My favorite article explaining zombie popularity was on Cracked and explained there is cycle between zombie and vampire media. When the right is in power, we get mindless hordes of consumers that all conform and can't think. When the left is in power, we get sexy, deviant foreigners that are parasites.
I was tired of zombies in 2010. Can we finally, finally move past zombies?
Oh great. Gany is running things? Now we have to worry about...
Hooray for us! We are accurately measuring the increasing spread of infection through our staff that we are creating by forcing people to expose each other to COVID!
To go down a L&L setting without bloodlines mattering, this idea combines some fairy tale-esque ideas with a little Mandate of Heaven. The title-holders of a piece of land are literally chosen by that land. Somehow a person becomes imbued with the trust of the genius loci of that place and becomes the noble of that place. It could follow a family line for a while before jumping to someone outside that family. A person could become entrusted by many lands, growing in power.
However, the land is influenced by the virtues and moral failings of its chosen paragon and each land has expects different things from its holder. If a noble lives up to the proper virtues, the land flourishes, crops grow two, three, fourfold in abundance, rivers and streams fill with fish, wild fruits and vegetables are practically tripped over with every step through the woods, every day seems brighter, the colors more vivid, and every night is peaceful. If a noble fails to meet the land's expectations, colors grow duller, the fields harder to plow, crops shrink in size, the streams become muddy sludge flows, and the rivers choppy and treacherous, the woods fill with thorns and poisonous plants, and the nights filled with fear.
I would probably use something like Pendragon's personality traits for this and give each land a selection of traits it cares about that are tied to the feel of that particular place. A wild, verdant rainforest might prefer Energetic, Indulgent, Arbitrary, Lustful, and Suspicious. A desert could prefer Cruel, Modest, Prudent, Honest, and Temperate. A noble who tries to hold the titles for many different lands will have to juggle the traits those lands desire of their title holder.
Thank you. I'd rather not derail the thread with a redundant discussion of something that's already being hashed out elsewhere.
To address the other half of your first post, simply put this thread is focused less on game mechanics and more on setting. Fluff not crunch.
@arkandel said in Alternative Lords & Ladies Settings:
Now I'm no expert in L&L but for example what would the difference be between what is being discussed here and what's already the system on Arx? Gender or sexual preference don't have a difference (but please correct me if I'm wrong) there either.
Go read the last 22 pages over the past two days of The Arx Peeve Thread. It starts here: https://musoapbox.net/topic/2381/the-arx-peeve-thread/26035?page=1302
@insomniac7809 said in Alternative Lords & Ladies Settings:
Real life nobility tended to get messy. Really messy, with the titles and ownership always disputed and shifting. Less "I own this contiguous area of territory, handed down by my forefathers into my care, to be passed down intact" and more like the portfolio of a major corporation--"I have the three core territories, some holdings on the border that are contested, have my eyes on some acquisitions I'm looking to make, and a couple things I wound up with that are frankly too far away to be worth their while so I'm just hoping to trade them off for something I can use."
Oh absolutely. Cyberpunk is essentialism feudalism in the future with the focus of the story being on the everyman rather than the "peerage."
@squirreltalk said in Alternative Lords & Ladies Settings:
@ominous I'd assume they'd inherit the title of whichever person involved in their procreation had the title, and marriage would still be important, but admittedly I haven't thought through the gritty details.
What if both individuals have titles? Does the offspring get claims to both titles?
The Ten Houses kind of sounds like how the peerage works in Monarchies of Mau. I wonder if the writers of the game borrowed a lot from the series.
@squirreltalk said in Alternative Lords & Ladies Settings:
I suppose you could just eliminate gender as a concept. Have everyone functionally capable of both ends of procreation. Tends to draw a very female-body-oriented kind of playerbase, but.
The discussion is less about procreation and more about maintaining castes and right to rule. See my authority equals ass-kicking example for an idea that has absolutely nothing to do with procreation as a means of passing on titles.
Assuming your genderless/sexless idea also requires inheritance of titles through offspring, how would you design the social norms? Would children inherit the title of the person who birthed them? Would there be a sort of dominance aspect, like with sea slug matings, where the lower socially ranked person has to bear the children of the higher ranked individual who would pass on their titles to the offspring? Do they reproduce asexually?
@Grayson beat me to it. The -lineal suffix is about lineage, patrilineal being lineage through the father, matrilineal being lineage through the mother. The -archy suffix is about rule: monarchy, autarchy, anarchy, patriarchy, matriarchy. Something being matrilineal says nothing about the rulership. It could still be a matrilineal patriarchy with men holding the political power inherited through their mother's line, so instead of inheriting from your father, you're inheriting from your maternal uncles. The Albions in the Kushiel setting work this way from what I recall.
Since we have a long running discussion about gay characters in a lords & ladies setting, I figured a constructive thread discussing ways to do a server that is open to alternatives for lords & ladies would be a good idea.
Let's start by establishing a baseline. The bog standard L&L setting is heavily patriarchal, is monogamous or polygynous, has political power held entirely or almost entirely by male characters, and has bloodline being tied to political power.
