Games we want, but will almost certainly never have
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What might also work is finding out what political plots players want to explore with their characters, then collaborating with them to create some NPC/roster characters specifically for those storylines. You could then advertise for temporary players to take over these characters for the duration of the plot. This way, Player A gets their political intrigue storyline, while Player B gets to drive a character like they stole it—engaging in roleplay they might not otherwise try with a character they were more personally invested in.
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@Raistlin said in Games we want, but will almost certainly never have:
1: Players who are willing to have characters that “lose” in these political games and who’ll accept consequences. It should still lead to engaging and imaginative RP but, in my experience, most people just want to “win” and don’t like being on the other side.
I think the biggest opportunity here is developing a system with interesting consequences. Yeah, there’ll always be players who only want to win no matter what, you can’t work around that other than identifying and getting rid of people who simply won’t play the game where it’s at. But one of the big reasons IMO that so many players have issues with this in games with any sort of competition or PVP (not talking about PK level PVP, just social reputation PVP here) is because the consequences suck to play. I think if someone wants to do a good L&L or Regency style of game, the number one focus they should have should be “how to make opportunities for consequences that are interesting and allow for a healthy cycle of winners and losers.” If you lose rep with the upper class, make opportunities to earn rep with shadier factions, that sort of thing.
It’s easy to say that players don’t like dealing with consequences, but often I think the issue that comes up on games is that consequences too often end up as All Or Nothing situations. Or players don’t have a good sense of what they can do to enact consequences on others, and without a variety of mild to medium severity consequences, people tend to only think of the biggest consequences that tend to be much more character-ending.
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@Ominous said in Games we want, but will almost certainly never have:
@Faraday The original RPG, D&D, was built around players having a stable of characters, not the one character per player paradigm that developed as teens and college kids who had no background in the wargaming culture D&D came out of took up the game. Ars Magica has troupe style play. Collaborative storytelling forums/games on the internet are a thing with probably an equal sized playerbase to the MU* playerbase. Storytelling games are growing in popularity and we are starting to see them overlap with traditional RPGs. Sure, there will be people who decide such a game isn’t for them, but let’s not pretend that the idea is some left-field ramblings of a crazy man. This has been done and was being done longer than one character per player, and the solutions to any issues should be out there already ironed out in the particular spheres mentioned.
Yeah, but those are all tabletop RPGs.
MUs fundamentally are not. I think a big recurring issue on MUs is people repeatedly trying to just port in tabletop RPGs and not doing any work to adapt it to the entirely different medium that MUs are.
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I see another possible design that might work with a one player to each character structure. All of the high-level characters are NPCs but are very active. The players play the lieutenants, sub-lieutenants, drones, etc. Every month or two months, they would get orders from on high to try to accomplish. Depending on how well they do, they get rewarded with better titles, trusted with more responsibility, and publicly acclaimed. A mission might be “Priority one for this month is to obtain 20 units of iron. Of secondary importance is 50 tons of timber. You MUST NOT trade away more than 30 tons of our coal. Our preferred trading partners for this deal would be the Lilliputians and the Lannisters. You MUST NOT do business with the Minbari.” Then leave it up to them to get that done however they can. Then everyone is wheeling and dealing, moving armies and navies around, promising future favors, etc. However. No faction is going to collapse from a player “losing,” because the characters with the ability to cause a faction to completely go down the toilet is controlled by staff, and they can take actions to right a sinking ship before its totally sunk.
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Back to games we want but won’t see…
Street Fighter / Mortal Kombat: I think both actually have themes you could build a MU around. Street Fighter is almost superheroics meets espionage while Mortal Kombat could be modern fantasy.
TMNT: One of my favorite things from my youth. I loved playing the old RPG and would love to play on a MU set in the TMNT universe.
Transformers: I know there are one or two out there but I find their themes confusing. I’d like a simple G1 Transformers game set on Earth and maybe Cybertron. Perhaps with a plot working up to the original 1986 movie(Unicron).
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@Roz said in Games we want, but will almost certainly never have:
Yeah, but those are all tabletop RPGs.
And even in those examples, in most cases any given character is still controlled by a single player. In Ars Magica for example, the main way it was done is described here:
In troupe style play, each player typically has one primary character who no one else can control. Since Ars Magica is focused on wizards and magic, very often this primary character is the player’s magus. Each player may also have exclusive control over one or more secondary characters, such as companions or grogs.
@Ominous said in Games we want, but will almost certainly never have:
let’s not pretend that the idea is some left-field ramblings of a crazy man.
I didn’t say that such a system had never ever been tried before, I said it was a radical departure from the established norm of how RPGs are traditionally done. Which is true. It’s almost unheard of among TT groups with a handful of friends. Trying to do it at scale with an entire MU game seems like it’s setting yourself up for big issues.
That still doesn’t mean that one couldn’t/shouldn’t do it, as I said. Just be conscious of what you’re getting into.
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@Raistlin said in Games we want, but will almost certainly never have:
Back to games we want but won’t see…
Street Fighter / Mortal Kombat: I think both actually have themes you could build a MU around. Street Fighter is almost superheroics meets espionage while Mortal Kombat could be modern fantasy.
TMNT: One of my favorite things from my youth. I loved playing the old RPG and would love to play on a MU set in the TMNT universe.
Transformers: I know there are one or two out there but I find their themes confusing. I’d like a simple G1 Transformers game set on Earth and maybe Cybertron. Perhaps with a plot working up to the original 1986 movie(Unicron).
One exists. It’s called Match of the Millennium. It has SNK and other stuff too. Sadly, a chunk of us quit recently when staff decided to promote a foot fetishist, pedo nazi to a place of plot importance, and instead of going ‘oh, we’ll ban them’, instead doubled down.
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@Popes said in Games we want, but will almost certainly never have:
One exists. It’s called Match of the Millennium. It has SNK and other stuff too. Sadly, a chunk of us quit recently when staff decided to promote a foot fetishist, pedo nazi to a place of plot importance, and instead of going ‘oh, we’ll ban them’, instead doubled down.
lol why is foot fetishist included in this list of actual serious things
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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.
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I have no idea how it’d work but I’ve always kind of wanted a game inspired by Ark: Survival Evolved/Ascended
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@STD it would appeal to me!!
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A Terminator game of sorts.
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@Floof said in Games we want, but will almost certainly never have:
I have no idea how it’d work but I’ve always kind of wanted a game inspired by Ark: Survival Evolved/Ascended
So not exactly this, but I was half dabbling with a Monster Hunter or Horizon type game idea at one point. I never got far, but like… go hunt things and upgrade your SWAG and improve the village etc etc.
