• Games we want, but will almost certainly never have

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    R

    @helvetica I’ve poked at mechs vs mechs and mechs vs kaiju combat on FS3, and it can definitely work. But changing types (ie, hitlocation charts) during combat would be very difficult.

    I would still love to do a Pacific Rim-style mechs vs kaiju game.

  • Consensus on Roster vs OC vs Mix

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    MisterBoringM

    @Coin I was not aware of that. Definitely something to look at next time I peruse Ares games.

  • Game Development: Modern Gothic Storypath System

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    RaistlinR

    Things have been a bit rough this last week since my cat passed away. We’re trying to get back to normal routines, though, and part of that for me is working on Dark City. I thought I’d share some screenshots of character generation. CG is mostly done though I’m making minor tweaks based on feedback from my beta testers.

    attributes.jpg

    skills.jpg

    review_screen.jpg

  • Good things in Mushing

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    KarmaBumK

    I don’t think this person posts here (Cayric? You out there?), but if they are… ❤ ❤

    I’m having one of those nice moments as a storyteller where something I just randomly dropped in a scene on a whim has ballooned into a wee plot, and one of the players swept up in the story happily surprised me and tied the whole thing back into the metaplot in such a way that it even filled in a plothole for me. 🙂

  • This topic is deleted!

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  • Metaplot: What and How

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    @Tez said in Metaplot: What and How:

    How often did you get players running things?

    I don’t remember off-hand, but I’d say it was probably somewhere around 75-25 Staff-run and player-run for straight up combat scenes. But this could also be because I had just fallen in love with the FS3 combat system and was running a ton of scenes.

    Seeding plot points to PrPs has to be done carefully, and if I’m being blunt, only with trusted plot-runners. On The Savage Skies we had a few player-run-plots that went off the rails and had to be reined back in via minor retcons. I would only provide metaplot seeds to plot-runners who have demonstrated a good handle on the basic setting, and only then after having an explicit back-and-forth conversation so that they knew what they were introducing and at least some of why they were introducing it.

    @Tez said in Metaplot: What and How:

    Did you get a feel from players or any feedback as to how the political side worked for them?

    There were certainly players who were chasing that side of things pretty hard. Interestingly, it was particularly the players who were on the side gaining power who were chasing after it, because they knew they weren’t doing anything, and yet their side was still gaining power and influence and they wanted to know who was doing it and why. Knowing players in general, I expect that they would have found the person who was gathering the power and done their best to shut them down – and I think they would have succeeded, but it would have caused a power vacuum in the Crown Council that would have caused short-term chaos in the war effort (but probably would have come out ahead in the long term).

    @Tez said in Metaplot: What and How:

    TWOP definition

    I had only tangentially heard of this source (Television Without Pity?). I think that my definitions came from working in gaming companies (tabletop and video) where there are some things that are immutable or relatively immutable (setting) and some things that can change with the story being told (metaplot). Looking at the wikipedia definition of metaplot, I don’t think that I disagree with the first two sentences at all:

    The metaplot (also, metastory) is the overarching storyline that binds together events in the official continuity of a published role-playing game campaign setting, also defined as an “evolving history of a given fictional universe”. Major official story events that change the world, or simply move important non-player characters from one place to another, are part of the metaplot for a game.

    I definitely think that that’s talking about metaplot – the events taking place in the setting that connect all the various storylines going on at once – rather than setting – the details of the world where the action is taking place – by my definitions.

  • Staff and playable pcs

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    M

    I think staff should be able to play or not play as it pleases them. If they’re open about it, so the people who shit themselves if staff does/doesn’t play (and I’ve seen it go both ways) can make an informed decision.

    Staff should also feel free to remove and boot any player who can’t shut up about that. I’m a big fan of staff getting noisy people who can’t accept the policies of the game but for whatever reason can’t leave TO leave so they don’t wreck the environment for others.

