I second the planet already being colonized and/or alien covenant.
I don't wanna RP SPACE HOUSE without the distinct possibility that I might have to bury my SPACE WIFE because she failed a clutch roll and ended up dying due to SPACE MOLECULAR ACID eating off her SPACE FACE.
But, in the interest of gender equality, I'm more than comfortable to let my SPACE WIFE wear the SPACE PANTS
(If you're polling for interest) I, for one, would NOT be interested in a space colonization game unless it involved some other larger overplot, such as something survival horror, war, or other action-based dramatics.
Not really looking to get stuck in a sandbox of boys and girls playing HOUSE in a space setting. I would need more than playing house and the assumption that one-on-one relationship "character building" is a worthy substitute for my time and effort.
@ixokai said in Generic sci fi game.:
I want my characters story to begin and end in a meaningful way, not end in an arbitrary point because a meta-story is now done, even if my personal story has gaping holes I didn't fully address or solve
That's why I think that a story that actually ends would be the one to grant you a beginning, middle, and end.
I'm gonna go out on a limb and say that a very, very small number of char-stories actually resolve in this hobby. Most games either get shut down, or people leave, flake off, characters come and go, or IC romantic partners disappear for 4 weeks and come back having made an alt to bang some PC with A HEMSWORTH as a PB.
In theory, if done right, an anthology game, with some planning and care/consideration, could assist players in finding ways to make their arcs in the "season", so to speak, being meaningful.
Edit: I'm just throwing out ideas. New formats. Things people could try. That's all.
If I ran/GMed for an anthology game, I'd have players state information about what kind of arc/story they're angling for. Perhaps they apped in with someone else as a married couple. If the season ran, say, 6 months, staff could help throw some things their way to challenge/involve that relationship, and then provide room in the end for resolution.
@Sonder said in Generic sci fi game.:
Add elements of that newfangled Valerian movie or whatever the hell it's called. I LOVE SCIFI. Scifi games sound amazing.
I'd be down
@ixokai To each their own. I'm just that guy that is of the opinion that part of the problem on far too many games are that there's very little harvesting and a whoooole lot of old, tired, ancient character nonsense.
On a lot of these games it's just plenty of ancient characters with sheets so maxxed out that they've started to have to take stuff like Skill Focus: Underwater Taxidermy, and far too many players are comfortable doing really stupid heroic things IC on the belief that your character will never die until you choose for them to die.
Creating a new character every season is attractive to me because it would be challenging and keep games from becoming stale.
How about female characters who aren't defined by their gender, but by their skillset and personalities as people who happen to be women? TBH I've often made wimpy male characters when I knew I was apping into a more action-female environment. I was more than content to let the skilled female characters fulfill their concepts as soldiers, etc, and enjoyed being 100% okay with being the damsel. Even then, it wasn't about which character was male or female, because there's no telling anymore who is actually female or male on the other side of the keyboard. I just hate that weird dominance wrestling shit.
I don't wanna derail this thread, so I'll end my point. I'm married to a so-called tomboy in real life, but she's not a tomboy. She's a woman who isn't afraid to fight, likes action movies, and if I treated anyone online in the manner I've been treated by being mistaken as a female, she would woop my ass.
So, for what it's worth, I don't envy the shit most women in the hobby deal with.
Edited a few times. I just don't care anymore which character has which organs. I just want the story to be good.
Love FS3 or not, it cuts down heavily on the overcomplicated sheet management systems, as well as people dicking around trying to find unbeatable feat/merit/etc combinations.
Back to Topic
I think you'd want to be clear ahead of time if it's a SPACE HORROR game. One cool idea, IMO, would be to have each "season" be a new setting with new characters and an established end-goal, run credits, etc.
Season. 1 could be like an ALIENS plot with plenty of char death/danger
Season 2: Space colonists find something under the ice
Season 3: Body snatchers a-la The Thing
Season 4: Everyone loved season 2 so staff introduced a sequel.
@Julia-Cornelia said in We Need a Game Set In the Roman Empire.:
As an aside, I'm glad we've reached that point in MU*ing where we can finally start calling people out for being misogynistic
I'm sympathetic. I've occasionally rolled up female characters because the character just reads better to me as a female. I approached MU as a writing experience, and I'm not much into TS.
