Posts made by Seraphim73

@auspice I paid $20 for that license. Just because I paid that $20 20 years ago is no reason to stop using the product.

@auspice Yeah. Deck of Many Things is just too awesome. A fellow PC once convinced my character to play five-card stud with the Deck. He made it 4 cards, then Death came for him.

I would be very curious, but I also agree that it would probably get old pretty fast.

@jaded Sounds like Tommy thought he was playing Pink Mohawk style, and the rest of you were more interested in something closer to Black Mirrorshades.

@ghost It was so awesome in part because after the initial side-session talking to the Aztech plant's player, I didn't have to do anything. The team asked him to set demo charges, give the charges to the rest of them, and keep the detonators. The team asked him to hang out by the mage while she went Astral. It was just... awesome.

Tabletop one-shot, Shadowrun 3rd Edition, mercenary group, I'm GMing. They've been hired to investigate what Aztechnology is doing at the pyramids of Tikal. There are five PCs, including a sniper/demo expert who is also an expert on Aztechnology procedures.

They sneak into the area, take out a few guards pretty quietly, then they decide that they need to get a little closer, but also have some insurance. They ask the Aztechnology expert to make them up some charges that they can set if they get close to whatever is happening. The expert quiets his glee, then agrees to do so. The group splits up, with the mage deciding to hang out with the sniper at the top of an outlying pyramid so that the sniper can protect her body while she goes Astral.

Several minutes later, the sniper slits the mage's throat, detonates the charges, and lets Aztechnology know that the offending team will no longer be a problem. They never considered that the Aztechnology expert might still be working for Aztechnology.

The best part of this was, I didn't have to do anything about the situation as the GM (although I likely would have if this was supposed to be a long-running campaign), and the Aztechnology spy didn't have to suggest any of these steps. The team wanted to carry his charges, and the mage wanted his protection for her body while she went Astral.

Probably because it was a one-shot, everyone loved how things turned out... and the Stealth Troll (yes, really) even managed to scrape up a couple of successes to survive the explosive charge and crawl away into the jungle to plot his revenge.

@ganymede said in Which canon property/setting would be good for a MU* ?:

FS3, as a system, is not capable of handling PvP competitiveness -- at least, not to the complication that many people who do like PvP will get much, if any, benefit. What FS3 does well, however, is simulate a battle scenario with two sides, which may be unbalanced number-wise, and figure out the outcome on a per-turn basis.

Two OR MORE sides!

@faraday said in Which canon property/setting would be good for a MU* ?:

Y'know, except the one who shot my archer in the head

That was an NPC, wasn't it? Or was it a PC? Huh... now I don't remember. I think they were all too busy shooting the Tank-lady.

More off-topic yay!

I wonder if a Fast and the Furious/street racer/something like that game could work.

@faceless said in Looking for potential staff for a Colonial Marines (Aliens) game:

@Seraphim73 and random people I never really got to know from TGG can attest: I ain't afraid to assault a trench on my own. Everyone else will catch up. Eventually.

You were doing it before Wonder Woman made it cool.

@arkandel said in Make MSB great again!:

No, these are good questions. I don't know! I think it'll depend, it's hard to make concrete rules and try to match what anyone post against them.

The best way is to probably play it by ear.

So, like pornography?

@auspice Right. I don't think that every NPC death (especially if they were just introduced for the one scene) needs to be a tragedy, but there should be some acknowledgement. I mean, yes, many units in WW2 took 200% casualties over a short period of time, so the guy who just caught a bullet next to you might be someone you'd never spoken more than 2 words to, and you probably don't care much, but they were still someone who was supposed to be providing covering fire for you.

The people who have been your character's ECO for a dozen missions obviously matter more than the guy who owned you $5 from the poker game, and the two deaths should totally be treated differently. I'm just suggesting that more ties to the setting (including the NPCs) are better.

@faraday Yup!

I have now decided that any time a named NPC from my PC's unit is introduced into a scene (wherever I play), I'm going to immediately come up with one connection between my PC and that NPC. Maybe my PC owes them $5 from a poker game, maybe they once accidentally saw each others' junk while taking a leak, maybe it wasn't accidentally... I don't know... but there'll be some connection there.

And yes, I do know that I basically just challenged you to load up any scene I'm in with NPCs...

I would be totally down for that too, @Three-Eyed-Crow. I don't mind losing a character now and then, especially if they a) live just long enough to give some dying words, or b) go out in a big boom (or a spray of acid, I suppose).

@Auspice, I think we should have those discussions again (maybe not on this thread). Because I think it's a very valuable thing for a game to have characters (and players too) invested in NPCs as well as the other PCs around them.

