Soooooooooooo....

I've been looking for games to play for like, three weeks. World of Darkness is tough for me to get into at the best of times, but none of the current offerings have managed to seize my imagination. There are no really good superhero games (all the current games seem pretty... restrictive, to me) and the only Shadowrun or Swords & Sorcery games in town are Denver and Tenebrae respectively, both of which have crazy issues.

Straight up, I don't know if I've got the time to get something off the ground fast, but I figure if I can't find something I'd like to play, the best option is to do what I do in real life - make it. Before I even start looking at shit like 'how do you get a dice rolling system going?' and 'how do I make sure backups exist?' Step one seems like it'd be 'decide what you wanna do'.

I fear World of Darkness because it comes with so much baggage and I don't know (or like) the themes well enough, so I'm going to take that off the table.

I've been on a huge Savage Worlds kick lately, which has the advantage of being very easy to understand, very cheap, and very flexible, so I'm leaning towards that as a system choice. With that in mind, I'm thinking of the following options to provide something that isn't anime-based or urban fantasy (as those genres seem to have plenty of support).

1. Deadlands - Has the advantage of being a published setting and I've got all the Deadlands: Reloaded stuff. A new video game is coming out at some point in the near future and that'll hopefully spur some interest too (did you see what I did there? Hah). Deadlands is 'fantasy western' so you can have your scary 'horror' elements in there, but it is also about gunslinging and being a bad hombre. Could be interesting, but I fear it is pretty niche.

2. Original Fantasy - Swords & Sorcery with magic and adventuring as a key focus. I've always liked the idea of playing around with a Guilds-type structure, where people can form up adventuring companies and go questing for gold, loot and glory. I don't know any published fantasy settings well enough to want to try and convert them over, but this has the advantage of being generic enough anyone ought to be able to get the general gist... with the potential pitfall that a lot of people might not want to bother learning about the (oh so rich and deep) lore of whatever setting I cobble together.

3. Oriental Adventures! Basically the same as the above but set in a more Samurai/Ninja/Weird Japanese Monster setting than a classical western fantasy one. This is mostly because I think samurai adventures are bloody cool, but I'm not sure I'd want to mash them all together into one big pot. I am seriously burned out on 'multiverse' style games and (personally) think it is better to try and keep themes mostly separate.

4. Superheroes? Basically the same idea as the fantasy one but... for superheroes. I have the notes for a game I was going to run in the aftermath of a Crisis on Infinite Worlds style event where, basically, the good guys lost and heroes from a bunch of worlds were shoved into the one remaining Earth with amnesia, and are now remembering who they were. This has the advantage of my ... having a bunch of shit written for this already, but I'd have to convert it all over to Savage Worlds and there's already a few superhero games around, even if they aren't to my tastes.

5. Space Opera - I could easily get into some sort of space opera thing as an alternative to the fantasy idea. Again, love the idea of ships and crews running around trying to scratch out a living as weird aliens and political machinations boil in the background. Some sort of Babylon-5-esque setup would probably be my choice here... but again, this'd require a lot of work and people might be turned off to the idea of learning all about a new sci-fi world just for the opportunity to play.

I'm thinking that if I go for one of the original ideas, I make it VERY OBVIOUS in BIG FLASHING LETTERS that I am open to integrating more original content into the world (but it would have to be original - nothing makes me facepalm harder these days than seeing Daleks and Klingons turn up in the same setting).

The hope would be that these kinds of action-focused 'Go Be Protagonist'-esque settings would help take some of the pressure off me as potential Headstaff, because in any case I would want people to focus on the adventure more than politicking amongst each other, and thus the potential for drama bombs would be ... less. Not nothing, but less.

What do you guys think? Do you have preferences for the above? Is there a genre you think is crying out for representation? Is there something painfully obvious I'm missing? Is Savage Worlds gonna mean that it is literally just me, sat alone, on my own, on my server, pouting for eternity? Most of my old MU*ing contacts have drifted off into the ether so... any advice y'all can offer would be greatly appreciated!

I've done it from the other end too. I would never respond to someone with a paragraph of aggressive text. If I really couldn't be bothered to read what they'd put, I'd just say 'hey, please redo this in a more conventional way'.

