Posts made by Tat

@ixokai said in What even is 'Metaplot'?:

A metaplot is not a plot in that you usually don't do anything about it specifically.

The metaplot is the plot happening in the world around you; you might do plots that it spawns, but it, itself, is not touchable as a PC.

I think this depends on the scale of your game, to some extent. And the positioning of your PCs and your plot. If your metaplot is a war, for example, and your PCs are a team of well-trained soldiers, they can (and SHOULD) absolutely affect its outcome.

If your metaplot is a team of shadowy people trying to redirect the shape of the world, and your PCs are the mutant super team who encounters them and foils their plans, you are absolutely affecting the outcome and direction of the metaplot.

I've run metaplots that were bigger than these - politics moving in the background, huge social changes sweeping the country. Sometimes they are necessary to ground your PCs. But they're also the plots people complained about all the time, because they had no means by which to affect their outcome.

In my opinion, a metaplot should be something players can and do affect, and larger, untouchable stuff should be kept to a minimum as much as possible.

@Gingerlily said in What even is 'Metaplot'?:

I felt like I'd seen it before but was not sure. I'll give that thread a look too.

In the meantime, I'd be super happy if anyone wanted to toss in some examples:

1. Examples of metaplots
   2)Examples of plots that are associated with metaplots but not metaplots themselves.
2. Examples of other types of plots that are appropriate for a game with metaplot

Ty ty

You see them a lot in TV shows. Take Buffy, for example. Each season has a Big Bad who is trying to do something Big and Bad. Many of the episodes (but not all) deal with some aspect of the shenanigans caused by the Big Bad on the way to achieving their goal.

I've run a couple of games that have recycled this format. Big Bad has goals opposed to our heroes. They attack city X or steal macguffin Y or otherwise cause chaos in search of this goal. We thwart them. On one game, we were mutant superspies, so there were lots of other plots that weren't related to that particular Big Bad. On the other, we were mercenaries - again, lots of potential for being hired for jobs not related to our nemesis.

Sometimes it can also be a mystery. Lost's 'Why are we stuck on this island?'. The plots then revolve around trying to solve it, uncovering clues, getting into trouble trying to uncover clues. That sort of thing.

Meta plots are really great for keeping story moving and for creating fun, interesting recurring antagonists. They can be a lot of work to run and maintain, especially if you place a lot of importance on letting players affect outcomes and shape the game.

@faraday said in MU Flowchart:

@Ashen-Shugar @Thenomain ++1

If I have my way, I'm never touching another line of MUSHCode ever again.

This is a super awesome goal. I've often wanted to do bodily harm to whoever decided that code should be one blob of indecipherable text that would break if you have mismatching punctuation.

Alternatively, learn to code!

Seriously. There's a hell of a lot of code that you can just patch in and tweak with a very small amount of knowledge. You'd be surprised how quickly you can move from that small amount of knowledge to a few cosmetic tweaks, and from a few cosmetic tweaks to adding a couple of fields to +finger, and from doing that to creating a code to list everyone's age, and then it's a slippery slope.

Your mileage will clearly vary according to the type of game you want and how many code-heavy systems you want, but there are an awful lot of games that can run almost entirely on code other people have already written for you.

Don't let the flowchart kill your dreams!

@faraday said in MU and Data Organization:

I haven't had a game with actual in game news files for over a decade. People do just fine.

In fact, I'd venture to say that most of them don't even notice.

The last two games I built had code help on the game, but no theme stuff. Never once did anyone ask me about it.

@WTFE said in MU and Data Organization:

Question 2

I'm going to come down on an unpopular side, I suspect. MU* servers are UTTERLY FUCKING TERRIBLE for navigating complicated or lengthy information. If the only "news" entry is "our web site at address http://foo.bar/baz contains all game information we have" then I'd be absolutely ecstatic (presuming it's an actual web site and not just "news"-style files hastily wrapped in <html></html> headers).

That being said, the advantages of web sites are lost if you don't make use of their advantages. Inline topical links (not links at the bottom where in news it would say "see also news foo, news bar, news baz") are vital. As is, unlike MU*-oriented information, not chunking the information at arbitrary levels. (That's what "paragraphs" are for, not entirely new pages.)

