@Arkandel said in Wheel of Time:
@Seraphim73 said in Wheel of Time:
There's a reason that the series ends at that point, everything after it is a very differnt story.
You know better that than! There are neither beginnings or endings.
Well played. Well played.
@gryphter If I wanted to play a Wheel of Time game (and I do), I wouldn't want to play after the books, because that's not the Wheel of Time setting that I know and love -- it's radically different from the Wheel of Time. Heck, it doesn't even have the Light and Shadow war that drives... well... the entire series. There's a reason that the series ends at that point, everything after it is a very differnt story.
@lordbelh said in Wheel of Time:
On the upside, Aes Sedai can't actually use the one power to hurt you anyway, so there's that! Unless you allow Black Ajah, but I'd probably restrict that to NPCs only.
Unfortunately, it is so very, very easy to get around this. For instance, if the Aes Sedai binds an enemy in Air, that's not hurting you, right? And then their Warder walks over, and the Aes Sedai releases them a heartbeat before the Warder stabs them.
Or heck, for a less blatant version, the Child of the Light is fighting the Warder, and the Aes Sedai just slows the Child's arm with Air, letting the Warder run them through.
@Packrat I agree that channelers should be rare and terrifying in RP, but once you've met a dozen and knocked boots with two... they're just not as scary. And because PCs are PCs, the terrifying thing just never happens anyhow. Which means that unless Staff leans hard into the idea that channelers are terrifying and NPCs fear and hate them, it won't be so, so they will get all the benefits of being beatsticks and none of the downsides of being terrifying social pariahs.
@lordbelh And after the Aiel War is over, you've got the search for the baby Dragon Reborn and the Dark Purges that follow.
I also like the setting that @Three-Eyed-Crow suggested, with an NPC Dragon Reborn and no canon characters. I would, however, change that to keep the rulers the same, so that nations respond to PC actions in ways that players can expect/understand easily enough. So you have Morgase, and you might even have Elayne, but she's going to be off-screen, doing Novice stuff, not out adventuring with PCs. You don't have Mat or Perrin, and if you have Rand, he's off-screen (although an "unknown" NPC Dragon Reborn might be even more fun) doing Dragon Reborn stuff, and once he's all super-powerful, he can be used to course-correct by Staff, but otherwise stays out of PC-doings.
This is generally my preference for -any- setting that involves canon characters: make them background, use them to make the world react in predictable-ish ways, and use them as quest-givers/course-correctors, but don't every have them just sitting down for a drink with a PC or group of PCs.
Also, I like during-books or just before-books because it's a more familiar setting to everyone. An interesting twist on this might be during the Aiel War, or during the Dark Purges that followed in the White Tower.
@moth said in Character Workshop: Share your resources:
I love Fantasy Name Generators, because you can pick by RL ethnicity, or by Star Wars race, or by... well, a whole lot of criteria.
I recently found this list of hobbies/pastimes that is useful for background skills/character flavor:
http://jillwilliamson.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/Character-Hobbies-and-Skills-Brainstorming-List.pdf
Binding someone in Air is easy, as others mentioned, and as @Packrat said, it's one of the more prominent reminders of just how utterly unbalanced the channeler/non-channeler divide is in the Wheel of Time.
@Tat
Slicing Weaves: Countering incoming channeling attacks with flows of Spirit (that's easy enough), with a distracting "lash-back" effect if one of your weaves is sliced.
Multi-flow weaves: Creating lighting requires strength in both Air and Fire (as I recall, and maybe Spirit too?). It gets even more complicated when you get to the idea that the requirements for the same weave may be different for male and female channelers.
Shielding duels: Just straight up channeling strength contests, straining to cut the other person off from the One Power (magic). If the other person isn't holding the One Power, it's easy, but if the other person -is- holding the One Power, it's relatively impossible unless you a) distract them, or b) are much, much stronger than them.
Severing (hey look, I've thought of more!): It's Shielding with an edge (literally). If you succeed, you cut the other person off from the One Power forever (for certain definitions of "forever").
Overchanneling: Channel too much and you'll get really, really tired. Channel even more, and you might burn yourself out and make yourself unable to use the One Power ever again (for certain definitions of "ever again").
