(no subject)
Okay, I've been MUSHless for too long. And despite my earlier vow never to admin a MU* again, I've decided the only way to get the kind of MUSH I want to play in is to run one. It's just gone on too long where I see a MU* that's sort of promising but then one big thing ticks me off and I have to back off it.
I'll probably run it off XET's former site. I've not yet settled on a theme, but I've narrowed it down to a few options:
1) Straight, Canon Marvel.
There seems to be very few straight Marvel games out there. I mean, mixed theme or Year One is fine in small doses, but I tend to get annoyed at them pretty easily. Now, I realize there's apparently a post Civil War mush on the horizon, but there's three things wrong with that. The first is they're at least discussing No OCs. And that is always a dealbreaker for me. The second is that I'm not all that thrilled with Civil War, at least how it played out. And the third thing is Post Civil War is post-Decimation. That is also a dealbreaker for me. For the most part, mutants is what I'm into in the Marvel U. Sure, I might like some other characters, but I read the MU for the mutants. Decimation decimated by buying list. So any game I run has to have mutants in abundance.
So, what time should we set it?
I can see two possibilities that appeal to me. One is the late 80s. Because that's when I started reading it, and I have fond memories of the Mush CotA (Children of the Atom). We'd probably have to play it so the 80s are happening 'now'. Characters after the continuity break would be allowable on a case by case basis, probably.
Somewhere with the New Mutants and the Hellions both in existence. Maybe the original X-Factor. Pre-Inferno though, I think, and probably pre-Fall of the Mutants. Where does that leave? I don't know, maybe the Morlock Massacre as an opening TP
The second continuity break option would be modern day, I think, but a few years ago. I'm thinking HoM as the breaking point, except HoM doesn't happen, or happens differently (either a drastic drop in the mutant population that reduces them to, say, 100,000 rather than 16 million, but not the boring 198, or maybe Wanda restricts her depowering to her own family, or something else entirely happens. This way we have an 'out' Xavier and X-Mansion, as well as Mutant Town, for a center for mutant-based RP. We also have the New Avengers, and, as much as I don't personally care much for the concept, it does do a decent job of unifying Spider-Man into a team structure which is good for MU*s.
I've been toying with an idea regarding canon teams. I always have this desire to please everybody, which means I am doomed to failure. However, I keep trying because I am a strange breed of optimist. The specific problem I'm talking about is the "wait, these are the X-Men? I've never heard of any of these people" impulse, where the teams on a game is composed to a large degree of OCs or misplaced canon characters, and it doesn't really feel like a marvel game anymore. Conversely, you have the problemw here OCs feel excluded, and where artificial means are used to keep OCs from just wandering up and joining the mansion because, even though that may make perfect sense for them to do once they learn about it, you're trying to keep the game from being an X-Mansion only game.
The half-assed try-and-please-both-groups solution I've been thinking of is to simply have two groups of all teams for which it is practical. One team is, OOCly, the canon team. Every member on it has to have been a canon member. The other team is the wild, anything goes team. This team can also include canon members. These teams must interact (unless the IC reasoning of the team forbids it - like say, off the top of my head, a pro-reg and anti-reg team of Avengers, and even then they should interact now and then) - no snobbery allowed, it's still everybody's game, but it's a means of keeping the feel of a canon game and having adventures with recognizably canon version of a team in existence, while still allowing everyone to play. It probably wouldn't work, but I'm thinking about it.
Anyway, moving on to option...
2) X-Men: Future's Edge (working title)
Cyberpunk and/or Cybergeneration mixed theme with X-Men and other Marvel concepts. I've talked about it before, and it's been rattling around in my head. Mutants have been around for something like 20 or 30 years, but tensions have been ratchetting up and persecution is beginning in earnest, perhaps as sort of a war-on-terror-removes-civil-rights metaphor. I still also want to include the idea that Magneto launches a nanotech virus designed to change huamns into superhumans and thus turn them to his cause, but only people under 18 survive the process.
Possible complications - either cool things to play with or hindering the concept: The ease of genetic testing and ubiquitous cameras makes mutant testing/detection almost trivial. It's therefore almost impossible to _secretly_ be a mutant (we can tweak this a little and say that the mutant genes don't express until manifestation, so almost everyone tests as human at birth, and teens might have a few months leeway of discovering powers before being confirmed as mutants).
Players could go for either mutants or humans, with cyberwear cheaply available. And of course other Marvel characters are easy to include. Tony Stark can once again just be a cutting edge weapons designer, with a battlesuit that's the best in the field, even though others exist. Spidey or others like him could be a failed genetic experiment. Steve Rogers could be the mind of a WWII vet in a cloned body. Or maybe an AI 'simulation' of a WWII vet that takes on his life of his own. Doctor Strange could be a uber-leet hacker. Well, or not. ;)
3) Dangerous Lives
Completely original theme supers game, with one twist. High fatality rates. With as dangerous job as superheroing must be, it might be interesting to play a game that's only semi-consentual in terms of death. There are heroes and villains but there's a high turnover, and the players go in knowing that it may be decided that their character dies.
Not sure exactly how to implement it, especially since I don't really want to do a stats-based game, so it'd have to be traits for it to work. Maybe something like a gladiator arena/jury system, where if two people get into a conflict that might prove fatal for one or both, other people not RPing are invited to watch it play out. Then, based on both the events of the fight and how it's actually RPed out, they vote on crisis points, like whether one character or the other dies, or if somehow they both survive. Character concepts would of course limit the options sometimes - like a Batman-esque character who absolutely refuses to kill, even in a pitched battle, obviously won't kill his opponent, but his opponent might kill him. (Though to even the stakes between characters like this, the opponent might put up something like inescapable incarceration).
As a balance, players whose characters are killed get some kind of bonus. Maybe higher power levels for their next character, or power-boosts for alts.
I don't imagine this would be an everyday occurance as its not exclusively a combat game... maybe something like one fight with fatal stakes a month. (Or, if you want to get a little grittier, one _mandatory_ fatal stakes fight a month, with the name drawn out of a hat, and they get to choose their opponent. The fight itself wouldn't necessarily be fatal, but it'd be a big fight that the outcome gets voted on... and other fatal bouts could also go on in the same month, but these would be set up by individual players).
The details still really need to be worked out. I'd imagine that it would have to be extendable beyond just plain combat, and cover things like secret identities getting revealed and/or discovered,serious injuries, family being destroyed, maybe even assassinations and deathtraps (with the 'fight' that the audience judges being the plot that gets get the two together for a final scene, whether it be a direct conflict or a slow cat and mouse).
Maybe have a rule where you have to have both a villain and a hero at all times. Apps should be loose and flexible though. Maybe just an 'origin story', and a general listing of powers, with everything else being up to the player.
4) A pure sci-fi game, no mutations (some bioengineering might be in-theme but it'd be closer to hard SF so no infinite optic blasts or the like), set in the far future. I'm thinking something kinda like Vinge or Hyperion, with an intergalactic empire/loose network, fast FTL travel through wormholes or jumpgates on established routes. AIs of various sorts. But this is probably the least formed idea. I don't know exactly what I want or what the major conflicts would be.
And the final option, the one so far I like most of all, is...
APRIL FOOLS.
Yeah, I know, it's a lame one, really a retread of the old 'XET returns' gag. But I had to do something for April Fools and I didn't have any better ideas. Plus, I've been kinda wanting to do a 'MU*s I'd kind of like to see' post again. But really, no plans to do anything on this. I don't even know for sure if I have it in me to play MU*s anymore. I just like to explore the ideas sometimes.
I'll probably run it off XET's former site. I've not yet settled on a theme, but I've narrowed it down to a few options:
1) Straight, Canon Marvel.
There seems to be very few straight Marvel games out there. I mean, mixed theme or Year One is fine in small doses, but I tend to get annoyed at them pretty easily. Now, I realize there's apparently a post Civil War mush on the horizon, but there's three things wrong with that. The first is they're at least discussing No OCs. And that is always a dealbreaker for me. The second is that I'm not all that thrilled with Civil War, at least how it played out. And the third thing is Post Civil War is post-Decimation. That is also a dealbreaker for me. For the most part, mutants is what I'm into in the Marvel U. Sure, I might like some other characters, but I read the MU for the mutants. Decimation decimated by buying list. So any game I run has to have mutants in abundance.
So, what time should we set it?
I can see two possibilities that appeal to me. One is the late 80s. Because that's when I started reading it, and I have fond memories of the Mush CotA (Children of the Atom). We'd probably have to play it so the 80s are happening 'now'. Characters after the continuity break would be allowable on a case by case basis, probably.
Somewhere with the New Mutants and the Hellions both in existence. Maybe the original X-Factor. Pre-Inferno though, I think, and probably pre-Fall of the Mutants. Where does that leave? I don't know, maybe the Morlock Massacre as an opening TP
The second continuity break option would be modern day, I think, but a few years ago. I'm thinking HoM as the breaking point, except HoM doesn't happen, or happens differently (either a drastic drop in the mutant population that reduces them to, say, 100,000 rather than 16 million, but not the boring 198, or maybe Wanda restricts her depowering to her own family, or something else entirely happens. This way we have an 'out' Xavier and X-Mansion, as well as Mutant Town, for a center for mutant-based RP. We also have the New Avengers, and, as much as I don't personally care much for the concept, it does do a decent job of unifying Spider-Man into a team structure which is good for MU*s.
I've been toying with an idea regarding canon teams. I always have this desire to please everybody, which means I am doomed to failure. However, I keep trying because I am a strange breed of optimist. The specific problem I'm talking about is the "wait, these are the X-Men? I've never heard of any of these people" impulse, where the teams on a game is composed to a large degree of OCs or misplaced canon characters, and it doesn't really feel like a marvel game anymore. Conversely, you have the problemw here OCs feel excluded, and where artificial means are used to keep OCs from just wandering up and joining the mansion because, even though that may make perfect sense for them to do once they learn about it, you're trying to keep the game from being an X-Mansion only game.
