Posts made by Runescryer

@arkandel said in Interest check: pure OC superhero game:

@packrat said in Interest check: pure OC superhero game:

Also depending upon the nature of things, there is no reason to assume that big power superheroes would be terribly effective against a city just being shit.

I see no inherent reason superpowered individuals wouldn't be at least as effective at any other form of crime as street level ones on a game, especially on a MUSH, and particularly if there's no systemic hurdle (i.e. artificially created by the creators) for them to overcome.

Was Luke Cage worse at fighting the Hand than Daredevil in the Defenders? Could he not deal with corruption in Harlem just as well in his own series? And yet he can knock down walls and throw cars around.

You can say this is just because of how he was written, and it's true, but remember that on MU* people always want to be able to do more, not less. You'll see street-level reimaginings of Superman wherever it's possible, able to tackle both that giant robot and the colorful pimp next door.

There's another, practical reason why I advocate separation of 'Crimefighters/Vigilantes/Anti-Heroes' and 'Superheroes', and that has to do with the theme and conventions of the two categories. Many times, what's acceptable in the 'grittier' themed characters is unacceptable to the 'Four Color' characters, and that can create tension not just between characters, but between players as well.

Example: two decades or more ago, I was playing on a mixed-Universe comic game; I can't remember the name and it's long shut down by now. I was playing Wonder Woman and there was a hostage scene at a mall. Deadpool showed up on the trail of the hostage takers. Now, this was before Deadpool was the lovable bag o' mixed nuts that we love and shell out millions of dollars to see movies of today; this was back when Deadpool was still a 'More Deathstroke than Deathstroke' gritty mercenary anti-hero. The hostage situation was quickly resolved, but the encounter between Diana and Wade escalated (and not, as current Deadpool would say, 'in a fun way'). Diana wanted to turn the criminals over to the police. Deadpool disagreed and registered his disagreement by shooting one of the captured and bound criminals in the head. Diana was rather upset at this and tried to restrain Deadpool. To which, Deadpool said 'Eff this, I'm out...' and started tossing grenades into crowd to make his escape. A fun time was not had by all.

Neither character was being played 'wrong' or 'not as the character should be played', at the time. But, it gets to the heart that Heroes and Anti-Heroes sometimes just don't mix because of thematic natures. So, IMO, it's best to keep them separated so everyone can be happy and play what they want. ICA=ICC, of course. And if an anti-hero character goes on a huge Punisher-esque murder spree, players should feel enabled to bring that character to justice. But, when you have two polarizing views of what 'justice' entails...sometimes you get the Daredevil/Punisher rooftop chat, sometimes you get dead civilians who died as a cover for a character to make an escape. In the long run, it's best to minimize the potential conflicts that lead to the mass casualty results.

@fatefan I call it the 'Frank Castle Unearthly Plot Armor' principle. I'm not pooh-pooing vigilante characters, but there's no logical reason why the metahuman heroes would just ignore all the killings and only 'focus on the Big Threats' aside from writing/editorial control. That's why I advocate a Two City system.

1. It keeps power levels roughly in the same ballpark for city inhabitants/heroes. Punisher and Batman are on the same power level; Punisher and Superman aren't.

2. It sets up RP and Events for the vigilante characters if the city they're in has a full on 'No Vigilantes' law that's backed by a corrupt city government to protect themselves from metahumans cleaning up their city. The superheroes that go and try to help clean things up are rebuffed by local law enforcement and government and the superheroes have to/should play by the rules. The vigilantes ignore the rules, which is entirely appropriate for them.

I think having a big city broken down into major neighborhoods is a good start. You shouldn't need more than 10 to begin with, and it allows you to have different flavors or themes for each neighborhood. Later on, you can always build sub-neighborhoods or individual buildings/establishments to expand the grid. The 'neighborhood' approach also gives you enough diversity for characters to relate to without being overwhelming. Just my .02

@zombiegenesis Yeah, I'm of two minds on the Karma/Hero Point combining XP and Dice Boost system. On the one hand, I can understand people's frustrations, and sounds like you have a good work-around. On the other hand, comic-book characters don't drastically change most of the time. If there's a continuity re-boot, things get shifted around, or if you're an equipment-based hero like Iron Man or Batman, your gear can certainly change. But a lot of the fundemental 'core' powers and skills don't really evolve as much over time they way they do in other literature & RPG's.

As I said, though, looks like you have a good work-around for FASERIP that could also be applied to MEGS.

