Best posts made by friarzen

@Auspice Ok, thanks. I figured it was worth checking in on, just in case.

The log forgery can be technologically detected with the right server side support. I have seen people respond with horror about the idea of a server keeping all messages ever sent, but there is another option. If the server automatically keeps crypto (sha256 for example) hashes of all messages sent/received, then any log submitted as evidence would be trustworthy if its hash matches a corresponding hash in those server side records. Obviously bad admins with access to the hash logs can defeat this, but that just goes back to bad staff makes for terrible games.

Since this thread has lots of good ideas and has vaguely branched out into @mietze's topic of game size, I keep being captivated by the idea to run an inspired-by "The Secret World" / Laundry Files / Netflix Travellers style of game, but since I'm far more familiar with MUDs and TableTop GMing compared to MUSHes, I'm curious if anyone has a "Newbie Storytellers Guide to running a MUSH". (not the technical aspects, I can do those in my sleep, but...hmm...the soft skills parts, I guess).

section14.eridanisystems.com is up and running but is still pretty much empty of a usable grid. I forgot to factor in my job's yearly Disaster Recovery Exercise event that happened at the beginning of this month to my 3-week-ish estimate, so my free time got eaten by life. So, I'm still mostly where I was a month ago.

Edited to correct the link.

Wow....where's the crotchety old Doomsday Prepper with the 300-acre mountain "compound" who made his fortune in his youth exterminatin' all the damn vampires (and demons and everything-else-that-go-bump-in-night)?

@Ominous Both of those are on my list of considerations, actually, as are CthulhuTech.

Huh, I'm surprised to realize how good a setting like Stargate Universe is for this. A single "giant" ship as "game/grid hub" that moves through different star-systems-of-the-week, shuttles for any space-sim minigames wanted, and stargates for instant travel whenever the plot needs it.

Hmm...this post is a very nice congealing of many of the design issues I've been wrestling with while building my personal passion project (which isn't very MUSH-like, it is more RPE-MUD-esque). I've never felt the urge to play HorrorMU because I'm much more addicted to High Fantasy/Sci-Fi and am generally turned off by horror/slashers as a genre, but I am definitely interested in how to...bend?... a traditional game into something more like this approach. Some ways that come to mind:

All of the characters are experiencing a series of mutual dream worlds where "the game" takes place, including some where the world cuts/changes into totally new roles/storylines.

The characters are souls that skip into new bodies/dimensions every so often (Sliders TV show as game mechanic).

Some "Great Magic/Aliens" in the world alters the game/characters periodically, some of how everything used to work translates to the new world, but alot doesn't....

Thanks for the ideas.

@PuppyBreath How am I supposed to reply without hiting <discard> to really prove the point?
AKA me too...

Has anyone run a MU* based on Gumshoe? So far, I'm considering some hacks/variants of it like "The Fall of Delta Green" and "Night's Black Agents" for the RPG basis of Section 14. It has an online free PDF/SRD available for the base rules, too, which is what is making me lean more towards it than other systems I've been researching. Anyway, thoughts?

@Rinel Section 14 investigators were unable to discover which hostile Entity or Entities provided Mr Lovecraft with the funding and materiel he used to create his original works. But, working swiftly, the Agents on-site succeeded in a surprisingly beneficial operation which swapped his originals with inoculated, sanitized copies. These copies gained notoriety and spread farther and wider than expected. Section 14 then discovered an added side-effect: desensitizing the general populace to such topics increased the success rate of the Agent indoctrination procedures. Since then, many suitably sanitized disinformation campaigns (so as not to fall afoul of Protocol 3's Operational Security mandates) have been devised to assist in the gradual reeducation of the public. Without confirming, nor denying, Secure, Contain, and Protect's Foundational guidelines are a perfect example.

@Ominous After giving this a day to percolate, I will start out by backtracking a little bit and explain what I am actually looking for and then how Gumshoe does and doesn't fit the bill.