As the central conceit of the lords & ladies genre of MU*s is that there is a class-system in the setting, suggestions should aim to maintain that aspect of the lords & ladies veneer, meaning that a peerage exists within the setting and that the right to rule is somehow maintained in a verisimilitudinous/believable manner. An idea for a server with a classless society would not fit with the discussion; though, it might still be an interesting server idea to pursue.
Discussion should be constructive, as this is not the Hogpit, and should focus on how suggestions could be made better, on inconsistencies, on interesting offshoots or elaborations to an idea, on the verisimilitude/believability of the system, on blindspots the the writer might not be aware of in their idea, etc.
I'll start. These will just be quick rundowns rather than full explorations of the ideas.
Matrilineal, non-matrimonial society. Political power and titles are passed down solely through mothers to their children. Marriage doesn't exist. No one cares who your father is. A prince could become the king because his mom is the queen. His children won't inherit his political title all. His sister's children would. The prince, as a king, would not have a queen consort.
Matrilineal, matrimonial society. Same as above but there is marriage, likely only for political reasons. A prince could become the king because his mom is the queen. The king consort might be his father or might not. Maybe his father was the hunky stablehand the queen had a dalliance with before she was married. It doesn't matter. The prince, once he is king, could marry someone, male or female, but the ones who will inherit his title would, again, be his sister's children not his.
Spouses and consorts/concubines. Spouses are partners who are peers or are peers of roughly the same rank. Consorts/concubines are partners who are commoners or commoners and peers of significantly lower rank. Children of spouses have the highest legitimacy to inherit, but children of consorts/concubines also can inherit if there are no spousal children or perhaps can inherit in other circumstances to be defined by the setting. Heirs can be adopted and take the same rank as children of consorts/concubines.
Authority equals ass-kicking. This is the most metal/badass option for a lords & ladies game. Might makes right...to rule. The king/queen doesn't wear a crown; they wear a title belt. The king/queen isn't the king/queen because of who their parents are; they're king/queen because they kicked the ass of the previous king/queen and no one else has been able to take the title from them yet. No one cares who marries who or whose children are whose. This might work in a shonen lords & ladies game or maybe a very high magic setting where the king/queen is the strongest sorcerer in the land and all the dukes/duchesses, counts/countesses, and barons/baronesses are progressively weaker wielders of magic.
Not necessarily. A lot of these ninnies work around livestock, so they are familiar with ivermectin. They just have never injected a horse's dose into themselves before now.
Also, this just shows why those One Weird Trick ads lasted so long. There's a market for that idea.
Critter credentials confirmed. You may proceed with the display of cute critterings.
@kestrel said in Attachment to old-school MU* clients:
@l-b-heuschkel said in Attachment to old-school MU* clients:
These are great points I hadn't considered. I know at least one person was thinking about some grid randomisation code a while back, where basically you'd input a command to go find a bar in some city and the game would automatically generate one which can then be referenced by anyone else in future, or they can just keep spawning new bars this city supposedly has. The idea was to combat the "small world" feel a lot of games suffer from, where they're supposed to represent something like a network of planets or a great medieval fantasy land but the scope is limited by how much patience builders have to fill in every detail. I live in my country's capital and can't imagine any game ever successfully mapping out all the bars and tunnels and secret hideaways it has to fully capture the feel of what life in this big city is like.
But if it robs people of even a basic sense of what the environment they're navigating is like, I can see how that would be a problem. Unless perhaps you give players the authority to pencil their additions into this vaguely hand-drawn (or even computer generated) map?
EDIT: I know the coder whose idea I'm referencing up there has posted on MSB but I can't find their posts and don't remember their handle right now. I'll link it in if I figure it out.
I have been dabbling with an idea like this but not for destinations/points of interest. I would use it to generate some random areas between the origin and destination. Maybe have it generate one random room between every set room on the grid. The grid knows that to get from point A to point D, you have to go through points B and C first, but ,when someone decides to go that way, it inserts point A.5, B.5, and C.5 on the route. Those random rooms could stick around for a while, so anyone else going from say B to E will also go through B.5 and C.5 as well, so there's a chance of two character running into one another in the random room. Honestly, though, except for a game based around overland travel between cities and such, where building out a huge grid would be exhaustive, it sounds like way too much work for very little payoff.
@arkandel said in Good or New Movies Review:
What makes it special?
I also would like to know the answer to this question. Realize that I dislike 95% of all movies made in the past 20 years and have particular disdain for the MCU.
@l-b-heuschkel said in What is a MU*?:
On a game such as WoW, you can roleplay around the story, but the story marches on no matter what you do, and without taking your actions into consideration.
What about Asheron's Call where the actions of players did affect the story on minor levels?
@derp said in The ADD/ADHD Thread (cont'd from Peeves):
Or do you want someone who makes obsessively sure that all things are on calendars and filed the way they should be just because he can't remember if he did that one yet and even though it's crossed off the post-it I don't trust the post-it?
9 times out of 10, it's that one that they want.
I am definitely detail oriented, until I am not. If it's something I am researching, incredibly detail oriented as I delve into every minutiae. If it's updating a spreadsheet entry for the tenth time after making a phone call to someone, making sure to refile I file I pulled, or some other tedious bullshit thing, not detail oriented at all.
