@silverfox said in Should Rinel become smol birb?:
Good lord please someone make a sky pirate game.
Question: Does it work if all the landmasses are floating sky islands and such and no one ever goes down to the surface below the clouds, or do skyships lose their pizzazz if everything is up in the sky?
@faraday said in Has anyone ever set up a server just for a small group of friends?:
I have, yes, and I've been on a few. The main issue with a friend-sandbox MU server is that you have neither the forced regularity of a TTRPG game ("We meet every Friday at Bob's house") nor the open-world nature of a traditional MUSH (where RP is readily available), nor the "toss out a pose when you can" nature of play-by-forum. It gets hard for folks to find RP and then things peter out. They've never lasted long.
That said, it's easy enough to spin up a server and give it a try.
One could always go the Spirit Lake route and open the server up for a limited number of outside players, so you still maintain the close-knit group a bit, while also adding enough of a playerbase to keep things closer to a traditional MU*
I am slowly reaching the conclusion that the town I now live in would be perfect for a MU* - Santa Barbara. Technically, I would use the whole County of Santa Barbara. The county has about 500,000 people in it with the Santa Barbara city area (Santa Barbara, Goleta, Montecito, unincorporated urban areas in and around them) being around 150,000, Santa Maria city area (Santa Maria, Orcutt, Guadalupe) being 130,000, Lompoc sits around 42,000 and you have a scattering other towns and cities (Ventucopa has a population of 90 in the middle of nowhere). However, there is quite a diverse mix.
Montecito has Oprah, Prince Harry and Duchess Megan, Steve Martin, and a bunch of other celebrities and other rich people living there. It's a bunch of gated estates and a couple of small-town feeling "villages" with boutique shops. Santa Barbara is your older, slightly snooty city with beaches and wealthy people with trendy shops and an actual downtown (the former Google CEO bought a mansion in the south of the city for $40 million). Goleta has more of a middle and working class vibe with some definite 80's influences to the architecture. Then you have Isla Vista which is basically a town that became all student housing next to the UC Santa Barbara, so it has the usual college town party scene. Santa Maria is your somewhat wealthier working class city. Lompoc is your not-so-wealthy working class city. Guadalupe is your Spanish speaking working class city. Summerland has the feel of a former resort town that is now filled with retirees (and Kevin Costner). Carpinteria feels like a city on the cusp of booming as cannabis and health care industries move in.
Then there's Vandenburg Air Force base for your military storylines and alien invasions. Solvang is a Danish town in the middle of California with its unique architecture and shops. Surrounding it are Buellton, Los Olivos, and Santa Ynez and the Santa Barbara wine country with vineyards and ranches. The Los Padres National Forest covers most of the mountains (which had snow this weekend causing Camino Cielo road to be closed for snow and ice, so you can still get your snowy weather stories). The Channel Islands are right off shore which are nature preserve, but you could pretend Catalina Island off of LA is also up here and have your island resort town too if you want it.
Honestly, there's a lot of variety in the county. Today for my job I went from a middle class-ish home in Summerland near the beach to a gated villa in Montecito to driving past snow-topped mountains to get to a home of a Trump supporter with an old 70s Mustang, who I am kind of surprised didn't pull a shotgun on me and tell me to get off his land with a thick Texas accent.
So if you wanted to tell a story about your character hob-nobbing with celebrities and tech millionaires in a vacation home or at the Ritz Carlton, while someone else is playing a vampire preying on partying college kids about 6 miles away, while someone else is playing a cartel member in a car chase with police 30 miles away, driving next to the most recent SpaceX launch from Vandenburg, while ALL of that is happening in an area that honestly feels like a bunch of small towns instead of New York, Chicago, or LA, that is entirely possible here.
There's even a strip club in Santa Barbara - a Spearmint Rhino - and a casino on the Chumash reservation in Santa Ynez, so you can find your vices too.
@Wizz
Yeah, he swings from "artistic, philosophical sort" to "misanthropic, badwrongfun neckbeard" pretty quickly.
@secretfire said in What Types of Games Would People Like To See?:
I still kinda want to see a Lords and Ladies style game that's either High Fantasy or High Sci-Fi, with plenty of plotting and intrigue. Not in the Arx-style (I can't get my head around the Arx codebase, its too much) - but even so, with plenty of people plotting to get the 'King of the Hill' spot and keep it.