First and foremost, I am looking for a system that players are either already familiar with or has enough free information online that I won't have to write everything from scratch. Barely second place in criteria is that it be a simple enough system to where I can build the chargen bits in python in just a couple of days and not have tons of edge/special cases or simulation code that I have to write to make it work for day-to-day gaming...this rules out most off-the-shelf systems (Nearly all D20 derived, level/class-based games, Shadowrun, etc). And 3rd, I'd like the system to have enough elements that it fits the modern-day+near future tech+magic+horror themes of the game, with bonus points going to systems that would have example pre-gen/vaguely balanced stats for Mages/Shogoths/Cyborgs/Tentacle-Monster-Of-The-Week/etc. This leaves (that I know enough about to guess): Fate, Gumshoe, BRP/d100, BESM, and Savage Worlds.

I tend to dislike Fate's dice pool mechanics, couldn't find much in the way of free resources online for BRP, and I've already GM'd enough BESM and Savage Worlds to know what I'm up against. That left Gumshoe as an unknown. I was barely familiar with Gumshoe before this past weekends dive, so that is what started this thread.

Overall, I'd say there is enough free stuff online that Gumshoe checks that box. It has very simple and consistent dice mechanics (baring a few oddball, probably-nuke-able edge cases), so that checks the second requirement, and it has several expansions/derivatives directly involved with the theme elements.

The "Clue discovery" split between the auto-success Investigative abilities and the test-oriented General abilities isn't really something that I care much about, at this stage. It is mostly just a system quirk, and the spends to get Special Benefits seem to be basically the same idea as Fate Points in Fate or Bennies in Savage Worlds. And as you point out, there are plenty of ways to avoid the "game grinds to a halt due to lack of Clues" problem.

The real question for me, now, is "Is there enough of a game inside of Gumshoe to actually work with and enjoy?" and I'm not convinced, yet. There are only two combat skills in the base rules, scuffling and shooting, and the damages seem to be mostly "nothing happened worth mentioning" or "oh, you win". My gut says it's just something I'll have to GM for a few sessions before I really know.

I don't trust my ability/time to run a quality, full-blown RvR game, so, while other factions do exist, they will all be non-playable in favor of a cooperative game. It might be something that gets revisited in the distant future, but not any time soon.

Hmm... This topic is timely to a game design issue I discovered after my last Section14 post. I was planning on just building out a traditional grid based on my first couple plots, only to realize that would lead to a sprawling set of used-once-or-maybe-twice-at-most locations that would then just rot. In my head, the game is fairly episodic, with only a couple of small recurring locations (like the secret base where the players reside between missions and the "generic" supply depots/storage-dumps/oubliettes that per-mission resources get pulled from or sent to), and the rest of the grid would be temporary-ish rooms used for part of a "Season". Right now, I'm working on just giving the players a set of commands to "re-skin" temporary-ish rooms as needed for scenes or PRPs.
I guess I'll need to think more on what that design means for privacy/ooc issues, though.

This is a solid topic I'm struggling with right now for Section14. My gut is telling me the game needs to have enough pre-exisiting wiki/in-game posts/theme-oriented-code/etc to get the vision across to the first batch of players, so that chargen isn't bombed with a bunch of off-topic concepts. But, at the same time, I know the final game is going to really depend on the back-and-forth with the players that crops up as the first few plot events/PrPs get run.

I'm kind of surprised people are using PDFs or Google sheets, instead of something more automated/targeted-to-RP like myth-weavers.com ... did something happen to blacklist that option, or do people just not know it exists somehow?

@Livia Huh, I have not heard of Phoenix Dawn before. This is interestingly similar to an storyline deckbuilding idea I've been working on for my main game project. Thanks for the pointer, I'm going to have to read it and see what wisdom I can glean from their designs.

Actually I think the original idea of Razor of the Dawn Castle is a good location, and could be made to work well, if there was some Imperial reason that it suddenly needed to transform from lazy backwater border keep into a major venue to hold a Winter Court (say in two years time).

The first thing that comes to mind would be a major Shadowlands power rising that needs to be handled diplomatically rather than via the usual Crab show of force (think a new, sudden Fae Kingdom or some such that has made Alliance overtures with the Imperial Throne to help them fight some OTHER threat from the Shadowlands).

Then you'd have the PCs be envoy's from their respective Clans all racing to mini-empire build what the Clans need for the Court and to impress/ally/dominate the new Faction.