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MU* Wishlists
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@Aria speaks a lot of truth. Also I would simply just state up front, “Yo, this is a coop game, no PvP” and if people wanna ask about PvP, they can be asked to see themselves out. I don’t wanna sit here and wave +sheets against someone, I’d rather work towards more sphere-based goals, or do some whacky shit like be a mad mage scientist who tries to tinker with his own magical devices or something.
I definitely think it can be done, and I think there’d be an audience for that.
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@Rucket [nerd_glasses]But what about when the tournament arc happens and we all have to kung-fu eachother?!?[/nerd_glasses]
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I’ve always hated the concept of OOC Masque. It has always seemed wrong-headed to me. I know this is going to sound impossibly naive and possibly insane given some of the battle-scars people (including myself) have in this area, but I’ve always been of the staunch opinion that a game for adults should be able to have the players act like adults in an OOC way. So don’t take any OOC knowledge IC.
Tis a little dream I have.
That said, I think cooperative games – even with canonically opposed factions – can work just fine. I’ve seen it first hand, even. I’ve mentioned it before on some thread, but there was a game years ago in which the Technocracy and Traditions had to cooperate in a town because Weird Shit was going on and both sides desperately wanted to know why. So, while there was friction, certainly, everyone there was cooperating. Any character who wouldn’t either wasn’t approved or would “leave town”. So just a tweak to the setting can set things like that.
But even without that, being open and honest OOCly is the best policy, I think. In my experience, most folk are fine to talk out conflicts and find a narrative solution everyone can live with. Those that can’t, well, there’s always staff. And I think we all know at this point that those people would involve staff EVEN IF some OOC Masque was in place and all the bureaucratic 't’s were crossed. So I don’t think it’d even be any different in the worst case scenario, but substantially better in the best case scenario.
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I feel like how co-operative a game is depends on how it is presented from the get-go. Like, all WoD games seem like they are set up for all the factions to work in isolated groups. Lords and Ladies type games tend towards ‘everyone works together even if we don’t get along’ (And a lot to do with romance stuff). Fantasy games seem to be a mix. At least by my experiences. Firefly games seem to encourage getting along until the ships get involved and what not.
WoD would probably need a bit more enforcing that everyone works together over just for their area. Since it seems like ‘Vampires only trust vampires’ or something is pretty baked into the theme.
Firefly games would probably serve better as a purposefully kept small game with everyone on a ship or two, similar to the show. Rather than ‘As big as we can get for playerbase’. Firefly has some pretty huge ships, though. If I made a Firefly game (I’ve been tempted). I would likely build it around 1-4 ships for people to join and have a max number of players. Without time delays for travel if people want to so stuff on planets.
I can’t speak about any of the other types of games since my preference is Firefly, fantasy and/or Lords and Ladies type games.
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My wish is actually a game that supports PvP very well and not liking someone IC and OOC is considered fine. Some people suck, and murdering their PC is enjoyable. I want to assassinate dinos. I want be a villain that people hate and let them feel the catharsis of taking that character down and I don’t want to water down the experience by having everyone involved aware of my sheet and collaborating to tell a compromised story.
The part where this is a fantastical wish is I’d like this to work and not turn into the staff’s favorite clique playing by different rules and not have to deal with the OOC drama that seems to inevitably slip into MU* games when you play this way.
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@shit-piss-love said in MU* Wishlists:
My wish is actually a game that supports PvP very well and not liking someone IC and OOC is considered fine
Isn’t that basically what MUDs are? Each mud I’ve tried has just been pvping people with all the code stuff.
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@icanbeyourmuse said in MU* Wishlists:
Since it seems like ‘Vampires only trust vampires’ or something is pretty baked into the theme.
Of all the groups in WoD you could’ve picked as an example, you picked the main one with a theme of PvP baked right in.
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@icanbeyourmuse said in MU* Wishlists:
@shit-piss-love said in MU* Wishlists:
My wish is actually a game that supports PvP very well and not liking someone IC and OOC is considered fine
Isn’t that basically what MUDs are? Each mud I’ve tried has just been pvping people with all the code stuff.
