I’m suddenly imagining one Season (Session?) having the gimmick that every single player character is an Isekai of some sort.

@MisterBoring said in The 3-Month Players:

@Ominous Have there been any games previously that ran on a seasonal format? If not, it might be something to take a chance on. If nothing else, it gives the people who are going to stay around more things to be interested in as time goes on.

The Network and HorrorMU had seasons, I believe.

MUs based on already established properties – especially those which are still on-going – likely have a big advantage on the “what do we do” question.

The simple fact that the main show/game/book/whatever can provide inspiration if not full plots to be lifted eases the burden on storytellers.

I remember there was a Babylon 5 MU* back in the day that lasted up through the end of the series with very stable player-counts because the show kept giving new context, plot feeds, and storylines that the game would incorporate and use as inspiration for additional stuff.

One personal problem I have is that, after a MU is established, I get gunshy about running PRPs. There’s no reason for this feeling, honestly, but I always feel like I’m intruding on others’ stories even if that is clearly and explicitly not the case. This is definitely a me problem and not a problem with games overall, but I wonder if others have this particular brain worm as well and that might account for things petering off after three months.

Three months also tends to correspond to college break and vacays. Not sure how much that matters considering MU players are all old now.

@Gashlycrumb said in Lords and Ladies Game Design:

@STD oh god. Now I really want to work up a homebrew for my table-top game and do a Strange Luck game, where all the PCs have Strange Luck, and every time you roll anything you also roll for Strange Luck first, it’s just a pass fail, pass and the whole table quickly brainstorms some extremely unlikely result for your attempt. And there’s a timer set for a some random length of time between five minutes and half an hour, and every time it goes off you get another bit of Strange Luck. I wonder how far we’d actually get.

That actually sounds really fun!

Though rather than a timer, you could do something like Fate points, where you get Strange Luck points for roleplaying certain things or accepting story complications or setbacks.

@Gashlycrumb said in Lords and Ladies Game Design:

I think of that short-lived TV 1990’s show Strange Luck where the protagonist is invariably drawn into things and solves them via a series of weird coincidences. The only one I can actually remember was him finding a glass eye in a can of beans, and later in the show dropping it and narrowly avoiding getting shot because he bends down to pick it up.

I think I remember that show. One bit I remember from it is that he would buy scratch-off tickets and always win the exact amount he needed to pay for a meal.

I also vaguely remember an episode involving a guy incorrectly on Death Row and scheduled to be electrocuted at midnight. The main character winds up tracking down the REAL culprit (who is remorseful to the point of attempting suicide), attempts to get to the prison to stop the execution, but instead ends up crashing into an electric pole… which electrocutes the actual culprit while saving the falsely convicted innocent man.

But, yes, stuff like that.

Demon Lord, Retry is especially good for that sort of thing because the titular demon lord is a both a complete conman yet also constantly insists that none of the coincides that happen around him are a result of meticulous planning (which all the other characters immediately assume is the case, especially when he denies it).

@Gashlycrumb said in Lords and Ladies Game Design:

The PC is supposed to be Machiavelli, but what I see is Mr. Magoo.

One sort of sub-genre I like is the clueless/misinformed protagonist ending up being attributed masterful abilities. Things like Demon Lord, Retry, Please Let This Grieving Soul Retire, or The Eminence in Shadow. Or something like the Ciaphas Cain series (though that is less that Cain is clueless rather than a complete coward).

That is sort of the inverse of what you’re talking about here, but I wonder if the same sort of idea could be applied with the characters attributing amazing plotting abilities to the bit after-the-fact even if the players all know that what happened was ludicrous.

It’d take cooperation with others, of course, and the person playing the fluffed character would have to be pretty up-front about their inability to actually be Machiavelli, but it could be an interesting roleplay challenge.

One game idea I’ve had battering around is a sort of Stargate/Isekai hybrid.

A portal is discovered which leads to a fantasy realm. Contact is made and is “friendly” (insofar as governments and corporations can be described as such), but there’s a lot of intrigue involving the Imperial Court and the supra-national secret organization that controls the portal on the Earth side.

Specific corporations are given latitude to open research and development on the other side of the portal and the wealth of new materials and phenomenon are a treasure trove (“This dragon hide is amazing! It uses carbon nanotubes weaved in microstructures that allow for incredible strength and resistance!”).

Meanwhile, the Imperials want the amazing technology that the Earthers have. Seeing a Vulcan cannon eviscerate a group of rampaging demons is highly impressive and the sheer quality and scale of material brought through the portal is staggering.

Players would be members of the Earth expedition – military, scientific, corporate – or higher-ranking nobles/commoners of the Imperium. So you’d also get some Lords and Ladies play in there.

While Earth-based scientific culture would be impressive on multiple levels, the Imperials would still have both home field and material advantage (the portal is only so big and the massive energy requirements means it can only be active for a short period per day). Plus, there’d be magic which, by its very nature, is resistant if not impervious to scientific inquiry.