Spirit Lake's magic system actually would handle most parts of channeling pretty well -- it already has schools that would work for flows, and it can deal damage, apply affects, and heal damage in combat.
What it can't do very well without relatively significant additions (from what little I've seen of Spirit Lake, but generally what I've seen from FS3) is slicing weaves, multi-flow weaves, or long-running slice/shield duels (most FS3 affects take place the turn you do them, save for reloading, from what I've seen).
I enjoyed RP quite a lot with both Gerrit and Solon (didn't RP with Antaeus).
Players who are happy to share the plot hooks they've been given, spreading them far and wide throughout the playerbase so that everyone can get involved. Nicely done, folks.
I have some of those problems myself -- not so much that I can't RP enough, but that my RP has to come at times that are awkward for anyone not in the Pacific time zone. I've found that web portal RP in Ares works pretty well, and is great for slow scenes that can still have import without being as pressing.
It does still mean missing out on events most of the time, and I get frustrated by that at times myself. I feel your pain, and I don't really have a great answer for you.
I generally schedule about 3 hours for a scene. If it's shorter than an hour, it doesn't really feel worth it (exceptions made for truly awesome and fast-paced scenes). I'm also okay with a GMed scene taking more like 4-5 hours, although I know some people start to fade off pretty quick after 3-4.
I've been thinking big-city cop who transfers to Grand Lake to get away from the stress. Because that will totally be stress-free. No, his name will not be Nicholas Angel.
Like @Pyrephox and @Three-Eyed-Crow and @Tinuviel and @faraday all mentioned, for me it's the free, persistent, dynamic, multiplayer, real-time, collaborative roleplay, where your character can have an impact on the world around them (and be impacted on it in turn) in an unlimited number of ways. There's also the fact that I write a whole heck of a lot better than I speak, and writing gives me time to edit on the fly, which is very nice. It's also more immersive than tabletop RP for me.
To ride along on @Arkandel's coat-tails, I think that the most important question any prospective MU*-runner can ask themselves is: What are my players going to do with their characters?
Between work, exploration, clues, etc, Arx has done a fantastic job with this. This is also where my own attempt with The Eighth Sea fell down (okay, one of a couple of places).
Even the most involved Staff can't be running things for players constantly, and you'll need to have a good idea on what you'd like your players to be doing day in and day out. And then you need to incentivize the heck out of doing that, and make it easy to do.
@roz Yeah, doesn't surprise me. I've had good experiences the couple of times I've talked to the players of characters my PCs were crushing on. Just frustrating to lose out on a lot of that sort of RP, but that's a gripe, not a blooper. Whoops!
Guess that's a blooper now.
@ganymede Doesn't seem to happen to me either.
Granted, that's probably because I regularly app in with my RL wife and aren't afraid to mention the fact on channels, but I've noticed that my characters get hit on a LOT less ICly now that I MU* with my wife. I mean, I'm probably not going to pursue an IC romantic relationship anyhow, but I enjoy the flirting RP, dang it.
(Yes, I know that when you're the constant, the problem is usually you, and it could very well be in this case.)
I'm sorry to hear this. He was an asset to the MU* community, a good player, and by what (relative) little I interacted with him, a good person. He will be missed.
I think that a skilled player could create and "successfully" play an unlikable character (maybe they're hypercompetent, so people bring them along just to get the job done and they start making connections despite themselves). A low-activity (lazy?) character is more difficult, but if they're competent and/or likable, they could get dragged into RP (although that sounds like a lot of work for your RP partners), alternatively, if you-the-player work extra hard to force the lazy character into activity, it could be very fun to play the unwilling hero.
I think that it's when you combine two or more of these things that it becomes difficult. I've seen unlikable, incompetent, high-activity characters, but they're never played that way intentionally, and they usually get avoided. I think that a likable, incompetent, low-activity character can be fun flavor, but is going to be OOC work to keep involved. And an unlikable, competent, low-activity character is likely to just be drawn in to roll dice when things get hard.
Note, I'm assuming by "low-activity" you mean a character who has little interest in involving themselves in things, rather than a player who has little interest in involving themselves in things.