Best posts made by Ide

Alright, what about Star Crusade, but high fantasy, high powered, and not Star Crusade?

Someone on another mud forum proposed an interesting idea once to make a game that was three different games in one.

As I recall it was a prehistoric setting but you could adapt it to other ones. The three games were something like:

• A PK sabre-toothed tiger game. As a tiger you couldn't use says and so on with other players, you'd have territory that you'd fight other tigers for, etc.

• A PvE wolf game. You'd have a wolf pack with other players, battle the tigers, and then hunt around and stuff. You wouldn't have says per se but you'd have other forms of communication with your wolf pack.

• A RP cave people game. There'd be some game mechanics to fend off the tigers and wolves but it'd primarily be a mush RP style game.

As a character in one of the sub-games it would be like you didn't know there were other sub-games coinciding with yours, but as a player you still would get to interact ICly/OOCly with the other games. So it's a way to bridge different player wants/needs and make a bigger game than would be possible if you opened these three sub-games as separate niche games, which I think is the strength of an idea like this.

I think it depends on what the players want to do.

I'd like to see an economic/war game for one.

@Lisse24 said:

I think this idea of having proactive players who start a bunch of interesting plots for their fellow players is also unrealistic. It's also not something that we see mirrored in literature, which means that players don't have a good model for it. Think about it. Jack Bauer* doesn't wake up, leave his house, and start killing terrorists. Jack Bauer wakes up, hears that terrorists have hijacked a plane, and then he leaves his house and starts killing terrorists.

My personal belief that it is the responsibility of staff to provide players with something that they can react to and then to help them find a proactive way to deal with that circumstance or complication, and that by doing this you can creative a healthy and active game. In my philosophy this doesn't need to be a full-blown plot, but can rather be little things to make the player's life difficult.

I don't think you're alone in believing that, certainly many (most?) mu*ers think of mu* as online TT, and most RPGs people are familiar with use GMs.

However IMO literature actually is a very bad model for mu*. Literature has already happened when you experience it, i.e. the author writes it and you read it. It's a fallacy to think of yourself as the reader and the other player as the author -- you are both authors, and if you want a model for mu* at all theater or improv is much better I think.

@Patty there is a decent summary here, http://www.rpg.net/reviews/archive/15/15286.phtml, search for "organizations in a fantasy medieval setting"

(edit: ninja'd by @Rainbow-Unicorn -- it does sound cool btw).

There was a long thread on WORA when SC tanked, I don't remember details more specific than 'drama'. But there should be plenty of folks here who can tell it.

I'm usually not one to say that rules are better than no rules, but maybe, looking back on mu*'s for the last 25 years, the lack of a culture of consciously improving RP on games hasn't been the best way to go about things.

That could work well with the Reign company system linked earlier. And it'd be a cinch to fast forward the timeline. Sort of like fantasy TGG (edit -- this game, http://mudstats.com/World/TheGreatestGeneration)

Don't Rest Your Head has a theme pretty much like that. The normal world, and Mad City.

I sort of remember someone on here talking about a similar idea they had going, set in Chicago maybe?

There's a great cave + canyon by Helens: http://www.mountsthelens.com/ape-caves.html , https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ape_Canyon . Also: Bigfoot.

Obviously most tabletop RPGs were never designed to handle 30 people crowded into a few rooms. But that's what a lot of mu*'s have to deal with. Not to mention a more accurate description is 30 people in separate rooms all over the world trying to communicate.

I don't think it's viable to slap a tabletop RPG into a mu* and call it good. On the other hand, you have games like Road to Amber which went IMO totally overboard in the other direction.

What rules, either formal or informal, do you find yourself adding to make mu* games run in a somewhat sane fashion? What would make your ideal mu* RPG?

I've always felt that mu*'s would benefit from more clear setting of stakes at the start of a conflict (not necessarily a scene, just when the gloves come off). What am I risking here? What is my goal? So often the risk is "as little as possible" and the goal is "pound this person until they cannnot resist". Both of which are rather boring IMO.

Some people handle this informally but there are rules systems that have this baked in and it helps.

I for one didn't realize Ares was so far along. It looks really nice from looking at the dev blog just now.

What are you looking for when you decide to roll/negotiate/telenuke? Do you want a 2 hour tabletop tactical grid experience? The whole conflict decided in one roll and then you pose it out? Simply a chance to use the powers you've bought up with hard-earned XP?

If there was a basic system that with dice in a few rounds decided the outcome in general terms, and did not have tactical mechanics, would that work for you?

I more like the question do RPers try to make art. All jokes aside, and people's goals notwithstanding, unfortunately I find that most people don't try.

This all reminded me of an old post on art and RPGs I read a while back that I thought had good things to say, http://gamingphilosopher.blogspot.com/2007/02/meeting-and-birth.html

edit: and http://gamingphilosopher.blogspot.com/2006/10/elitism-and-rpgs-as-art.html