Posts made by Lithium

@tragedyjones

Not sure if I like the direct movie connection or not, but whoever this mortal is, he's a bad ass to take on 5 vamps, kill 3, and kidnap one

Still no way to read notifications with a dark background, and is there any way to ignore a person yet? Thanks.

@Arkandel

Unless one of those builds is pulling jars of spiders out of nowhere, I am not interested in what anyone else says is viable

@Entropy said:

The biggest conundrum, really, that I see is the Atlantis issue, with Namor and Aquaman. I've been talking to some people, and there are some ideas about how to resolve it, but it can still be a bit tricksy to work around in a feasible manner.

Eh, Namor and Aqua are both half breeds, make them brothers, vying for the throne. In both worlds Atlanteans are /normally/ blue skinned to begin with.

Or you have two separate underwater cultures claiming to be the /real/ Atlantis, and have them be essentially at War, hot or cold. We know Namor would definitely go to war about it.

Or you can go with Namor being dead, since he was decapitated recently, and the survivors joined up with Aquaman's Atlantis.

@Soresu said:

I never played on Minos Cluster, but apparently it was a game among the Gods.. I am sorry I missed out on it.

It had severe clique issues, I tried playing as a new independent and essentially it became like ATS to me because nobody was willing to let newcomers into the RP. So all I could do was fly around and do cargo runs and not once did I even get inspected so there was no RP there either...

I don't know, maybe it was the time I tried Minos Cluster but it was very much 'full but dead' when I got there.

@Arkandel said:

@Apos said:

As for severity, in my experience everyone worries about banning people that don't deserve it but that doesn't really happen so much as, 'Gosh, this person has been sending lewd pages to women. Let's warn him and oh good he says he understands and promises to stop' and a month later he is still there and 5 or 6 women have stopped logging in for mysterious reasons.

Absolutely, and I agree... I just don't know we'd catch this person by looking at their BG, that's all.

Just because you can't catch them /all/ doesn't mean you shouldn't /try/ to filter anyone.

This is why my 'no approval' characters are so much weaker than a regular character that requires approval. Practically anyone should be able to thump a side kick except perhaps another side kick so if they break theme to much they can either get help, or be disposed of ICly. All else fails, I have /zero/ qualms with removing theme breaking crazy from my game because they agreed to it by skipping past my AUP and just typing the requisite command to get them out of the start room.

People should really read what they are agreeing to before Apple turns them into human centipedes.

@faraday said:

@Lithium said:

My current idea re-chargen is to allow pretty much instant approval for 'side kick' level characters... It'll be interesting to see how it works out.

All I can say is I hope it works out better for you than it did for me

It wasn't skill points/powers that were the problem, it was people whose backgrounds were flat-out CRAZY, or who had a seriously deficient understanding of the theme. I don't see how those sorts of problems would be any better for sidekicks vs main chars.

Yes, you can let them hit the grid and expect players to sort the mess out, but my experience is that it seriously irritates the existing players. They didn't sign on for that nonsense and it can be really disruptive to RP. I see it as my job to insulate them from craziness as much as practical, and apps are an important step.

It might, but, it's a sidekick character. If someone is greatly breaking the theme ICly then I expect the PC's to react as if that individual were psychotic and see that they got the 'help' they needed at the local Vault (The Vault is my 'super prison', it is set up in cells all over the city because the city is flippin huge) and thus the problem is solved.

@faraday

My current idea re-chargen is to allow pretty much instant approval for 'side kick' level characters, or people just brand spanking new to their powers. Regular starter characters will require approval and backgrounds at least to an extent (Bullet points of important things or the like) but it'll mostly be a code thing if I get chargen going right.

Of course in the game I want to build/am building slowly I expect PK to be a thing and ICA=ICC to be enforced not just by staff, but by the players.

It'll be interesting to see how it works out.

I don't agree with @Arkandel in this whole thing to begin with. I think if we all could play together nicely, we would have done it by now. People become to invested, unwilling to back down, unwilling to compromise, and /that/ is why there needs to be rules.

