What's up with the two Age of Heroes games?
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@renaveleigh said
It’s nothing more than a reboot of L&L.
Incorrect, it’s a fundamental change of theme. LnL followed the same basic pattern that lots of these games have been following for a while – lots of pre-existing backstory that attempted to create an approximately comics-accurate merge of DC & Marvel status quo. SHM is a superheroic ‘year two’ where there’s a very minimalist superheroic history and almost everyone is just starting out. Teams and reputations have to be established (or not), and there’s no weight given to ‘because it happened that way in the comics’ – or indeed if it was ever in the comics at all – over what players actually play out.
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@Colette said in What's up with the two Age of Heroes games?:
attempted to create an approximately comics-accurate merge of DC & Marvel status quo.
In no meaningful way has that ever been true except for major tentpole characters, and even with them primarily just the FF and Superman. On UH, the New Mutants was an infamous clusterfuck because half of us were our comic ages, mid 20s, and half of us were teenagers - just like some of the core X-Men. When a friend wanted to play Oracle, she was approved and then unapproved because, quote, “Batman would put her in a robot body.” On HA, I needed to get Dr Doom’s permission to say he was the origin of Titania’s powers. At a point when Batman Beyond was running around in the present in comics, Terry was repeatedly ruled a banned character because somebody on staff decided it would cheapen and age Batman and got very angry about it.
Even when it wasn’t explicitly enforced, these games have always been predominantly Year One. It’s one of the reasons all of them are so generic. Two different games but there is no meaningful difference between the SuperHero MUSH of 1998 and SuperHero MUSH of 2026, just as there’s no meaningful difference between them and HMUX, UH, HA, and the other who-knows-how-many games that have used the exact same setup in the time I’ve been online.
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@Prototart
UH still has its website up, you could go take a look. You’ll see things like“The Avengers, first called together by Fury in 2021 to stop an attack by Loki, have become public icons, with t-shirts, toys, and all manner of merchandise for sale, though they still pale in comparison to the Fantastic Four in that regard.”
That’s for a game set in 2031 (though I remember it being 2027 when I was there, so I guess they’ve updated that). Iron Man and Batman started in 2015. X-Men and Fantastic Four in 2017. Peter Parker bitten by a radioactive spider in the same year.
HAM: Batman from 2005, X-Men 2011, etc. The Avengers were supposed to be the brand new team, having been established just 2 years prior to game day zero in 2018. Hell even the Titans were around for five years and disbanded for another three before the start of play.
SHM: JLA, this year. X-Men, not founded. Avengers, not founded. Titans, not founded. Etc.
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@Colette It sounds like UH is still up, and they would like to start over. I’m not sure if the reputation is too tarnished or not, but they had this post up on the site, which only has a few people on but there’s still people logging in according to mudstats.
===========<* United Heroes MUSH BBS - 1: Official Announcements - 183 *>===========
Message: 1/183 Posted Author
Recruiting Mar 26 2026 LevitzRecruiting.
I know it is a lot to ask considering our history.
I want to go all in on helping get us back to being active again.
As I approach retirement, I want to reach out on all the players who had fun here in the past, and get some scenes in!
I will be playing an EFC, and I will be active. Every day. Let’s get out there and recruit. Bring some people back. Get some scenes in.
I want to shout out those players who have been playing here. Thank you. Now let’s build on that.
We will also be recuiting staffers. Those who have the same goals we do. To have fun, no drama, RP, and enjoy the genre.
I will ask this. If you are still here and are interested in this mush, then bring your friends back! Quick approvals, OCs welcome (as long as they aren’t massive novel level apps! LOL), and everyone welcome! Everyone. Let us let the past be the past, and move on to the future without previous issues.
Lev
-------------------------------< End +bbread 1/183 >--------------------------------------------------------There was another one after that talked about it closing, then about the headwiz saying he got a lot of feedback not to close, so he wants to bring the place active again. He seems passionate, but I don’t think he’s gotten the support he needs, one way or the other.