Huh that’s interesting. I always felt the defining feature of MUDs was their focus on PvE over human interaction. Makes me wonder that a lack of coded systems to enforce fair play contributes to PvP not working out in a MUSH/X format.
To clarify my wish; I want a MU* where I do not have to think about the real people behind the characters and can act entirely IC, and not have that negatively impact my outcomes. I recognize this is not a wish that can be fulfilled; the human element is precisely why there are so many problems in MU* and there’s no way to prevent OOC from getting involved.
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There has been a very different divide for me where Mud/Mush/Mux’s specifically had things put in place to allow PvP. Where as a Moo wouldn’t at all.
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@shit-piss-love said in MU* Wishlists:
the human element is precisely why there are so many problems in MU* and there’s no way to prevent OOC from getting involved.
I would argue that the human element is the entire point of a MU*. The fact that you are interacting and collaborating with another human being through the thin veneer of a fictional character is one of the key differentiators between MUing and other forms of gaming.
He/Him. Opinions and views are solely my own unless specifically stated otherwise.
BE AN ADULT -
@Pavel said in MU* Wishlists:
@icanbeyourmuse said in MU* Wishlists:
Since it seems like ‘Vampires only trust vampires’ or something is pretty baked into the theme.
Of all the groups in WoD you could’ve picked as an example, you picked the main one with a theme of PvP baked right in.
Haha. Did I? I don’t know much about them. Vampires just were the first that came to mind since the last WoD character I played was a ghoul.
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@icanbeyourmuse So when Vampire was first written in the early 90s, the game was primarily about the Camarilla (a large Vampire faction of many different Vampire clans that has a sort of Medieval lords vibe to it) and their conflict with the Sabbat (a smaller Vampire faction that also had several clans, but not as many, with a sort of Crusading church vibe to it), but layered with hundreds of years of history and bloody vampire horror.
This conflict was written as frequent, hostile, often intensely violent, and an intrinsic part of the game. Some variation of it has been baked into every version of Vampire since, whether it was in VtM 2.0, the anniversary editions, or as Invictus/Lancea Sanctum (with a few additional convenants just for funsies!) in what became the Chronicles of Darkness. It’s a big part of why - as much as I love both WoD/CoD Vampire as it’s written - I generally don’t think it’s a great fit for large online games unless staff actively wants to spend a decent bit of time telling stories around and adjudicating interfaction and interpersonal conflict. Most of the other splats will have some shared antagonist that they’re willing to at least temporarily set aside their petty differences to face, but in most versions of Vampire, the antagonists are… some other group of vampires. Could it do well in a smaller, controlled setting with a clearly outlined group of antagonists and and a narrative driving towards a particular endgame? Yeah, I think it could. But that would have to be baked in from the beginning and constantly reiterated, because otherwise you’re eventually going to get some random player(s) that decide their primary goal is to be Lord of All the Fangly Ones and being an ICly scheming, manipulative dickface to get there is part of the theme as written.
Note that I have had plenty of fun over the span of many years playing exactly this theme. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with it. But in comparison to a lot of the other World of Darkness lines I’ve run on various games over the years, I’d say that Vampire: the Requiem was 100% the one that caused the most amount of me sighing and going “…fucking really, guys?” at something that was OOC, in comparison to both versions of Mage and both versions of Changeling, which I’ve also staffed.
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@Pavel said in MU* Wishlists:
I would argue that the human element is the entire point of a MU*. The fact that you are interacting and collaborating with another human being through the thin veneer of a fictional character is one of the key differentiators between MUing and other forms of gaming.
This.
@shit-piss-love said in MU* Wishlists:
My wish is actually a game that supports PvP very well and not liking someone IC and OOC is considered fine.
I don’t think there’s a game in existence where all the players liked each other OOC. I know I routinely get caught between two friends (or groups of friends) who really can’t stand RPing with each other. And that’s fine - different tastes, different personalities.
But let’s not conflate liking someone with the ability to problem-solve and handle conflicts in a mature manner. They are very different things, and one neither requires nor implies the other. PVE games have stupid schoolyard drama, but PVP games tend to ratchet it up to 11. I just can’t stand dealing with it (as player or as staff).