    Twenty years ago, I often got pretty enraged when I saw staff member PCs (and I agree with Faraday that sorry guys, everyone’s going to know who they are even if you don’t put a tag on it, that’s the way things are) “hogging all the spotlight,” Now, honestly, I’ve gotten to the stage that I just don’t care. If there are things going on that I can participate in, then I will stay and participate until I don’t feel like it anymore. If nothing is available to me but lookyloo, usually I’ll leave sooner. Not with animosity, but just because it’s boring, and I don’t have control over it anymore. I have found that the last case seldom happens, honestly. I’m not in the proper geographic area for prime time for more places, but I can almost always find people to enjoy who at least enjoy me enough to RP with me.

    I wish I was better at dual wielding (playing and STing). I could do it pretty well when I was younger, but honestly I just find it super hard to focus that way now for a variety of reasons. So if I ever do do my little glorified tabletop thing, I won’t be having my own “pc” because I’ll have my hands full running STed scenes which involve keeping track of multiple characters even if they aren’t as fleshed out as a PC, and that will max me out. I never assume I am unique in the hobby, so I think that’s why some people also don’t like to have PCs on games that they run (or if they do they are pure flavor side pieces with friends, for funsies).

    I think that it’s a good idea for all alts on a game to be public, for avoidance purposes. I don’t think this should have to include all alts in the hobby ever. To some degree there’s some trust involved. I am shit for remembering people’s alts usually. But If I find out that there’s someone who has expressed negative things about me in the past, while I won’t avoid them on another game in the sense of flouncing off on public scenes or crying to friends about how they too should not play with that person (luckily my friends in the hobby would kick my ass if I behaved that shittily, unless the person was a creeper/abuser, but those are rare and usually my friends will spot them before I do), I also don’t seek them out. I also don’t lie if someone asks who I am. I just don’t like broadcasting because I do have two consistent stalkers still in the hobby that will OOCly seek to interact with me if I am publicly known on a game (but they’re both kind of weird and tend to get removed eventually). I wouldn’t be upset if I even interacted with them wittingly on a game (they don’t tend to disclose who they are). I just don’t want the OOC interaction.

  • Blocking Players

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    FaradayF

    @Trashcan said in Blocking Players:

    If people genuinely never want to see a word Bigmouth Joe ever says for the rest of time, I guess that’s fair,

    That was the requested feature, yes. I understand that someone may only want to suppress notifications rather than block completely, but I think differentiating those would entail too much complexity on both the player/command side and the code side.

  • Towers of Licensing?

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    MisterBoringM

    I vaguely recall someone asking a game to fully delete every scene that they had participated in from their history and just rewrite the story as if those events never occurred when they got bored and quit.

    This was maybe a decade ago and I can only remember the game was sci-fi in theme, maybe a cyberpunk style game.

    People are silly sometimes.

  • Writing character diversity - resources

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    PavelP

    @Faraday said in Writing character diversity - resources:

    because humans have differing experiences

    Nuh uh! All sub-categories of people are monoliths, and each individual is an exemplar.

  • Active WoD MU*s?

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    P

    The London one is open now if anyone wants to check it out.

    https://towersmux.net/

  • Two Birds: One Stone

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    P

    I’m going to start writing a setting document soon.<tm> Proooobably going to use Cairhien as the quote-unquote hub. Though with Traveling being a thing, people will be able to go wherever pretty much.

    IN PROGRESS.

  • Silent Heaven: Small-town Horror RPG

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    J

    The game has been running for a while now and while new games tend to fizzle out and die I’d just like to give kudos to Silent Heaven for going strong and continuing to mature.

    In particular I think the gamerunner has done a lot of work addressing and removing negative influences, and the community has never been such a welcoming and chill place to be.

  • Disquiet (rave!)

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    T

    Good game. Very positive environment. I enjoy running plots again.

  • Changes at Star Wars: Restoration

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  • Installing Arxcode?

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    JumpscareJ

    @somasatori said in Installing Arxcode?:

    If I recall @Jumpscare did something with Evennia that has a good crafting system. I didn’t roll a crafter on Silent Heaven when I did (Simon was a disgraced med student), but it looked super cool. Maybe that might be compatible?