Oh, and whilst I was there, there was a grand total of one other person sat in the chargen room. I can't say for sure what the playerbase is, but I'm fairly confident that they won't be handling more than ~5 apps in a week. The workload is not exactly excessive right now. If this guy can't be polite at the rate he's working at the moment, he's just going to buckle if the playerbase actually picks up.

@Coin said:

While I understand your frustration at being replied to that way, and while I agree that, if your paraphrasing is accurate, they should have been a lot more polite, I can also understand the sentiment of being annoyed or frustrated by someone who writes a background this way.

As someone who has handled countless apps in the past--and a lot of people know this of me--I fucking hate long backgrounds. And writing them as poetry would probably make it worse since I don't like most poetry, and why do I have to read your background in this format when it just makes it more effort for me? It's a game. It's not your weekly writing group. Give me the basics and that's it. You find it boring to write them, but it's equally if not more boring to read them. I would much rather just page with a player and talk about their character history; at least that way I'm engaged.

Honestly, if he'd said 'This is not the kind of app I'd like to see, please rewrite it' I would have done so without complaint. I'd have been a little disappointed maybe, but I was actually prepared for that; it wouldn't have taken much effort to turn what I'd written into two-three paragraphs of explicit 'this is who I am and where I came from'.

It was specifically the 'This makes me want to dock you XP' comment AND the fact that (when I picked up the message) it had sat there for ~4 hours with nothing for me to respond to other than 'This is bad and you should feel bad' as essentially the only response. that's what made me decide that it wasn't worth bothering to continue. My leisure time is a fairly precious resource these days; I've got no desire to spend it interacting with people who are angry/antagonistic... or even who are just bad at communicating, frankly.

@Volund said:

Would like to know who said that and for what character. 5 days is too long to wait to get a response like that. On the 5 day part I can only clench my teeth and sigh because nothing I have done in the past has ever lead to a well-oiled staff team (largely why I stay out of policies), but that kinda response is not so cool.

It was Qaf (I think that was the correct spelling) - my character's name was Mahn'di. I'm unsure if they'll still be around mind.

I decided to give this place a shot because I had some spare time and was bored. I was going for a warrior-poet kind of vibe, so I did the background as a series of stanzas - writing histories is one of the most boring aspects of chargen IMO, so I figured I'd spice things up a little.

After waiting 5 days for someone to look at the app, the response I got was 'Writing your background this way does not help. In fact it makes me angry and want to dock you XP. I can't do that, but don't do this again. I will have more comments for you later.'

The coder/owner is a nice guy - really great! But every other member of staff working for him seems like a colossal tool.

I was vaguely looking forward to running some Exalted scenes on the odd weekend I have some time free - I'll probably find a Play by Post game somewhere to occupy me instead.

Just thought I'd share my experience.

I feel compelled to link to: http://savagefallout.blogspot.co.uk/

Fallout using Savage Worlds. It is what I'm playing in my IRL tabletop group right now and it works really well. Also free!

Honestly, it depends how it is handled.

This seems like a ripe setting to explore Blade vs Edward.

Okay, updated the race page and added a new 'State of the Galaxy' entry.

I may well take you up on that offer, Coin - it is always great to know what people like and what they don't. I'm trying to cast my net as wide as I can here without becoming overly generic.

Yeah, the idea was that their 'real' name has been lost - or more likely deliberately erased. I think I'll take a crack at rewriting the race entry to make that more obvious...

I like the 'native language is partly-psionic' idea too - I'm totally going to steal that. I may incorporate it into the origin of Human psionics as well - Imperials probably didn't feel the need to encode their communications since psionics are so rare anyway, and so humanity developed a souped-up psionics programme to crack them in the war... like the enigma machine, but with human lives and captured aliens!

The Imperials aren't meant to feel terribly alien physically - they are more alien in culture and capability than in looks. Personally I quite like the idea that they refer to themselves in that way but if the consensus is that it doesn't work I can definitely go back and have another look.

The idea is that, despite their arrogance and certainty about their own superiority... they don't actually know a lot about their own origins. They don't know where they came from, how their technology developed or what their history is - they have a myth, but that just raises more questions than it answers. I may make that more explicit in the writeup. (I have some vague ideas for a metaplot around answering some of those questions, but it'd rely on having a decent amount of Imperial players who, you know... would care )

Hah, never heard of that before.

... is the similarity a good thing or a bad thing?

Derp. Permissions changed.