@zombiegenesis Yeah, especially when dealing with Karma. There'd have to be logs dedicated to 'Meeting Obligations' rewards, adjustments for 'Breaking Obligations', 'Charity' awards...and staffers would have to go through them all and do the rewards. The best you could hope for would be a week's delay after a log submission for a Karma Reward.

@zombiegenesis in FASERIP, Popularity is your social stat, but only used on NPC's. PC's can't socially dominate each other without actual Powers, which is a good thing, IMO. Even then, Popularity can still help players determine PC's reactions towards each other.

@fatefan Well, it's also possible to condense it to different areas/neighborhoods/suburbs have different themes. In Astro City, you have Shadow Hill housing the mystic threats and themes. Metropolis, you have the Central Business District for 'classic' superheroics and Suicide Slum on the same island for darker vigilante heroes. Part of why I recommend a two-city system has more to do with verisimilitude than genre conventions. There's an area of The City that's riddled with crime and corruption; why wouldn't the PC's spend time there to help clean it up and take down gangs and criminals that have no real chance of hurting the superheroes?

For what it's worth, my take on the various Supers RPG's I've played over the years....

Champions: The big kid on the block. You can create any character you can imagine with this system. Moderately easy to learn rules-wise, complex to learn cgen-wise. A lot of new players take a look at the size of the two 6th Edition corebooks and run away screaming, thinking they have to know everything in both books in order to play. Having lots of power templates from the UNTIL Superpowers Database and 'Ultimate' books would be advisable. You also need to have an app staff that can say 'no' to a concept/build that's too abusive of the system.

Mutants & Masterminds: Another 'build the character of your dreams' system. Also easy to learn rules, hard to learn cgen. Again, have lots of pre-made power templates ready to go and an app staff that knows the system and can nix problematic builds that can break the system.

DC Heroes/MEGS: A good mix of point-build and pre-made powers. You have a solid definition of scale for each attribute (M&M really only gives you Strength) in terms of how you rank among others in that attribute. Also, a built-in subplot system for players to define personal TPs and thread them through events. The downside tot he system is lots of players don't like the idea of your XP mixed with points to spend on increasing dice rolls & successes.

Marvel Super Heroes/FASERIP: Easy to learn, fun power/attribute descriptors (Unearthly Strength, Amazing Reason, Monstrous Endurance), simple percentile chart system to determine success. Suffers from the same issue as DC Heroes: XP used to also alter dice rolls. Also, it's a fully randomized cgen system, which might turn many players away; although there are lots of ways to turn it into a point buy system.

Aberrant: Great adaptation of the Storyteller system for Superheroes. Lots of players will be familiar with the dice system already, and there's crossover playerbase potential with the slew of WoD games already out there for players looking for something different, but with a familiar system. Also, Onyx Path is gearing up to release the new version of Trinity/Aberrant/Adventure! next year, so corebooks will be easy to attain. Also, the new version will apparently have rules for events affecting the future, or even previous, eras of gameplay.

DC Universe: The DC RPG from West End Games just before it shut down. It's a variant on the D6 system, so it's rather easy to learn. The problem is that it does break down at higher levels of power with nebulous benchmarks instead of 'you can lift this much with X dice of Strength'.

I'd be in for an all OC game; and an M&M 3e one at that. For what it's worth, here's a couple of ideas I've been running around with for my own 'in planning stage game'...

1. Legacy Characters. Every player gets the chance to create 1 Legacy; whether it's an alien race, a hidden nation, or a lineage of characters using the same name stretching back decades (or even centuries depending on how you want to set your game history). You can even have the legacy change 'sides' over time (example: Marvel's Black Knight, who started off as a knight to King Arthur, had a descendant fight in the Crusades, the 60's descendant became a villain because the Ebony Blade rejected him, leading up to the modern incarnation, Dane Whitman, who was given the Ebony Blade and accouterments of the Black Knight by his villainous uncle repenting on his deathbed). Other players can tie their characters into a Legacy, but only with the permission of the original PC (A PC creates an Atlantean Legacy and another player wants to create an Atlantean PC, but needs to get the permission of the first player to do that.)

2. Homage characters. Let's face it, there will be characters that are pastiches or straight off copies of big name characters. It's not necessarily a bad thing, since that's part of how new players learn a game or how to RP; it's just a thing. After all, Iron Man started out as Marvel's version of Batman, and the Fantastic Four were a super-powered version of the Challengers of the Unknown. So, each player gets 1 Homage character that's an obvious expy for a better known character. That doesn't mean straight carbon copy, though; The Confessor is Astro City's homage to Batman, but the characters are very different (same with Samaritan/Superman, Winged Victory/Wonder Woman, First Family/Fantastic Four).

