@ZombieGenesis
For starters, I will disagree that people in the MU community are mainly interested in Urban Fantasy and Super Heroes. I think for many these games have revolving tropes and character concepts they revisit over and over and over again. Most hero MU players you'll read say things like "I'm a psylocke, emma, kitty, etc" and have close ties to their "relationship" roleplay partners oocly who have, on multiple occasions, romanced their characters with Booster Gold, Hawkman, whatever.
Fact is that SH games are popular because of two reasons:
- Comics are a never-ending spank bank a lot of us have had since our youth
- The system of
popular successful most SH games is...typing. There's little to learn.
Point in case, IIRC was it you @ZombieGenesis or someone else who tried Mutants and Masterminds as a system and it didn't last long? I imagine any super game that used any of the crunchy systems like FASERIP or Champions would fall flat so long as a "write out your sheet" SH MU with somewhat passable staff existed.
WoD/CofD are somewhat similar. There's a lot of Anita Blake in those games and in my experience I've encountered 3 kinds of players on Urban Fantasy games:
- Person who hoards xp and uses it as a justification for everything
- Person who gives zero shits about the system outside of cgen, doesn't go to events, and wants to have in-theme TS in peace
- Person who actually likes the system and wants to use it, but has to find people who also will use the system.
Some players are just so used to WoD/CofD that the learning curve is over and they're familiar with it.
SO, ONTO THE TOPIC...
I think all unmakeable games fall into association with these concepts.
I think that people would absolutely play in the THEME of Shadowrun, CpunkRed, Eclipse Phase, Traveler, or any other crunchy system so long as the crunchy system isn't something they have to learn. I will go so far as to say that most MUers are NOT TTRPG players and there is such an aversion to dice deciding anything contrary to what they want for the dreaded my story that introducing a system and ACTUALLY USING IT is a fool's errand.
Now, the only caveat I have for this is Firan/Arx, because there were automated wealth/powerbuilding systems that people could metagame on the side. The systems were a little more complex, but there were clear, established ways to get up and over most players through ooc networking, asking people to do wealth system stuff that (like a pyramid org) came back to build your own character, and as I understand it...in the end led to power-locked, unbeatable factions who churned this to the point of no return.
So, tl;dr?
Cool setting, less dice. Otherwise it's dubious at best.
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