@arkandel said in FCs on Comic MUs:
Self-awareness is the main roadblock there. How many of those people honestly, truly think to themselves "well, I lack the narrative skills", let alone "I am a toxic person" and reach the conclusion they ought to abort the project because of those reasons?
Absolutely and unfortunately true.
I think the addendum I at one point suggested for Utopia was "at the end of one of the stories, use that for the cut-off but instead of how it ends say the Phoenix Force or whatever undoes that 'No More Mutants' shit"
If there's some random character somebody has a hard-on for that lost their powers they're back because that hurts nothing, and it lets people make mutant OCs and it justifies the conceit of the entire X-franchise that people are scared of them because this is the future of humanity and there are millions of the bastards, and one day they'll replace us, rather than just "this bunch of super-people is worse than this other bunch, because shut up."
@The-Tree-of-Woe said in POLL: Super Hero MU Gut Check:
I would also like to say, part of the role of staff on a Superhero game is keeping a character inside a set of parameters. Call it the conundrum of equilibrium - if Wolverine becomes a chlorine-farting three headed penis monster or Wonder Woman develops tits as big as the rest of her and isn't interested in saving the world because she's too busy gobblin' Power Girl's pie, then staff on a comic book MU* has an obligation to send out the Shepherd's crook and fix the problem.
That's the FC problem -- A FC ain't only about what you want. Whether you're playing on a "Year One" game or a game using canon backstory, that character comes with parameters you should be living within, as it were. Superman saves people, Shadowcat is an X-Man, and so on. Now if Superman and Wonder Woman's players hate each other OOC that's a different problem...
Edit to Add: And yes, I'd totes play on an X-Men focused game set in the Utopia era, or even on a general marvel game where that was where cutoff put them, with the ideal era being right before "Schism." The whole family is home, crazy shit is happening, and it's as much "We must fight humans who'll try and exploit us" as "People who fear and/or hate us are going to try and kill us."
Edit Edit: Also Namor was FUCKING AMAZING as an X-Man and that is where he belongs forever.
I agree with and echo all of this.
(Except for the part about Shadowcat, she could definitely hang out exclusively with a character defined in their source as a coke addicted poor-little-rich-girl bitch who has no loyalty to anyone but herself, and totally ignore X-people unless she sees tits in an image gallery. That is the truest spirit of the character and staff has no right to intrude on it.)
@Tempest said in POLL: Super Hero MU Gut Check:
Does Utopia mean no cancerous horde of teenage OC brats wanting to go to mutant high school and making whoever apped X-Men want to blow their brains out?
Utopia explicitly isn't a school. It's a militarized mutant city-state on an island off the coast of San Francisco, run primarily by Cyclops, Emma Frost, Magneto and Namor.
There is a school there, but it isn't at all mutant high the way X-stuff has an unfortunate habit of becoming on games.
The X-Men were also basically the San Francisco Avengers at the time, which was neat.
It also kept them away from a couple of stupid events. The only Secret Invasion stuff was a mini if I remember right.
@SunnyJ said in POLL: Super Hero MU Gut Check:
Young X-Men
PLEASE do allow them. Mercury, Rockslide, X-23 are all great characters. I am not hot on OCs either, and I am much more prone to teach as Nightcrawler, Emma or Gambit if it is a FC student. I am not saying BAN OCs, but OCs need to understand they are fighting an uphill battle and not resent other players for it. It would be unfair to hate people for not liking OCs, as it would be unfair to ban OCs altogether.
Mercury is amazing. Why would anyone not want to play Mercury?
@SunnyJ said in POLL: Super Hero MU Gut Check:
@Social-Diseases Can I upvote you twice?
You have the girl from Do The Evolution as an avatar so yeah I think so.
It probably does not need to actually be said but if someone were to at this point open a superhero game with a fairly ... normal ... Marvel or DC theme, or even a joined one that made sense and was consistent, they could expect a fairly large number of migrant players.
You have to begin with a solid base. And I understand this should go without saying but it does apparently have to be said - if you do not have the temperament, if you do not have the organizational and narrative skills, you should not even make the attempt. If your goal is self-aggrandizement, you should not make the attempt; if your goal is to create a sandbox for yourself and for your friends and your attitude is that anyone outside of that group is so peripheral to your interests that they may be subject to any level of abuse, you should not make the attempt. When you begin toxic, you have no right to complain that the environment is poisonous. And when there is a problem on a comic game, 9 out of 10 times, it is because of this. All other problems flow from the source of malicious or inept staffers.
