Best posts made by ZombieGenesis

Well, it's a new year and I'm doing my best to get back into some hobbies I've been missing. To that end, I've been pondering opening an OC hero game using M&M 3E.

• It'd be an Ares game. Given my work schedule and whatnot, I just can't play on regular MU's much anymore. I need the web client and the ability to have asynchronous scenes.

• Taking advantage of the Ares scene system we'd be a "gridless" game. That's not to say we wouldn't have a setting we just would not have a grid built on the mush itself. Instead, the grid would be supported by a wiki describing the various locations of the setting.

• For ease, there'd be no coded sheet. Instead, we'd use a sheet tab on the character web profiles that would house a PDF sheet. The sheet would either be user-created or a sheet built by HeroLab.

• The tone of the game would be something akin to The Boys or Invincible.

• Players could choose to create a character of any power level up to 10.

And that's about all I've thought of so far. Here's what I'm looking for from others...

1. Is there even any interest in a game like this? Not that I'm looking to make The Next Big Thing. Just want to be sure there's any interest.

2. I'd love to have some people come on as plot runners and maybe some character app staff. Access to HeroLab wouldn't be necessary(I'd be using that to check the math and whatnot) but some eyes to help me spot broken power setups would be nice.

3. I'd also love to find someone knowledgeable in CSS who could make the site look pretty. I can make it look functional but that's about it.

Thanks for reading. If you have any comments, thoughts, or questions feel free to PM me here.

Aw man, I don't think I can resist this season. I know my RP times are weird but I'm gonna try to make it happen!

I set a max XP cap for all characters when I run XP-based games. Everyone who creates a character starts with that amount of experience, then I give guidelines for "newbie", "experienced", and "advanced" characters. This way, they can create the character they want and immediately get into the RP they want.

If someone wants to play a younger/less experienced character that evolves, they can do so at their own pace. If they want to jump right in with a more experienced character who will change less over time, they have that option too.

Some things might be put behind "plot locks," requiring a player to bank XP and then go through a plot or something to get.

I don't like experience to feel like a punishment to new players and a weapon for more established characters.

It's gotten really bad with the mentality of "I don't like X...X must be destroyed and any involved with it sent to jail or murdered!" My wife and I have a side business where we self-publish Splatterpunk novels. We have since had to start using pseudonyms and we tell NO ONE what our writing names are after people showing up at our house threatening to kill us for...fictional things we wrote. Keeping in mind that we only publish through the Kindle Unlimited Program so though our philosophy is "horror without limit" we have to keep things to a certain level just to keep our stuff published. So it's not like our stories involved the raping of babies or anything. Even so because of some of the stuff we touched on it triggered a small group of people and resulted in one of the most bizarre nights of my life. My point is that these things hit on even very small, personal, scales and it's just bizarre.

(This is long and kind of got away from me but this is actually something I've been discussing with people RL too so I thought I'd just let loose. Feel free to ignore!)

Personally, I don't believe in moderating speech. At least not to a severe degree. I'm a believer that words are harmless, it's the intention behind the words that have meaning. I developed this mentality through a lifetime of working in phone related jobs and an extreme dislike of passive aggressive behaviors and phrases like "Oh, I kill them with kindness." Rude is rude regardless of what tone you're using.

Further, while there are certainly those individuals who see other sexes or races as lesser I think when one person calls another person a name it's not in the belief that the name in question represents an entire subset of humanity but rather they use it because they know it will inflict emotional harm on the person they are using it against. For instance, if Man A calls Woman B a "bitch" it's either because that woman is Dee Reynolds or because they know that calling Woman B a bitch is one of her triggers. It is unlikely because they think all women are "dogs" to be cowed and broken.

Finally, I think some things that should be quite clear such as racism is often not quite clear because of how each individual person perceives things (IE how they are "triggered" by things). For example, and I'm going to use things like "the n-word" instead of the actual word even though I think that is patently ridiculous just so I hopefully do not trigger people, BUT on the Big Brother live feeds (yes I watch Big Brother) there is a little person (I'm not sure if midget is offensive so I'll just use little person). He was explaining to a woman who happens to be black how the word dwarf or midget was offensive to little people (I forget which word it was). He said it would be like calling a gay person the f-word or a black person the n-word. Now he used the actual words. She did not get offended by the use of the f-word but went ballistic over the use of the n-word.