My background is more freeform, where if you want rp - you get on channel and go 'hey, who wants to rp' then people find a spot to play in. I mean, I've done code-heavy places before (and by 'code heavy', I mean some scifi places), but Arx felt more like a text-based MMO to me in terms of implementation. I'm sure its great, and that people into it have a super-fun time, its just...a bit much, for me. I generally want to be able to log on, find a scene, and roleplay. There might be plotting, or intrigue, or backstabbing, or great loss in it...but it should still be rp. With Arx, I felt like I was running around some area in an MMO or a NWN persistent world wondering where everyone was.
I think these desires are mutually exclusive. Plotting and intrigue needs something concrete to plot and intrigue over and that concreteness comes from game mechanics. Otherwise you're just stabbing each other in the back over the color of the draperies. I mean, I guess you could plot an assassination on your brother, so you can inherit a pointless crown that doesn't mean anything, but that strikes me as just being mean to the player of the brother for no reason, because, again, the crown is pointless. Kind of like kicking a dog, because it was sleeping and no one was watching, so you could get away with it.
@Jennkryst said in What Types of Games Would People Like To See?:
So I got my 'Your Eclipse Phase Hardcopy from the Kickstarter just shipped' email today. So THAT. Arx in space, where you can be a squid that shoots lasers.
What about Coriolis - the Third Horizon? I think that would work even better.
@lotherio said in Are there any high fantasy MU*s?:
I started working on one not too long ago focused on small folk (sort of like gnomes) and their high fantasy adventures/world. The knights road like snow lynxes, war ponies and wild boar. It had an encroaching enemy of other small folk (goblin-like) who mounted like winter wolves and wolverines. It was a small forest location and focused on their struggles, the bad ones were winning the struggle to control the vale/valley. It stalled as some collaborators weren't sure about playing wee folk.
Sounds a bit like Mouse Guard, which is a MU* I would like to see sometime.
@Lain If the easiest method of presenting the information is also the best, then that's a win-win.
It is my villainous plot to turn all threads into gif threads.
Also I am hoping we will overwhelm Rinel with cuteness so we can change their name with no objection.
I had a similar idea, though, with more of a focus on megacorporations fighting each other for resources and plots of land. I was going to steal some ideas from Offworld Trading Company, using a hex grid to mark off the world map. Throw in some Tales from the Borderlands with its space cowboys and some cyberpunk elements and voila! Yet another game idea I won't see to fruition.
Anyways, I am very interested in seeing how this develops. It looks like you have hashed out quite a bit of where you want to go with things.
EDIT - A random thought popped into my head from previous conversations months ago. Someone mentioned the joy of space trucking in a MU*. You might want to consider creating something like H-space (I think that's what its called) on the planet that people can drive/fly/sail/whatever through to get the poly-neutronium-yttrium-silver-chloride-154 from point A to point B. Though, it's sounding like you want a smaller grid.
@lotherio said in Are there any high fantasy MU*s?:
For me, I couldn't do one of the established RPGs/settings like Mouseguard or Humblewood.
Me either. It's kind of why I want to turn the mice into humans and just have the dangers of the world be equally large and dangerous as the dangers in Mouse Guard are to mice. Make the snake a giant snake. Make the owl a dragon, wyvern, or a roc.
@Ganymede And harder to defend from others trying to take it for themselves.
Honestly the best rendition of a killer robot ever.
@Roz's point about Republic City is a good one and Republic City is actually the basis for my idea of a fantasy island world. It's a Babylon 5/Citadel - a central hub where people from around the world/cosmos gather for a good fluff reason that doesn't break verisimilitude.
@Coin's point about having it set after the death of an Avatar so it is set that no one will be playing the Avatar is also a good one.
My understanding of the setting is that the number of airbenders are pretty low around Korra's time, so maybe set it a few generations after Korra so that the number of airbenders can be reasonably increased, that way airbender PCs won't be seen as very special/strange.
Yes. I am surprised at MUs not borrowing more ideas from other RP mediums and tabletop games. Microscope, Dread, Fiasco, Icarus, Universalis, and other atypical RPGs have interesting ideas.
Status symbols are overly expensive and still get purchased. Rational actors humans are not. One of the shortcomings of many Economics and Political Science models.
We got princesses being kidnapped. We got fencing. Obviously the next gif needs to be this:
