Posts made by secretfire

@sunny

As noted above "Right, because a universe set in Buffy isn't a Buffy game" - I guess you'll say Angel wasn't buffy because it involved adults and wasn't in a small town?

Pittsburgh, the City of Bridges as a "City of Bridges" (to other dimensions) is a wonderful idea. Its a city that mixes the ultra-modern high-tech with urban decay and absurdly old architecture. 400-year old coal mines underneath entire sections of the city, plenty of buildings (--plenty--) from the 18th century still very common - thats a decent idea.

But the thing that kills mushing is the extreme OCD; the 'I want to play the exact character with minor variations on every mush, in this ONE THEME, that I've done for XXX years and refuse to vary on'. Guess what? I'm sure Mexico has teens and young adults struggling with themselves, too! (And vampires!) Hell, I bet Dublin, Ireland, Johannesburgh, South Africa, and Paris... ....all have vampires! Its sad to watch the hobby decay from a writing pasttime into an OCD-outlet pasttime.

That being said, I think the Pittsburgh idea is a good one.

I mean, my interpretation of the 'end of buffy/angel' was that all the potential slayers would become slayers. And that this would be an ongoing thing; so there's no reason you couldn't have 'new' potential slayers. Supposedly, that's even the angle they are going for in the reboot/continuation?

Just, for the love of god pick somewhere interesting. There are so many 'genetic smalltown' or 'generic bigcity' games its -tiresome-. Shake things up a little. I don't know how, something interesting. Perhaps everyone is attending some college in D.C. (and it turns out Congress is stupid because some lizard-demons from pluto or vampires have been replacing the politicians) - perhaps its in South America, or Puerto Rico, or Wakanda or Hong Kong or something. Hell, make something up if you have to. -Anything- other then 'generic small boring little town with a college'.

If its a mundane town, at least flesh out whats going on with its 'supernatural politics' enough that its really interesting. Perhaps it has a dimensional portal to <x> dimension, and the creatures come over and pretend to be immigrants, or people from the civil-war era get zapped into the present periodically. Something with meat. We've had literally 9,000 mu* with 'very light supernatural themes in a generic boring town'.

Awesome idea for the mush. Reminds me of H.P. Lovecraft's Dreamlands.

When do you open for beta?

This is almost depressing. This is it for mushes? ...thats sad. Its like watching the last few dinosaurs meander around the rats scurrying at their feet. Remember when the number of active, real mu* seemed almost endless?

@magee101 Yeah, they have one bond org. SPECTRE. The rest are real life orgs; like ISIS, for instance, or chineese intelligence, which I just don't feel are appropriate.

@valkyrie I logged on a few times, and saw it was mostly based in RL organizations - which is problematic for me, both on a personal level (I don't think its appropriate) and on an OOC level (I couldn't rp there because of my job) - I've peered as a guest once or twice and there doesn't seem to be much activity.

Its a good idea, but I think they should have avoided RL geopolitics, and stuck with stuff like 'illuminati', 'Spectre', 'Majestic 12' and the like.

I've had this in my head for a WEEK now! Thanks!

*I can see that lone star from a thousand miles away
Calling me back home though I've ventured far astray
When I see that beacon shining for me all alone
It calls me back to Texas and to home

Lone star shine down on my home town
Fill my memory light my way

Cattle in the old corral, the open range all 'round
Sunlight and the smell of new mown hay
I remember though I've wandered and much happiness I've found
Still I wish that I could be back there today

I know my home is waiting for me by the river shore
I know that all the ones I love would welcome me once more
In dreams I see them now though it seems I'm bound to roam
My thoughts are still of Texas and of home!*

@thenomain

There's a bit of a difference between the Bethesda and BIS Fallouts. Yes. Bethesda went for 'quick and lazy and aesthetic'. I LIKE the Bethesda stuff; but they'd have skeletons sitting inside buildings being actively used and lived in at the time. So its been 210 years, but no-one has bothered removing the skeleton? Easy to mod out. I mean, for mu* purposes, I don't care. But someone specifically said that they thought it would be 'too dead and depressing' - and I was merely correcting that idea. Consider it a professional nitpick as someone with a science background. Again, I don't care either way. Just trying to be helpful.

@downwithopp That seems 10000000x more depressing.

Honestly, rural texas, alaska, south america - any of these places are pretty safe from a nuclear war. They'll have global fallout to deal with, not local fallout, and that'll follow the seven-ten rule:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_fallout#The_Seven_Ten_Rule

They'd mostly have to hide for a few weeks, take shitloads of iodine, and worry about Crazy Weather for ~20 years or so. The 'in game representation' of it taking 200 years and there being skeletons and blasted trees is pure fiction.

If people WANT that pure fiction, they could just Vault 111 it.