To me, I see nothing wrong with how he used either word. He was using them to explain how another word was as offensive to him as those words were to other people. He was not using them to cause emotional distress or to denigrate a type of person. He was just using it as an example of how severe another word could be considered and yet he was still roasted for being a racist by the woman on the show and the internet as a whole (well, the whole who bother to type things in comment sections).

So...in short I guess my opinion on forum moderation of speech is that you're damned if you do and damned if you don't but I think a poster's intention is much more important than the actual verbiage they use.

Well, we've decided to move forward with this. These are the next steps I'll be taking...

1: Setting up a mediawiki (and maybe trying to bribe someone to make it look pretty).
2: Transferring the data from my wikidot site to the mediawiki site.
3: Making some modifications to the game code(mainly adding the Feral character type from Witchcraft).
4: Moving the game over to a permanent home and going live.

We're hopeful this won't take more than a week or so to get done. The biggest thing is going to be setting up the mediawiki so the sooner we get that done the sooner we get the game open.

I've convinced my TT group to play the old Street Fighter Storytelling Game on Saturday. I don't know why but I'm incredibly excited. I played the crap out of this game back when I was in High School and I'm hoping that revisiting it doesn't burst the nostalgia bubble it's been living in.

We're also going to take a look at the new Dark Souls RPG which I'm very excited for.

Don't why I felt the need to share this, I'm just that excited.

If I came across as saying "everyone should post everything", that's not what I meant. Just that people should be free to share what they want without fear of being shamed. They should also be free to not post anything for whatever reason as well.

Also, anything that is posted should have clearly defined tags to let people know what is going on in the log. People who fail to do that should be dealt with accordingly(reprimanded and/or having their ability to post logs revoked).

I just don't buy into the "I don't want to read it, so no one should be allowed to post it" mentality.

I figured I'd open this here so it has it's own thing instead of derailing the other thread. A lot of this is contingent on me looking at my Buffy code and finding that it's usable but...

I'm thinking of opening a Buffy game. That's about as far as I've gotten with the idea but here are the seeds I've been pondering...

1: Put it in a big city that hasn't been explored in the Buffy-verse(so not L.A.)
2: Have it be in real time since the show went off the air. So it's been 15 years since all the potential slayers were made active.
3: No limit on slayers aside from them having to be women. Given the time period since all slayers were made active this is all the current generation has known, Buffy may even be a legend at this point (ala Luke Skywalker).
4: No comic continuity. Keep it strictly TV canon.
5: No real limits on what PCs could be. If it was in the Buffy/Angel core rules I think it should be supported on the game.

And that's it for now. Those are the ideas I'm thinking about running with. Thoughts? Ideas? Thanks!

@mr-johnson I do not get the mentality some folk have about superhero games being required to cater to OCs. While I have my own, personal, problems with the staff of this game that prevents me from ever playing there their stance on FCs is not part of that. I can see being disappointed in that decision and making your own decision not to play there as a result. I can see letting staff know that you'd be all for playing there if they did allow OCs. But to have a little tantrum mocking them for not allowing OCs? Seems a bit juvenile to me.

I don't think there's one answer to this question. I also think it depends on the specific situation and, more importantly, what the consequences of the IC failure are. The biggest one is character death. It was one of my biggest problems with WoD games back in the day, combat twinks luring other players into combat just to kill them.

One solution might be to simply not allow failure in places that might cripple RP on the whole. If the Elysium is the primary source of RP on a game it'd be rough to ban a character from it unless they did something horrendous, for instance. Don't allow permadeath on unless, again, something horrendous has happened. Things like that.

A lot of modern RPGs handle situations like this by having "success at a cost". If someone was going to fail at something, switch it around so they succeed...at a cost. They owe someone a favor, they suffer some sort of permanent mark of their failure, they make an enemy, or whatever. Don't let failure stop forward momentum. It might redirect it but momentum should always be moving forward.

Make sure failure is fun. A lot of players like succeeding because, well, it's fun. You win. You get to look like a badass or whatever. I think it ties into the above, something along the lines of "Sure, you fail at this but..."

I run a private game where we experiment with various ways to RP. We use a modified version of the Storypath system and it's allowed us to move RP in directions we wouldn't have ever thought of on our own, including embracing failure.

I guess, in short, I'm saying make sure failure isn't crippling, make it fun, and make sure RP keeps moving forward in some fashion or another.

