The new season of Game Changer just recently released and I haven’t laughed this hard in ages.

If you don’t have a DropoutTV subscription what are you even doing with your lives?! It’s the only streaming service who’s content is getting better and better and better as it goes along.

The idea of one “main” love interest just sounds exhausting for whoever is playing them. Every single person is going to want to be in private scenes with you, and if you are keeping them as an NPC for public events only, I think a lot of people are going to lose interest rapidly. I have a lot of other thoughts but this is the main one, it just sounds like a LOT on a single person and would quickly become Not Fun.

@Third-Eye said in The 3-Month Players:

New game opens. The theme at this point almost doesn’t matter. The appeal of it at this point almost doesn’t matter.

It is mobbed by the same 40+ people, most of whom evaporate in 3 months.

The cycle repeats at the next new game, the XYZ of which almost doesn’t matter.

IMO the bubble seems to largely happen on specific genres of games and my theory is that it happens because 1) it’s the genre people want to play, and 2) there aren’t enough games in that genre to tickle everyone’s fancy. So a game in that genre comes up, 40+ people rush to play (even tho the theme/setting only appeals to 10-15 of them), then slowly but surely those people who aren’t really “all in” on the game trickle off & the game settles into a ‘reasonable’ population. But then the new hotness in the same genre pops up, and the rush happens again, and hey your friends are playing over there and not over here, so you go over there too and by 5 month’s time the first game is dead and the second game is about to lose half of their population because the theme/setting didn’t appeal to them but they want to play in that genre, rinse & repeat etc. etc.

Then you have the OTHER side of it where gamerunners determine a game’s success off “The Bubble” and the natural trickling off of people to settle into a more “reasonable” population makes it seem Unsuccessful, so they give up. Or they burn out. Or they didn’t hook the people they wanted to hook and they don’t really want to Rp with the people who are left so they give up.

I suspect if you had 2-3 high fantasy/pretty princess games and 2-3 modern supernatural games opening up at the same-ish time, you wouldn’t experience that bubble. But IDK, I could be wrong.

@Faraday said in The 3-Month Players:

The main issue IMHO is that many (most?) games open without a clear plan of what players are going to do.

This. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve looked at a game and gone “oh this concept sounds neat, but what will I be able to DO here?” I also can’t tell you how many games I’ve created in my head that sound neat and then @KarmaBum is like OK but what will people RP?

The “What Will People RP” question sticks with me now and is not just the reason why I don’t personally open games, it’s why I don’t join a lot of games anymore. It’s more than just the theme or the meta plot, to me it’s how do you give players the agency to run their own stories and do more than just RP the random karaoke night until I feel fucked to run another plot, if that makes sense.

@Ominous said in Lords and Ladies Game Design:

Alice, Bob, and Carol, a trio of town guards, could be the ones to come across the zombie horde and report it to their sergeant, the commander of the town guard, or the mayor.

But what happens when Alice, Bob & Carol, a trio of town guards, come across a zombie horde and horde that information to themselves because they want the plot? IDK there’s no real perfect way to ensure everyone gets a bite of the plot cake except to just put the information out there for everyone.

@Gashlycrumb said in The Magicians:

@bear_necessities I like. My own druthers would be to set it in the 1930’s or 1960’s, but I bet the appeal of that is too narrow. I’m pretty much against cannon characters as PCs and want every PC to be original. Roster PCs created for the game and played by someone who didn’t create them are great, but the characters from the shows and books, naw.

I would totally be down for 1930s or 1960s, but I think you’re right about the appeal being too narrow. Your scope is probably already narrow enough with an existing IP that isn’t currently “popular”, and you could always run ‘back in time’ or alternative timeline events which work with the existing magic system.

And don’t get me wrong, I am sure magic school could be a fun concept. It’s just the appeal of The Magicians to me was never Brakebills, it was everything else. TBH if I was making a game, I’d probably base it in Fillory or new-Fillory, or maybe even the Neitherlands.

