Posts made by ZombieGenesis

Sort of yes? I've been toying with using the Storypath Ultra system to do a WoD-style game. I'm a big fan of the system and think it could be a good way to give a fresh coat of paint on things while keeping it familiar and comfortable.

Sadly, I have deleted this site from my favorites bar and will no longer be checking here for PMs and such, which was all I'd been coming here for over the past few years, anyway.

For those who wish to contact me, I can be found on Discord as Zombiegenesis on the Ares and MuHaven servers.

@Ghost said in The Case Against Real PBs:

"ridiculous argument about Sporty Spice"

This was posted as I was writing my post. I'll counter a ridiculous argument with another one, did you ask for consent from all the people you jerked off to in high school? Did you tell them you were doing it? No? Did it affect their lives in any way that you were doing it?

@Ghost I can't stand the stance of "if you disagree with me, then..." enter whatever negative thing you think the person doesn't want to be associated with. It's the whole, "anyone who disagrees with this hates puppies." So I'm gonna check out of this discussion because it's clear there's no real attempt at discussion happening here.

I hate to say it, but I might finally be done on this forum. Nothing constructive seems to happen here anymore, and the most active thread in months amounts to "Ghost thinks people who use PBs are creepy weirdos, and if you disagree with that, then you must be one."

It's too bad. I've been part of this forum since, like, 2 incarnations previous, but if this isn't a death throe, I don't know what is.

@Misadventure said in The Case Against Real PBs:

Not doing something you don't like doesn't shield you from others doing it. For a collaborative thing that's going to be a difficulty.

I don't think it is that difficult. Here's the thing about someone's chosen PB, it really only matters to them. Everyone else can ignore it or even replace it in their heads. I think there are very few occasions where strictly adhere to "X is playing my character" affects RP in any significant way.

Ghost in on about a legal or at least reasoned question about PBs.

I don't think that's what Ghost was talking about. In fact, I'm not even sure there was an actual question in his post.

Or are you saying that my feeling that my imagination is overwritten and I don't like it is something I do wrong and should change my experience?

I think this hobby's only "wrong fun" is ruining someone else's RP by being selfish. If using PBs negatively impacts your RP, don't use them. As I said above, it'll not impact RP significantly. Even if they don't have a decently written @desc(and how many of them do?), you know their general appearance. And if there are any specific questions about what they're wearing, you can always ask OOCly.

So far got lots of disagree but not much reasoning shared about the question put out there.

I think plenty of reasons have been shared regarding the original post. I think the issue is there really isn't a "question put out there." As for the legality of certain age groups for PBs, I have been focusing on the original post's content. Which wasn't about the legality of PBs in any way as I understood it.

If I were to run a MU* and decide I didn't want PBs, I would just make that policy and if asked why answer "because that's how I want it."

No other reason is needed. Not enough game runners use this philosophy and end up doing things they don't want to do and wind up with regrets.

I'm going to break my post up into two parts; AI Images vs Actors and my thoughts on this thread as a whole.

AI Images vs Actors
I think AI art is amazing. I pay MJ a yearly sub so I can create images to my heart's content. I think it has a lot of advantages for MUSHing. Being able to create truly unique images for your character that can be tailored to the game theme is a powerful argument for AI art, IMO.

That said, getting consistent images of a singular character can be very difficult. I think that might change in the upcoming months with MJ, but for now, it can be very difficult and is reliant more on luck than prompting.

I think actors have a place for PBs as well. I often base my portrayal of a character on the actor I'm using to play them. It can affect how they act, how they talk, and how they react to things. I often hear their voice when I write dialogue or imagine how they might act in my writing scene. I wouldn't say it overwrites the imagination at all. For me, a good PB can fuel my imagination.

Also, you can often find dozens(if not hundreds) of suitable images for your character, especially on games set in a modern setting.

