Posts made by Seraphim73

For me, it's a combination of Escapism, Curiosity, Creativity, Collaboration (and occasionally Challenge).

I like to get into the heads of people who are very different from me--I usually consider a few parts of their psyche "better than me," but for the most part, I wouldn't actually want to be any of my characters, I like to torment them too much.

I also like to get away from the troubles and concerns of the real world to explore different ones, especially if I can find a place where every choice you make has a possibility to change the world around you (escapism from powerlessness, I suppose?).

I like to write with others, I like to spar (verbally/textually) with others... but most of all, most of all, I like to push the world and watch it react (and to be pushed by the world and watch how my character reacts). Whether this means other PCs reacting to the actions of my character, NPCs reacting to it, the grid reacting to it ("hey look, my actions caused that bar to get burned down...") or any other way. But the reason I play MU*s rather than writing stories or playing video games is that I like the give and take between my character and the rest of the world I'm playing in.

I'm a huge fan of the Shadowrun 3rd Edition system for most anything modern and future, but I don't know how well it would work on a MU*. For a MU*, I'm a big fan of Ares.

@Three-Eyed-Crow said in What RPG SYSTEM do you want to play on a Mu*?:

I keep vaguely wanting to run a small group online TT with the "Leverage" RPG system

I've actually been using the (to my mind) key component from the Leverage RPG system on Fires of Hope: Flashbacks. No more huge planning scene that takes 3+ hours away from the execution of the plan. Instead the group gets 30ish RL minutes to come up with a basic plan, and then we start in. During the execution, every character gets one Flashback where they can flash back to a previous time where their character did legwork or pre-planning or whatever to help with whatever obstacle is in front of them.

//Example: The group is stealing starfighters from a repair yard. They sneak up to the fence, but find out that it's humming slightly -- yup it's electrified. One of the characters uses their Flashback to have, the night before, gone in and set a small charge on the generator running the fence. The roll Mechanics, pose having set the charge "earlier," and then pose setting the charge off. Pop, fence is no longer electrified, the insertion can continue.//

Star Wars: Saga Edition also has skill challenge rules. They're rather in-depth, and I've never actually used them, but they're there.

@Derp The All-Aboard-the-Murderboat situation you describe is the next step along the path of the White Knight (after "getting in peoples' faces for being meany-pants"). It's definitely a problem, but it can also be just fine, so long as Staff is willing to back up the threat from the antagonist to a level that gives the fifteen (or thirty) people something to do against it... just in order to hold it off, not to annihilate it (as you yourself mentioned).

@Arkandel Exactly. Until the consequences for bringing anachronistic modern societal views into a different setting are actually codified and applied, people will keep White Knighting because they get to feel good, they get to act as their player would, they get to be part of the popular group, and there aren't any penalties for acting wildly out of theme.

As to the point @Arkandel made about PC demographics versus NPC demographics... that's always problematic, and, in my opinion, tied in to the White Knight Blight. A ton of players want to be cool and hip and forward-thinking, and they forget that EVERYONE ELSE on the game wants to do the same thing. Often the best way to stand out and to be "different" is to represent the majority NPC viewpoint. I've had a ton of success playing Stormtroopers, Clone Troopers, Imperial Officers, patriotic (toward the Republic, then Empire) Senators, uptight knights, dogmatic Children of the Light, and other "generic" character viewpoints, because everyone wants to RP with them because they ground the other PCs in the world by representing that majority NPC viewpoint. Unfortunately, they also rather require Staff to be willing to back up that majority NPC viewpoint with... you know... majority NPCs... or else you get actions taken because of PC population, not universe population.

The folks behind Green Ronin are really good people, extremely progressive (to the point of being punk in many cases), and very socially conscious. They're definitely pro-LGBT.

@Arkandel Why not? Granted, I was pretty certainly using the term incorrectly, but I was going for the idea that they're becoming the ones causing the conflict.

