Best posts made by Pyrephox

@Bobotron said:

@Pyrephox
As far as #2, this is why so many games have automated, coded combat systems, particularly if they do not use an existing RPG property for their system. If the system says you are hit, it does everything -- proccs status effects, assigns damage, and if you're KOed it sets you KOed. The expectation is that you'll roleplay around the combat system output dynamically. It's an ingrained thing in one line of MU*s and their culture, and allows people to freeform the results if they want to do so.

Yeah, and I do like that. It SHOULD make combat smoother, and faster. The problem with a lot of tabletop systems on MU* is that tabletop systems tend to have a lot of corner cases and weird interactions between different rules and powers (especially once supplements are added) which then negates the benefit of coding, since people have to stop and work out "Well, okay, but if I have this power, it says X, so I shouldn't even be able to be hit by that guy, because he doesn't have power Y. But he does have power Z, that doesn't SPECIFICALLY say it overrules power X, but logically it would seem to..."

So, I guess, to my further note of design challenges for a MU* RPG system, it'd be "Must be a clean system, where the code can resolve 99 percent of opposed contests without intervention."

@Coin For some people! For me, honestly, I found it almost impossible to fire up a separate client and do things the old way when I tried to go back to a 'regular' MU*. It was just constant, low-level frustration that made the experience a lot less pleasant.

And, I mean, I'm someone who started MU*ing with a raw telnet connection (and did that for about a year or so until someone introduced me to clients), so it's not that I haven't 'roughed it', before. I just don't want to NOW.

@L-B-Heuschkel Man, I'm really surprised those things are still around. I remember news articles about them several years ago that noted that - being clones - they're super vulnerable to disease/parasites, and would likely to be wiped out as soon as something hit the population.

On the other hand, I suppose it's nice that SOMETHING is thriving in 2020, even if it is an invasive army of crawfish clones.

@zombiegenesis said in Potential M&M 3E OC Game:

And thusly I'm at a bit of an impasse. I'm just not a fan of M&M and its forced sense of "balance" and I'm not sure what I'd use instead. Hero/Champions is probably my favorite system but I think that'd be a hard pill for some to swallow.

So, yeah, that's where I'm at. Sort of languishing. Thankfully I've found some people to help out with another game so I'm not just twiddling my thumbs.

I think you might be able to do Hero/Champions if you simplified chargen for most people. Like, had pre-built common powers that people could just choose in chargen and add onto their sheet. Maybe an 'advanced' version for people who know the system and want to do weird things, too.

@Saturna said in MUs That We Would Love To Make (But Won't):

@Ominous I like all of these, but especially the fae.

I would actually adore a changeling-only WoD game, getting more into the Courts and politicking. Entitlements, venturing into the Hedge, etc. Obviously with True Fae threats here and there.

I would love this, but without a focus on politicking and more a focus on the urban part of urban fantasy - Huntsmen, relationships with mortals and how Changelings navigate finding allies or enemies among the various horrors of the darkness, with oneriomancy and Bastions and hobgoblins enticing both humans and Lost into dangerous bargains.

@krmbm That...is a good question. Especially if you're having debutantes as a focus. Girls were presented as young as twelve, historically, although fifteen to eighteen were more common, and usually married between 1-3 years of their coming out.

@auspice said in A Regency MU (Conceptual):

Gambling halls and the like would be present, but characters populating them would be alts as opposed to someone's primary pc (reason being it's not the focus of the game and I don't want balls with 75% commoners because 'but I wanna go!')

I'm not quite sure what you mean, here. The nobility went to gaming hells, and commoners did go to balls and participate in the Season - the daughters of naval and military officers, physicians, clergy, and barristers could all be presented at Court, and as those were considered aristocratic professions, they were definitely part of the social whirl of London. Any sufficiently wealthy person could be invited to the events of the ton, or any sufficiently /exciting/ person - high class courtesans and entertainers often went to balls, even if they wouldn't be invited to the most rarefied venues or to intimate gatherings. Rather famously, Beau Brummell, one of the most influential figures of Regency fashion, was not a peer, but rather a middle-class fellow and military officer who caught the eye of the Prince Regent.

I think that's perfectly reasonable, yeah. And probably should be done more often, since some people think of async as 'once every couple of hours' or 'I have to go to sleep, but we can pick up tomorrow' and others see it as 'one pose every day or two'.