I'm with you. Put that shit in a window where I can read it in multiple tabs and it doesn't scroll my game screen. My /preference/ for this is a good wiki, because I think a good wiki, configured right, takes a lot of stress off staff and lets helpful players be helpful. But even a good webpage will do.

I'm actually kind of shocked that there are people who'd prefer to read things in their client still.

@surreality Sorry, I don't exactly mean 'RPG books are automatically better quality'.

I mean that they have a /reputation/. That is, people know them, and know about them. Maybe I'm wrong in this and there are lots of people regularly picking up sourcebooks they are completely unfamiliar with to play a M* they know no one on, but I personally don't think that's the general trend.

I think people play games for two major reasons: they love the theme/setting, or their friends are there.

An original setting can manage both, but it has a much higher hurdle. It's gonna rely more strongly on the second reason, and has to worry about how to get the first crop of players to draw others in. Basically, the bar is higher, and I think anyone building a game should consider it.

I will posit, however, that there is a pretty significant difference between watching a tv series or reading several novels and then finding a game set somewhere you love, and reading a bunch of wiki text explicitly to play a game.

One is something you did because it is entertainment in and of itself, and is probably of some degree of quality.

The other is something you'd be motivated to do... why? Personally, I'd probably only do it if someone I know and trust went 'read this, play this, it's AWESOME!' There's a super slim possibility that I'd just like the idea enough, but it's super slim. And on top of that, the wiki text is often (IME) not very entertaining, and sometimes not even very well written.

If, on the other hand, I spied a game set in a beloved franchise, I'd be interested in a moment.

Tabletop source books are not the same as wiki setting, in part because they have been heavily tested and have a reputation. The starting point isn't the same, and I think you really do have to consider that when designing games.

@Pyrephox said in What locations do you want to RP in?:

I'd love it if room descs and locations in a WoD game really brought in that kind of stuff. Pointed out the places where the police just will not arrive. Made mention of suicide rock in the park, where every year on the longest night, someone kills themselves, and somehow, the police are never in time to stop it or able to keep it from happening. The other 364 days of the year, of course, it's a LOVELY place. Here's Compton's Vegan Delites, and it's got great selections; let's just not talk about the fact that the last restaurant in this spot closed down because the proprietor was found adulterating the hamburgers with bits of his missing wife. But the fried tofu is fantastic.

These are my favorite kinds of room descs. They don't just tell you what's there, they give you suggestions to fuel your RP. And sometimes they turn into plots.

I like to be sure that my grid does a few things:

• Builds on theme in some way. I LOVE writing little traditions or plot hooks into the description. For example, when I built a Mutant Town, I decided it had a graffiti culture, and that went into a lot of rooms and later characters wrote it into their concept. When I built a space station, I decided that the elevators were gang-controlled, and we had plots around them later. We once had a projectile space-cactus in an office that became the center of a number of scenes. Little details that hint at things about the setting, theme, and culture can go a long way. I'd rather some color of that nature than a strictly descriptive paragraph or two. The locations you choose should build the theme, too. Are the majority of your rooms in the rough part of town, or the upscale one? Are you highlighting ritzy night life or dive bars? You probably want some of each, but where you focus will affect how your game feels.

• Provides easy reasons to RP with people randomly. Bars and coffee shops are the usual go-to for this, but sometimes there are more creative ways to go. Grocery store is a good one. Laundromats, if appropriate for your theme. A plaza or park filled with food trucks. Maybe a bookstore or a library. A gym. A pool. Anywhere strangers might make small talk.

• Provides places for a variety of 'moods'. I once built a grid that I realized a few months in was GREAT for group hangouts and drinking and debauchery, and great for private scenes in private rooms like apartments, but didn't have a lot of space for quiet, introspective characters or RP in public rooms. So we added a chapel, a botanical garden, an dimly lit observation deck filled with stars.

• Gives people places to become 'regulars' at. These are usually your bars and coffee shops, but could also be a book store or a much-loved food truck or something. They should also build your theme, but in my experience, these are the places where player-created traditions are born. That place loves us because we tip well, this place hates us because we got into a bar fight and broke a table, etc. So on a WoD game, these are probably your 'safe spaces', but it's nice to be thinking about variety and mood for these, too. Where do we go to get into trouble, where do we go for a quiet drink, etc.

