Posts made by Ghost

@bobotron Wow, thank you, I'm suddenly seeing it a bit more clearly.

I mean most of the Colonial Marines in the movie were assholes, but they weren't all heartless. Many of them were mercenary, and even though they were merc-like, they still patted Newt on the head, or didn't want some kid to get killed.

You can be a mercenary hired to do a job and not go all Apocalypse Now Evil with it. They still took their queues from their officers and the Corporati who set the mission parameters. It's part of the job, and so long as the stories don't push hard limits (like genocidal behavior), the reality would be "Fuck it, put the kids and their daddies on the transport back home. They were stupid for trying to homestead on government property, anyway. Once this job's done I got a barbecue and a beach full of hot people for leave in six weeks, and this cash is gonna buy me a whole lot of tequila."

@bobotron said in Which canon property/setting would be good for a MU* ?:

@ghost
You'd have to have some sort of good economic/IC benefits system, really. It's why real life PMCs are the way they are; they get paid TONS of money to do the job.

Vacations, money wired home to family, finding yourself some Arcturians...

That's a good way to angle it. The kind of personalities involved in being in a PMC for money would likely weed out a lot of "I'm doing this for the betterment of the universe" and result in a slightly more mercenary mindset.

@lithium said in Which canon property/setting would be good for a MU* ?:

@ghost I would actually play a game with FS3 if it were an Aliens setting world... I like the colonial marines angle a lot.

The thing I really liked about the idea when it crossed my mind was the corporate soldier setting. In canon, the military was outsourced to private corporations, so a lot of these soldiers were being yanked around by Weyland-Yutani to do soldiery stuff, but under the dystopian guise of corporate control of political policy.

So the setting wouldn't have to be CONSTANT aliens and/or predators, but could also have this element of:

• "We were sent to Gradis-54 to reclaim a mining operation from armed rebels" (Who were, in fact, seeking independence due to corporate greed)
• "We were combat dropped into a hazardous wasteland to provide security for corporate officers while they installed a strange lab..."

I think the trick, though, would be writing stories that didn't constantly end up wanting to make the players shoot their corporate bosses, you know? Weyland Yutani are assholes, so the storylines of where the marines go and when would have to be carefully crafted to avoid that.

@lithium said in RL Anger:

Lex Luthor

Oh. don't get me started on Jesse Eisenberg's Luthor.

I'm not a fan of the "Eccentric Mark Zuckerberg Less Crazy Joker" angle on Luthor.

@ganymede +1 for Batfleck.

I think, when you play Batman, the strength of the Batman is in your Bruce Wayne.

• Keaton was a GREAT Bruce
• Kilmer and Clooney were meh Bruces
• Bale was a great Batman, but his Wayne wasn't the greatest IMO. Perhaps it was because I kept seeing Patrick Bateman

Ben Affleck is a really great Bruce Wayne. He really identifies well with the character and the way he channels that vein of corporate loneliness.

@bobotron said in Which canon property/setting would be good for a MU* ?:

@ghost
Along the same line, Starship Troopers (based more on the novels and Roughnecks cartoon, which was a bit more wartime take on it) would be pretty cool.

Colonial Marines:

• Infantry
• Pilots
• Medics
• Technicians
• Convicted criminals serving their sentence in the marines
• Smartgunners
• Corporate Attaché
• Synthetics
• Corporate lab techs/scientists

Starship Troopers:

• Mobile Infantry/Assigned Naval crew
• Psychics
• Infantry
• Medics
• Snipers
• Heavy Weaponry
• Armored Battlesuit land tanks
• K9 Units...

Seems a good setup for FS3

@thatguythere Fair enough, but if I had to choose between another Trek MU and an Orville MU, I know where my money's at.

Also:

Simple setup:

Take a little bit of TGG, mix it with Battlestar, whip it up with FS3, and you've got a game where a platoon of soldiers who answer to corporate Weyland-Yutani interests are sent to fight wars, enforce martial law on labor disputes, and, you know...

...kind of run into xenomorphs and predators.

What about S.M. Stirling's Emberverse series?

Post apocalyptic, non-zombies, people reintegrating back to Dark Ages communities?

@lithium I'm going to see it, and while I'm in the movie, I'm going to be silently hoping for a flash of emerald light near the end so that I can have a quick preview of what's to come for the Green Lantern Corps movie.

@icanbeyourmuse I think Elixir from the X-men is a GREAT example as to how a non-combatant character can be utilized during action sequences. Elixir is pacifist. He's a healer (though one hand can kill, one can heal). He ended up getting placed on X-Force, which is the X-Men equivalent of the SEAL TEAM SIX MURDER SQUAD.

So in a lot of sequences, he's hunkering down and trying to stay out of harm's way while pulling wounded people to safety, or diverting to help innocent bystanders.

So one good way to handle this on a MU would be to incorporate a non-combatant squad in TPs or other missions. Heck, an all-non-combat TP consisting of characters running through rubble and burning buildings alongside a superhero fight without ever having to throw a single punch could be really enjoyable for the people who don't like to roleplay combat.