@il-volpe said in A healthy game culture:

@pyrephox It seems like a lot of the PKs I remember and have chatted about had OOC motivations first. Someone saw a chance to PK somebody who pissed them off in pages and get away with it IC, and did it. We all decided to play Let's Hunt and Kill Darke and damn the consequences, he was ruining the game anyway. Ones between players who are friendly or neutral to one another much much more often included either a warning and an out or hiring a third party to do the dirty deed.

I think there's definitely an OOC aspect to a lot of PKs. Sometimes, it's because people are trying to correct an OOC problem through IC means (the 'this guy is ruining the game' issue where the game doesn't have a way to say 'this player is actively making the game unfun for a lot of players, can we uninvite them' but it DOES let you just kill any of their PCs who cause a problem until they give up trying to play), and sometimes because people get caught up in the Righteousness of a PK (the 'this guy dumped my BFF - HE MUST DIE' issue), etc.

I tend to think that the most valuable PVP is not fatal to anyone's PC. I'd rather see PVP that focused on competing desires and rivalries where it isn't 'winner take all' but characters could have wins that aren't stable and losses they can recover from - and where IC losses don't translate into OOC assumptions that the player doesn't know how to play/the character isn't competent.

Which, again, comes back to that culture issue and - as mentioned above - staff that are invested in setting up that culture and spending their time mediating and promoting it. And that's a hard thing to find. There's not a lot of people who want to spend their time herding angry, anti-social cats instead of having pretendy fun times.

@sunny said in Alternative Lords & Ladies Settings:

I still have permission to set a game in West's universe. ^^ I doubt I'll have energy any time in the foreseeable future, but it's still something I think about a lot.

Holy shit. That would be AMAZING.

I don't know how anyone would do it, though. It's so high fantasy and there's so MUCH. It's also so--there are so many genuinely hard IC choices to be made in that world, and so many MU* players are not capable of dealing with difficult choices. I feel like it would be a horrible disaster.

But man, I would play that disaster for as long as I could.

@ominous Possibly! Although it's also likely that both of them took inspiration from other sources - the Ten are basically highly formalized merchant guilds when it gets right down to it. The Empire has a hereditary monarchy, but it's VERY strange. (The Twin Kings rule; they are the sons of the gods of Justice and Wisdom. They take human wives, who the gods of Justice and Wisdom then procreate with, and those god-born children become the heirs, who take wives...etc. But half-god children are fairly common in that setting, and generally can talk to their celestial parent, etc.)

I think there was a Legend of the Five Rings MU* for a while - I remember playing on it briefly. I think the problem is that it's a very rigid setting, meant to provide a small tabletop group plenty of opportunities to have to navigate high-stakes social interactions with unforgiving rules of conduct. This works a lot less well in a MU* setting, so you might have to think about how you want that to work, and give people some specific guidance on what the OOC expectations are for certain IC constructs like etiquette and honor.

@songtress I am here to destroy your illusions about humanity!

@pacha said in Alternative Lords & Ladies Settings:

@misadventure

Yeah, I mean, in the historical example I gave that is what happened. It was very common in ancient Rome. I just find it odd that we can accept dragons and magic and sentient animals but adoption is the thing that breaks immersion.

I think, for the answer to that, you'd have to explore why people want to play L&L games in the first place. It seems to me that quite a few - maybe even the majority - of people who are attracted to these games do so because they WANT to play marriage RP with Important Babies and powerful lineages. The prince/ss fantasy isn't quite the same if anyone gets to be a royal just by being adopted by one.

Which isn't to say such a game would fail or be a bad idea, just that it probably would need to consider its audience, because some of the immediate appeal of the genre for a lot of players would be absent. You DON'T see people lining up to play political games centered around guilds or senates or free cities, even those would be valid settings and even easier to have a wide variety of characters in a MU* setting.

@insomniac7809 said in Balancing wizards and warriors:

@pyrephox said in Balancing wizards and warriors:

I don't know much about the WoT setting, so I can't speak to it in specific, but when I think about balancing 'wizards' and 'warriors' in a more overarching sense, it comes down to making sure that every character type can contribute in a fun, flavorful, and effective way in a combat situation, and to do so roughly to the same extent as any other character type.

I do agree with the post as a whole, I'd just quibble with this in particular, depending on how things are supposed to work.

In a game like D&D where the mechanics are basically a combat engine interspersed with improv freeform, yeah, I'll agree that everyone needs to be able to contribute meaningfully to combat. But in a system where, say, investigation and diplomacy are given just as much mechanical weight as the murdery bits, there's nothing wrong with having the PC who kills things real good getting to dominate the scene, in the same way Sherlock Perot gets to shine in the locked room murder scenario and Wilhelmina Foppingtin XIV gets to rock in the socialite ball.