    I could pull out my crafting code and allow you all to shred it to bits.

    I’m mired in to-dos, but remind me in about a week and I’ll look into it.

  • Episodic Games & 'Down Time'

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    @MisterBoring Whether or not that’s better, I don’t know if it’s practicable. And there are folks that really like that down time between episodes (I like some, just I would prefer that it be a couple of weeks compared to a month or three, again, I know people who prefer the downtime to the episodes, so YMMV).

    I think that the only way you could possible get anywhere near even just a couple of weeks between episodes is to have two Storyteller Staffs, because there’s going to be some cooldown time and some administrative ramp-up time on either end of an episode. Even then, I think it would entirely depend on the setting/theme of the game whether the shortest possible downtime is the best option, a medium length, or a long downtime. I think that if you have intense episodes without much time for the players or characters to catch their breath, you’re going to want a medium-long amount of downtime; if you have episodes that meander and have time to catch your breath in the midst, then I think you would want shorter amounts of downtime.

    I could see, say, a WWII game that has people at the front (or on alert at the airbase or whatever), needing a month or so between campaigns, to let the characters (and players) breathe and find their new status quo. But I could see a murder mystery game needing much less time between cases (because you’re probably going to get a little bit of investigation time and some breathing room in there, and it isn’t likely to be as life or death all the time as a combat game.

  • The Lost Realms Discussion

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    CoinC

    @Raeras said in The Lost Realms Discussion:

    @tighearna
    Genuinely curious question. I’m not extremely familiar with Hobbit/LotR lore and I know it’s not D&D so

    I can understand on some level why your policies say to keep romantic rp between the same species but is this primarily aimed at the physical aspect?

    Or is this just across the board because it’s not thing at all in the lore? (Again, I can see other reasoning for wanting to keep things separated on the physical aspect)

    This is the one at least a few people are going to deliberately flaunt in private scenes, guaranteed, lol.

    It’s a problem created by the nature of a MU.

    In a work of fiction, the protagonists, deuteragonists, and antagonists are, a lot of the time, people whose circumstances are somehow special. In settings in which things like cross-species reproduction is rare but possible, that’s an easy way of making a “special person”.

    In a tabletop game or a small group, your characters are the protagonists of the story, so them being special is not a big deal; you can play a half-elf because, despite being vanishingly rare (which automatically makes you special) there’s a lot more control over who can and can’t be that specific version of special, as there are only about 3-6 protagonists.

    MUs, unfortunately, break this by catering to a much, much larger playerbase. Suddenly, if one out of every five characters is a half-elf, then being a half-elf isn’t special because it ceases to be vanishingly rare.

    Do I agree with this policy? Ehn, not really. I think once the characters hit the grid they should be able to fall in love and have the lives they choose (if they are rosters, they should probably be played by the same person for a long-enough period of time before they can do things like get pregnant or married or whatever, just to avoid people doing that and then bailing on the character).

    This is especially true given that the game has a policy of one character per player, which means the pool wherein you can find someone to play a romantic storyline with is extremely limited. Even aiming high and saying that you’ve got 50 players, lets say you’re playing a Hobbit… but most people are playing Humans or Elves, there’s maybe at BEST another 9 Hobbits on the game. Let’s say your character is bisexual/biromantic, that’s 9 people – once you start eliminating through schedule, chemistry, RP preferences… yeah.

    I personally would bend a little and let interspecies relationships just be more common, but that’s just my take. Clearly @tighearna has their own vision for their game, which is how it should be.

  • City of Glass - Discussion

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    PavelP

    Wait, you all read the books?

  • A Constructive Arx Thread

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    T

    @Artemis There’s a group of us that’s adapting DnD rules into a post Second Reckoning campaign. One friend is doing a small module to apply to Arx and I’m creating a longer campiagn that’ll probably take place five years after putting Azazel back into his box.

    Will it be the same? Nah.

    Will it be fun? Probably.