Death has been really torn about what he wants to play up and emphasize in the starting, npc, culture.
After players hop in, all bets are off. Then it'll be its own, living, breathing monster. One that will evolve and shift many times - and hopefully never really stagnate.
Heh. I don't like stealing unless I have permission or know who to credit for the awesomeness I steal.
We still have a ways to go, but you're welcome to pop by. 104.236.218.102 port 6667. I'm Pestilence. Death is vamp lead, and Famine is a general rulesy guy.
Here's how it all went down:
It's a funny thing, peace. Hiroshima proved the power of nuclear weapons, and began a race to acquire frightening numbers of nuclear bombs. All justified with a need to protect themselves. The same thing happened with guns, ships, and aircraft
In other words: War Never Changes.
Weapons on Terra Firma are still a threat, but with more focus on finding a new planet to inhabit, some weapons have migrated to orbit around the Earth. Hundreds of innocuous seeming rods made of tungsten drift in orbit, asleep and unheard of by most of the population. Unlikely to ever be used, they are there to maintain the status quo, so everyone can feel safe that no one would be so foolish as to use a weapon that everyone has.
The problem with safety is that it is often an illusion.
And the problem with massive arsenals and maintaining them is human error.
No one can say for certain what caused it. Was it someone sneezing and hitting the wrong button on accident? Was it something more sinister that had been infiltrated into the code?
Speculation and rumor. That's all there is right now, because the end result is the same, regardless of the cause.
On March 13th, the orbiting satellites of Project: Thor awoke. Tiny LED lights sparked to life while the GPS system ran calculations and realigned the rods with the planet's surface.
Ten minutes later, each of the telephone pole sized tungsten rods slammed into the surface of the planet, each with a force equivalent to 7.2 tons of dynamite.
The world went black, and when it woke up, everything was changed.
Once fertile lands had become craters. Known waterways dried up and new areas were flooded as water sought the path of least resistance. Cenotes opened up and the faces of mountains were so changed by the impacts that some became unrecognizable.
The worst of the damages were caused by man made structures. The Hoover Dam didn't survive the onslaught, and the flooding that came with its collapse killed thousands. Nuclear waste storage facilities and nuclear power plants have created wastelands, dead zones of radioactivity that put Chernobyl to shame.
Food, water, shelter. The needs of the people have not changed, but the world has.
And now the future of the human race is uncertain.
Welcome to the Descent Mux.
What we offer:
Mortal/M+, Vampire, and Werewolf using the nWod2.0 system.
Easy, as painless as possible cgen to help get people on the grid faster.
A system for people to pitch plot ideas, as well as claim and run 'on the spot' plots with elements that normally might require pre-approval - bridging the gap between wanting to ST right now, and the wait to have a prp idea reviewed.
A dynamic grid. The game will open with 4 neighborhoods of Manhattan available. From there, people can plot to open new grid spaces - up to and including leaving the island to go exploring the world at large. This is not just an option, but encouraged.
A setting that makes even coffee shop rp into a plottable topic! Want coffee with your friends? Sure! Go to the old warehouse, wade through a few draugr or revenants, and -get that coffee-. Then sip it while healing and snubbing others that have no caffeine. Or use it to barter for important things. Like bullets!
A cross-sphere Boon system to keep track of favors.
A certain scarcity of resources that makes conserving them important.. Blood for vamps, Essence for wolves, bullets, food, and water for mortals. Just -surviving- will be an important theme.
A grid vs grid style territory system designed to be simple-but-complex. Similar to Go, it's easy to wrap one's head around, but the ways it can be used are many and subtle. (Example: Jimmy poisoned the well (used an action to reduce a grid space's Water attribute) and people are dropping like flies! (consequence: reduced Population for the square, weakening it to attack.)
Goals:
Fostering a community of cooperative storytelling, with a lot of open communication about end goals and things people want to seee happen with a scene. PvP happens! And dramaless PK scenes will get xp goodies. Less drama; more communication and cooperation!
To create a dynamic, living world of chaos that puts most of the control and direction in the hands of the players, wihin the given theme and setting.
Want to run a merchant caravan? Please do! Want to take over a small, neighboring island and make raids on the mainland? HELL YES! Want to play politics? Totallly doable, because with the grid system, friends will be really important to helping to maintain territory. And vamps need territory and people.
What we need to get there:
Code help (Install Theno's amazing code. I know someone that can help troubleshoot, but they've never done a full install before.)