Finally, I almost always revisit the grid with player input about 6 months in. They usually have suggestions for things they've wished they had but don't, or maybe temp rooms that are getting more RP than grid rooms because of some unexpected IC hook. If you do logs, you've probably also noticed trends and things that work or don't.

Given the discussion above, I think the general consensus is that an effective resolution system is worth compromising powers within a combat setting. Hence, why some of us believe your system is super-wicked-effective for a superhero game.

Yeah. I've played (and run) X-Men games both ways, and it really is pretty awesome to be able to use the system.

But also we wanted street-level anyway, because that's where we wanted to tell our stories, and because it's way easier to keep things balanced and create interesting challenges at street level. We still did some BADASS shit, but like. Not world breaking. Generally.

So it wasn't even really a compromise for us. And PERSONALLY I'd suggest that people who do superhero games think real hard about going street-level, because providing constant challenges for Superman is hard enough. Doing it for 20 Supermans is insane.

@faraday said in POLL: Super Hero MU Gut Check:

@Tat I'm glad you made it work to your satisfaction, but I know from our discussions that it was not a natural fit and it took a great deal of finesse, as you say, to get all the combat stats tolerably balanced. I'm not a comic book person, really, but I don't even know where to begin setting weapon values for Superman's laser eyes or Captain America's shield, for instance. Also the stat values are geared towards normal human abilities (with max attribute representing Albert Einstein, where does Professor X fall?)

Well, to some extent you hit a point where all that matters is /relative/ power/smarts/skill. I mean, if you have adamantium claws that can cut through literally freaking anything, you can just crank the penetration and lethality up to insane degrees and you're fine. You don't have to know where exactly the math makes sense until you find something that it /can't/ penetrate.

Similarly, if I knew that one person's superpunch should be able to damage another person's super rock armor, I just tweaked numbers and sat in a room using them til it looked 'about right'.

I mean, you're right that it's not a 'natural' fit. I did sit there and roll things a lot and calculate rough percentages, and I screwed things up, sometimes massively, and sometimes to really freaking hilarious effect. But my players rolled with it pretty well.

Which brings me back to the flexibility thing. At the end of the day you really have to just accept that nothing is going to do superpowers perfectly because there are simply too many variables. I think this was a pretty good approximation, though.

Oh - I also think that we chose to not mess with attributes when it'd be appropriate (say, strength) and instead added bonuses to rolls or just ignored them all together when the scene called for it. In many cases, mutation use doesn't /realistically/ require a roll because look, if you're THAT strong, yes, you can knock down the door. Etc.

But we also have a more permissible GM style that tends toward the cinematic rather than the nitty gritty numbers, and I don't think it would have worked for someone who wanted that more 'realistic' level of code regulating combat or RP.

@Tat Oh, and also (perhaps obviously), players with invulnerability of some sort got their own special armor.

I'd say that maybe half of our characters on grid had something for their mutation in the combat code.

@faraday You undersell your system!

It's true that FS3 doesn't work for ALL mutations/powers. It worked for us at X-Factor largely because we were a PvE game and weren't using it to settle player disputes. We used it in a few ways.

• In general, you were required to take your mutation as a BG skill. This skill represented the finesse with which you used your mutation (IE, how well you could control it) and NOT how strong it was. We had a lot of conversations over how to use that stat and what it meant, and this turned out to work pretty well. Strength was determined in your mutation write-up, so when you rolled your mutation, it told us how well you used what you were in theory capable of.

• Combatty powers like super strength, claws, explosions, even fire-creation, all got their own customized weapon, allowing them to use it in +combat. This took some trial and error, esp with things like penetration and lethality, but honestly worked really, really well.

• Powers involving speed got their own stance. It took me a while to come up with this and I'll be honest, I'm really dang proud with how it turned out. This also allows the player to use their power in +combat.

• Powers that didn't fall under any of these categories could get a plain old roll to see their success/failure. Again, we were looking for how well you did with what you've got, not how strong your hit was or something.

• Finally (and I think this is seriously key), we GMed with flexibility and a grain of salt. There were times when it turned out that the custom weapon I made was clearly underpowered (hello, armor blocking adamantium). So we just ignored the +combat and I posed the NPC dying and knocked them out. There were times when someone was so OBVIOUSLY possible that we didn't bother to roll. I didn't make someone roll to take flight unless there was an obvious impediment to it, or to phase through a wall unless there was an obstacle. Etc. Honestly, I think in ANY system that tries to tackle flexible powers of any sort, mutation, mystical, or otherwise, this is the absolute key to making it work.

