I think Trek games could benefit from looking at Ashen Stars' implementation of the GUMSHOE system for missions. Basically, a Star Trek mission is a series of pieces of information with various crew members deploying various items or skills to obtain them, and throughout, the meat of the show is crew members arguing over what to do from their various points of view and from various moral values. How much damage a phaser does just doesn't ever matter - they're insanely deadly when they need to be, and useless against Our Superior Planning And Technology when they need to be.

Hey everyone, nice to be on the new board.

As always, I'm here to derail everything and say "well actually" in a smug manner. Great to be back.

Well, Actually the key to Shadowrun MU* success is how you generate player content, or more specifically, how you permit players to generate their own content.

First, there should be systems in place to connected player characters to teams of Shadowrunners (or other sorts of teams if you want to branch out, but the team aspect of Shadowrun is key to the property.) Like, when I'm making a character I shouldn't just be making a hacker, I should be making a hacker who is already connected to a street samurai and a cool looking elf mage who smokes cigarettes. Partly premade characters will help here (partly premade characters are probably the way to get through the shitty over-complicated Shadowrun character creation in the first place).

Second, there should be systems in place for player characters to have a constant stream of problems and challenges thrown their way. Something along the lines of a random run generation system for Faces to interact with. "Well guys, looks like the ( YAKUZA ) want us to ( ROB ) a ( FLYING ARMORED CAR )". Put a range of difficulties and tests in the run generation system so that the characters can do well or badly, but let them run the run themselves. A staff-run shadowrun definitely should happen; another advantage of organizing your game by teams, since the staff can just notify the team "hey, let's do a shadowrun for you guys, see you on wednesday at 9" or whatever. But there should consistently be stuff that characters should be getting into without staff involvement.

Finally, I think the key thing to take away from the success of the recent CRPGs is that in those games something personal is at stake. You aren't hired by a stranger to do something to strangers in exchange for money. You need the money to get something that matters; you're hired by someone that matters to do something to someone else that matters to you. Personally. Probably more important than a scrupulously accurate SR5 chargen system is a way that teams can share with each other and staff "important shit that will fuck with my character personally right now".

Double finally, have you considered using the system from the CRPG instead?

It's all good, if you've got it all figured out, you don't need anyone's help. I promise you your staff will burn out and with no other means to introduce content your playerbase will devolve into just drinking and fucking - nothing wrong with that, of course - but if you don't believe my promise, you can definitely get right to proving me a fool. I hope that you do. :bowtie:

I just don't think the fun of Star Trek is ever "are they good enough to accomplish task X or find piece of information Y", it's always, always, always, "how do we decide what the right response in this difficult situation". I mean, even A Trouble With Tribbles was this formula.

Gonna throw back to the OP and say that MXT 3.0's character system was the best I've ever seen in many years of superhero MU*s. Basically, you picked out a Marvel character, linked to a page on the Marvel wiki about them, put a few sentences on a trait for people that didn't want to click through, and said what you intended to do with the character over the next 30 days of roleplay. Since superhero comics contextualize everything about character in terms of immediate action (your romance is only important insofar as the bad guy is blowing up your boyfriend or is secretly your boyfriend or both), and since there's no point in just retyping/re-editing what 1,000 comic book nerds have already distilled out of your characters' idiotic continuity, it was simply the perfect system.

There were many good follow-on effects of this system. If you wanted to see a character played, you posted about it and someone could try it without much in the way of investment. So you saw characters played that had rarely been played before. You could express clearly what you wanted from the character and everyone could see it. You could instantly put a team of 4-5 characters together, have a rollicking adventure, then high five and move on to a different situation.

It didn't last and it didn't spread. Most superhero places these days are still asking you to write long backgrounds (instead of linking to someone else writing the background) and traits. It's boring and pointless when you didn't invent the character, their background or traits - those all belong to Disney now so why pretend like I've got some control over it or that the staff does?

The only people complaining about the Marvel Heroic chargen never made a character with it and played it. Yeah, you can't min-max it; because the balancing is all in the initiative/action order mechanic, not on a character sheet.

Now, I suspect it might not be too useful for a MU* because the role of a dice system on a MU* is extremely variable and might not hit the sweet spot MHR is looking for (also where do you put the index cards and who keeps track of the Doom Pool?)

Mutants and Masterminds is easier than HERO and GURPS but that really isn't the end of the question. My question is: what's the purpose of the dice system going to be on this MU*? Plenty of superhero games exist and have existed without one. What does this bring to the table?

I just don't think the fun of Star Trek is ever "are they good enough to accomplish task X or find piece of information Y", it's always, always, always, "how do we decide what the right response in this difficult situation". I mean, even A Trouble With Tribbles was this formula.

I think Trek games could benefit from looking at Ashen Stars' implementation of the GUMSHOE system for missions. Basically, a Star Trek mission is a series of pieces of information with various crew members deploying various items or skills to obtain them, and throughout, the meat of the show is crew members arguing over what to do from their various points of view and from various moral values. How much damage a phaser does just doesn't ever matter - they're insanely deadly when they need to be, and useless against Our Superior Planning And Technology when they need to be.

I can't believe you were only 17 in those heady Marvel MUX days, you were way better at writing than that. Let's hang out and play some Marvel Heroic on Online Tabletop sometime.

The jumble of confusion over this is because there's a lot of confusion in tabletop RPGs about what character advancement is for. GMC advancement only makes sense in the context of characters with visible, relevant Aspirations whose ambitions/desires are being put in a vice with increasingly horrible situations. On most MU*s, they're not being put in increasingly horrible situations (the staff will only impose this on them once every few weeks at most and there's no reason to have PrPs do this ever) and individual character Aspirations are never relevant (because the setting isn't constructed to interlace with them the way they are on tabletop.)

The obvious solution - not having character advancement until those two things occur - isn't considered fun.

The chief obstacle to horror on MU*s is that there's 20 people logged in at a time, and horror is best when someone's absolutely isolated. The ideal ratio of staff to players for a horror game is, quite simply, 1:1.

@HelloProject said:

Batman - Just a Batman game. Not every comic game has to be inclusive of every comic ever. An interesting theme could be that Arkham has been taken over and now it is functionally its own city (If this overlaps with Arkham City, I apologize, I've never gotten to play it, I only have the first game). Like, the people in Arkham function as their own society, which gives villains stuff to do other than go out and be nuts. They can have social. And then there's the rest of Gotham, where you've got Batman and other crazy people willing to put on a suit and fight crime, or you're just a normal person dealing with it all.

There have been Gotham City games in the past, but Batman villains are mostly bonkers and not really suited for day-to-day RP. You could do something like No Man's Land, which gave a bit of postapocalyptic elements to Gotham City, but that eliminates some of the "law & order" theme, since in such a milieu the cops are just another gang.

I thought you said back on p4 that people wouldn't be allowed to go on shadowruns without some other authorized person running the scenario?

@Rook Actually it's connect.mu-gateway.net 6700

Checked in there to see if could get some text based space for a OLTT situation. Seems like all the commands are still in place there to do that.

For the same reason I would not count on staff to tell meaningful stories, I would not require anyone to write a background on a Shadowrun place. Who could even tell if someone was lying about their background anyway? That would only become relevant if someone wanted to make it so, and they'd reveal the lie in RP anyhow.