Posts made by Tempest

@Bobotron

Stuff like the traitor thing is always iffy. It COULD be super awesome. In a perfect world, it WOULD be awesome. In the real world, somebody'll muck it up. Would the 'spies' be known to each other?

On one hand, that'd give them a lot more angle to play with it. On the other, then if one person gets 'caught' they can probably get mindfucked into outing the ones they know. Which is all realistic and stuff, and one of the dangers even in real life of 'spies' knowing each other/etc.

Also you'd need to keep that on the downlow as a player OOC. And it feels like it could breed this weird paranoia in-game (which, admittedly, could be fun), but with all the OOCness that goes on on games, keeping those kind of things OOCly a secret is pretty hard. The minute you got 'oocly outed', I feel like it'd just be a matter of time before that 'somehow' turned into ICly outed.

I dunno, just my random thoughts as I consider it a bit. A lot of fun. Potentially a lot of mess.

Onto servus-- Will they have powers, a-la ghouls? And TBH I'm with you on the humans, like I said, not my thing, but I know it is for some people. Having the servus is probably good enough.

And yeah, the powers thing. As long as all the options are at least 'kind of neat', I wouldn't even worry about it too much. I've been playing Guild Wars 2 lately, and even there, half the traits my class gets are clearly worse than the other options.

Yeah, I'm sure some 'meta' build of murdervamp will arise, but eh. It's a MU for RP, and with the politics/other powers/etc, should be ways around dealing with that, anyways.

So like, actual mechanics to replace the usual "ST decides circumstantial bonuses"? IE have coded weather and if it's raining, you get -2 to all perception-related stuff?

You could probably get way more detailed with this than I did here. This was after not using the system for 2 years, fumbling around the helpfile for 5 minutes.

@Bobotron

So, in the other thread, I saw you mention the three 'traitor houses' repeatedly, and then say you hadn't decided if they're going to be open to PCs or not. Are you still thinking about that?

You also seemed averse to human PCs in the thread, but on the wiki (cough), I saw something about humans being allowed as servus (or w/e) to vampires. Is that accurate? --Because I was going to comment that you should definitely consider allowing humans of some sort. It's not my thing really, but I am 100% sure there is a crowd of MU players that really likes playing the 'servants' of Vampires, and since you have them in the setting, it didn't really make sense to cut them out from PCs.

I am really liking everything I've read so far. I also really like the idea of powers 'branching' (assuming I understood that right). So two vampires with Intensity/whatever at 'Master' may not have all the exact same abilities. That's pretty neat, and fun. (Will inevitably lead to some instances of 'why would you ever pick X over Y', but who cares, even successful, 5 year old MMOs have that problem with their class traits.)

The SW Saga edition games tend to have this +map system that I always thought was fucking AMAZING. You can make a grid in the MU and put markers on it to represent trees or walls and leave a spot open to mark a doorway, etc, and then players can put their chip on it to represent their character and move it around/etc.

It's been a while since I've messed with it, so I don't remember all the details, but I remember falling in love with it.

@Bobotron

Ahh, the combat system sounds interesting. Is the Transformers system similar to the one on the SRW MUs? Also saw it used on that FF/Kingdom Hearts game, which was pretty neat.

And okay. Actually saw the answer to the PC things in the other thread, sorry.

From that thread...I'm sure this is a very simple thing, but I don't know these abbreviations "A game starting out more heavily CvE but moving towards a heavy CvC"--What's CvE/CvC?

"the MMX/TFGenerations combat system" -- What is this, exactly?

Are you going to allow the stuff like "witches" as PCs, and not just Vampires? Seems like yes, but figured it was worth clarifying.

We should all be in it! Free speech! People's rights! Down with the Patriarchy!

HelloProject, are you the Patriarchy?

@Ganymede

Let me fix what I meant to say. "It's not being done currently, and I assume because of that barrier."

Yes, it has been done.

It'd require a very mmm..."giving" staff, though? Case in point, Shav did not have PCs on RfK and did not allow other staffers to pursue titles/etc, as I recall?

Even CoFaB pulled off the political thing pretty well, I thought. My only (glaring) issue with that game was that Chimera got way too involved in stuff as her PC and Staffbit both. Aside from that, the game got a lot right.

@Ganymede said in UX: It's time for The Talk:

will try to create a political or economy system that would eventually create its own RP. Because I've seen it happen before, and I know it's possible.

The one easy, glaring exception to needing metaplot to prevent sandbox on a WoD MU is....make a vampire game and let the players get involved in politics. It just needs staff there as a mediator and also probably as the initial prince/whatever (unless you maybe did some storyline with them being wiped out and new people filling the praxis), and then it'd probably be pretty self-sustaining if there were systems for territory/feeding.