We really liked FS3 for this game because it let us add a degree of suspense and surprise to combat scenes, to handle weapons and armor, but also gives you the tools to flex what the dice say when they are clearly wrong. I know some people don't like this kind of GMing when dice are involved, but I feel like it worked pretty well for us.

@Meg

@Meg This made me literally lol. Like I wheezed so hard my boss stuck her head in to see if I was okay.

PS: We need a faction of lurkers. I mean mostly I just want a faction. I feel left out.

@faraday (kind of belatedly)

I think part of the problem is that 'hobbies' can be such a very broad range that if you want to be REALLY GOOD at your hobby (lots of people do), it's kind of hard to show that.

Also, honestly? I think there's this trend these days where people think that their free-time fiddling with x y or z hobby makes them totally as good as the person doing it for a living. I'm a great writer, I could publish if I wanted to! I could totally sell my knitting on etsy if I had the time! I could start my own bakery and make a fortune if I wanted!

Etc etc.

In other words, I think the failing is as much in people's actual point of view as it is in the system.

@Three-Eyed-Crow said in Web-based MU poll:

One of the things I like about my MU client actually is the sense of separation, weirdly enough. I generally play with Firefox open and a bunch of tabs going but I can also...not. I can just cut myself off a bit, like I do when I'm playing any other sort of video game, and open nothing but the client. It's kind of nice and feels less busy.

I'm not sure if this is what @Monogram is talking about and I can certainly just use my browser for less BS at any given time. This is one of those things that's the fault of the user rather than the fault of the thing itself. But it is one of those ephemeral things that makes me rather like having a separate piece of software that I play on, even if I recognize that clients are alienating to newbs.

ETA: That said, I'm still excited about the idea of a game that's entirely web-based. It feels like the way forward and absolutely would cut down the barrier for entry that's keeping new players out of the hobby. I'm just trying to put my finger on why I like my MU client, in addition to all the centralization for real-time RP stuff I think telnet games do quite well.

This is pretty much where I am. I am SUPER excited to leave telnet games and their limitations and their frustrations behind. That doesn't necessarily mean I'd love RPing in a browser all the time. I have too much going on and I'd inevitably lose things.

But there are lots and lots of web apps that also have their own stand-alone client. Being web-based doesn't HAVE to mean everything lives in a browser. Think Slack, or Spotify, or Pandora. You can use their web client, or you can download their dedicated application and run it that way. That's what would be the ideal end-game to me.

The primary benefit of moving to something web-based, in my opinion, is the ease with which you can start playing AND, hopefully, the ease with which you can build a game. Forum games are insanely popular because all you need to run one is an idea and the ability to write some text. It'd be great if we could get even close to that easy for a basic M* game.

@Insomnia said in Issues with SimpleMu:

Anyone using SimpleMu and Windows 10? I'm having an issue where even though none of my auto-connects are checked, I'm still auto-connecting. I've removed the name from it and am hoping I'll just get the welcome screen since I really don't want to delete the password.

It's fixable, but annoying. Anyone else have this happen?

Somewhat more helpfully - I've never had this problem, but I have had other things get 'stuck' in configuration. If you open the config files in a noteditor, you may be able to find a toggle that you can reset manually. I had to do this for something because even deleting the worlds didn't work - it seemed to keep making the same mistake, or reusing the old config file.

I'm in a rush atm, but if you can't find where they are, let me know and I'll dig for you.

I use SimpleMU for most the reasons mentioned above - spawns handled a way I like, auto spell check. I also love how easily it runs off a flash drive.

Literally the only thing that I want that SimpleMU doesn't do is to handle https links as something other than email.

I've tried Potato, but I had real issues with noticing when there was activity in my spawns. It handles notifications in a really weird way that I just could not get the hang of - and I tried!

It also has some minor things, like not auto-spacing logs, that I don't like, but the fact that I kept consistently missing things in my spawns was what killed it for me.

I'd love to see someone code a newer, better option that takes on some of the things people like about old programs and some of the stuff available for Mac. But there isn't one yet, SimpleMU still works seamlessly for me, and I've learned (annoyingly) to c/p https links.