Edit/Afterthought: All it takes is a little creativity and inclusiveness to accommodate these character concepts, but YES, I totally agree that there are people who play to win, and it makes combat events hard to sit through.

@icanbeyourmuse Agreed. And I say this out of genuine concern and not out of some snide manner. I always feel a little bit for players who make characters that don't really mix with the general flow of the game, then watch them frustrated that they can't seem to find a fit:

• "My character's a pacifist who doesn't have any combat skills, but all of the events are combat events!"

We see this a lot, and sure, there's a million different ways to assume what's happening when this happens (could be they want the game to be X when it's Y, or that they're unwilling to see the fun in playing a pacifist character IN combat, but whatever). I think this is just a good way of pointing out that you should scout what the general flow of the game is about before committing to one particular concept, or at the least, be willing to scrap-and-replace if your idea isn't working out.

@Lithium : My favorite bit of this are the ICEMAN fans. For years, Iceman has been romantically linked to many, many women (Including Mystique), but within the last 4, maybe 5 years, Marvel wrote him in as actually being gay. So I've been on a few comic book MUs and seen that wrestled with.

• Guy playing straight Iceman mildly uncomfortable with gay players/characters trying to determine if the character is gay
• Gay Iceman struggling with only a small representative population of gay characters in canon
• WHICH TIMELINE IS THIS? GAY ICEMAN FROM CURRENT CANON, STRAIGHT ICEMAN FROM THE MOVIES? AAAUGH.

I'd just like to point out that one of the benefits of playing an OC is not being harassed or bound by rampant canoneers.

In playing an OC, you shield yourself a bit from people making demands on character relationships, romantic or not, based on existing canon. You also protect yourself a bit from people pushing their OOC fandom, romanticized or not, onto your RP.

One of the drawbacks I see in OCs is that sometimes they don't really fit into the setting. Like any game, a player should take care when creating a character to make sure that the character us a good fit. A good example would be a pacifist OC with the mutant ability to make spaghetti out of thin air on a game that is focusing on the action and fighting of two groups of mutants who regularly shoot lasers at each other.

Each approach has its benefits and drawbacks, but with picking characters that fit the intended feel of the game and staff who reign in overpowered concepts as being NPC only, balance is possible.

Orville.

Just sayin.

@bobotron said in POLL: Super Hero MU Gut Check:

Has anyone else here read Marvel Heroic from Margaret Weiss Productions? There are things you could totally mine from tat, since it uses a variant of the Cortex System.

I printed one of the character stat sheets to a PDF, located here: https://www.dropbox.com/s/5ugmtzt9mra45ss/MHR - Cyclops.pdf?dl=0

You could adapt something like that, since it's already using descriptive traits. It does two things, I find, really well...

• Plot Points: These are gained from you, as a player, doing something to gimp yourself. Cyclops' example shuts down his optic blast (typically by his visor getting yanked), and he gains a PP. Or you can roll your distinctions (which are descriptives for yourself) as a d4 (this giving you less of a chance at success) for a PP. You could, theoretically, limit how many PP someone can have at a given time.

Otherwise, the system is pretty simple: make a die pool of trait/distinction/powers/etc. and roll, and the DM has what's called the Doom Pool, which is dice representing the enemies/environment.

Remove the 'making stuff on the fly to affect the scene' aspect of it, and you have a pretty solid way to mechanize the traits system

I'm a fan of that system for herostuffs. I don't have the time/knowledge to code it, but if someone were to take on the effort, I'd join the project to help design it.

@kanye-qwest People here strap on full armor and mail and do full contact SCA fighting in 90+ degree weather. WTF.

Though a few hours north in the pine trees it could be good for a LARP, but it's a bunch of driving.

I'm curious about this, so thanks for posting. For the most part I've sworn off LARP, but if a DR LARP ever opened here in AZ I'd probably give it a try.

AZ tends to be horrible for LARP, though, because weekend camping events in 110+° weather aren't high on the wish list for anyone.

@Lisse24 I'd totally be willing to make purposefully tragic emo characters for fun.

@Ganymede

“Hi Draco!” I said in a depressed voice.

“Hi Ebony.” he said back. We walked into his flying black Mercedes-Benz (the license plate said 666) and flew to the place with the concert. On the way we listened excitedly to Good Charlotte and Marilyn Manson. We both smoked cigarettes and drugs. When we got there, we both hopped out of the car. We went to the mosh pit at the front of the stage and jumped up and down as we listened to Good Charlotte.

Because it's in the news recently (and it never fails to make me happy), I am posting the link to the greatest piece of gothic Harry Potter fan fiction ever: My Immortal

http://myimmortal.wikia.com/wiki/My_Immortal/Chapters_1-11

Note: it's best to read it in the narrative voices of any of the following:

• James Lipton
• Patrick Stewart
• Christopher Walken
• Morgan Freeman
• Tilda Swinton
• Jennifer Tilly
• Samuel L. Jackson
• Carl Sagan

I am particularly fond of the part where the main protagonist (Ebony Dark’ness Dementia Raven Way) goes into the Forbidden Forest to hook up with Drago Malfoy, and they are interrupted mid-coitus by Dumbledore, who announces his presence to them by calling them motherfuckers.