Posts made by secretfire

This place just finished its first event chain; an exploration of a starship graveyard that wasn't quite what it first appeared. I stand by my initial review, and I'll add this to it - the staffer seems to honestly understand Trek, its not 'star wars in a star trek skin'; the plot felt like a Trek plot each step of the way, like something that could have been a multi-part episode of an actual Trek series.

The staffer seems good at giving people things to do when GMing an event, and seems available and interested in his/her game. I also still really like the TOS vibes, since its set in the middle of the original Enterprise 5 year mission; though there are some hints about temporal shenanigans from the 'season opener' they were done in a clever and tasteful way that called back in subtle ways (for those who got the references, it was clear enough to not be required) to specific series plotlines and even specific episodes. Honestly, I've been pretty impressed by the quality of the forethought and plotting that has gone into it.

There are currently 3 scientist PCs, 2 engineers, one shuttle pilot, one doctor, one security-officer, and one enlisted rifleman. Still plenty of space to go around. This is the ship they are using (single ship game): https://statlas.aresmush.com/wiki/uss_atlas

To note, they have a grid up now (small but very functional and well written) and their theme seems a cool conceit: Basically, the ship they are setting it in was designed as an over-engineered prototype 'doomsday weapon' (my words, not theirs) - and now without an apocalyptic war against the Klingons looming, they have this absurdly powerful, very high-maintenance, buggy and impractical ship made from prototype technology with tons of engineering compromises - and no war to shove it in. Its a neat conceit; the idea that not all engineering is good engineering, and that compromises might be made for the sake of performance which turn out to not be the best. I mean, this is something you see IRL that never really shows up in Trek. And the Original Series era is always kickass, right?

I'm not saying it as eloquently as possible, but after taking a look around, I like it. And their staffer seems friendly and available. Just my two-cents.

@Sparks I meant more something like 'political plotting of the local nobility vs the guilds vs the local elves vs the local orcs vs the wizards vs the druids', rather then a specific setting /par se/. I spent the first 15 of my 23-ish years mu*ing mostly on freeform places, so it never even occured to me that Ares is bad for magic. Oops.

Very Belatedly: I've actually seen a lot of games I like come out over the past year, but die for lack of people. Like I really like Fallout: Montreal (which is in beta) - but when I've logged on, its been hard to find people evenings EST. There was a gritty noir Altered Carbon game I liked; also had people issues. A Star Trek game (sometimes a great notion) came out a few months ago on Ares, which is a great codebase - but staff, also, seemed mostly active daylight EST and weekends EST, so while it /does definitely have people/ - they don't tend to be online at the same time as me. I think Mu*ing is getting to the point where 'good ideas' are less of an issue then 'good available players'.

THAT BEING SAID...

I'd like to see a 'generic d&d inspired' game using the Ares codebase. I know the Arx codebase exists, but the few times I've tried the codebase I've found it overly complicated and the overall structure not conductive to RP; I just bounced off very hard; but Ares seems easy to do and conductive to RP.

Other themes I'd like to see:

*Call of Cthulhu (would never happen, but)
*Eclipse Phase
*Spelljammer (also using Ares, ideally, and not the actual ruleset)
*Victorian Steampunk

I mean, thats just me.

@Paradox Sweet. I wasn't like, too serious, but I wanted to bring it up. Sounds great. Can't wait!

@Paradox

The only problem I have with this - and I swear I'm not trying to start a political discussion (please noone do that!) - the USA is not the same place it was in 1992 when Stargate game out, or even the same place it was when SG1 came out. The assumption of a sane, competent, efficient government with moral leadership is gone.

I mean, I might not vote for Ra, but I might vote for Hathor or Baal. What happens if your players go through the gate and are just like...you know what, fuck it, I'm siding with the goa'uld? I mean, a lot of them are even crazier then what we have here on Earth. But some of them...you know, some of them might seem like a decent alternative.

Sweet. Stargate, ftw!

@meg Thats an amazing idea. I'm amazed I've never seen anyone do that before on a mu*. Very creative.

Alright, brainstorming a bit - how's this for a concept. Dance instructor. Almost every small town has at least one dance school catering (mostly) to kids. I live in the middle of nowhere in a poor area and they have a bunch of them; so it seems plausible. (Though, in all fairness, new ones spring up and go out of business every so often, but the old ones seem fairly stable.)

I don't mind if the character is a local or not (though given the theme, either could work) - but probably, at least, someone who left town to go to school, if not from somewhere else entirely, had dreams of the place ala theme, and moved and has tried to start up a dance studio. Usually I play logical, very detached characters; might be nice to play perhaps someone more in touch with themselves, more emotional. Perhaps vaguely spiritual but not religious, in the fashionable trend these days. With a number of people making artists, coffee shop owners, and so on, I think it would fit in well without being overdone.

I noticed on the wiki that some (but not all) of the schools of magic had recommendations about which professions would suit them best. Any thoughts on this one? Looking at the wiki, seems like a few of them might fit, depending.

Took a quick look around the wiki. Looks neat. Lots of backstory. Noticed a bunch of characters already created which, while I'm not 100% sure, seemed to have a bunch of RP logs together and were from other worlds. Presumably the other sides of the portals? Are those alpha characters, or npcs, or what?

@lilli I used to play there (on EST!) but got busy and kinda dropped off. I'll make an effort to try logging back in. I think most of the other players were on Australia time. Thanks for the reminder!

@skew Fair answer.

@skew

Few questions. You've addressed some of these in part, but since you have more info now (and since your wiki is now easy to find via google!) - I think I'll go for it.