I doubt this would appeal to too many people, though.

I like the definition that a metaplot affects every character even if they don’t realize it. It also typically changes something major in the setting, though that major change may only be seen by specific characters.

An example I can think of is a oWoD MU* years back that had a metaplot centering around Locational Weirdness of a small city and it’s environment.

In specific, every sphere had different aspects of this Weirdness to attend to. For Werewolves, the Wyld and Weaver were best buddies for some reason and absolutely crushing all the Wrym spirits around. Things were still hella imbalanced, but imbalanced in a much different way from normal WoD.

Vampires had to contend with blood bonds simply not working any more. With anyone. This naturally threw huge wrenches into the vamps power structures. And now they actually had to treat their Ghouls well, since they could just rebel and weren’t mentally shackled to them any longer. Tremere were forbidden from entering the area and Sabbat were almost unheard of since the Vinculum just… didn’t work any more, so they quickly fell into infighting. Meanwhile, Anarchs moved in and quickly established themselves due to the massive power vacuum caused by blood bonds failing.

Changelings had to contend with a huge influx of Glamour. The place just glowed with the stuff. The downside is that this meant Bedlam was a constant threat and that all kinds of dangerous Chimera born from the dreams and nightmares of mortals around the place infested it. Some had to search out and purposefully cuddle up with Banal people just to keep the Things and ODing on Glamour at bay.

Mages – both Union and Traditional – made a pact to study the Weirdness. They also both lost established Constructs/Chantrys and there was a mystery there with both; in both places, the resident magi just simply disappeared without a trace. Magic also just… didn’t follow the normal rules where these places stood – the Technocratic Construct was without power and trying to reestablish it always met with failure (sometimes catastrophic), and the Traditions Chantry always treated ANY magic cast in it as Extremely Vulgar, regardless of paradigm. The Higher Ups wanted this thing Solved, so there was an oddly close working relationship between the Union and the Traddies. They met every week in the back of a bookshop/cafe. Donuts were supplied.

And regular mortals got treated to all kinds of bizarre weirdness. Disappearing alleyways in placed they’d been to a thousand times before, odd shadows that didn’t quite match, glimpses of Things just at the corners of their eyes, strange dreams and nightmares, inspiration striking with skills and knowledge they had no practice or understanding of, inexplicable equipment failures… and equally inexplicable equipment successes (“… This car has no engine. How is it running?”).

@Faraday said in Metaplot: What and How:

• Babylon 5 MU basically followed the key events from the TV series, with variations influenced by the PCs.

As a side note, I’d KILL for a Babylon 5 MU*. Sadly, one of the best (if not THE best) Sci-Fi TV series seems to have been mostly forgotten. Sigh.

@SolarFlare said in MU Peeves Thread:

@Hobbie "Surely these little robed beings with glowing eyes who stole my ship parts CAN’T be the ‘Jawas’ people in the cantina are complaining about stealing all their ship parts!

“I don’t know, Kandu. It’s a mystery. If only there was some sign or information about what these mysterious ‘Jawas’ are-- HEY! Dangit, those little robe guys started stealing the repulsor lifts on the speeder again! Jeez. Now, back to the mystery of Jawas…”

@Prototart said in MU Peeves Thread:

somebody on a WoD game once asked me to justify why my char had Dancing 4

like

Look, don’t you know how DANGEROUS Dancing 4 is? You’ve be able to cut up the rug and defeat Antedeluvian vampires in a breakdancing contest! Your pirouettes would dizzy the minds of mages! Werewolves would howl in defeat at your disco moves! Changelings would have no choice but to bow to your Thriller! Your ballroom dancing would shake the very pillars of heaven!

Totally understandable to ask for such mind boggling power to be justified.

@MisterBoring said in MU Peeves Thread:

This is why I try to write characters who are boring as fuck in their backgrounds. I thoroughly enjoy “random nobody gets drug into a world of whatever and has to adapt” stories.

This was why I liked playing bog standard humans in WoD MU*s. Just someone completely absent from the machinations of mages, the centuries old plots of vampires, the chicaneries of changelings, the violence of werewolves, the… bandages?.. of mummies, etc.

It was really neat to toss them into the world with these kind of characters and see what happened to them. Interestingly enough, most of the time these standard human characters ended up being quite popular with the supernatural crowd. It amused me to think that there was only, like, ten normal humans in the entirety of the WoD and I was playing one which all the other supernatural entities were trying to court.

@Hobbie said in MU Peeves Thread:

The great thing about broad strokes backgrounds (aka Schrodinger’s BG) is that you can fill things in retroactively as they arise in story. It also makes it much easier to write in the moment.

Or go the Old Man Henderson route and just make an insane background that has everything and the kitchen sink to justify any possible weirdness.