Every female character I have rolled up has resulted in a truckload of uninitiated, unsolicited creeper flirtation and nagging, pressuring, etc. I've also ran into situations where I got the impression that my char was being taken less seriously due to alpha male on scene needing to own the dominant role.
Oh. Yeah. There's misogyny.
The last game set in a Roman Empire era/setting had a shitload of rape, forced character pregnancies, and when you mention that game's name on this forum, people flee, close doors, lock windows, and speak in bad English things like "yooo musss go now. Yooo go back home. You stay away. Isss Vam-peeeer."
I put it at a 65-75% chance that if another Roman Empire setting game opens, plenty of people who enjoyed Firan will show up to roleplay some of the same, theme-enforced misogyny.
Someone ran away from me in For Honor yesterday. It felt awesome.
For you For Honor players, I was playing a Raider managing point B in Dominion mode. I was hacking apart those little NPC assholes. A guy (Orochi) ran up to me to fight and I took him down to about 1/3rd health when a Conqueror ran up to help him, which put me in a 2v1 situation. I grabbed the Conqueror, threw him into a fire to get him to fuck off. For about 5 seconds I was godly. 2v1 and I'm shoving people around and controlling the fight. I killed the Orochi (non execution) and then the Conqueror tried to cold cock my Raider. Two seconds later I executed the Conqueror with a neck snap.
2 dead bodies at my guy's feet within 2-5 seconds of each other.
I go back to clearing out the little fighter NPC guys but keep an eye on the spawn point because both guys died within seconds of each other, so were likely to respawn together and maybe retry the 2v1.
Orochi respawns. I watch him run out towards me...Stop...Then run to capture another point.
Conqueror respawns, runs out towards me, stops, watches for a few seconds, then runs off to capture another point.
Fuck. Yeah. Making yourself a living embodiment of "fuck that, not doing that again" felt great.
I log everything, included pages, so that if someone makes me angry I've got all kinds of blackmail and MSB material.
KiddingKindOfNoYesNotReallyMAAAAYBE
You know who you are...You're out there.
Real Answer:
I log scenes, scrub out channel chatter, ooc, pages, etc using Potato Events, then run them through Faraday's Log Cleaner before posting. I have the logs on my laptop, but if I leave a game or the game closes, I delete the logs.
My potato events that scrub pages make it kind of hard to keep a log of WTFpages if stuff starts getting out of hand, but I've only had to disable them to save a log of pages once or twice, and I never post them on MSB/WORA. I handle my shit internally.
@Arkandel said in Roleplaying writing styles:
arn against needlessly generalizing abo
Yeah, I don't mean to be an overgeneralizing DICK about it. Like @Auspice said, I know there's plenty of people out there, like you, who use that style of posing that aren't doing it because there's some assumption of blurred IC/OOC lines.
It just...makes me feel uncomfortable, and it does so largely because I don't personally believe that asking someone why they do so, in the heat of the moment, would yield a truly honest answer.
I've run into more trouble than good with the hobby, so color me pessimistic, but it's a red flag.
@Misadventure said in Roleplaying writing styles:
Gilmore Girls, is there nothing it can't ruin?
I hate Rory so goddamned much.
I guess my point, in the end, is that:
I've got a few minutes in between work tasks, so I thought I'd preach to the masses about how being referred to in the 2nd person creeps me out. Most of us agree. So this is probably nothing new to you, but it just gives me weird-chills. It creeps me out.
So please, dear god, if you type "you" when referring to a character, pleasePleasePleasePLEASE pay attention:
Here's how it goes down in my head. The pose will be in bold. The italics will be what I'm thinking.
She steps out of the car and takes your hand, and looks you deep in the eyes, and says "You mean so much to me." BECAUSE MY FUCKING HUSBAND CAN'T BE BOTHERED TO SPEND TIME WITH ME AND I'M GETTING REALLY ATTACHED TO YOU. HEY. MAN IN THE BOX THAT BRINGS ME RL FULFILLMENT AND JOY BECAUSE MY HUSBAND WON'T WATCH MOTHERFUCKING GILMORE GIRLS WITH ME??? YES. YOU? DON'T EVER LEAVE. I WILL CHASE YOU BECAUSE GOD DAMNIT I NEED THIS!
