@arkandel I agree with you on all points except one; the 'let's all' part. I can't speak for everyone but that's not what I'm trying to do. I'm trying to find ways to encourage those who can and those who may want to try. Part of that is finding the right incentive system that doesn't ostracize those who can't or don't want to.
I really like the idea of automated prompts. Even something as simple as using an online writing prompt generator could be interesting.
@arkandel said in MUs That We Would Love To Make (But Won't):
@zombiegenesis Yeah, that's fair. Maybe an 8-ball kind of code which, if at least half the scene's participants silently activate, spits out a random encounter in the room.
The game They Came From Beyond The Grave has these quote cards that you hand out to players. Players get rewarded for finding ways to get to a point where they can use the quote or action they were given. I think it's a really neat system and has encouraged a lot of creative interactivity in the gaming sessions we've had with it. Something like that may work too.
Not to be pedantic but Stargate came out in 1994 not '92. Not that the world changed a whole lot in those 2 years(aside from me graduating high school...) I'm quite excited for this game. Stargate is one of my all time favorite franchises right up there with Star Wars, Star Trek, and Ghostbusters. I can't count how many times I've seen the movie and the show as the only reason I subscribed to Showtime. SG1 is one of the few long running shows where I did not hate a single season. So, yeah, hella excited about this project. 
@Thenomain said in What would a superhero game need to be/do to bring in a new player base?:
What would a superhero game need to do to bring in more people or a bigger base, a second answer:
Give the players something to do.
That's about it.
I honestly wish it was that easy. In my most recent foray into running a superhero game, Empire Bay, we had a ton of plots started up with people attempting to run scenes on these plots on a regular basis. On top of these regular scenes we had leads left dangling for people to look into at their leisure just by contacting staff. Now what it led to?
Nothing.
People kept making excuses to not show up to the regular scenes, we received not one single request to look into the dangled leads we had put out, nothing. I felt bad for the guy who was really spearheading these things, he put a ton of work into it and nothing came from it.
I'm not sure what the answer it but just creating things for players to do isn't it.
My suggestion? Create the game YOU want to play at, find a small number of players that share that dream, and have fun. If it grows and you get a ton of players, great! If not? Well, at least you and that small core group of people are having fun.
@ThugHeaven I could not agree more. My wife and I read a lot of erotica (we also run a side business where we self publish our own) and one thing we have learned over the years is that there are often gold nuggets to be found in even the shittiest of stories out there.
We've often been shocked to find out we find this or that is sexy based on how it is portrayed or written in an otherwise forgettable or awful story. Those bad or poorly written stories often led us on a path to find stories that were perhaps better written. Sometimes we even find ourselves really enjoying a story in spite of the flaws to be found within it.
From a player's standpoint, there's not much to learn Ares wise. It mimics most MU* commands quite nicely. The biggest thing I found for people transitioning over is learning the scene system(which is totally worth it).
One of my biggest issues getting involved on a game is that, often, the setting is just too large. Even so-called "small towns" often encompass large areas and I often find it difficult to worm my way into plots. Some of that may be my timid RP nature but it led me to wonder about smaller grids.
On top of that I work at a hospital and on lunch today I noticed something...we're not actually a very big hospital but we still have a fairly large campus and a lot of people milling about. It led me to wonder about setting a game in a hospital (WoD or some other urban fantasy).
Some of the larger hospitals out there employ over 20,000 people with almost half that again in affiliated physicians. On top of that they can have upwards of 2,500 patients actually staying in the hospital not to mention how many more may be there just for brief periods for surgeries, doctor appointments, ER visits, or just there visiting any of the above. The total population equals that of a small to medium sized town.
Now the setting wouldn't have to be a hospital (that's just what I'm most familiar with) but anything that employs a large number of people and has a large number of visitors. Has anything like this been done before? I can't think of anything. And if not...why? Are there flaws that I'm not seeing that could not be overlooked or worked through?
RE: The Grid - I've taken the reigns on that. I have a vision for it now and I think it is coming out rather nicely.
RE: Timeline - We're post season 7. We're treating season 7 like it happened in 2003 and we're opening in 2015 so 12 years have passed. We treat only the TV series as canon (Buffy and Angel) so no comic stories are canon.
Systems wise I'm a big supporter of Savage Worlds nowadays. Been working on a c -gen system for a potential SW game in fact. My TT group is currently in the middle of a Necessary Evil campaign and we're loving it.
Thought I'd post an update. Things are going pretty well. I think we're about ready to start letting people in. I have a few people over testing out c-gen looking for any obvious bugs. News files are all up. The only big thing left is a butt load of data entry for the wiki in regards to the DC Heroes RPG. I figure that can wait till after we open, however.
So, I work Wednesday but might start letting people over on Thursday. That's my plan as of right now.
Oh, and I'm thinking of implementing a 7 or 14 day wait on second alts just to be sure all the choice characters aren't taken.
You can check out the pre-alpha stuff here:
Gonna try this with my TT group for sure. If people wanted to do it in an MU type environment I'd be willing to host it.
Not sure why but this has me very excited.
LOL
I've been spending the morning migrating the DC Rebirth stuff over to a private server. It'll be hosted all by itself with a mediawiki all its own. We'll be using wikidot till the mediawiki is fully up and running but hopefully that won't take too long.
Still working on some bugs and stuff but soon, I promise. Things have slowed a bit as my pain meds tend to knock me out but it's coming.