3. Two Cities. It sounds like you're already on this track, but the Metropolis/Gotham dynamic does help enforce a separation of themes. Rather than having the Batman-type character enforcing a 'No Supers in my city' rule, I would recommend that you set up the 'grittier' city to be deliberately anti-super/anti-vigilante (through corruption of city government, perhaps, which adds lots of 'clean up the city' style TP's for the vigilantes).

4. Character Wills. It happens: RL or some other factor prevents a player from logging back in, and it disrupts the flow of the game if they were a PC vital to certain events. You can help mitigate the damage when this happens by making each player fill out a Will to determine what happens to the character when the player drops for whatever reason. Does it go into storage until the player returns? Does it become available for app by another player? Does it become a Staff NPC? Figuring out what happens beforehand is a good idea, IMO.

Looking forward to the game

@seraphim73 said in Star Wars?:

Sidenote: I'm actually against WEG D6 because with large amounts of XP (which is -going- to happen on a MUSH, all it takes is time) Jedi are just obscene. Like, Tartatovsky-Clone Wars-level obscene. And I totally understand that Saga Edition has pretty much run its course within the MU* community.

That's just a matter of scaling XP for the game or making Force Powers more expensive to advance than Skills or Attributes, IMO.

@jennkryst said in Star Wars?:

There is also FFG code floating around somewhere, but I don't know how complete it is.

While I like the FFG system a lot, I don't think it's well suited for a MU. Mostly for the same reason I'm not a fan of FATE for MU's: it requires extra interaction between the players and the person running the scene, rather than just a simple dice roll to determine success or failure. That just slows action scenes down quite a bit.

@mr-johnson said in Star Wars?:

So what you guys are saying... is after I finish working on and get my superhero game either stable or dead from disintrest I should build a Star Wars Saga's KOTOR game? I like this idea.

If you're going to make a system game, go with D6 instead of Saga. It's more flexible for character concepts, easier for unfamiliar players to learn, has a play-style more in line with the cinematic feel of Star Wars, and player-driven advancement rather than static, pre-defined level advancement.

@lithium Another theme idea that works is 'making it local'. All of my TT games from D6 on have mostly focused on a single sector of space with about 20 planets or so. You're not going to do the really big 'blow up the Death Star' canon stuff that the movies do and have Galaxy-wide consequences, but you can do the equivalent that make you Big Damn Heroes to your small patch of the Galaxy. Pretty much the same as what 'Rebels' did; make it important locally.

@faraday said in A Game of Thrones MUX Discussion:

@roz said in A Game of Thrones MUX Discussion:

I imagine there are plenty of lawyers who are like "you should say no just so we can all avoid the potential for a possible headache down the line."

Right. "I don't feel like dealing with any potential headaches, however unlikely" is a completely reasonable position to take. "I really don't mind but my lawyer says I can't/shouldn't" is a cop-out IMHO because the actual risk of losing a court case against a derivative fanfic writer is ludicrously small.

Pretty much. However, two Star Wars notes.....

1. In the original Marvel Comics series, prior to the release of Empire, Marvel wanted to do a story involving a second Death Star, but Lucasfilm nixed it.

2. There's a 'claim' making the fan fiction rounds that 'The Last Jedi' cribbed a lot of plot-points from a Rey/Ben fanfic that was written after Force Awakens. And is apparently longer that the entire Harry Potter book series. Written entirely in under two years.

Yeah, I detect the faint aroma of fertilizer on that second point, but, here we are anyways....

Another thought,l one geared towards the 'automated' side of the discussion...

A Waterdeep/Undermountain game. Undermountain gives you 20+ levels of dungeon hack & slash, along with an in-lore reason for rooms to 'respawn' (Halaster's portals and summonings). So, set the dungeon rooms to randomly generate appropriate encounters & treasure for the dungeon level, then respawn after a certain amount of time has passed since a group cleared the room.

Similarly, IIRC, there's plenty of random encounter tables from the various Waterdeep supplements & boxed sets for 'above ground' action. And you can also program random encounters in buildings for players that want to do exploring & thieving by night, with respawns of encounters & treasures like with the dungeon rooms. Plenty of material also for Staff to create and run their own events.

@arkandel said in What's missing in MUSHdom?:

@runescryer said in What's missing in MUSHdom?:

@tinuviel Right. Which is why you need to subdivide a MU into smaller groups or 'spheres' like WoD games do.

On the flipside, that's destroyed some WoD games because when they were subdivided, staff neglected to give them a thematic impetus to interact with each other (in fact often enough they were explicitly told not to due to reasons), essentially dividing the playerbase into islands.

That's never a good choice.