Camping is a problem. There is no easy solution.
I remain fond of my idea, which is not shocking because it was my idea - do absolutely anything you want with a character, anything at all. As long as, in addition to whatever you want to do, you fill the role that character occupies. Batman must be Batman. Superman must be Superman. If you are not filling that role, you must be removed from that character.
And I think a solid patch-over is that, every few months, characters who are hugely important to their world or hugely popular with players should be required to stand for vote. If a writer so bungles a book that sales plummet, he's fired; if a player so bungles a character that a plurality of people think he should not be playing that character, he should be fired.
@packrat said in FCs on Comic MUs:
Additionally the level of pressure expectation leads to faction head types burning out rather quickly unless they are surrounded and supported by a clique.
It might be even better to look at certain characters who occupy that sort of role not as "you get this character until you're bored with it," but as -
You are writing an arc with this character.
You do not get to keep it forever.
You will, eventually, not have that character. Someone else will have that character, for a different arc to tell a different story.
@ganymede said in FCs on Comic MUs:
@tempest said in FCs on Comic MUs:
People froth at the mouth for alts, it's crazy.
Too fucking bad? People clamored for alts on RfK, but the absence of alts was one of its best policies.
Many people have disagreed with my point of view, but I believe that players need to invest in their characters more. If you cannot get your PC into RP for whatever reason, switch PCs. Keep trying, or don't try, whatever you choose.
I can see very few reasons for playing an alt, other than "I want to try something else but I don't want to lose the RP I have on the PC I currently have." That's fine, but, if you want to get more RP on the PC you currently have, why not put more energy there rather than split them with another PC? And if you just want to switch concepts, why not do that, quit your own PC, and pick up the other? This is especially true for FC games.
Where FCs have leadership positions, activity needs to be higher than just one scene a month. Much higher. And staff needs to be pro-active and get on people to either set up alternate leadership or giving it up in favor of players who can meet staff's expectations.
I have to agree with all of this.
I could probably see allowing 2, maybe 3 characters so long as those characters were sufficiently different in focus, but...
When you have someone with 8 or 9 alts, I don't care how active they are, that's a tremendous problem.
It's cool, at the end of the day we just disagree. I like canon places, those are the ones I always had the most fun at.
If you decide to do a game like you're talking about, I'll be more than happy to help you with anything you need in terms of timelines, news files, etc. Standing offer to anyone who makes a comic place and wants help in that area.
The problem with X-School is that every game has done it. I'm bored with it. I'm so bored with. It's always the school. It's always Westchester. It's always New York. And in the past ... decade? ... it's also usually been Year One by a different name. And I don't like Year One, I never have. I've never understood why people love taking a character whose main appeal seems to be who they are and proceeding to change almost everything about them.
So if I were to toss my hat into this particular shitshow of a rodeo again after all these years, I would have to do something different. And different, to me, is Utopia. It's not just a different location, it's a different feel. For people who want Mutant School, that's still there, but that isn't the heart of it. This is a city-state, and a boat ride away is a city that thinks most of the X-Men are rock stars.
On the matter of continuity...
There was a game I played on years ago, and they had what I to this day consider the single best rule that I have ever seen on a canon, in-continuity comic game:
"No one cares what Iceman did in The Champions."
If you read a good wiki entry or two on a character, if you follow that up with a good mini-series or arc or a few one-shot stories about that character -- and you can find every single comic book ever printed online without spending a dime or going to a site headquartered in Papua, and anyone who isn't a piece of shit is gonna help hook you up with some great books if you ask them -- then unless it's a character so complicated that you need to have read Grant Morrison's biography to understand what the hell they even do, I don't think anyone is going to say "No, you aren't good enough to be in our nerd club house."
Does that help ameliorate some of your concerns about getting dragged beneath the waves of 50 years worth of comic books that are honestly not going to matter all that damn much beyond 'This is where we are, this is what we're going for, this is where these characters are at.'?
I don't mean that to sound bitchy, if it does - I've re-wrote it three goddamn times and I'm still not sure the tone is positive as intended.
I think the addendum I at one point suggested for Utopia was "at the end of one of the stories, use that for the cut-off but instead of how it ends say the Phoenix Force or whatever undoes that 'No More Mutants' shit"
If there's some random character somebody has a hard-on for that lost their powers they're back because that hurts nothing, and it lets people make mutant OCs and it justifies the conceit of the entire X-franchise that people are scared of them because this is the future of humanity and there are millions of the bastards, and one day they'll replace us, rather than just "this bunch of super-people is worse than this other bunch, because shut up."
