Best posts made by Lisse24

Building off of what @Pyrephox began. I think there are a few things that are left out:

First, a diffuse power structure. This is what most people are getting at with resources. If the resources are spread out, than no one holds all the power.

Second, the power structure needs to be dynamic and changeable. In too many games that spout being political, including most L&L games, it's really, really hard to change who is in power. Firan was horrible at this, especially in later years. The clan leaders held all the cards and more minor nobles didn't really have much to bring to the table. Politicking was limited to between clans, meaning that 95% of the game population was excluded from that game play. Was it possible to take over a clan? Sure. It happened a few times, but not nearly often enough to make an interesting political game. Status in WoD works a bit better, for a model of a political game, but you need to make rising in Status powerful enough that it's something to do, and just like in real life, it needs to be really hard to stay at the top.

The whole reason I play WoD/CoD games is because I wanna play generic urban fantasy and its not there.

That being said, I don't care what system you use as long as it's generally easy to learn. I don't have the time or intricacies to pour over a new system if it's going to be exceptionally fiddly.

More important than the system, I think you should really, really, really try for an original themed game. If you're going with a well-known property, you'll find that people coming into the game will have their own preconceived notions on how things should and shouldn't work and may well ignore your theme files. You'll also be hemmed in by the canon that the property has established in their own products, which will have elements that do not work in a MU environment.

@Apos Exactly. It's a balancing act to find enough change where people feel impact, but not so much that people feel like things are coming out of the blue.

By the way, I think HBO's The Leftovers should be required viewing for people running plots on MUs, because I think they hit that sweet spot perfectly. On that show, Big Things happen: 2% of the world's population disappears, cults swindle people out of money, a nuclear bomb goes off, BUT the story never focuses on those things, the story focuses on how those things affect people and how people's personal reactions to the Big Things flow from and cause more Big Things. The Big Things are never important. How they impact people's lives is what's important. The result is a fantastical story that feels real and grounded, impact is always felt, and when something comes out of left field that people didn't see, the reaction afterwards is "Oh, well, that makes total sense, how could we think anything else would happen?"

Now taking that sweet spot and getting it into MU form? That's the hard part.