1. This is one little backwater planet. The Empire has an imperial garrison on freaking /tattooine/. What hope/use is there for PC opinion on anything? You are going to be hard pressed in this regards, I think. Everyone will both hate the empire to an extent, and wish they'd go away to an extent; but be powerless to do anything about it one way or another. Kinda like living on Cloud City, really, from an ic perspective. Moreover, since they arn't imperials or rebels (which is a cool idea by itself), and can't join up with either due to OOC Fiat, they'll gravitate towards neutrality; which makes logical sense, as icly speaking, there is little benefit to one backwater planet from either group. However, it means that, at best, you've cut out your own metaplot.

2. I like the idea of 'no rebellion or empire players'; but how do you avoid (even with issue #1 solved) all the pcs essentially being the same? You essentially have a game where the only faction is the 'indie' faction. Indie factions don't really conflict with one another. I don't actually really see even any possibility for conflict with your playerbase arising organically, even independently of issue #1. At most you might get occasional skirmishes between cops and the criminal types.

3. So, since this is a single planet (and again, I'm not trying to sound hostile, these are honest questions) - like, outside of 'grifters in the cantina'; I'm guessing all non-natives to the planet will be PCs, not npcs? Like, if your inspiration is say, tattooine (or some other human-majority generic world), and you have one spaceport, you'll have aliens in the spaceport, but not anywhere else, really. And if you get a playerbase of all aliens, it will start to strain believably. On the other hand, if you /discourage/ aliens, you cut out a lot of star wars.

How do you avoid being stuck in a corner here?

I'd just make it a really interesting system. Please for the love of god not Tattooine. A system with multiple planets on it, ideally also some permanent space-based presence. In star wars, thats all the equivalent of the same place. Make it an interesting place with lots of diversity.

I think there's room for 'big plots' that are 'big' because people care about their homes and each other. You don't need a whole galaxy, you need character growth and development.

I'll check the Arx wiki out. I'm pretty good with intrigue, political plotters, scheming and the like.

I've heard a lot about this Arx place. I thought they were Roster only, and were kinda patterend off of Firan? To be honest, while I like fantasy games, I've avoided trying anything that sounds too much like Firan. Not that many mushes left these days though, especially medieval fantasy ones.

Looks awesome. Don't get me wrong, I wish there was more "chargen customization" (instead of purely just post-chargen customization and cgen stats) - but combined with your backgrounds it looks pretty good. Should be pretty sweet.

I'm pretty tempted to make a junkie, and I don't think I've --ever-- said that before in 20 years of mushing, lol.

Edit: One thing I do see- Chem resistant. I don't see anything like Chem Reliant though, which may be intentional as you'd have to adapt it somehow. Dunno. Not a big deal, but you asked if I spotted anything missing. The general list of them, as I'm sure your aware, is the standard list of perks (and the traits, which are at http://fallout.wikia.com/wiki/Fallout_2_traits)

Off the top of my head, you should have a background or two which correspond to some of the traits; it looks like 'Perks' are things you get in gameplay, and backgrounds are awesome, but the traits were neat, too. I mean, it could work without them (I've seen systems with nothing work before); but I thought I'd mention it.

It was much easier to quickly acquire power in the (early) fallout games by abusing chems then anything else. I still remember killing the Deathclaw in the original fallout unarmed and unarmored at level 3 that way. Pack on some Buffout and some Psycho, make sure you've focused on Unarmed - deathclaw goes pop. Still hard, but doable. Probably should be much easier to be an addict-warrior then a power-armor warrior.

Though I mean, obviously they'll have their own flavor, and some things don't translate well to a mush.

If your definately going with Dayton, then the other big things you need to decide are tone related. I mean -I- think Buffy (as intended) isn't dissimilar from Angel in tone; just made a bit more juvenile for its intended audience at the time. But a lot of people here feel they /are/ different. So you'll have to decide if you are going with the 'everyone is a student and they are gossiping about mundane stuff most of the time' character drama, or the Angel 'jobs are hard and life is hard, and there is prejudice and bigotry out there and we all have to get along' stuff. They are both talking about the same thing; the monsters as metaphors for the darkness of our lives. Angel had more 'monsters as people' then Buffy did; but I think by Angel Whedon realized the importance of getting along with other people, and how the lack of it turned into another source of darkness and isolation.

I think what you were going for is a city small enough where you can mix that, and Dayton (being firmly in the rust belt) is in the middle where a lot of the....societal issues...that anything Whedon tackled would be front and center. I think you could easily find ways to integrate things; like Buffy had an evil Principle, you could have the Superintendent of the local district be a Trump-style hardnose hunter, who wants to crack down on immigrants whom are actually from a neighboring dimension; and has been harassing these immigrants children. Perhaps a local manufacturing plant is on the verge of shutting down - and the college students find out that an ancient spell, set in the 1920s, kept something sealed beneath it for as long as it was in operation.

But I don't think, from the beginning, you should really get into a 'rut'. I think the way you will be pushed is very, very strongly towards people who will just want to do school RP until the end of time, and if you do that, eventually the game will die (sooner rather then later). I think that RP can and should be important, but the focus has to be, from the beginning, integrating it into a larger 'community'. No matter how old the characters are, the rest of Dayton should affect their lives.

This also gives you ways to push drama. You don't need a 'hunter training school'. You just need 'major ongoing plot hooks' generic enough people can spin off of them, which will naturally 'set' different types of PCs into drama against each other, but not in a combative way. The rust belt is -filled- with tension right now, and its a potent way to mine it. In highschool, this is mostly 'outsiders' (buffy crew) vs Cheerleaders (Cordelia); you just need to find ways to broaden it. Give points of view to NPC groups that disagree with each other...strongly...without being necessarily entirely wrong.

This is a setting where you have armies of girls that can -kill anything-; but what happens when they hit problems they can't stab to death? Those were the things that stymied Buffy the most, and were exclusively what Angel grappled with.