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@Faraday said in MU* Wishlists:
But let’s not conflate liking someone with the ability to problem-solve and handle conflicts in a mature manner. They are very different things, and one neither requires nor implies the other. PVE games have stupid schoolyard drama, but PVP games tend to ratchet it up to 11. I just can’t stand dealing with it (as player or as staff).
This came across my feed the other day and I immediately thought of the MU community:
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Man, I vibe with this.
In kids terms this is also said “they are being mean to me” (and all its variations.) A great deal of the time they aren’t being mean, they just aren’t acting in a way the kid wants them too. So they must be mean.
I don’t think we ever fully grow out of this…
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Plz someone make a Contagion Chronicle game: https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/318347/Chronicles-of-Darkness-The-Contagion-Chronicle
More seriously - I think the reason why PvE games are more difficult is that it takes a lot of staff time/energy to keep players with Things to Do, particularly when you have multiple spheres, and while I think there’s a large pool of CoD/WoD players, there is a much, much smaller pool of people willing/able to put in the work to make and actually run a game with the strong horror/PvE focus that would be amazing. And some of the ones who are out there have a tendency to be somewhat emotionally unstable, so it’s a dice roll when it comes to play experience.
I’d really love to see more single-sphere (or Mortal) focused games with staff who were really passionate about running those stories. More often what I see is “here are the most popular spheres or the spheres that people have loudly demanded, anyway, but the game staff actually only feels comfortable doing anything with X and Y sphere, so Z sphere, while technically extant, is basically stuck with whoever decides to take one for the team until they burn out”.
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@Pyrephox Contagion Chronicle has some good stuff, though it feels like it would be hard to implement and run! (In a game sense, not code wise) Also the actual God Machine Chronicle stuff has never really been embraced by the CofD MU*ing community, I feel like.
But I did consider it a while back.
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@Pyrephox said in MU* Wishlists:
I’d really love to see more single-sphere (or Mortal) focused games with staff who were really passionate about running those stories. More often what I see is “here are the most popular spheres or the spheres that people have loudly demanded, anyway, but the game staff actually only feels comfortable doing anything with X and Y sphere, so Z sphere, while technically extant, is basically stuck with whoever decides to take one for the team until they burn out”.
I have been saying this for literally twenty years. It made sense when I was working on White Wolf’s official game servers that they offered (almost) every splat that they had published because they were ostensibly marketing vehicles for the company and were built to support their product line, but…
After that, it seems like most places just opened up as many spheres as they could manage out of a desire to reach a critical mass of players, whether they could actually serve those spheres well or not. I would really like to see games that are single-sphere or maybe - maaaaaaybe - two or three spheres if they have overlapping themes that will be highlighted in the game’s setting and plot, thereby giving them reasons to be running around in the same spaces.
My kingdom for a Mage: the Awakening 2E game.
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I’d really love to see a Vampire and Changeling game using some of the content from Dark Eras 2 – there’s a merit that allows Invictus Oaths to be sworn with Changeling vassals, and I had ideas of setting up the Changeling Freehold courts with an extra court. The vampires aren’t others, they’re just the ‘Night Court’ of the freehold, and are bound up in the freehold oath as well. Probably can’t really embrace all the vampire covenants this way and it changes that game dramatically, but still.
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@Pyrephox said in MU* Wishlists:
I’d really love to see more single-sphere (or Mortal) focused games with staff who were really passionate about running those stories. More often what I see is “here are the most popular spheres or the spheres that people have loudly demanded, anyway, but the game staff actually only feels comfortable doing anything with X and Y sphere, so Z sphere, while technically extant, is basically stuck with whoever decides to take one for the team until they burn out”.
I suspect there’s also a lot of “Well, when the game started, we had someone who was super passionate about running Highlander: The Quickening, but they eventually got overwhelmed with <thing> and had to step down, so now one of the other staff members who isn’t really enthused about it and doesn’t care much for a lot of what Original Highlander Staffer did and honestly doesn’t have the time because of the sphere they’re really interested in running, but we didn’t want to just shut down the sphere and leave all the players who are invested in it in the lurch.”