@Gashlycrumb I personally would start a game after where the show ended. Fillory is destroyed, the Fillorians are in a new world, and you can establish from there. It would be a blank slate that you could really create from, vs having to deal with book/show stuff involving the alternate timelines and cannon characters, etc. And I would just require all the PCs to be post-Brakebills at that point.

@helvetica Yeah that sounds about right, I can’t keep all my MUSH drama straight

It really is a great theme that I would love to play, I just don’t see how it can be done. Even from a systems standpoint, the magic system is so complicated, it doesn’t seem like something you could just throw together or “make work” on FS3 or anything.

Double-post but this was what I told my bfffff way back in the day when I wanted a Magicians mush:

Almighty Me — 7/7/20, 7:13 AM
and again, the fun part of magicians is strangers in a strange land, where they are in the Narnia-esque world and all of the creatures are assholes

@Gashlycrumb I did not play the latest Magicians game, but if I remember correctly, there was a known sex-pest who sex-pested her way into running the game into the ground. I admittedly was exaggerating on the whole ‘awful MUSH every time’ because I too only know of two instances, but I am pretty sure the other one burst into flames too.

I am probably generalizing here but it has seemed a common theme that people equate the Magicians with “adult Harry Potter” and want to play kids at magic college. Which, whatever floats your boat, I just felt like magic college was such a small point of The Magicians and PERSONALLY do not want to play kids at magic college, it’s just not my thing.

@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.

@Gashlycrumb I do but it has made for an awful MUSH every time

@Roz what the fuck

I really like the idea of different sandboxes but wonder if it would be overwhelming? It’s way easier to do on Ares since you can have multiple scenes running at once so it’s doable, but the thought of having 3-5 async scenes each in a different time period does seem a lot.

Just because I was reminded when talking about Disneyland stuff, I would love a game based on twisted fairy tales. Dimension 20 did such a cool season on it and I wish I was as creative as Brennan.

ETA on the sailor moon stuff, there was forever ago in the 90s a Sailor Moon TT game very similar to WoD that would probably make a good MUSH. I remember because my dad was dating this girl who’s teenagers were playing it in the basement and they refused to let me join even though I am a Sailor Moon Super Fan!!! and I clearly haven’t forgotten now almost 25+ years later

@KarmaBum said in Games we want, but will almost certainly never have:

@KarmaBum said in Games we want, but will almost certainly never have and probably in every other iteration of this subject that’s ever been mentioned because KB still wants to play cowboys and yet you may notice that KB has never opened a cowboy MUSH despite several games and that is because KB wants to play cowboys on someone else’s game not my own for a change so will someone please just do this already???:

Cowboys (vs werewolves)

A Wild Imaginary West (clicky) game would also be acceptable.

We are not the same person but I want this too thanks

@Jennkryst said in Game Development: Modern Gothic Storypath System:

crossed with Everworld but never had the energy to get it done.

Every so often I have this intense memory of reading Everworld but can’t remember wtf the series is named, so I go on this crazy google hunt trying to remember and finally figure it out. And anyway this is to say please do this? Thanks.

100000% staff should play their own games.

I’m on the fence about whether or not they should disclose who their PCs are though, especially on story-driven games. Being able to just dip into a PC skin and turn off Godmode is part of the appeal of having a PC on your own game; you don’t feel forced to provide story for anyone if no one knows who your PC is, and you don’t have to worry about people only playing with you because they think you are a plot dispenser.

@Jumpscare said in MU Peeves Thread:

Yes, her eyes may harken back to bygone timeless memories hidden within pools of mystery, but what color are they?

IDK about you but eyes harken back to bygone timeless memories isn’t an automatic AI flag to me. I’ve seen descs like this since the late 90s?

I want to ask people to RP but I have 0 ideas for scenes and so I wait around hoping someone will have an idea and ask me instead or an idea will magically come to me lol