Society has laws, not necessarily because they are good, but because they provide boundaries of what is acceptable, and what is not. Without those boundaries things quickly devolve into Lord of the Flies type situations.

Humans are cruel, we are vicious, we are wicked, and we care about ourselves more than others when taken as a whole. There are outliers, but really, Human Nature is pretty much the same as wild beasts (Look at Otters and Sea Lion pups, Sea Lions and Penguins, Dolphins, Killer Whales, etc).

Civilization, Society, all rules we have put into place to try and stem the tide of destruction that happens when humans meet other humans.

It doesn't work that well given the amount of murder and worse that is ongoing even today.

So why would anyone think this would be a utopia in a mush format? I have no idea. It's like a big hands of sign by the staff saying 'Do what you will.' and eventually people will be asshats enough that Staff will have to place down rules, they'll have to enforce them, and it'll end up just like every other mu* with enforced rules and staff interactions...

@surreality said:

@Alzie said:

@Misadventure Players are never helpless, especially so in games. All it takes is clicking exit.

This is still more than a bit overly simplistic.

It isn't really 'click exit', it's 'potentially scrap a character you may have been playing for years and otherwise have excellent experiences on because a specific individual can't behave maturely enough to leave you alone'.

If it was as simple as 'click exit', this hobby would have substantially less angst-ridden bullshit in it than it does.

That's not entirely true. It is as simple as click an exit, or type quit and hit enter.

Nothing lasts forever and these are games not life and death. They're really not. If something is happening you simply cannot handle, then quit is an option.

There's also the option of talking to staff, page locking, leaving situations with the person who is the problem, or trying to resolve that problem.

There are /other/ options, but quit is most definitely one of them.

Sometimes it's the only one left when a game has stopped being fun or entertaining.

Does it suck? Sure, it can, but in the end we have to be willing to let go of a character or it leads to even /more/ asshattery. Nothing lasts forever and if the time spent on a 'game' is more frustrating than fun, it's time to go imho.

@Ganymede

Thanks I appreciate it. I have some ideas myself and I want to make sure I am going to settle on a system before I start putting to much into it. I have a lot of possible ideas milling around at the moment.

@Lilli said:

I've looked at most of the superhero/comic themed mushes, I think. My problem is most of them use a DC or Marvel included content.
While I like said content, I don't want to RP in said content. Those I used to play on are gone, I think. (With original themes), or too rules heavy for me to deal with, making me feel at a loss of how to function within the game.

Yeah I am the same, I don't want to deal with Kryptonians, or Magneto, or other already pre-written crazyness. It is impossible to keep up with all the versions of these characters, and then when people want to put their personal spins on things it gets even worse. This is why I dislike Marvel/DC/<insertpublishedcomichere> themed games.

I don't know, maybe I should just build up an Aberrant based game, put in some house rules to handle things like Mega-Strength, get rid of Taint, and just go. At least a billion people are familiar with the core of WoD rules so it'd be easy to pick up.

Necro time! I am also looking for a SuperHero game, preferably one with a coded system that is actually used to determine resolutions, and is active.

I know 6th Age, HeroMUX, and Brave New World are all pretty active, but, mostly consent based all of them.

ChampionsMUSH is in dire need of more players, but that system is very difficult to get into in the best of times and they have a lot of house rules. That said, I'd be willing to help make a person's character for them if they wanted to join, setting up the sheet stuff not writing backgrounds and the like, I could guarantee would be an approvable character.

My fiending for a new Super Hero game was being met by building my game but time is now at a premium so it'll be years before I finish it unless a more competent coder wants to help me out so... yeah!

Games, if any... I've checked mudconnect and mudstats of course already... thanks.

@faraday said:

@SG said:

If a story is 90% set in stone regardless of the dice, then why have them at all?

For the last 10%?

But seriously - I coded FS3Combat, which will never kill a player. The worst you get is incapacitated. I believe that you can have fun quirky outcomes and randomness and consequences without having death.

