Best posts made by JDCorley

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?