@ganymede said in FCs on Comic MUs:
@fatefan said in FCs on Comic MUs:
(This assumes, of course, a broadly inclusive approach to comic themes rather than a focused one, like where everyone's involved with the X-Men or is riffing on Batman: The Animated Series.)
An expansive approach to comic themes is a terrible premise.
It really is. Places that allow absolutely anything end up having little to nothing of quality. They're always slapdash, crude, and often incredibly contradictory in every context because they're trying to allow for any possibility in an attempt to attract players. And on those games, every time, there will still just be one or two groups/spheres/themes -- however you want to label it -- that attract the largest concentration of players anyway.
My suggestion for a place was, and still is:
It's primarily an X-Men game. It's located on the west coast. They're living on Utopia, the island in San Francisco bay they had for a while.
If you want to play someone who is not an 'X-Man' (or a mutant on Utopia, or an aligned 'super' on Utopia or in San Francisco), they'd better actually be in the area.
And no, Spider-Man did not just move.
@ganymede said in FCs on Comic MUs:
One alt.
Just one alt.
I have not seen it done before, but it certainly isn't as if you can keep a straight face while saying the status quo works in any meaningful way. I'm sold.
@ganymede said in FCs on Comic MUs:
@tempest said in FCs on Comic MUs:
People froth at the mouth for alts, it's crazy.
Too fucking bad? People clamored for alts on RfK, but the absence of alts was one of its best policies.
Many people have disagreed with my point of view, but I believe that players need to invest in their characters more. If you cannot get your PC into RP for whatever reason, switch PCs. Keep trying, or don't try, whatever you choose.
I can see very few reasons for playing an alt, other than "I want to try something else but I don't want to lose the RP I have on the PC I currently have." That's fine, but, if you want to get more RP on the PC you currently have, why not put more energy there rather than split them with another PC? And if you just want to switch concepts, why not do that, quit your own PC, and pick up the other? This is especially true for FC games.
Where FCs have leadership positions, activity needs to be higher than just one scene a month. Much higher. And staff needs to be pro-active and get on people to either set up alternate leadership or giving it up in favor of players who can meet staff's expectations.
I have to agree with all of this.
I could probably see allowing 2, maybe 3 characters so long as those characters were sufficiently different in focus, but...
When you have someone with 8 or 9 alts, I don't care how active they are, that's a tremendous problem.
@packrat said in FCs on Comic MUs:
Additionally the level of pressure expectation leads to faction head types burning out rather quickly unless they are surrounded and supported by a clique.
It might be even better to look at certain characters who occupy that sort of role not as "you get this character until you're bored with it," but as -
You are writing an arc with this character.
You do not get to keep it forever.
You will, eventually, not have that character. Someone else will have that character, for a different arc to tell a different story.
@arkandel said in FCs on Comic MUs:
Self-awareness is the main roadblock there. How many of those people honestly, truly think to themselves "well, I lack the narrative skills", let alone "I am a toxic person" and reach the conclusion they ought to abort the project because of those reasons?
Absolutely and unfortunately true.
You have to begin with a solid base. And I understand this should go without saying but it does apparently have to be said - if you do not have the temperament, if you do not have the organizational and narrative skills, you should not even make the attempt. If your goal is self-aggrandizement, you should not make the attempt; if your goal is to create a sandbox for yourself and for your friends and your attitude is that anyone outside of that group is so peripheral to your interests that they may be subject to any level of abuse, you should not make the attempt. When you begin toxic, you have no right to complain that the environment is poisonous. And when there is a problem on a comic game, 9 out of 10 times, it is because of this. All other problems flow from the source of malicious or inept staffers.
Camping is a problem. There is no easy solution.
I remain fond of my idea, which is not shocking because it was my idea - do absolutely anything you want with a character, anything at all. As long as, in addition to whatever you want to do, you fill the role that character occupies. Batman must be Batman. Superman must be Superman. If you are not filling that role, you must be removed from that character.
And I think a solid patch-over is that, every few months, characters who are hugely important to their world or hugely popular with players should be required to stand for vote. If a writer so bungles a book that sales plummet, he's fired; if a player so bungles a character that a plurality of people think he should not be playing that character, he should be fired.
It probably does not need to actually be said but if someone were to at this point open a superhero game with a fairly ... normal ... Marvel or DC theme, or even a joined one that made sense and was consistent, they could expect a fairly large number of migrant players.