My Thoughts On This Thread

A while ago, there was a discussion about "Why aren't there more MU discussions here?". I think this post is emblematic of why activity has dropped here so much. To me, it very much comes across as, "This is why I think you're a creepy weirdo for Sex Reasons."

I think there is certainly a discussion to be had for a game using only AI imagery instead of PBs. I think it could absolutely be a good alternative. I also think there are plenty of reasons to keep using PBs as they've been used since I got into MUing in 1995, and they don't need to include Creepy Sex Reasons.

The problem is, I didn't get the impression that's what this post was really about at all. To me, it very much came across as a judgemental post meant to shame people who do enjoy using PBs, for whatever reason.

And I think that's the primary problem with the MU community as a whole. A lot of people are much more interested in judging others than they are in coming together to tell cool stories.

I agree. Season 2 has been fantastic. I've also been enjoying Monarch Legacy of Monsters and Netflix recently got Tacoma FD(a sitcom done by some of the people from Broken Lizard).

If I understand the question correctly, many systems do this very thing. Take the many and varied PbtA games, for instance. For this very reason, my group used a variant of City of Mist for quite some time. Instead of a binary pass/fail or chip away at an arbitrary number of "points," it uses a much more descriptive system that encourages drama and creativity. At least, that's how we felt.

We have recently returned to using the classic D6 system, which utilizes difficulty numbers and "points" for various things. It was nothing against City of Mist. Thanks to a really nice Ares plugin, It became more convenient to use the D6 system. I don't think the enjoyment of the players on those games has diminished at all because of it.

The system is just a tool. How useful it is comes down to the players. There are a number of ways that a player can achieve a goal and, in the end, I think the ultimate goal is "to have fun." The problem is there is a large number of players out there who are concerned solely with their own fun. They give very little consideration to how someone else may be enjoying a scene.

That goes well beyond any system. It's one of the reasons I've left the superhero MU space. I got tired of everything being a fight about how OP someone wanted their character to be. It doesn't help that this seems to be the current trend in comics: all characters are "alpha mutants" or whatever. Explaining to them that we have to balance things based on the player base as a whole meant nothing to them. Worse, you'd then see it reflected in their RP. There are players out there who will see any game as "<My Character> MUSH" and no system will fix that.

If the question is, why do we track points that are just a track to inevitable success? Then the answer is that it doesn't need to be a track to inevitable success. Failure can advance RP and drama, too(often more than success). I think the issue comes back to people not wanting their character to fail. Ever. At anything. This can be frustrating to other players for a number of reasons.

First, some players may like a little failure to spice up their RP. Not everything has to be rainbows and roses. Second, in order for Character A to be the success hero they want them to be, other characters need to fail. Often, they need to fail a lot. This can make them feel like secondary characters, which is no fun. Third, these players who cannot fathom their character failing often can't fathom YOUR character succeeding, and they have no problem explaining that fact to you.

Regardless, I think it all boils down to this: the system is a tool, and bad players ruin it for people.

Recently, a brilliant and generous person created a D6 plugin for Ares. This is something I've actually wanted for quite some time. I even started a project to build on myself but just didn't have the time to dedicate to it. So, this was a godsend for me as it has opened the door to do something I've wanted to do for a long time, open a Star Wars game using Ares.

This project is very much 'in development' and I'm just starting to get things put together. I'm posting here fishing for anyone who might be interested in helping out in some way. I've got a good idea for a time period and theme but even those are fluid at the moment. Here's what I'm thinking.

Time Period: Roughly 4,000 years BBY. I put it here because we can easily fudge things. We're not going to be restricted by canon, we're very much going to be our own thing. To that end, I'm fudging things a bit and will be having the Sith War and Mandalorian War be essentially back to back. The galaxy has been in a state of war for 20 years.

Setting: The galaxy. We will likely have some hot spots like Coruscant, Corellia, and some other places, but I don't see the need to limit the game to one specific location.

Factions: Republic, Jedi Order, Sith, and Fringe. I'm hoping to be pretty open with things.