@lordbelh & @mietze Ugh. Yes. White Knight Syndrome drives me batty and insane. Especially when it goes as far as "You were mean to <person>, so you must be punished!" "Yeah! I agree!" "Me too!"

This is especially bad when the White Knights are espousing some modern belief that flies completely contrary to the theme of the setting.

What the White Knights don't seem to realize is that when they do this, THEY become the antagonists--and not (usually) good ones, either.

@Bobotron Well, as I suggested, how about NPC support for those who stand up, make their opposition known, but still fail? Makes it more likely that they will come out on top next time.

Of course, that still requires that there be an actual, measurable system to track influence/politics/resources/whatever.

@ThatGuyThere Oh, I've seen a few scenes where the NPC opposition was resolute, powerful, and a real threat. But often it seems (at least to me) like the player expectation is that the NPC opposition be a speedbump--when the PCs start to get pushed around in a scene, their players tend to panic from what I've seen, and many get grumbly if they get too beat up (physically or politically) or fail to accomplish something. It's one of my least favorite trends in "modern" MU*ing.

@Thenomain I too would rather have the awesome player playing my character's opponent than their friend.

Sidenote, @Arkandel , how about "opponent" or "rival" rather than "antagonist?"

When you're playing with your character's friends, you need friction from an outside source to create action -- when you're playing with your character's opponent/rival, the friction is already there.

@Autumn said in What do you WANT to play most?:

Use of existing media for themes also has some advantages, and "better-written and more engaging material than an original theme is likely to have" is one of them.

I think the biggest thing that 'known themes' have going for them as settings is that all of the players have a similar (if not exactly the same) view on theme. The theme doesn't "belong to" a group of players (usually Staff) and everyone else is learning it for the first time.

@Ghost said in PC antagonism done right:

some of the my story society tends to avoid difficult characters on an OOC level, which bleeds into IC.

• Disclaim. If someone pages you to ask, explain that it's all part of the show.
• FOR FUCKS SAKE, BE WILLING TO ICLY SUFFER NEGATIVE CONSEQUENCES.
  If you're making a character designed to generate conflict, it is a MUST that you are willing to give the people you're antagonizing a victory.
  If one player refuses to roleplay their character as having lost at all (I.e. despite being fuck-pummeled in a fistfight, the loser laughs and walks it off), then not only is it poor rp, but it's cheesy and shows a lack of ethics.
• Be realistic. No one is 100% antagonist.

I agreed with so much of this so much... and then you got to this point:

• Keep it IC. Always.

I think that this is the one thing that you CANNOT do when playing an antagonist (either a "bad guy" or a "person with opposing goals"). I absolutely think that you have to make it clear that you are NOT your character, and the easiest way to do that is to be a joy to be around OOCly, even if your character is a pain in the ass ICly. All too often, people tend to assume that you believe your character's beliefs (usually because they're playing an expy of themselves, but with more rock-hard muscles/lithe curves)--if this happens to someone playing an antagonist (especially a "bad guy"), then you get OOC conflict.

I agree with @Lisse24 and @Arkandel that "antagonist" doesn't have to mean someone who is a bad guy, it can simply be someone who... I don't know... wants the new city council decision giving the job of making sidewalks to Company A, because they have ties to Company B. That person will be an opponent of anyone supporting the decision, but they could be perfectly pleasant to be around and certainly wouldn't be an antagonist.

I also love the suggestion that @Lisse24 made about designating rivals. This would really only work on a political game where votes/decisions/influence attempts could be tracked, because that extra XP would be tied to times where they came down on opposite sides of an issue.

A slightly more subtle nudge to encourage both opposition and losing might be the idea that any time someone loses a fight (especially a political one) they get a little boost from NPC opposition as well (a plot hook, some information, something like that) because they've demonstrated that they're willing to stand up to "those in power" (or that they're aligned with those in power for those not-nearly-rare-enough times when PCs bloc together to vote in something wildly against the interests of the masses of NPCs).