I don't think there is a "normal". As most people have said here, it depends. I had a scene yesterday that lasted a few hours and poses came like gang busters. It was a mix of players both on the web and on the mush.

I've had scenes start with a brisk pace on the MUSH and then revert to a slower pace when someone had to bow out but we didn't want to end the scene or kick them from the scene. So we just transitioned it to a web scene and the posts came every few hours till we were done.

The other day a RP partner and I decided to wrap a "scene" not necessarily because we were done but because we realized the "scene" had been going on for 2 RL weeks. The scene itself was just a place for us to sit and pose maybe two or three times a day. Super causal scene that transitioned from one place and time to another. We tend to keep one of these private scenes going just so we always have something going on though it's not uncommon to break from that "scene" as we focus on other scenes or even other games.

That's the great thing about the web portal, it's like Burger King in that you can play it your way. It also helps breach the timezone gap. I RP with a few people from the UK and a lot of people from the West Coast of the US and this helps us out a ton.

@atomic I think you should make the game YOU want to play the way that YOU want to play it and everything else will sort itself out. You'll attract like-minded players who share both your vision of a system and theme and I think you'll have a lot easier time maintaining and managing a game like that. I've tried creating the game that "other people" want to play and it just doesn't work. I think you'll find that most supers players are open to a great many things and as long as you're passionate about what you're doing you'll be okay.

While this was a pretty busy week (my niece graduated high school and my wife and I celebrated our 15th wedding anniversary) I still managed to get some decent feedback on the game. I was alerted to some c-gen bugs and realized I need to put some more stuff up on the wiki. All in all a good week. Things should start moving more quickly since I'll be around more often starting this week.

I'm not going to get too into this. First, I think it's tacky to drag these things out in public. Second, the banned and their friends will not see that they did anything ban-worthy and I have no desire to be dragged into any mud-slinging or circular arguments.

What I will say is that any speculation about why any individual was banned is exactly that, speculation. I have not, and will not, state publically why any of the three individuals banned today were banned.

Each incident is unique and complex and goes beyond any single issue or encounter. They all happened because I felt they needed to happen for the health of my game and for my own mental health.

I think some folk see Ares as an obstacle to creating a game using "system x" and I thought I'd address that for a moment. Anything you could do in TinyMUX or MUSH or whatever you can easily replicate using Ares. Ares gives you all of those tools plus other things.

I think the problem with Ares is that people expect FS3 level integration with any system plugin coded for it(web based character generation, full on systems for combat through the scene system, etc). That's where things get hairy. Those things would require a lot of effort and work and, in most cases I believe, are unnecessary.

Ares by itself is an amazing platform even if you only utilize it for the character directory and scene system. Ares is MUSH/X++. It just also gives you the tools to build on that to go even further(web based character sheets, web based c-gen, etc).

Ares is like a buffet table limited only by the talents and abilities of your chef(coder). By default you get everything you could get in a MUSH/X with the addition of a built in wiki, character profile system, and web based scenes. On top of that you can add other things as your desired or are capable of creating.

In short, Ares isn't the obstacle. The expectations of what it means to be an Ares game is I think.

So I've been working on a Star Wars game set in the Old Republic era and it's moving along. Initially I was just going to keep it private because of some of the design choices that were made with how the FFG Star Wars system was implemented but myself and the other players involved think it might be fun to take the game public next year.

So, my question is centers around how open people would be to a modified Fantasy Flight Games(FFG) Star Wars system. I'll list the big changes below.

The game itself would be running on Ares, which is important to know for some of the changes we'll be discussing.

1: The first major change centers around talents. Talents have been changed from the talent trees in the core Star Wars games to the pyramid system found in the core Genesys system. This was done mostly because there was already a core FFG plugin for Ares ready to go. I did go through each specialization to re-tier the talents to(hopefully) create a balanced and fair character progression system.

I like this change because it makes it easier to modify specializations and I honestly find the pyramid system easier to follow than the Star Wars talent tree system. I think players will have an easier time customizing their characters using this system as well.

2: The second major change centers around Jedi. I've opted to use the system presented in the Clone Wars source books to represent the Jedi. Instead of a number of Jedi careers with 3 specializations each we have the Jedi class with the Padawan, Knight, and Master specializations.

Personally, I never liked the system of Jedi careers presented in the Force and Destiny RPG. I think the Padawan/Knight/Master system more accurately represents the movies and other source material. I've also kind of included it in our theme. I'll try to keep it brief but I'll explain below.