System: D6. It's a bit customized using some of D6 Space and some of the old WEG Star Wars system. Mostly we've combined the Mechanical and Technical skills into one and added Presence. I'm also in the process of simplifying how the Force works basing it more off of the D6 Space metaphysics system. It has full web integration including character generation, a dice roller for scenes, and dice rolling for jobs. It's really slick. I've also added the Traits plugin so people can record other things they may have(starships, equipment, companions, etc).

What I'm looking for: Mostly people who want to contribute in some way to get the game up and running and, once we're open, keep it operating smoothly. Like I said, we're customizing the system a bit so feedback on how that feels will be nice. Getting opinions on the theme and setting will be very helpful. And, once we're open, appstaff and plot runners would be great.

So, if you're interested feel free to drop me a message here. Or if you know anyone that's interested. I'm pretty excited but I'd very much like to have at least some sort of a staff base if I'm ever going to open it to the public.

@Misadventure For elaborate things, I've used +jobs, but I usually create a tabbed box on the game wiki. The first tab has the prompts that should be used for the scene. Another tab has the "reveal". This could also be multiple tabs if there are potentially multiple results.

I handle this in one of two ways in the games I run. These are generally used for GMless RP as most of the people I RP with use Ares and asynchronous RP.

1: I've set up a plot where the story can be advanced by completing a number of scenes. I provide a page with a number of prompts and some hidden information for when certain benchmarks have been met. When the players meet those benchmarks, they reveal the hidden information and RP accordingly. One scene leads to the next(scene prompt, action prompts, clue prompts, scene close) until the mystery is solved.

Sometimes I also give the players one scene with various prompts and then have them submit a job when they're ready to move on to the next one.

So here, we use specific clues that lead to a solution.

2: Sometimes we don't have anyone who is running the plot, but we still want to do X, Y, and/or Z. So we do our RP and lean on the system to see how things go. We treat it almost like a game of Clue. We use "oracles" to answer various questions, come up with our guesses, and then determine how correct we think we are. Then we roll to see if we're right and RP accordingly.

For example, through RP and various oracle checks, we're pretty sure the killer(most of my RP happens on horror or superhero games) is the sheriff. Based on how the oracle checks went, we're 75% sure. We roll to see if we're right. If we are, we move on with the plot. If we're not, we RP how our characters found out we weren't and go back to the drawing board.

Not everyone's cup of tea I'm sure but it works for us and we have a great time with it.

@Ghost Aliens is for sure on the list of games I want to play or run. I was pleasantly shocked by the Marvel game. I hated the beta, but they fixed almost all the issues I had with it. I'm going to pre-order the Kang adventure and run it with my group when it comes out.

@reimesu My group had a blast with City of Mist. We used it to emulate a more straight-up superhero game. We did modify things a bit, used 3 themes instead of 4, and they were customized by the player instead of having strict themes. So a player could have "Alien Physiology" as a theme with related tags within it.

We're starting up some Savage Worlds stuff now. I'm running Rifts and another player is going to start up a Savage Worlds Pathfinder campaign. We're pretty psyched.

I can't speak for everyone, but from what I've heard from others and what I've experienced, the lack of posting seems to come down to a few things, depending on the situation.

• A New Game: I know some people who are wary of posting about new games either in development or that have opened because there's always going to be that one person or small group who log on, checks the game out, and posts about all the "red flags" they found on the game. It could be how something is worded in the policies/new files, someone they found out is a player on the game, or someone who is staff on the game. People often have to go on the defensive about their game before it's even open.

When I opened IA 2.0 I had people message me on Discord with a list of IP addresses and asked me if anyone was connecting to the game from them. And, if so, I need to be on high alert.

• It's Exhausting: Posting on these forums can be exhausting. For most people, MUing is a release and an escape from everyday life. The game itself is supposed to be their focus, but often(take a look at how this thread is going, for example), things spiral, and suddenly, we're all investing a lot of time and energy into defending(or attacking) someone or something. People have better things to do, and often, these posts become an emotional sinkhole.