...run away. I must run away.
Fuck. How do I get out of this without coming across like an asshole? I hope to god I'm not some kind of proxy husband or loneliness fulfillment engine, because I put a lot of firearms skill into this sheet. I wanted to do a lot of combat in this game, but there's none of that shit going on so there's filler RP that includes potential nudity scenes, which seemed a really good idea at the time...
<NAME> pages: Hey, are you there? Can I throw another pose in real quick? I hope this doesn't make you uncomfortable, so... OMG. OMG. OMG. OMG. Please don't.
She turns and pushes open the door and leads you through, where her super lavish, super comfortable mansion's bedroom is. She turns and tugs some kind of rope behind her neck and all of her clothes come off so that you can see my naked body. "I need you. I love you."
Okay, nope. nopenope. Does she even have enough resources to have this kind of place? God, I hope she doesn't wig the fuck out when my character turns this down. Time to find a way out of this one.
One thing that I LOATHE about the faction/Hero-vs-Villain format in MU form is the amount of planning that seems to take place on an OOC level. Over the years I've seen a lot of sudden, incredulous coordination that always gives me a raised eyebrow.
Even when I run tabletop games, I don't allow the players to huddle and discuss OOCly what to do. As a GM, I don't really care what the players know. I don't care if I've got a cop, a pharmacist, a politician, and a computer expert playing the game. This information being used when it isn't on the character sheets(and the ability to network OOCly to coordinate some kind of awesome IC plan) is, in my opinion, metagaming.
So, naturally in the holistic PVP sense, my gamer-brain goes on this sort-of alert status. I think, with this format and all of the paging, skyping, emailing, or other communiques that can be passed under the table, it's simply way too likely that people will coordinate OOCly to win ICly.
WoD games tend to be fucking horrible about this, right on down to PLAYERS browsing the books to put together nigh-indestructible merit/power combinations that the CHARACTER may not have even had the baseline knowledge as to how to achieve. A dropped batch of hot XP in a skill the character has never presented any inclination towards should not turn "pacifist flower girl" into "armored human tank" overnight.
This happens because of OOC planning/knowledge driving the IC.
EDIT: Think "PC HIVE MIND", where what one character knows, all of them know, and although Player A only succeeded in the perception roll, somehow Player B moves their character to be in a good position for when the fight starts. The PLAYER knows a fight is starting, and wants their character to be in a sweet spot.
I've told @Auspice this, and after an episode of Twin Peaks I'm feeling strangely open book. I had no idea what The 100 was, so when the MU came out there was all that board stuff, but I have little clue what it was.
I have since watched 3 seasons of The 100 and think that the idea of opening a MU in that theme was fucking ingenious. Part of me is a little jealous for the people who got to play.
Edit:But back to Star Wars (don't wanna derail too much). I think that level based systems with defined xp, gear, and class requirements can be very rewarding, but these games need regular inward flow of XP to keep people feeling productive. If I had to pick a SW system to run a game in, it would definitely be Saga or FFG, with FFG admittedly taking a forward edge for me.
There ARE prepakaged SW MU systems in existence, though, and there is no existing FFG code system in the community that I know of.
I built a grid once.
A digital frontier.
I tried to picture clusters of information as they moved through the computer. What did they look like? Ships? Motorcycles? Were the circuits like freeways? I kept dreaming of a world I thought I'd never see. And then one day . . .
...I made a character on it, a bunch of crazy shit happened, and I quit mushing.
@Misadventure said in Superhero Games: Quest For Villain PCs:
OMG its (American) super heroes! Character growth and themes are explored by punching things.
In the bathing suit region.
With a penis.
Honestly, I think the @saosmash @Roz @Meg @Tez crew might actually run the best superhero games. There's a lot of depth of character and it isn't nearly the mostly vacant, private room bangfests that I'm used to seeing.