Wiki help (I am no good with wiki. I can put up a picture and information, but fancy formatting or making log and pc templates is beyond me)
A wolf staffer would be great, to get early opinions and direction for wolf-specific theme.
Opinions! More people to bounce ideas off of!
The barebones wiki lives here: http://descentmux.com/index.php/Main_Page
Bad doctor fucking with my kid's health. Gonna crawl so far up this dickbag's ass he's going to look like a 60 y/o porn star when I'm done with him.
I could use some advice on the grid layout. If people want to pop by and check it out the address is 104.236.218.102 port: 6667
The initial idea is an 'exterior' grid level with a general room that has a loose 'this neighborhood has this in it' type desc. Then you go deeper into the room, and get the detailed room desc. From this second room sprouts the rest of the area. Like a mini-grid off a network of map rooms.
Right now I have things named to make it easy to see on +where how they clump together.
For example:
Hell's Kitchen is the superficial layer on the map. From here you can go to other neighborhood nexii, or go 'into' Hell's Kitchen.
HK - Hell's Kitchen. The first room a layer deeper into the nexus. It has exits to go to businesses, and sometimes smaller subsections, like the Hudson River.
The Hudson River is: HK - Hudson River (hell's kitchen neighborhood - room name).
If you go to the Hudson Park, it displays as:
HK - HR - Hudson Park ( I will not go deeper into layers than this.)
My question is, when in the base Hell's Kitchen grid layer, should I make the HK - Hell's Kitchen exit have green brackets so the 'into the neighborhood' is easier to see? With maybe dark red brackets for the 'this way out to the grid'?
#5 on that list seems really important. Not the ic/ooc separation (though it is needed and nice), but that constant, steady feedback by page and the frequent idea tossing for what you and Bass wanted to see or wanted out of an intense scene.
Ah, cool. Thank you! I had an exit on my room parents, originally and it kept echoing to any rooms I made, so I had to nix their exits.
@Bobotron - How do you make the exit? is it just a dead end exit?
I have mine set up to... well, here:
OOC parent uses highlite black to color dark exits for staff, and hides the objects section if there are no objects in the room. It looks like this to my staff bit:
+-------------------------------+ Staff Nexus +--------------------------------+
This is a temporary desc for an OOC area.
+----+ Players +---------------------------------------------------------------+
Pestilence
+----+ Exits +-----------------------------------------------------------------+
Death's Room <DR>, Famine's Banquet <FB>, Build Nexus <BN>, War's Panoply <WP>, Pestilence's Palace <PP>, and Out <O>
+------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
My ic parent hides objects section, colors dark exits, AND, if you are staff, it shows the attributes for the grid vs grid system:
+----------------------------+ HK - Hudson River +-----------------------------+
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hudson_River
+------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
Food: 2 Population: 2 Water: 2
Shelter: 2 Security: 2 Owner:
+----+ Players +---------------------------------------------------------------+
Pestilence
+----+ Exits +-----------------------------------------------------------------+
Javits Convention Center <JC>, Hudson River Park <HP>, and Hell's Kitchen <HK>
+------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
I have room parents for ic and ooc rooms set up, but I cannot for the life of me, figure out how to put together an exit parent without it echoing funny. Am I overcomplicating this? Can I just make an exit that goes no where I can slap my succ, osucc, and odrops on? And is there an easy way to make it call on the exit name so: X moves to exitdirection.
Updates!
Dug a 47 room grid last night. Just need to do some more cross-linking to finish off the preliminary grid, then on to parenting to make it look pretty.
Found a great map of the Manhattan neighborhoods, and modifying it as I go to display how the grid rooms interconnect. They will be color coded to show what sections are 'locked' and which have been 'unlocked' via prps/staffplot.
Which is not meant to a limiter. If someone wants to try and cross to Joisey, then we start adding Joisey grid spaces. If people want to migrate, then we migrate. Building is stupid easy and changing the grid is no big deal.
I learned how to make a flatfile. Downside: I don't know how to do it without turning off the game for a few seconds. But hey! Backups.
Now that I have the laptop problem solved, I have run into another one. I can't seem to get ahold of @sammi, and haven't heard from him in a while.
And I think I'm missing functions or something. I get a handful of 'I don't see that here' or 'huh' messages when I try to copy and install theno code. And I'm at the point where I really need to get it installed 
If someone that knows how to get it in feels like throwing a little love my way, I'd be seriously grateful. I can't see what I need, or what I have that I can modify until I know what all the thenocode will include.