This is fair! When I said to the same extent, I was more thinking of 'has something to do that's interesting and effective at each phase' of a given scene. The warrior might be best at smashing heads, but that doesn't mean that she should just have to stand there and do nothing (or make things worse) in an investigative scene. Likewise, your clever wizard might excel in a scene about uncovering a mysterious writing and translating it on the fly, but they shouldn't be so useless in combat that their job is basically 'stay out of the way', either. Even if it's 'realistic', it's not typically very FUN for players to be Sir Not Needed In This Scene.

@arkandel I mean...these things exist? They're not hypothetical constructs that we have to imagine how they'd look and act. There are pay-to-play MUDs out there. There have been pay-to-play MUSHes that have made money. They haven't made anyone rich, to my knowledge, but they have been going concerns that have survived for years. Just because they're not popular with/known by the MSB community doesn't mean they don't exist.

@Cobaltasaurus said:

How do you make the metaplot open to any PC? Not contingent upon one PC? And at the same time make PCs feel like they have a special part in the metaplot?

I know that in games where there was a metaplot, I've often felt like the actual PCs involved didn't matter. It often felt more like the staff just needed someone to stand here and do this at this particular time, and it could have been ANYONE. This is partially, I think, because the metaplot was...too plotted, and often very oriented in the past. "This really cool stuff all happened a long time ago, and the job of the PCs is to uncover it at Dramatic Moments, not to /change/ anything." A consequence of the attempt to coordinate 50+ characters, I think.

To specifically address your question - what about front-loading things and being willing to step outside the linear plot box (which doesn't work all that well for long-term MU* plots anyway). Basically, ask every player upfront if they want their PC to be a part of the metaplot. Some people are not going to want to be. But for those that do, their character gets Something Special that's related to the plot. Or, preferably, PLOTS. Make those plots a lot more If...Then... than MU* plots often are. Something like:

Setting: Brass City By Night

Long Term Plot 1: Descendants of an ancient coven are being drawn, all unaware, back to places of power where their ancestors sealed away horrors from the material world. When the descendants enter those places of power, monsters will be unleashed to stalk the city, and must be destroyed or resealed.
How many PCs directly affected?: Up to 13.
What PCs do: By virtue of their blood, the PC Descendants are living keys that will automatically unseal the prisons of certain horrors. However, their blood also gives them the power to rebind those horrors, although it will take three, five, or seven of them working in conjunction to do so. PCs who start chargen with, or acquire during play, Occult of *** or more get an automatic Int+Occult roll to know (at chargen) or stumble across their heritage and the connection to the Horrors. All players will be informed of the particular site or sites that will trigger an event for their PC, and that this will be a dangerous event. It's their choice whether their PC seeks that out or not. Rituals to reseal the horrors will be teamwork actions of Presence+Occult, extended, requiring 5 successes + a number of successes equal to how many weeks the Horror has been free, with each roll taking five minutes. While the horror's minions attempt to murder them, of course. Horrors are ephemeral beings and have banes and bans that can be researched to make it easier to lure them to a suitable sealing place and keep them there during the ritual.
Places of Power, the Seals, and the Horrors: (1) An intricately inlaid tile seal in the front hall of the first Brass City Police Station. It holds Marik, Lord of Chains. Passive effect: while Marik is bound in the Police Station, rolls to resist the impulse to act violently there are at a -2. Be sure to put up frequent news posts about Yet Another Accusation of Police Brutality at least every two weeks, and that cop and criminal PCs know about the penalty. Give them a Beat for playing out a scene where they indulge the impulse to be violent and it hurts them professionally or personally. (PC: Jane Doe. Let Jane know that when she enters the police station, she needs to call for staff. When Marik's seal breaks, Jane will receive a +2 bonus on all attempts to break or open locks while he's free. Once free, Marik will trigger a panic, and flee into the nearest weak-willed host - his priority will be to create an enslaved cult, and eliminate the Descendents as he can identify them. He has a 2 dice pool to start with to identify them, but it grows by 1 every week as he becomes more familiar with the modern world and gathers followers. See Cultist character sheet and Marik character sheet for powers and other stats.), (2) The Old Hanging Tree in Center Park. It holds Cassandra, the Soul-Stealer. Blah blah blah...

