I am still working on this, although my activity has dropped a bit during the semester. I'm hoping that in the next few weeks, as classes end, I can dedicate enough time to tighten this thing up for a "beta open" to see what all needs to be smoothed out.
So, get your most awesome, gonzo, and ridiculous sci-fi character ideas ready.
@misadventure If I could hire a Ken Burns soundalike for occasional memorial documentary clips, I would.
@kumakun said in Fate Development Thread:
What else would you do to fate to make it more MU* friendly? How do we make it so new players aren't stuck in hours of OOC land trying to figure out the basics?
One thing you may want to consider (and that I played around with when I was developing a Fate game) is providing some semi-permanent/sticky location aspects for IC rooms, as part of the desc, in addition to whatever scene-specific/situational aspects there are--more as an available resource for players to easily lean on, invoke, etc.
There's the cross-fighting-game-theme Match of the Millenium MUCK: http://motm.kicks-ass.net/
@Ghost @ZombieGenesis There was a GI Joe MUSH that I ran for a year or so around 2007. It used the WEG-based D6 system mostly as a path of least resistance. It had quite a bit of coded objects to facilitate the "smashing action figures against each other" atmosphere, where you could quickly jump in a HISS and fire lasers and your enemy and then leap out and kickbox or whatever. Then, between scenes, you could easily heal back up if desired. (After all, how long does someone really stay "down for the count" in the GI Joe universe, other than Duke for part of the movie?)
It was a lot of fun, all in all, and I've thought about spinning it back up, but I don't know if anyone would show up for it.
If I were adding to a comic/superhero wishlist, I'd love to see a game that was willing to make (and let players make, through TPs) consequential changes to the world/game over time. It's difficult to care about the stakes of something when you know that the initial status quo must always be maintained--and I say that with the acknowledgment that a recognizable world is key to bringing in new players.
I found myself really digging Die, a comic about a group of adults who had a traumatic experience playing D&D in their teens (more or less getting stuck in the game world, Jumanji-style, for two years) and who then return to the world once again.
Kieron Gillen, the comic author, developed an RPG for the comic that is influenced greatly by PbtA philosophy: http://diecomic.com/rpg/
I wonder if it'd be possible to set up a game that's based on the comic's premise, using the RPG rules.
The biggest downside is that the game suggests each character is unique in their role--but I'm considering having PCs from different groups who've come to the world (and either having other PCs as part of their original party, allowing them to be apped in +roster style, or just letting them be NPCs in a backstory).
Worth considering further? Or is it too difficult to juggle that sort of "different clusters of 'unique' character types" premise?
The "four color" descriptor, as I understand it, was initially meant to distinguish comic books (printed in CMYK) from black-and-white pulps/magazines.
At any rate, that's an excellent point about needing to implement a system that keeps things "consistent" across encounters/scenes/whatever so that it's not all ultimately just a matter of consent (as there already exist several such games) to keep a non-powered person from getting pulverized by a much more powerful one. And, of course, this means using a system that keeps PCs pretty balanced so that one ultra-powerful person doesn't stand separate from everyone else.
For those interested in fantasy games about exploration, DrivethruRPG has the core game PDFs for Forbidden Lands free for today (9/20) only.
https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/258593/Forbidden-Lands-Core-Game
I'm curious if anyone's tried out the Lancer RPG, "a mud-and-lasers RPG about mechs and the pilots who crew them." It seems interesting at first glance, as I'm always looking for that "lived-in" dirty future aesthetic.
The core rules are available for free: https://massif-press.itch.io/lancer-core-book
But the authors are also running a Kickstarter for art, editing, & layout improvement: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/massifpress/lancer
@mr-johnson Also, not to keep Mignola-fying this, but there's another book/comic series he did, involving "Joe Golem, occult detective," in which Manhattan began sinking in the 1920s and became very Venice-like. I mention this as you might find it interesting for maybe a neighborhood in Gotham/Metropolis as an effect of the Great War.
@Tempest said in POLL: Super Hero MU Gut Check:
Staff has to be willing to get the RP ball rolling, not just to build a game and expect people to show up and breathe life into it on their own. And that means potentially running multiple +events in the first few weeks (maybe months) of your game until people are hooked enough to start doing it on their own.
I think this is the real issue, 100%. Even after players start running their own events, staff should continue doing this and breathing life into a changing world.
@Ghost I agree that it definitely could be a bit too much to digest all together. I have not yet had the chance to sit down and try to make a character or walk through a test conflict--hopefully I can do so shortly to see how immediately cumbersome it is (vs. what might end up emerging, complexity-wise, over time).
@mr-johnson That's cool (I mean, the explanation is; the situation with them taking the image isn't). I just wanted to make sure, since the familiar image took me by surprise. Thanks for the info!
Whether or not the game focuses exclusively on goat preservation, there seems to be enough interest that I'll consider more fully what might be doable in terms of RPG-ish infrastructure to support RPing Icelandic settlers' frontier-survival travails.
Do you have a local library system that would let you use something like Hoopla to check stuff out digitally for free?
I imagine it would help a lot to have a bunch of in-game/on-hand resources (stunt examples, character templates a la Atomic Robo modes, etc.) to offer something resembling concrete boundaries. I don't mean 'productive constraint' necessarily but something more akin to comparable measures that can be usefully mad-libbed to what a player's going for.
I still want to run the sci-fi sandbox that I tried out last year, even though it was effectively a failure. I still want to run a BPRD game using the ARRPG rules (swapping Science for Occult and otherwise charging forward).
How much OOC conversation tends to go on in scenes with conflict so as to help shape poses? One thing Fate basically demands is OOC chatter about how a given aspect is being invoked/compelled, so for types who may want relatively minimal OOC "infiltration" of a scene, Fate may not necessarily be the answer...
@ghost I am surprised at how surprised I am that I want to see (make?) this happen.
@tnp That's been my experience as well--the motivation is steadily dwindling because, even though I've tried to get in scenes with as many PCs as I could, I'm apparently not doing it enough or with the right PCs, so I've encountered (with one really interesting "scared of the dark" exception) literally zero of the theme that actually interests me about the game.
@packrat Not to speak for @Lithium but I think it's less about young heroes specifically than it is to remove whatever FCs are in that universe out of the equation. So the "new generation" is more about "not the Justice League" or "yes, even the Champions have been neutralized, so [thought-they-were-retired OC] must try to keep peace on the streets"