The barrier is, I'm guessing, that you can't make that game and then be involved in the actual politicking shit yourself if you're staff, so nobody's done it.

People have sort of half-ass tried this. Fear and Loathing has player politics, supposedly. Hard to have any interest in when they just let people randomly app in at 150 XP or whatever as 'guest stars'. And they're using some weird hodgepodge of 1e/2e. And they have other splats and dragging other splats into sphere-politics is just meh.

@Ganymede

Are any of them active, and allow FUs?

I had a character on some D20 SW game that I played off/on, last time I logged onto it, it was dead and I recall there being talk about some drama here.

Then there's uh...some game that started recently? But doesn't allow FUs, as I recall from the ad thread. So, meh.

Any active MUs out there that actually have stat/equipment/etc systems with more 'oomph' than WoD/FS3?

Kind of have the urge to play something where the mechanics matter, without resorting to trying to find an RP MUD worth playing.

This is honestly a pretty interesting topic.

I've played quite a few muds. I even played the one @HelloProject mentioned, years ago. (Headwiz Ozma?)

I've almost never encountered anything on a MUD that is hard to figure out how it works.

Meanwhile, so many 'basic' commands on a MUSH have like 3 pages of helpfiles describing it. Like...goddamn man, I just want to set a fucking +note on my character, or do an xp spend.

As somebody who knows 0 about code, I assume MUSH code is archaic and sort of hack-jobbed, since it varies wildly from game to game, and outside of the copy/paste WoD games or FS3 games, etc, MUs flat out have 'custom code' that somebody just made in their free time.

MUDs are generally based on some other codebase (ROM/DIKU/whatever), and the flavor/theme around the code is just changed. Sometimes massively changed and almost unrecognizable, but they still had the same foundation.

Not to insult anybody or anything, but I'm going to go out on a limb and just say MUD coders are probably better coders, or at least have way more time to code. Like that just seems to be a very obvious conclusion, as somebody who knows nothing about the inner-workings, but has expansive experience with both systems. I can only imagine a MUSH has maybe 1/50th the code a MUD does, if not way less.

Personally, I find culture variances between muds/MUSHes pretty curious. Little things like how a huge chunk of the MUSH population can't be fucking assed to read the bboard even once a week, where MUDs have forums/etc dedicated to the game and people are commenting about things on the game hourly, nevermind in-game noteboards that get checked p.much every time you log in.

@Kanye-Qwest IDK about you, but I die on every hill.

@Kanye-Qwest

I definitely believe both sides of the problem fuel the other in various ways. Which makes this seem like a problem that isn't going to be going away outside of the occasional rare game that mostly gets it right.

@HelloProject

The sandbox trend is very, very dull and it makes WoD-MUs specifically feel like they're barely 1-step removed from being Shang these days. It honestly makes MUing a chore sometimes. If you don't have a clique to RP with, you get to go out in public and endure the lower quartile of MUers who can barely string together a series of 3 coherent sentences littered with typos (nevermind the content of those sentences being anything you can work with to ignite/continue a scene with) or are playing a 4'6" ghoul/wolfblooded fuckslut who expects to be taken seriously when she's not spinning on her 6'7" viking daddy's dick. (oh god is this slutshaming?)

Two of the things fuelling this, imo.

It's very rare these days for staff to want to put in the effort (or understand how) to build a world/setting that players can actually impact or has anything going on. So the players actually motivated to "do stuff"...have nothing to do, and they have no ongoing problems that need solving to work with to fuel the scenes of dragging the less motivated players into shit. A lot of the time, there is just nothing meaningful to talk about in public RP, because there is nothing going on in the game, so...people go to what's easy, hooking-up and fucking.

The other part is that players seem to be less interested in story. This is to say, people will /loudly/ claim to want story, metaplot, etc, but really they just want story when they want it, how they want it. Which is perfectly fine, theoretically, except a lot of them will skip +events, make no effort to be involved in the game, ignore the game's setting/theme, then complain how the game has nothing going on because nobody is running them the 1 specific thing they want (mind you they never tried to locate an ST for that thing, either), or the story isn't focused on what they made their character for, etc.

The one exception, and the thing that always gets a sizable chunk of people frothing at the mouth to play, are games where you can shove your dice down other people's throats willy-nilly.

/endrant

P.S. A Mistborn game /sounds/ awesome, if you just scratched out the plot from the actual books and did your own thing in the setting. Hell, you could just overwrite the book plot, do it with some twists and just bitchslap anybody who does anything stupid with info from the books or whatever. The question is how would you combat 'everybody wants to be mistborn'? You can't just rule them out completely, because that's just boring as fuck. But would anybody make anything /besides/ mistborn? Any sort of 'staff picks who gets to be mistborn' would probably end poorly (see every Star Wars game with limited Force Users).