Games we want, but will almost certainly never have
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I wonder if anyone still cares about The Magicians.
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@Gashlycrumb I do but it has made for an awful MUSH every time
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Whenever someone mentions The Magicians I get it confused with The Librarian(s) and I feel the urge to watch those movies (and the subsequent TV series) and then make a game out of it. Somehow.
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@Gashlycrumb said in Games we want, but will almost certainly never have:
I wonder if anyone still cares about The Magicians.
I think about The Magicians as a setting for a TTRPG quite a bit - but I also think that the most people who say they want a setting like the Magicians really just mean they want a slice-of-life urban fantasy game. There’s nothing wrong with this, it just isn’t really what the Magicians is about at the end of the day, and I tend to think that most of the most important themes just don’t translate very well to what most people want out of an RP game.
I also think that there probably needs to be room for (if not a focus on) interpersonal conflicts within the characters of the player-base, which requires both a very mature/responsible p-base and a well curated and moderated community with very little tolerance for people that are taking advantage of the social-conflict heavy nature of the setting. Which is probably why…
@bear_necessities said in Games we want, but will almost certainly never have:
I do but it has made for an awful MUSH every time
The MU attempts have largely been unsuccessful. People, it turns out, don’t tend to want to play in an ironic, “magic actually can’t fix your problems you have to deal with your shit” game that’s high in drama and social conflict. And many of of the people that do end up kind of sucking (or being willing to put up with people who suck, because they have limited options for this particular scope of RP).
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@NotSanni said in Games we want, but will almost certainly never have:
I think about The Magicians as a setting for a TTRPG quite a bit - but I also think that the most people who say they want a setting like the Magicians really just mean they want a slice-of-life urban fantasy game.
I think most people who want a Magicians game want a magic school game and … again, that’s not really what the Magicians is about. I agree with everything else you said, and I think the dark interpersonal social drama of the Magicians makes it not a great theme for a MUSH.
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@Pavel said in Games we want, but will almost certainly never have:
Whenever someone mentions The Magicians I get it confused with The Librarian(s) and I feel the urge to watch those movies (and the subsequent TV series) and then make a game out of it. Somehow.
This is literally just nWoD Mysterium, and it’s great.
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i just want a good old L&L mush to scratch my regency era itch gdi
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@Artemis It’s weird that there don’t seem to be several floating around. Brigerton was fun, right? And L&L is probably among the easiest themes to run.
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@Gashlycrumb fr. I might even take a stab at it myself if I had any kind of time like that rn. Maybe a lot of ppl are tired of l&l? Just gib us arx back :C
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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.