The half-assed try-and-please-both-groups solution I've been thinking of is to simply have two groups of all teams for which it is practical. One team is, OOCly, the canon team. Every member on it has to have been a canon member. The other team is the wild, anything goes team. This team can also include canon members. These teams must interact (unless the IC reasoning of the team forbids it - like say, off the top of my head, a pro-reg and anti-reg team of Avengers, and even then they should interact now and then) - no snobbery allowed, it's still everybody's game, but it's a means of keeping the feel of a canon game and having adventures with recognizably canon version of a team in existence, while still allowing everyone to play. It probably wouldn't work, but I'm thinking about it.
Anyway, moving on to option...
2) X-Men: Future's Edge (working title)
Cyberpunk and/or Cybergeneration mixed theme with X-Men and other Marvel concepts. I've talked about it before, and it's been rattling around in my head. Mutants have been around for something like 20 or 30 years, but tensions have been ratchetting up and persecution is beginning in earnest, perhaps as sort of a war-on-terror-removes-civil-rights metaphor. I still also want to include the idea that Magneto launches a nanotech virus designed to change huamns into superhumans and thus turn them to his cause, but only people under 18 survive the process.
Possible complications - either cool things to play with or hindering the concept: The ease of genetic testing and ubiquitous cameras makes mutant testing/detection almost trivial. It's therefore almost impossible to _secretly_ be a mutant (we can tweak this a little and say that the mutant genes don't express until manifestation, so almost everyone tests as human at birth, and teens might have a few months leeway of discovering powers before being confirmed as mutants).
Players could go for either mutants or humans, with cyberwear cheaply available. And of course other Marvel characters are easy to include. Tony Stark can once again just be a cutting edge weapons designer, with a battlesuit that's the best in the field, even though others exist. Spidey or others like him could be a failed genetic experiment. Steve Rogers could be the mind of a WWII vet in a cloned body. Or maybe an AI 'simulation' of a WWII vet that takes on his life of his own. Doctor Strange could be a uber-leet hacker. Well, or not. ;)
3) Dangerous Lives
Completely original theme supers game, with one twist. High fatality rates. With as dangerous job as superheroing must be, it might be interesting to play a game that's only semi-consentual in terms of death. There are heroes and villains but there's a high turnover, and the players go in knowing that it may be decided that their character dies.
Not sure exactly how to implement it, especially since I don't really want to do a stats-based game, so it'd have to be traits for it to work. Maybe something like a gladiator arena/jury system, where if two people get into a conflict that might prove fatal for one or both, other people not RPing are invited to watch it play out. Then, based on both the events of the fight and how it's actually RPed out, they vote on crisis points, like whether one character or the other dies, or if somehow they both survive. Character concepts would of course limit the options sometimes - like a Batman-esque character who absolutely refuses to kill, even in a pitched battle, obviously won't kill his opponent, but his opponent might kill him. (Though to even the stakes between characters like this, the opponent might put up something like inescapable incarceration).
As a balance, players whose characters are killed get some kind of bonus. Maybe higher power levels for their next character, or power-boosts for alts.
I don't imagine this would be an everyday occurance as its not exclusively a combat game... maybe something like one fight with fatal stakes a month. (Or, if you want to get a little grittier, one _mandatory_ fatal stakes fight a month, with the name drawn out of a hat, and they get to choose their opponent. The fight itself wouldn't necessarily be fatal, but it'd be a big fight that the outcome gets voted on... and other fatal bouts could also go on in the same month, but these would be set up by individual players).
The details still really need to be worked out. I'd imagine that it would have to be extendable beyond just plain combat, and cover things like secret identities getting revealed and/or discovered,serious injuries, family being destroyed, maybe even assassinations and deathtraps (with the 'fight' that the audience judges being the plot that gets get the two together for a final scene, whether it be a direct conflict or a slow cat and mouse).
Maybe have a rule where you have to have both a villain and a hero at all times. Apps should be loose and flexible though. Maybe just an 'origin story', and a general listing of powers, with everything else being up to the player.
4) A pure sci-fi game, no mutations (some bioengineering might be in-theme but it'd be closer to hard SF so no infinite optic blasts or the like), set in the far future. I'm thinking something kinda like Vinge or Hyperion, with an intergalactic empire/loose network, fast FTL travel through wormholes or jumpgates on established routes. AIs of various sorts. But this is probably the least formed idea. I don't know exactly what I want or what the major conflicts would be.
And the final option, the one so far I like most of all, is...
APRIL FOOLS.
Yeah, I know, it's a lame one, really a retread of the old 'XET returns' gag. But I had to do something for April Fools and I didn't have any better ideas. Plus, I've been kinda wanting to do a 'MU*s I'd kind of like to see' post again. But really, no plans to do anything on this. I don't even know for sure if I have it in me to play MU*s anymore. I just like to explore the ideas sometimes.