Also, between folks idling out and being killed off, and NPCs being killed off, and the handful of PCs who surprise everyone by choosing to be killed off in dramatic fashion... I don't see a lack of death as a big problem on the games I've played on, honestly.

But I'm not saying anyone else is wrong if they like risk and chance. Just saying that's not fun for me - and I know I'm not alone.

There are plenty of games where Death is by consent only, and I am not saying there aren't times when throwing the dice out to kill a character dramatically isn't awesome (I've done it myself in the past), but on the flip side there are very few games anymore that death /isn't/ optional on outside of rare circumstance.

Especially in the 'super hero' genre.

So for me, I wish I had time to find a good system and finish Horizon City, just because it offers that experience. No game is for everyone, won't catch me on Neighvada Nights for example and I believe trying to cater to everyone is a recipe for failure.

@ThatGuyThere said:

@Cirno
Because M Night made a couple of good ones first.
that is the true secret to making it in Hollywood, put out one or two good and profitable movies then start churning the out the dreck, and raking in money.

The good ones in M nights case are Sixth Sense and Unbreakable, granted Sixth Sense really doesn't hold up well after time and shock have passed.

UInbreakable was panned, bad... Signs got a lot of love though why any aliens would come /here/ if water made them melt is beyond me. Our planet is practically nothing but water and if they could travel here, they'd fucking know it.

As someone who never watched the cartoon I actually didn't mind his Avatar movie, neat special effects at least. Was better than trees making us suicidal at least.

@Ghost said:

@Arkandel Respectfully, I disagree. What we are doing on these mushes is more akin to tabletop gaming than MMORPG. If a game has 50 individual logged in IPs and 100+ characters, are we talking 100+ protagonists who are the main character in the story and are thusly protected from death until it is delivered on favorable terms? Nah. We are playing tabletop RPGs, and every tabletop RPG has rules for death and dying, but most games try to avoid using that bit out of fear that the player will ragequit and take 20 players with them.

It's why sometimes players choose actions like "rush the minigun that is spitting 40,000 rounds per minute" instead of "find cover and call for backup", because after a certain amount of time you know which GMs will kill your char, and which will give them a miraculous survival. Lots of people wanna be the hero, and that lack of logic quadruples when there is no OOC fear of repercussion, such as character death.

See, this is why I have no fear of killing /anyone/ in any of my plots on any of my games. Without actual risk, there is no reward, and nothing has value. Even if the only thing being risked is time spent and loss of potential stories. Make a new character, make new stories! It always amused me how some people see PK as the 'end' of stories, no it isn't. It's just a focus shift.

@Jaded

I spend a lot of time on the Nexus so I keep fairly abreadst of things but I do enjoy those youtube videos when I have spare time at my current job.

Not that I RP much these days, but, I personally start typing as soon as I finish reading and absorbing the next person's pose. Then as other people pose (If it's more than one individual in the scene) I adjust my pose to react to the whole, and so on and so forth. Sometimes it takes a few minutes to get it all updated, but I find it is not exactly hard to keep things moving at a good clip, and I hate it when things stall out too.

That said, this is one of those topics that really is personal opinion and preference. I'm going to toss this thread shortly since I won't have time to continue the game anytime soon.

@Lilli I can't imagine coding into the game directly, I'd screw things up. Even using notepad++ to check for unclosed code... I still miss them sometimes heh.

Way braver than I am.

I've ran a few successfull campaigns on mushes, but for me it's about not having an ending, it's about having a solid /beginning/ as to why this impacts the world and then letting characters run with it. You have to know what the NPC's are like personality wise pretty well before hand because you /will/ have to adapt to situations on the fly.

When doing it this way, it may resolve in an entirely different way than you imagined, and in my opinion that is awesome. It's organic, players impacted the world to some extent, and it will impact the future of the game to some extent, large or small.

I've also seen it done badly where the GM refused to let people try anything except certain predetermined path(s) to success.

For me you can't rail road it, you just can't. It's not just your story once you unleash it onto the game world, like any plan, it won't survive contact with opposing forces.