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@Purplelamia said in What's up with the two Age of Heroes games?:
There was another one after that talked about it closing, then about the headwiz saying he got a lot of feedback not to close
I wonder if this would be more the case of people not wanting to lose the option to play there again, particularly given it doesn’t cost them anything to maintain, but don’t have the time or actual interest to play there. Like a kind of “you can’t close my favourite bar that I haven’t been to in years, what if I want that gallon of ‘Wicked Jizz’ cocktail for five bucks like I had when I was 21?”
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@Colette It’s the same people, doing a variation of the same theme. It is the post-Crisis version of LnL.
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@renaveleigh Same people, yes. Variation on the same theme? Well it is a superheroes mush, yes. Given the name I don’t think we’re making any bones about that.
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@Purplelamia I see their scene logging system broke a year ago and isn’t fixed yet, which maybe should be something they want to look into if they’re starting up again.
Even after the big explosion they kept maybe a third of what was a pretty large player base at the time because there are always going to be some people who see the drama and nope out of paying any attention to it, so don’t care. People who weren’t directly involved in the drama often had no idea what was happening until the big explosion. Without a fair bit of effort to talk to people, find where the receipts had been published and so on, it’s just people on the internet arguing and you have no idea who’s talking crap. Their bigger problem is how dead it looks.
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So for an OC-only/focused (refer to previous post in thread with questions about this…), what system would people use?
- Deviant the Renegades?
- FS3?
- What do the superhero MUSHes use?
- Some other system out there made specifically for superhero-ing?
INQUIRING MINDS WANT TO KNOW!
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@catzilla Narrative power sets (1-2 paragraph explanation of range and min/max impact) with a baseline skill to roll.
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@renaveleigh said in What's up with the two Age of Heroes games?:
@Colette It’s the same people, doing a variation of the same theme. It is the post-Crisis version of LnL.
Which is Post-Secret Wars HA, which is Post-Dark Crisis UH, which is post-Ultimate Invasion HMUX, which was post-Unity 2000… whatever, you get the point.
Just the same people doing the same scenes as the same characters with the same people also with the same characters. Over, and over, and over, and over again, like some Rust Cohle nightmare involving tights.
(Fun side note, Rogue’s been able to control her powers for like 15 years in the comics and I don’t think I’ve ever seen somebody do a version other than a teenager who can only touch people in elaborate bondage scenarios. Because Rogue has been played by the same person on almost all of these games.)
Keeping all player actions is always hilarious. During UH’s last activity spike a few years ago, which ground to nothing when staff didn’t want to do apps, it had been seven years since anybody had played Raven. A character so popular you tend to see her open only slightly more often than Batman. Why? Cus nobody wanted to deal with years worth of somebody else’s bullshit that had “grown” a character into something absolutely no one else would ever be interested in dealing with.* I call it the Chaucer Fairchild Principle. (Somebody did pick Raven up on UH, but only after being given permission to rewrite the entire app and throw out all existing “history.”)
*pointless anecdote example, when I was a kid Power Girl opened on BnB and I had her for maybe a day before finding out that like she was engaged to Blue Beetle or something and I’d need to have their relationship end IC, so I just never logged in again
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@helvetica said in What's up with the two Age of Heroes games?:
@catzilla Narrative power sets (1-2 paragraph explanation of range and min/max impact) with a baseline skill to roll.
the only OC-only game I remember really taking off used Mutants & Masterminds but I didn’t log into anywhere but Shang for a decade so i could be missing dozens of examples
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My first MU* was a very heavily OC-centered X-Men game. I enjoyed it very much. There was a theme, things happened to progress things. People died, there was lasting impact to player choices that wasn’t dictated by ‘well they wouldn’t do this in the comics’.
But this was like-- whew boy, two decades ago almost.
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@Prototart There was Champions MUSH for a real long time, too.
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(Fun side note, Rogue’s been able to control her powers for like 15 years in the comics and I don’t think I’ve ever seen somebody do a version other than a teenager who can only touch people in elaborate bondage scenarios. Because Rogue has been played by the same person on almost all of these games.)