• Lack Of Goodwill: I think people have run out of goodwill and faith in their fellow MUers. There have been too many attacks, too many smear campaigns, too many creepers, and too many breaches of trust for people to get over. I know a lot of people who now just play in their little corner and try not to think much about the rest of the MU world around them.

• Inevitability of Attack: No matter what you post, someone will attack you somehow. Someone, for some reason, will come at you and try to put you on the defensive. Whether it's having run too many games(whatever that means) in the past, having played a character someone thought was problematic, having said something off-color at some point in their past, or any number of other things.

In the end, I think it comes down to some people just feeling the juice is no longer worth the squeeze. They know that if they come here and post something, some combination of the above is going to happen. And I get it, a lot of people have a lot of valid reasons to be wary of certain people and situations, but other people take things too far.

That's been the experience I've had and the experience some others I've spoken with have had, at any rate. I know that I've personally written up posts that I thought might be fun or interesting and have ended up not posting them because I just knew the entire thread had a high chance of taking a sharp nosedive.

And I'm not saying this is specific to any forum, exactly. I don't know really anything about the other forum that popped up when the schism happened here(I don't even know the name off the top of my head). So I hope this doesn't come off as any type of attack against them or against here. It's not. It's just me recounting experiences.

It's a shame, as I've been a part of this hobby going on 30 years now. I love it. I thoroughly enjoy cooperative storytelling with people. I've just become very wary of the forum communities is all.

@headery We've had some issues with people being forwarded to a non HTTPS version of the site. I've updated the link to hopefully prevent that.

I created a game, mostly for some friends but I enjoyed the theme and setting so much I've decided to take it public. We're in what I would call a "beta" phase. Mostly because we're small and short-staffed.

Realities collide in the city of Century Station. Century Station has become a nexus of realities thanks to an experiment gone wrong. Beings from other places and times have begun popping up all over the city, some with powers and abilities far beyond anything this world has seen before. At least nothing they've seen outside of a comic book or action movie.

Infnite Adventures MUSH is a blended universe-style storytelling game. Characters are ripped from their home realities and deposited here, in Century Station. We allow pretty much any reasonable character to be applied for here (Superman, Captain America, Hellboy, Buffy, the Ninja Turtles, etc.). While comic book characters are likely to make up the brunt of the characters on the game, we are not limited to just comic book characters. Any character that can be reasonably assumed to exist in our universe can be applied for.

Website: https://infiniteadventuresmush.com/

@Devrex I love that. I think if I ever open a game again(and I probably will) I'm also going to include an "RP Hooks/Ideas" board where people can post things like that. Things for people to bite on and say, "Heck ya, let's go play that!"

@Misadventure It depends on the situation and the NPC. I'm fortunate that the players take a lot of initiative for their RP and handle a lot internally. They may just ask, "So is it okay if we created <NPC X> and do <SOME THING> with them?" Then they'll spoof the NPC in their scenes.

Another time we created a host of NPCs for a slasher plot and players adopted the NPC to play in scenes up until they were killed.

Other times staff might step in and portray the NPC in a scene. Finally, yeah, there are +jobs to handle how some things might be done.

I think if you're playing with the right people, there is no real wrong way to handle it. Your example of using NPCs to represent an obstacle to overcome is fantastic.

The FS3 system is great for all of this because you can include rolls in the +jobs themselves for +job interactions.

@Misadventure I run a private modern horror game right now with a very small group of people. We make liberal use of NPCs for plots and RP. Ares has a good system for NPC characters(either pcreated or just something people can list in their relationships tab) and we've used it to great effect. I'm a big advocate for NPCs on games.

@Misadventure I'd like to think this would work. I know several people who would be interested in something like this. For my group, it would come down to the final setting and whether or not it was Ares, but I think, in general, this type of theme could work. So long as there's something for players to do and plots to engage with, I'm sure players would come.