To @Arkandel 's question about how to "Make sure conflict is driven by character motivations..." one of the coolest little innovations that I like on Fires of Hope is that there is a +goals system--each character has to have 1-3 (I think, it might be 2+, or 2-4) goals. They assign logs toward achieving those goals (one per week max), and when they accomplish those goals, they can turn in the +goal for XP based on the number of logs they put toward the +goal (each +goal also has a minimum, mostly to keep really huge goals harder to attain). I think a system like this helps to ensure that players are constantly reminded of their goals for their characters, and it's also--in a political game rather than an almost-entirely-PvE one like FoH--a great way to put people in conflict based on their characters' goals. A player could even have a +goal to -fail- at something (I might just take myself up on that, now that I'm thinking about it).

I absolutely agree with the idea that choices need to have consequences--it's not just "which shiny do I want right now," it should (almost) always be, "What shiny do I want now, accepting that it will hinder me in some other way." You have no action without tension, and there is no tension without consequences to choices.

I think that @Three-Eyed-Crow really hit things on the head though... Staff has to encourage the culture that they want in their game.

To the question of what an opponent brings to the game that @Misadventure brought up... they provide friction. We all know by now (whether it's true on a particular game or not) that NPC opposition is just there to be a speedbump, but when there is another PC pushing back on us, we don't know how things will turn out, and everything the opponent does provides us with something to react to--the world is only really fun (to me, at least) when it pushes back in response to your pushes, giving you something to work with in the process.

Edited to add: @Kestrel did make a spectacular opponent-player on The 100, and I think one of the best things she did, besides just being nice OOCly, was a good bit of journaling/vignette writing. When you see why someone is doing something that you think is "bad," you can understand the choice and the character a lot better, and you're (usually) less likely to have an issue with it.

@Lotherio Not really. We're playing a couple of places, and helping out, but we're not StoryStaff or HeadStaff or anything like that anywhere, nor are we planning to (unless Blu ends up working on a Magicians game--I probably still wouldn't do any more Staff-stuff than helping set up FS3 for her).

@Auspice @Ghost and @Jennkryst -- @GirlCalledBlu has been poking at the idea of a Magicians game as well. She was thinking of setting it around 1940, for major events in the world and in the magical world (from what she's told me, I only watched the first couple of episodes).

@Arkandel I fully expect to see the results of this poll vary a lot more than the What Are You Playing poll. I thought that the comparison would be interesting, however.

So I asked what people DO play in the last poll. Now I'm curious what people WANT to play.

I'm just curious what people play most here. Not what they want to play, not what they like playing most, what they are playing and have played the most.

In reading other topics, I think it becomes pretty clear that people have significantly different experiences based on where (and often what theme) they play most, so I was curious about how things shook out.

To prevent the Bottomlanders from finding out about us. Those bastards are terrifying, with their zeppelins and their goatees.. The players aren't just protecting the secret, they're protecting the world from the Bottomlanders (and occasionally crossing over to the Bottomland to foil expeditions there that might discover us here on the Topland).

@Arkandel said in Hobby Glossary:

"Emote fighting" for example is what we used to call purely posed combat in a MUD I played, but I've not seen the term picked up anywhere else since.

And boy do I wish it would be picked up elsewhere. I haven't had a good emote fight in... years. Way, way, way too many years. Dice ruin everything (while at the same time making things SO much easier).

I've always been part of the group that calls their lowest stat, the one that their concept just doesn't need, the dump stat.

And for @ThatGuyThere -- not only does TV Tropes agree with us, but also Urban Dictionary and 1d4chan (although I'm not sure that the last one is a good thing -- there are a significant number of people with Charisma and Wisdom over there, from what I've seen).

@Ganymede I agree completely that risk (and accompanying that, loss) is more important that death in making a game with consequences. You can lose territory, belongings, political influence, time, limbs, life... whatever it is, but without loss and risks of said loss commensurate with the rewards you're trying to gain, I think things tend to come off flat.

Sounds like most of us are actually pretty much on the same page though, just some are at the top of the page and some are at the bottom.