20 on UH, 24 on HAM, 25 on LnL, not a teen. Her sheets on all three of those games make it clear there are no exceptions to the no touching rule, bondage-based or otherwise. Maybe on some of those various sexytimes superhero games that seem to proliferate, but that player isn’t keen on those.
it had been seven years since anybody had played Raven. A character so popular you tend to see her open only slightly more often than Batman… (Somebody did pick Raven up on UH, but only after being given permission to rewrite the entire app and throw out all existing “history.”)
Just 1 year, 7 would be before UH started. After the long-term player of the character dropped during the big early 2020 walk-out, the character was reapproved 1 month later and went through at a quick count 3 other players until there was that May 22 to May 23 gap. Funnily enough Batman had a gap between June 22 and Jan 23, so you’re right, only open slightly more often than Batman.
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RE: System for OC Game. Heads up, this is kind of stream of consciousness, so it’s long and rambly. Sorry in advance.
I’ve thought about running an OC game for a long time. I actually ran one ages ago called Sovereign City, back in the Mutants and Masterminds 1E days. Superhero MUs have been my main source of RP for most of my MUing life (since the mid-90s), and most of that time was on blended-universe games. For whatever reason, those just don’t do it for me anymore. I get why they exist and why they’re popular. I just can’t bring myself to play on them these days.
So I keep coming back to the idea of running the game I want to play. The problem is, I’m not sure anyone else would want to play it. Modern superhero comics don’t really grab me either, so if I ran a straight canon game, the canon would basically be the 1990s bumped up to modern day, with some tools bolted on to fold in characters who’ve shown up since. And my worry is that would appeal to exactly one person: me.
The natural fix is an OC game where players can run pastiches of canon characters or build their own. But then I start thinking about all the problems that come with that, and the big one is: what system do you even use?
I firmly believe the bar to entry for any game should be as low as possible. That alone rules out most of the RPGs I actually like (Champions and Heroes Unlimited are two favorites). I’m also not sold on narrative traits for an OC game. You either get the player who doesn’t explain nearly enough, or the one who explains way too much, and somehow both lead to the same problem: wildly different ideas of what that write-up actually means in play. That kind of system works fine for FC games, where you can glance at a character and go, “Oh, I know what they can do.” But on an OC-only game, I think it’d be a nightmare. I picture staff spending more time refereeing arguments over whether a character can do this, that, or the other thing than actually running scenes.
So, long story short: if I were starting an OC game today, what system would I use? Two ideas:
A hack of Aberrant 2nd Edition. I’m a big fan of Aberrant 2E. Well, parts of it. I’d gut the whole nova tech section, which I find basically unplayable. But strip it down to the core system and powers and it’s a pretty slick setup.
A hack of Legends in the Mist. This is my current favorite RPG. For anyone who doesn’t know it, it’s an evolution of City of Mist, which itself grew out of PbtA. You get four themes, each with a “might” scale (I’d probably use 5 or 6 for supers). Each theme has 4 Power Tags and a Weakness. That’s it. It’s very narrative, very flexible, and the bar to entry would be nice and low.
Anyway, those are my thoughts. I love the idea of an OC game. I just keep getting hung up on actually pulling it off.
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@Raistlin I don’t know about the systems, FS3 might not be robust enough, it’s numbers always seemed a bit wonky to me. But I can say I would certainly check out an OC type of game like this.
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@Prototart said in What's up with the two Age of Heroes games?:
@helvetica said in What's up with the two Age of Heroes games?:
@catzilla Narrative power sets (1-2 paragraph explanation of range and min/max impact) with a baseline skill to roll.
the only OC-only game I remember really taking off used Mutants & Masterminds but I didn’t log into anywhere but Shang for a decade so i could be missing dozens of examples
I’m not familiar with that system. In my old age, I defer more and more toward not creating unnecessary activity. Nothing more eye-roll inducing than a system that’s complicated where it could have been simple. I’m here to write.