Theme is solidifying and evolving. Looks like it's going to wind up being very 'Fallout' and 'The 100', with some Mad Max and Supernatural thrown in.
The wiki is ugly, but it holds information just fine. (http://descentmux.com/index.php/Main_Page)
And I have the laptop issue solved enough I can start trying to move forward with code installs again.
So I have a vamp staffer, and a grunty staffer, and a couple people who have been letting me vet ideas past them. But what I really need is a wolf 2.0 staffer to help gel the wolf specific theme. And a wiki guru. My wiki is weaker than an overcooked noodle.
I have some policies and theme files up on the wiki, if you're interested, pm me, or poke me on Skype as taikaovtings. Thanks!
Progress!
http://descentmux.com/index.php/Main_Page
It's not a pretty wiki, but it is up and I'm adding policy files to it as I can, and working on hammering out the theme from scattered idea into a cohesive setting.
Run into a snag with the code insertion, but hoping that'll be sorted soon.
I'm using Chrome. I was told I can try to hand close the code, but some code needs spaces in weird places - so not sure if it would work or cause more problems because of my noobness.
Been busy, with @Sammi's help in learning how to wrangle some code. It seems like the Muxify that @Thenomain has linked the MSB is broken? It wasn't converting or saving properly.
So what we've got so far:
Room parents (Man was THAT a learning experience!)
BBS installed.
The first Neighborhood of the grid assembled and started on desc'ing.
Plot code, and events code, but I think we're missing a function for them to work. I'm learning, but slow.
And we've started working on the territory system and tossing around ideas.
Which is why I'm here, to look for advice on the first and roughest draft.
Social Attributes on grid squares will range from 0-5. 0 is a rare and catastrophic situation.
There will be a handful of ways to interact with a grid square.
+- Attack. Population+1/2 security, rounded up. So: 1-2 is +1, 3-4 is +2, and 5 is +3 - leaving some purpose to the effort of raising an SA to 5.
+- Defend. Population+Security. Uses an action. If the winner of the contested roll scores 5 or more successes, the loser takes -1 population to reflect excessive casualties.
+- Improve. Spend an action to add +1 to one stat. Cannot raise the same stat twice in a row.
+- Erode. Spend an action to wear down an SA of another grid square. This action can be detected with Investigate. Security vs Population to initiate.
+- Shift. Move one point of one attribute to another attribute. This can be done to aid in Defending. Cannot gain more than a +1.
+- Investigate. Spend an action to patrol your land or another square. Your population vs their security.
The conflict actions don't appear to have much to do with Food, Shelter, and Water. however: Those are key components to staying alive.
Food: If your population is higher than your food for more than 2 weeks, lose 1 population.
Water: If your population is higher than your food for more than 2 weeks, lose 1 population.
Caveat: If both water and food are below population, lose 1 population per week, instead of two.
A low population and security with higher water and food resources are going to attract random, npc raids as people flock to try and soak up some of the things they need to continue living.
Each trait affects the others.
Yes, people that hold territory within the same Neighborhood can aid each other. So if Bob has Pop5 and Sec5, Billy, Susy, and Jake can band up to overthrow someone they don't like. In a case where multiple people attack the same square, the defender defends against each in the order they come in. As before, critical successes impact the population of whoever loses the confrontation. So if Billy loses, and Susy scores a crit, then Bob's population is only 4, for Jake's attack.
No, it does not mean that the stats for Billy, Susy, and Jake's territories stack. They are resolved individually with the hope of wearing down the beseiged land - this is a reflection that it is far easier to dig in and defend than to move an army in a resource tight environment.
New territory can be gained by plotting and working story to explore and open more grid rooms and neighborhoods, by copping a squat on unoccupied territory, or by beating an occupied piece of territory to Population 0, and moving in. Caveat being the limited amount of actions, and unless your buddies help you, it could be reclaimed easily. (This will tie in with a Favor system (think boons from RFK, but for all spheres) and hopefully spur more rp than just number crunching.)
We've been discussing a generic 'coterie' thing for mortals, and we might call them Camps. Basically gives the same benefit for being able to band up that Coteries and Packs get. It won't make the playing field even for mortals vs supers, but it'll help with tracking who is affiliated with who.
No, we haven't gone digging through the books to account for merits yet. This is the loosest of roughest stages, but feedback for the idea is welcomed.
Maybe. But, like I said, it's easier to adjust upward than downward. And I can't play with it more until the codebase is installed anyway.