The game takes place after the Mandalorian wars so the galaxy has known nothing but war for 20 years or so. A lot of what it means to be a Jedi has been lost in that time. An entire generation of Jedi have been born and thrown into war without proper training. Secrets have been lost but that also means they can be found again. Want a talent from one of the dropped Jedi specializations that we don't use? Create a plot to rediscover it. We think it could add a lot of fun and depth to Jedi RP.

3: The final major change is that we don't use things like Obligation or Morality. We found those work great in tabletop with a small group but we thought they could get muddled on a larger game with 10 or 15 active players.

I know this doesn't go much into theme but that's not really my concern at the moment, I very much like our theme. I'm just wondering if people would play at a Star Wars game using the FFG system modified as I've described above.

Thanks in advance for the feedback.

Ok, so we've hit a spot where every time I think I've fixed something I find out 3 more things are broken. That said...I think I'm just about done. Over the weekend I'm planning on doing a major update to part of character generation that I think will take care of the last lingering issues. At least the last of the issues that I think could break the game. Then we'll be able to move forward.

If I get everything done I'm looking to get done tomorrow I'll post a "soft open" advertisement. If it doesn't get done until Saturday I'll probably hold off till Sunday night as Sunday is my TT day. Either way I think we're closing in on an actual opening so...yay!

The reason this needed a disclaimer is because a LOT of erotica is pretty much derogatory crap (or worse rape stories) written by people who don't really understand the subject matter (ie: 50 shades) or don't understand what it is that /makes/ something hot, let alone what is good writing. If people just grab random erotica and read it under the impression it's going to help them, well it's probably not.

All of this is entirely subjective. While I've never felt disrespected or criticized by anything I've read I do agree that there is a lot of erotica out there that could be considered poorly written. That said I've seen some erotic series that I thought were terribly written gain a very rabid following. I feel erotica, more than any other genre, shows us just how diverse we are as a people. This is all thanks to the fact that we don't have publishers declining to publish stories because of their personal feelings on the matter. If someone wants to write and publish something...they can!

This has led to an amazingly diverse genre that has, literally, something for everyone. When you have a genre this diverse a lot of it, possibly most if it, won't be for everybody. Whether it be a style of writing or the specific subject matter it is going to resonate with some people and not with others. I have a peeve where the use of the word "rump" to describe someone's ass just turns me right off. Not even sure why, it just does. Because I don't like it I would not say all books that use the word rump should have a disclaimer on them, however.

As for your mention of "or worse rape stories) believe it or not rape is one of the biggest requests my wife and I get as writers of erotica. There is a large demand for rape fiction and it's not all from men, I'd say half of the requests we get come from women. Again, everyone is different in what they find sexy and erotic. Now I'm not saying that just because there is a demand for it you should write it, I'm just noting that there is a shocking (to me) amount of demand out there for very hardcore/violent sex.

If any kind of disclaimer was needed it might need to warn newbies to erotica that they might want figure out their own hard limits and learn to identify what stories may offend them and avoid them.

There's a /lot/ of erotica out there, a crazy amount. Everything from Dinosaur porn to Bigfoot to supernatural romance to office romance to every other kink you can imagine. Not all of these make for good reading or help write anything remotely good when it comes to TS.

If you want the best bang for your buck, so to speak, /TALK ABOUT IT FIRST/. Don't just drop sexy times on your partner and muddle around grasping at straws. Talk about what language is good, what limits and squicks might be had, even what person (When dealing with two individuals of same gender 'you' can go a long ways to differentiate who is doing what rather than she/her he/him/his or whatnot).

Communication is key. No two people are going to like absolutely everything the same to the same amount, and it takes some effort to get things to click as best they can for everyone's sexy times enjoyment.

This I agree with very much. As a player I play both male and female characters and I've had both sexes just sort of jump right into sexy goodness when I wasn't ready, prepared, or willing to do so myself. I don't think great in depth talks are necessary but certainly making your partner aware of your own limits (or lack there of) might be a very good thing. I think Shang's +kink system works very well as a passive way of setting up what you're willing to do as a player. Barring that I think liberal use of +finger notes is a good thing too. Pre-emptive communication as it were.

I'm currently re-evaluating the idea of which system to use entirely. I may end up going with Savage Worlds(which I already have mostly coded and ready to go for Ares).