Games we want, but will almost certainly never have
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@Artemis It could be that no one is going to try to live up to Arx. Everything else might just be a lackluster comparison. I never played there but I heard people talk about it for years.
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@Gashlycrumb said in Games we want, but will almost certainly never have:
And L&L is probably among the easiest themes to run.
In my experience, L&L is more like the icing on the cake. Arx being (in a very, very, very reductionist view) L&L & Magic & Elves. L&L is set dressing for the so-called real game.
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@Gashlycrumb said in Games we want, but will almost certainly never have:
@Artemis … And L&L is probably among the easiest themes to run.
See, the idea of running a Lords & Ladies game is very intimidating. I think I could open a superhero or modern horror game tomorrow and be fairly confident in running plots, helping players, and all that. But when I think about opening an L&L game? I get all anxious.
And it’s too bad because I’d love to see a Game of Thrones game. The two people I RP with most would also love it. I just find it all very intimidating - probably mostly because I’d be doing all the staffing work by myself, and that’s a lot to handle.
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I’m not much for L&L games, but there’s one L&L-ish game that came out recently as a TTRPG that I’m sort of interested in: Our Brilliant Ruin. It’s a post apocalyptic game set in a world where the aristocracy chose to basically ignore a calamity that poses a threat to all of existence, The Ruin. It’s a strange energy that’s slowly turned all of the world into a rusted, collapsed, monster filled wasteland, with the exception of the Dramark, the last bastion of aristocratic society. The aristocracy is perfectly fine just maintaining the status quo for the small bit of the world the Ruin hasn’t claimed yet. Players can be members of noble houses, servants to those houses, or the unbonded, who aren’t attached to the nobility in any way, but also aren’t kept safe by them.
Oh, and did I mention it’s 100% free?
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@Raistlin I suppose it depends on what you want? GoB was set up to have an excuse of sorts for lots of nobles to be about, lord and ladying it up and having tournaments and romances and rivalries, ocassionally taking on bandits, pirates, spooky supernatural schemes, hoardes of crocodiles, etc. People who wanted an epic war (which would have been a lot harder to run) were disappointed.
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@Gashlycrumb If I ever did it, it’d probably follow along the same route. More personal, localized stories.
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@Artemis said in Games we want, but will almost certainly never have:
i just want a good old L&L mush to scratch my regency era itch gdi
Wheel. Of. Time. Fourth. Age. L&L
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A L&L game with actual politics, maybe incorporating ideas from board games like Republic of Rome or John Company, instead of just being Bridgerton, i.e. worrying about who’s the best dressed, worrying about who’s fucking whom, and gossiping about both. I mean that stuff is fine and part snd parcel, but how about some underlying politics driving all of the standard courtly antics.
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Long have I wanted to do an Exalted Drams of the First Age (vibes not mechanics) L&L game.
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@Ominous When I ponder my Game of Thrones game, I think about this exact challenge. To make politics work, I think it boils down to needing one of two things:
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.
2: Having staff or players willing to temp NPCs to act in those losing spots or to suffer the consequences of actions.
You’d also need staff keeping an eye out for players who might take advantage of a game that allows political maneuvering. There’d need to be a zero tolerance policy for using politics to pressure people into RP they don’t want to participate in.
I don’t think these are reasons not to incorporate politics into the game—they’re just hurdles that would need to be overcome. I actually think it could be very rewarding if done right.
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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 have a solution to that, but it always gets waved away - any character can be played by any player. When you log on, there’s a list of characters available, and you select who you want to play that day. Then there’s less connection between one player to one character, and any given character “losing” isn’t going to be devastating to that player.
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@Ominous said in Games we want, but will almost certainly never have:
I have a solution to that, but it always gets waved away - any character can be played by any player. When you log on, there’s a list of characters available, and you select who you want to play that day. Then there’s less connection between one player to one character, and any given character “losing” isn’t going to be devastating to that player.
By all means, if you think a game like that would be fun you should run it.
But I think you may be overlooking some significant challenges. Most RPGs are designed around playing a single character who interests you. This would be a radical departure.
You also risk wildly inconsistent characterization, plot holes, dropped threads, and conflicts as multiple players try to steer a character in different directions from one day to the next. I think it would also be harder to make meaningful connections with other players, since you don’t have shared character bonds to latch onto.
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@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.
You also risk wildly inconsistent characterization, plot holes, dropped threads, and conflicts as multiple players try to steer a character in different directions from one day to the next. I think it would also be harder to make meaningful connections with other players, since you don’t have shared character bonds to latch onto.
It would definitely work better with a smaller group of players on the server, say 10 to 30, not an Arx-sized 100+. Scene logs would be required for any actions to be considered “canon.” If it isn’t in a log on the website/wiki, it didn’t happen. That way everyone knows which characters have done what.
Another option and one that might work for a larger server, is to allow players to have a character or two that only they can play and make these characters the big players in the setting. If it were a fantasy game, I would compare them to the demiurges from KSBD or the patrons from 13th age, nearly-immortal god-queens/kings and their lieutenants or something like that. That way the setbacks in the “Great Game”, while costing hundreds of “lesser” lives are again just setbacks to them rarher than complete ruination. Then make all the sub-lieutenants and drones be playable by anyone. This would be comparable to Ars Magic with players having one magus and custodes and the gross being shared.
Otherwise, I feel like you’re limited to cooperative settings, which somewhat limits the scope of the setting. For instance, Arx’s cooperative nature felt off considering how big and varying the cultures were. The lack of infighting felt off.
On the other hand in the John Company board game, what the houses are vying for is who has the most pensioners in their family living in nice retirement estates. Losing isn’t so much your family being eradicated as it is living in an estate that’s only 200 acres compared to your rivals who got an estate that’s 500 acres. The real loser in that game is India and its people as it gets raped and pillaged by the colonialism (unless the game ends by the company going bankrupt or India driving out the colonizers, resulting in all of the players losing). In Republic of Rome, one of the players is going to end up as Dictator, but that doesn’t mean the losers got culled from society. The only way that happens is if everyone loses because Rome falls to the Carthiginians or the Gauls or the Germans…
So perhaps a server could keep the one or two characters per player structure but the fighting is more over “The Senate gave my family three magistrate positions this term and yours only got two” style stuff. Still the server needs to play that stuff up more, because on most servers it just feels like increasing random numbers that don’t actually mean anything. Firan did a somewhat decent job of that but only somewhat, and it had plenty of other problems.
By all means, if you think a game like that would be fun you should run it.
When I win the lotto, making me indepently wealthy and therefore having the time to dedicate to such a project, I’ll get right on it.
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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.