EDIT:

You could always start it 20 years later, and have flashbacks. Some PCs could be old-timers, the others could be the first 'new generation', so to speak. Even for the young'ins, they could have occasional flashbacks of being kids.

Advantages: 1. You get past the radiation and nuclear winter. 2. You allow time for Odd Communities to pop up.

Disadvantages: You do loose the initial mixture of hope and despair. Yes, despair at the 'paradise lost' of it; but in the guise of the Lonestar, the CHARACTERS political perspective is of, largely, secessionists from a fascist state...so hope, too. You'd probably be able to maintain it though, with good GMing and having incentives for people to play family members, and a mixture of old/young pcs. Plenty of ruins. Lots of wildlife - 20 years later, nature will essentially be back to normal.

Its HARD to say what will take off and what won't. Most mushes fail, sometimes I have no idea why (sometimes its obvious) - and its hard to say beforehand. I know thats a terrible answer, but its true. You'd have to have a great wiki, I think. I'd start with that, NOT a server.

@rizbunz Any objection to players getting together ala 'Vault City' (F02) or 'Caesar' (New Vegas), or the Brotherhood (FO4) and starting a....civilization expansion initiative, lets call it, once the initial struggles for survival and 'not starving to death' or 'being eaten by cannibals' wears off?

@magee101 Several fallout sources mention oil, including the original voiceovers. "POSEIDON OIL" might also ring a bell. If that doesn't convince you:

As a scientist IRL, I can absolutely tell you that burning oil is a waste of money, and we use it for a crapload of things other then burning. We could all get magic self-moving star trek cars tomorrow, and we'd still need oil. And as someone whom has had 'any economics ever' I can tell you that, in the 50's and 60's, the U.S. was very, very much exporting goods. Actually, it MOSTLY exported goods during that time, particularly to Europe. There is no reason why they wouldn't.

@ganymede PLEASE - you know half the population REFUSED to go into the vaults because the directions were in English.

@rizbunz I don't even mind freeform. Usually makes combat easier, tbh. I always had more combat prps on my freeform places then code heavy ones. A lot of intermediate mu*ers need at least some sort of guideline though. But I couldn't care less. The important bit is a detailed theme, and a system that leaves detailed, flavorful characters with player groups that have some basis for a mixture of types of interactions, so to speak. So rp, plot and drama can dynamically form and proceed.

PRAISE THE HOLY DWELLER!
PRAISE ATOM!
PRAISE THE GREAT Z.A.X. !

There's a few other 'quick and dirty' ways to handle this:

1. FATE is a really, reaaaaaaaaaaaaly quick and easy system to use. The Inheritence Gambit (pretty good game, but I've been too busy with RL to play there recently) uses it. It basically has a few basic stats, and then 'traits' you build out; and its honestly very adaptable. I think the staff might have a RIFTS game based on it, too.

2. A game like this could easily work with a basic, old-fashioned free-form setup; a writeup on one's skills and strengths, with some sort of limit and app-based guidelines. If everyone is a magical creature or DemiGod, then it makes sense that while many would be 'better' in many things, or really awesome (Hercules/Achilles like in one thing) - not everyone will be a Hercules of all stats, so to speak. At this point in time, everyone mushing has been doing it for 10-30 years, and either you can play fair with people or you can't.

3. While I wouldn't RECOMMEND it, you could probably easily adapt a number of systems that are already coded and gerrymander them into kindasorta working. I mean, there are a ton of ways you could do this.

The problem with using something like Scion is you'd have to code it, then people would have to USE it, tabletop to mush doesn't work well except for the very new systems which had this sort of thing in mind. I mean, there's a reason there are hardly any d&d mushes, and why tabletop games as mu* barely have any combat compared to Actual Tabletop or even compared to freeform games. I can't count the number of coders who announce projects, spend like a year on them then abandon them - its not worth the work for the payoff.

Any chances of this actually happening?

Sounds awesome. Also, I'm amazed at how little love Egypt has ever gotten in mu*ing, but they had fairly regular trade with Egypt; so I mean, if amazons could show up from (where-ever they lived) ......

One of the problems Generations of Darkness had was that it originally planned, from my extensive discussions with staff, to do something like this:

<IC Play>
Timeskip with new history based on IC play
<IC Play>
Timeskip with new history based on IC play

And that was abandoned a few months after it started and it never did that; largely because of internal debate over whether or not to engage with player agency as they interfered with the course of 'cannon' history, but also because of general skittishness over the concept for the reasons above.

Personally, it can work either way, but I think a time-skip every so often is a wonderful idea, as it gives people a potential chance to reinvent themselves and then explain why, and can break up cliqueishness, which is a problem.

The time chosen is super appropriate as the other problem SW in general has is uh, a not-insignificant number of people mistake 'I'm not angry when I do this' for 'I'm doing good and not using the dark side'; which is actually an IC issue at the time too.