I might be biased there.
@Seraphim73 said in New MUSH 'Game' Mechanics:
They can be used to effortlessly leap across to the balcony to kiss your lady love, but they can't be used to slay the dragon.
Does anybody really need points to use in private scenes to jump across a balcony to kiss their love? I mean, this sort of thing is typically just RPed anyway 99% of the time. I would also worry about people taking a dive when it doesn't even matter to save up points for when they want to do something important.
But as a general idea I like the idea of a diceless sort of tradeoff system. I explored something like that for FS3 at one point. The devil's in the details.
@Ganymede said in What even is 'Metaplot'?:
"Metaplot" suggests that the game operators have a point to which they wish to see happen go
I agree this is often the case, but it isn't a required feature of a metaplot. You can allow players to shape the direction of the metaplot, within reason.
Funny story: In the first use of +combat on Babylon 5 MUSH, the bad guy NPC overpowered two of the FCs due to a couple fluke rolls. This had the potential completely derail the metaplot by exposing the Army of Light and bringing down about half of the FCs. All parties involved agreed to just ignore the code results and RP it out for the good of the game.
So in my mind it's a balance. Metaplot requires enough of a boundary to keep people from breaking the game, but not so much that you put your players/stories on rails.
I like a lot of the definitions earlier, particularly @Arkandel's mention of "overall narrative" and @Seraphim73's description of metaplot as the "spine" of the game.
It's also good to note that a game (and a TV show) can have more than one metaplot. As @Thenomain mentioned, the "presidential stuff" in BSG wasn't really related to the war metaplot, but it was a different metaplot about the rebuilding of society (including the government) post-apocalypse. That touched a lot of episodes.
Firefly is another show that had multiple metaplots: the "hands of blue" Alliance/River thing was a big one, but there was also a running subplot about keeping the ship afloat, and another about the lingering effects of the Unification war, etc.
Some MUSH examples...
Babylon 5 MUSH essentially just reimagined the metaplots from the show (coming of the Shadows, leading to the Shadow War, the Earth/B5 political strife and independence, the Narn/Centauri war, etc.)
Sweetwater Crossing's first metaplot was about a range war between two neighboring ranches. The second was about a railroad baron trying to come take over the town.
The various BSG games have all had war-driven metaplots, though BSG:Pacifica also had a big metaplot about military/civilian tensions.
@n0q said in For Want of a Stat System:
I remember Shadowrun being one of the first systems which came to mind, but I'd concluded it would be an absolute fuck to tear the Shadowrun out of that system, with the way money, race, cyberware, and magical aptitude was worked into chargen (balance purposes). Similarly, 'good' martial arts was locked behind magic, as well. In retrospect, maybe this was just super lazy of me. I'll take another look at it with an eye towards revising chargen to fit my needs.
I'm not sure which version of SR you were looking at, but with the point-buy system, the balance is less clunky and easier to tune towards your needs. I'm not sure the vehicle rules really fit what you're looking for, but it does at least have them. I also don't know what you consider 'good' martial arts though... my character in tabletop absolutely kicked butt in melee combat without any magic. I mean, sure, physical adepts are better (that's kind of the point) but that doesn't mean mundane experts suck compared to other mundanes... at least in my experience.