@faraday, yes please. I've noticed that it's often hard for players to get into the world of their character, especially if it's radically different from the real world. That goes for everything from caring about the NPCs around your character to their whole outlook on life. Like, if your character grew up in a time of strife, and the generation ahead of you was much-more-than-decimated while you were still just coming of age, you're going to have a very different outlook on life than if you grew up in the 80s in the United States of America.

I just find it fascinating to get into the headspace of people who grew up in a different time/place than I did.

@lithium said in FCs on Comic MUs:

No MU is ran entirely by one person, unless it /is/ a game intended to be a sandbox for a few people and if so there is /nothing wrong with that/.

Unless you're @faraday and you're running BSU without any additional Staffers, and keeping things humming along nicely at that.

I think a policy of FC's needing to /lose/ more might help.

This I think should be a policy for everyone everywhere. I would love to see PCs in general lose 20-30% of the time. Yes, that includes mine. Without some chance of failure, you don't have a story, you have posturing. I also agree with you that encouraging goals for characters is a must. Nothing like being reminded of your character's goal(s) to drag you out of an uninspired moment.

@the-tree-of-woe said in FCs on Comic MUs:

Check for intent first and foremost and treat knowledge as the secondary concern, and encourage players to learn more about their FC as they play if there are gaps in their knowledge.

Totally agree with this. It seems to me that most apps for FCs should be about what you want to do with the character, not what you know about the character.

@ganymede They have those on BSG too, except they just substituted robots for aliens.

And the alien sex scenes in Aliens aren't very hot, unless you're really into facehuggers.

This sounds totally like the sort of game that I would play in a heartbeat. I think that much like many BSG games, there may be some tone issues, since much of the drama and tension in both BSG and Aliens comes from "OH MY GOD, WE'RE ALL DYING!" and that doesn't tend to happen on MU*s (besides TGG) without copious NPC blood being spilled, but I think that a solid storytelling staff/playerbase can get around that.

Consider me interested in playing, even in testing, but not really able to Staff.

@Sunny Totally in favor of this. If PrPs have a base writeup (to assure Staff that they aren't just a social tea party (again, using hyperbole on purpose)), points gained in them go into the "big pool of important points."

@Lotherio I do like the automatic gossip idea. You could totally do weighted points instead of two different pools, but then you're just lessening the issue (which honestly might be enough of a counterbalance).

@bored Totally agree. I was just trying to provide options, but I agree that it's usually best to use the mechanics already in place to represent what a character is doing.

@Lotherio said in New MUSH 'Game' Mechanics:

hey staff, Rogue and Gambit never RP, but everytime there is an X-men Team throw down, they are always full of points ...

Yeah, this is exactly what my concerns/suggestions have been working on. I think there are great ways to let everyone contribute something toward a group effort (you've shown several of them neatly), but my concern (because I'm a wary staffer when I staff) is that when you announce that everyone has 4 weeks to get their points in to secure X Territory or to run the Space Race, both sides then just splinter up into their little groups and run lots of microfailures to gain points, and slap them down to let their side win. Or, if you're watching out for masses of new points showing up, they pad their ledgers between challenges with "Oh no, I spilled tea -all- over myself at this tea party" (yes, I'm purposefully being hyperbolic, it could even be "I got sucker punched at this random bar fight" for a less ridiculous example), and then, as you noted, slap down a metric boatload of points when the challenge comes up.

Unfortunately, the easiest ways to police that behavior (if you decide to do so) in my opinion are to either separate point pools (plot and fluff), or to only allow the "plot" type points. Certainly, you could have Staffers going over every "fail" report and allowing it (and probably posting it somewhere public as a result, so that everyone on-grid can react to it and the failure can actually have teeth) or disallowing it for not being "fail-y enough."

I keep harping on this, but I'm trying to work through to a solution that I like too, mostly because it's an interesting system, and I'm interested in seeing it work. I think that @Ganymede has had some very good suggestions too, particularly allowing points to be used for support/suppression/etc, other things than just direct influence.

@Lotherio I'm responding to your response to my own proposal, but it seems that the rest of the thread is slightly derailed, so I'm just going to go with it.

I think that how much you police the system will depend on the players you have. If it's an invite-only game and you only bring onboard people you know and trust? I don't think you have to police it at all. If it's a wide-open game and anyone can join? I think you're going to get people who misuse the system pretty quickly if it's not policed from the start.

Then again, I recognize that as a game designer/runner I'm the type who would rather clamp down on all the things from the start, and allow looser restrictions as people prove they can handle them. That style isn't for everybody, I know.