@runescryer That one has been a big temptation for me. I'd set it in an OC universe that kind of mimics The Boys. My biggest issue is that while I really like Aberrant 2E I think it is a bit bloated and needs to be streamlined a bit. I find their nova tech rules unplayable.
So this is my fear, I'd streamline and simplify the Aberrant rules quite a bit. I'd remove quantum(mostly because I don't like the idea of having to pay to use your powers) which means most of the powers would need to be reworked. Which is fine, I think it could be done fairly easily both to remove quantum and to simplify them over all. But then I'm afraid people would be like, "Well, it's not really Aberrant any more so..."
But, yeah, this is one is like an itch in my brain.
Well now is as good a time as ever. I think we're about as good as we're going to get without being 100%. If you're interested in checking us out you can connect to us at dcrebirthmux.com:2001. We have a temporary wiki up at http://dc-rebirth.wikidot.com/.
I'm on as Dark Souls but I'm at work so may be prone to idles or ghosting out. Hopefully there's enough up to get people started but if you have any questions just let me know and I'll answer em just as soon as I can.
So @Ganymede suggested a theme for an OC supers game involving dreams and nightmares made reality. That, combined with the recent Sandman trailer, got my brain churning. This isn't necessarily a game in development(which is why it's here instead of there) but I thought it might be interesting to talk about. Here are my thoughts/questions...
Living dreams/nightmares? Are they dreams/nightmares made flesh? Like the personifications of dreams given body in the real world? Or are they normal people who have been imbued with powers and abilities linked to dreams and nightmares?
Actual dreams and nightmares? Do people still dream? What effect has dreams and nightmares coming to life had on the actual dreams of normal humans?
OC Supers or...? The original idea was for an OC supers game but might this work better as something more akin to a WoD style universe? Do these supernatural beings walk proudly and openly in the world or hide in the shadows gathering in secret?
Power level? How powerful should these characters be? This will likely be affected by the question above. More WoD/Vampire 5E levels of powers and abilities? Avengers/X-Men? DC/The Boys?
Setting? For me, and this is likely impacted both by the Sandman trailer and the fact that I'm running the Fall of London campaign for my TT group, but I think this would be a great game to set somewhere not in the United States. I think London would be great.
I really dig this idea but, for me, I like it less as an OC supers place and more in-line with a gothic supernatural game. Though I guess there's nothing saying it couldn't be a cross of the two, something more Scion-like in scope?
Pretty much what the title says. I've recently fallen in love with the Savage Worlds system and have been tinkering with a character generation system for it. Looking for some people interested in trying it out and letting me know what they think. Mostly looking for bugs and for ways to increase user friendliness.
Right now it's just a basic system, I haven't even coded in any of the arcane backgrounds because I don't know what direction I'd want to go in if it ever did mature into a full game. You can select from a number of basic fantasy races, set your attributes, skills, select edges, and balance out with hindrances as needed.
Were it to mature into a more full fledged game right now I'm 50/50 on either an OC super hero game using the Powers Companion or a dark fantasy game (further divided 50/50 between a Rippers/Bloodborne style game or a Dark Souls style fantasy game). Of course these are all just thoughts and fantasies at the moment. It's entirely possible that it goes no further than it is right now.
If you want to come check it out feel free to connect to muxmadness.com:1111
All I ask from my RP partners is that they give me something to work with in their poses. I hate flat poses or poses where they just respond to what you've done and add nothing to the narrative. So long as you're interactive and not trying to dominate the scene, I'm all for people RPing however they want.
I often ask my partners what they want to get out of a character or scene or plot so that I can be sure to keep those very things in mind as I play opposite them. We all have something we want to get out of RP, be it just a fun night of monkeying around or something more specific and focused. Again, so long as that doesn't lead to you prioritizing your fun over others? I don't see a problem with it at all.
In regards to Striking Looks/Attractive type advantages in a game, I just treat it like any other "striking feature" a character might have. My character may notice that someone is "hot" or whatever their thing is but that doesn't mean that they're attracted to them.
My only real issue with it is that everyone wants to be "the hot one" and when everyone is hot then that becomes the new average. We're RPing on a CW show and every character has the Striking Looks(Hot) merit. I get it, my character will notice, but it's hard to make that character feel special because, as we've said, everyone has that merit.
That's one of the reasons I think it's good to have a circle of people you can trust and rely on for things. I've had a partner come to me and say, "I really want to play a bombshell character who makes someone's nose bleed just by entering the room." So I was like, "Oh, okay. I can make that character for you." Then we can discuss how we see things going, whether it's short or long-term RP, etc and so on. I know what they want to get out of the RP, they trust me to respect whatever boundaries they have, and, hopefully, they have fulfilling RP as a result.
That was a long ramble and I apologize.
I've posted about this place before and recently posted about an OC game in another thread where some people showed some interest in an M&M game so I thought I'd post about it again. This is a game I've had up and running for a few years now and the population has come and gone...come and gone...etc and so on. At this point it's become one of those things that just exists; it's there, it has a character generation system, it has a grid, and I hang out as a staffer. So if people are interested in M&M 3E and an OC superhero game...it's here.
For the time being that's about it, I make no promises about activity or RP or anything. The game has what the players bring to it. If people are interested in coming on board and helping the game grow, however, I'm more than open to bringing on more staff.
If interested we have a wiki at http://empire-bay.wikidot.com/ and you can connect to the game via muxmadness.com:1200.