MU* Wishlists

[Pavel]

@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.

[shit-piss-love]

@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.

[junipersky]

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.

[Pavel]

@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.

[icanbeyourmuse]

@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.

[Aria]

@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.

[Faraday]

@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).

[Aria]

@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:

[junipersky]

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…

[Pyrephox]

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”.

[Livia]

@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.

[Aria]

@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.

[Livia]

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.

[Autumn]

@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.”

[Pyrephox]

@Livia I’d love to see a street-level Mortal+Changeling game that focused a lot less on Freehold stuff, and more on God-Machine and fae horror - oneriophages, hedge ghosts, real ghosts, Things Which Should Not Be, etc. Creepy horror stories in dark alleyways and alien Hedge woods, where Mortal stuff receives just as much attention as Lost.

Give me dark cults, and covens of psychics trying to fight back against them with their small magics. Corrupt cops who’ve signed deals with Huntsmen to capture Lost. All of that.

[Eleret]

@Pyrephox said in MU* Wishlists:

Give me dark cults, and covens of psychics trying to fight back against them with their small magics. Corrupt cops who’ve signed deals with Huntsmen to capture Lost. All of that.

I have zero familiarity with the source, but this sounds very interesting!

[Testament]

After watching the recent trailers for Armored Core 6: Fire of Rubicon, I now have a hankering for an Armored Core mush. But I feel like that’s so oddly specific and not your general mech or Gundam based mush, that there likely there likely wouldn’t be a lot of interest in that.

[BloodAngel]

@Testament I would play it!

(Edited for typo)

[SpaceKhomeini]

@Testament

If someone made a grimy-ass Battletech game I’d, well, try to play it but I don’t even know how that sort of thing would work.

Also, no Clans, sorry, even if they have the sexy hardware.

[Jennkryst]

@SpaceKhomeini Literally just Lords and Ladies but in SPAAAAACE, and Mechs instead of full plate.

… but if combat campaigns, Megamech or whatever. The hard part is they don’t have personal-scale rules, though, so it’s tricksy.