@Pavel said in Consensus on Roster vs OC vs Mix:

@Gashlycrumb said in Consensus on Roster vs OC vs Mix:

Ask B.F. Skinner about it.

He’ll just go on, and on, and on, and on about pigeons…

In college, my dad attended a guest lecture by Skinner in which he talked about Behaviorism. At the end he did a demonstration with one of the trained pigeons.

It didn’t perform as it was trained.

Skinner was clearly annoyed and embarrassed. My dad thought it was one of the funniest things he’d ever seen.

Even in psychology the old adage applies: never work with children or animals.

For me, I never play FCs/Roster characters. I just can’t get into them; they’re like ill-fitting suits. Always off, never comfortable. I need to play a character I create, even if said character is fitting a specific niche.

That said, I have no problem playing with FCs or Roster characters.

But as others have stated, if you’re just going to make OCs second-class characters, it’s probably better to go with Roster-only. Players will generally pick up on that attitude and you’ll slowly end up with a mostly or all Roster-only MU* anyway.

@Popes

Is Liberation the one where all plots have to come top down? And there’s only predetermined characters allowed in every sphere?

Yeah, I’m not surprised that place has basically become deadlocked and slowly dying. That sort of top-down play went out in the 90s because it’s completely unworkable in MU*.

I am surprised it lasted this long, though.

@Kestrel said in MU Peeves Thread:

Not a meaningful complaint. I know I’m being a silly insecure baby about it.

But I wish the person I’ve been playing with for years, who always expresses unequivocal enthusiasm and joy about our scenes, would sometimes actually initiate them, seek me out, invite me to games they’re on, so my brain weasels would stop making me doubt whether they actually want me there.

As someone who does this, I might be able to provide an explanation.

For me, I generally assume unless someone asks (either on chan or in pages) that they’re either busy or otherwise not available. That goes even more so with someone I play with regularly. My own brain worms keep telling me that they’ll get tired of me constantly playing with them, so I try to give them space and opportunities to play with others. It’s also a reason I tend not to page first – I don’t want to be That Player who just won’t leave someone the fuck alone.

Oddly enough, I don’t seem to have this problem when I just join a MU*. Maybe the excitement of hopping on to a new place and all the shiny and new things makes the brain weasels hibernate or something.

It is a problem I recognize and try to at least offer up scenes every once in a while. I do try when someone asks to come up with the setup. At the very least sceneset, if nothing else.

But with all brain animals it’s a difficult thing to constantly keep in mind and overcome on a regular basis.

Whether it’s the same for your friend or not, I don’t know.

@kalakh said in MU Peeves Thread:

For some reason this gave me the mental image of a fuming Klingon sitting in the shadowy corner of a medieval tavern. I don’t know why Klingon specifically, but Klingon.

[Public] Ko’Dath says, “WHY DOES NO ONE WANT TO HAVE AN HONOR DUEL WITH ME?! MY BA’LETH HUNGERS FOR BATTLE! IS IT BECAUSE I DIDN’T PAY FOR A ROUND OF BLOODWINE? MAYBE I SHOULD JUST TAKE MY K’TINGA AND GO BACK TO QO’NOS SINCE IT IS CLEAR ALL YOU DISHONORABLE CURS DO NOT WANT ME HERE!”

@Jennkryst said in MU Peeves Thread:

@STD Babies are grown in bellies, and that is whee food goes once you use your mouth to eat it. Ergo, mouth babies are just as valid as butt babies, especially since this was that game with telepregger-nobody-even-needed-to-touch creeper power.

Guh.

Even assuming you’re being facetious, Firan was even stranger than I thought.

… Breeding was one of the Staff’s (multiple staffers?) personal kinks, wasn’t it?

Also: dare I ask about the telepregger ability? That’s insane enough to be some sort of oWoD thing.

@Pavel said in MU Peeves Thread:

@Jennkryst said in MU Peeves Thread:

@Pavel said in MU Peeves Thread:

@Tez said in MU Peeves Thread:

Firan! I got you, old man.

Well, that one’s a gimme. If you can think of a stupid policy, Firan did it first and worst.

Firanites don’t have buttholes, remember.

This is kink erasure!

Yes. That is literally why that call was made. They wanted to avoid people using buttsecks to avoid running the breeding code.

… WAT?!

… Did Firanites not have mouths, either? Seems oral sex could be used to avoid breeding code, too.

@Pavel said in MU Peeves Thread:

@Tez said in MU Peeves Thread:

Firan! I got you, old man.

Firanites don’t have buttholes, remember.

… Wat?

Encountering and reconnecting with an awesome player who you knew 19+ years ago on a completely different genre of MU*.

It just seems like complete fantastic serendipity.

And then playing with them and discovering that not only are they just as good as you remember, but are actually better. Their RP has improved!