Right. I'm not saying a game should start out with 1 staff per sphere/team/subculture/whatever, but there should be plans made for staff growth to scale as the game grows. And ideally, when it comes to theme & plot, Game Staff should function like the Editorial Board of a comics publisher; they gather together to talk about the big, all inclusive events and keep each other informed of smaller events that they are overseeing so that continuity remains constant and other staff can possibly build off of those smaller ideas as well.

@thatguythere But, there is a built-in balancing mechanism: the Realm Actions. If you're doing the L&L thing and running a Realm, going on adventures is your ONE action for the month. No espionage, no troop movements, no reactions to aggression against you. That's it. Sure, you get a Realm to run and all the Political RP, but your Level Advancement is restricted. Or at least, not as fast as players doing the pure adventurer route. You have to balance the needs of the Realm along with your own advancement needs. If players want to sit around at 1-3rd level and constantly attend to their Realm, that's their call. But, they're going to be out-leveled in a few months by adventurers not tied to the L&L RP. All of a sudden, players that opted out of L&L play at the beginning can start making their own power plays as a mid-late game route. A 3rd Level Rogue who's been spending all their time running a Guild network and slowly expanding can suddenly have to deal with a 10th level Rogue that's decided it's time for a change in leadership in the area. Sure, there might be some leveling of the pure L&L players to their own machinations and plots, but not at the same speed or rate as a dedicated adventurer going dungeon questing & monster slaying. The downside of the adventuring route, of course, is that while you might be 10th level when you start making your political moves, you have almost nothing in allies/support to make your power plays, while the 3rd level Guildmaster you're trying to replace as squads of assassins to toss at you and bully gangs to beat up your few followers and deny you gaining territory. Of course, the 10th level can gank the 3rd level and claim to take over, but he's not a proven earner yet, just some guy that's good with a blade. The 10th level would still have to do all the Realm actions to slowly increase territory/holdings as they start finding and purging away the loyalists and such.

There's also the matter of 5e not being exclusively written/published by WoTC. They're licensing out certain portions to other game studios for development and then joint publishing. Example: The Sword Coast Adventurer's Guide was written in house by Green Ronnin. So, you're tossing in other publishers into the mix for copyrights.

Also, not a lawyer, but if you give proper credit, stay non-profit, and don't directly copy-pasta books, things should be fine.

@thatguythere said in D&D 5E:

I would be wary of including too much Lords and Ladies into a D+D game. Though I say this as someone who does not like lords and ladies and would in theory be interested in a D+D game. Despite the similar settings the focus on the games are different, Lords and Ladies at least in the iterations I have seen focus on the higher levels of society and political matters, where as D+D is about adventurers (who can come from all parts of society but tend to function on it's edges) and action. You might be able ot combine them as two separate spheres sharing a location, but with out this you will end up having one half becoming the dominant style of play.

The thing about Birthright is that you can completely ignore the L&L mechanics if you want to. The 5e conversion doc skips over all the Realm mechanics completely, only giving details on how to create a character and how to do the Bloodline mechanisms & powers; Realm play in 5e requires individual DM's to convert from the 2e sourcebooks (which isn't hard, but a bit of a chore). It's one of the reasons why I think Birthright could do well as a MU, because it embraces multiple levels of playing styles. Want to be a traditional adventurer/murder hobo? You can do that and there's some very challenging and unique higher level monsters to go after. Want to engage in the Lords & Ladies metaplot and vie for (or support someone) to become the new Emperor? You can do that too, although you might want to do a bit of leveling first if you've got your eye on the throne.

@arkandel There's a 5e conversion doc. And it's not exactly hard to port 2e to 5e.

Nice things about the (semi-official) conversion doc:

1. Point system attribute generation
2. If you want to play as a bloodline scion, you have to allocate points to a 'Bloodline' attribute to determine how strong the divine blood is within you. So, bloodline characters get a few nifty abilities, but non-blooded characters start off with better stats, in compensation.

@arkandel That's pretty much Birthright: D&D with a Lords & Ladies meta-plot and mass combat system added in. You can choose to have your character be a descendant of a divine bloodline or just an 'average' adventurer. Even if you are part of a bloodline, you don't have to be a landed noble and can just adventure.Every three game months, for those playing the political/power game, there's a 'turn' taken to resolve rulership events like espionage, trade, troop movements, war, etc. And if you're off adventuring, that's one of three 'actions' you get for the 'turn'. Holdings are gained and lost through these Domain Actions, and it's possible even for players that come in late to the game to participate and thrive, as long as they play smart. It's pretty much D&D 'Game of Thrones' before GoT was even written.