Long-Term Plot #2: The God-Machine is attempting to use certain people to bring certain pieces of far-flung infrastructure together, hoping to piece together a bit of itself for one of its infinitely complex, mad experiments. When the pieces meet one another, they join, which has direct effects both on their couriers, and gradually, on the whole city. However, the person who possesses the WHOLE piece of Infrastructure could have unprecedented power...at the cost of giving over their soul to the Machine.
PCs Directly Affected: up to 6.
What PCs do: PCs start the game out with a gift, heirloom, or stolen item (as appropriate to PC background) that resembles a piece of character-appropriate jewelry or accessory. It is, however, distinctive, and the character has a +1 to a certain skill as long as they have it in their possession (and gains the Bereft Condition if it is not in their possession, gaining a Beat if they take negative personal or professional consequences because they are trying to reclaim it). PCs also know a list of people who, should they meet them in a scene, Something Will Happen - in this case, the two items that each carry will attempt to fling themselves at each other, and will bind together, creating something new. The new item (see the list of proto-Infrastructures) can only be held by ONE PC, but will have boosted bonuses for having it in their possession. Not having the item still subjects the PC to the Bereft Condition (which fades after a week, provided the PC does not gain a Beat from pursuing the object). Once completed, the bearer gains a significant occult ability (powered by Willpower). HOWEVER, the bearer no longer generates Willpower normally, and if the bearer runs out of Willpower, it is as if they are affected by the Soulless condition until they find another of the city's pieces of Infrastructure and 'recharge'...or until they destroy the item, or it is taken from them (at which point they gain the Bereft condition instead). (This item, if not destroyed, may also be used as a Significant Item in later plots.)
List of PCs and Items: PC1 - silver choker (+1 Crafts), blah blah blah.

So on and so forth - you can have varying levels of staff involvement, or (as with the items) staff can serve mostly as "kick off" points, while PCs can do most of the actual "plotting" themselves, once they figure out that there's Something Special. You can hold off introducing the "last pieces" of a plot you don't want to "fire" just yet by adjusting the rate of people with specific Special Backgrounds hitting the grid, and you can always introduce another plot that deals with 6-10 people as the game grows, without damaging the specialness of the earlier PCs.

@arkandel I think another thing that games can do is be more explicit about the experience they want to provide. Like, so often I've seen characters be approved in a game where the character is clearly built for a specific experience - only for the game runners to turn around and be either indifferent or actively hostile to that experience.

In which case, they shouldn't approve the character. It's okay to say no to applications that don't fit what you're looking for. It's okay to state upfront that, hey, the theme of this game is adventure pulp and action, and we're not interested in digging very deep into the metaphysics of the setting or exploring the way X works, so characters built around that will not be approved.

It's impossible to get EVERYONE on the same page: some people are always going to want to play a Pokemon. But we can do a better job of communicating that we often do. Lessen the issue, if not eliminate it.

@jennkryst said in MUs That We Would Love To Make (But Won't):

@pyrephox begins HSPACE Chant

Noooo.

My idea would be the colonization of a single planet, with either a crash-landed ship or - at most - a monitoring station that trips could be made up to so that you could have space-walking adventures and orbital dangers. The map would be divided into regions that would expand as new tech was built/reclaimed from the archives/discovered in the world, but I'd prefer to represent that in a 'resource cost' rather than OOC time.

For example - if you started out at the base camp, initially you have five regions right around you that you can explore, and each one covers about five miles, because the skimmers are locked in a crashed part of the ship, and that's as far as you're going to get on foot, in a hostile alien terrain that may or may not require hazard suits before you get the terraformer up and running. So you'd pay X amount of resources (effort/fuel/energy/whatever) to go out to them, scene regarding one of the Crisis Points of each territory if you've got some people and/or a GM, or you can go out alone and gather samples of 'Unknown Alien Flora/Fauna/Geology X32288' and its friends, and bring them back to the camp for analysis (which would also cost energy/skill checks), or give them to other people for analysis, etc. Then those Flora/Fauna would get names created by their discoverers, and skill checks would reveal one or more uses, + one or more threats. So, you might discover that an alien critter has dense, waterproof fur that is excellent for making cold-weather gear...but the code also throws out that its blood gives off a horrific, gut-curdling stench that causes anyone who smells it to require Grit/Constitution checks or be paralyzed while they wretch or try not to wretch. If the character then enters the sample into the colony database, then everyone gets the stats/behavior of that critter to be able to use in plots freely.

As the original regions become better explored, they take less energy to reach. When skimmers are released from the ship (or native fauna is tamed for riding), new regions open up that are BIGGER, because people can cover more ground, and those new regions take more energy to get to, but you might also discover things/recreate tech that let you have more energy.

An emphasis on discovering and transforming your environment rather than doing ships and interstellar travel.

Agreed with the above. 2nd Edition is probably the most MU* friendly version of the system, by far.