@KarmaBum said in World Tone / Feeling:
People seem to be saying this a lot, so I’m kinda curious what “touch the world” mean in terms of MUSH gameplay.
Can you share some concrete examples from a player perspective of what this looks like on a MUSH?
Recently on Star Wars: Age of Alliances, my derpy Space Captain stumbled across the really rather grimdark tone-shift on Chandrila. Like, full-on fascist hellscape with military police on every street corner and history being dramatically rewritten to favor the Sith Empire. It really broke her heart, because as a noble-born Coruscanti girl, she had visited Chandrila as a child before the Sith rose to power in the wake of the First Order’s destruction.
This character was also very friendly with several suspected or known rebels because for her the war wasn’t personal. She had a shiny uniform that never got dirty while standing on the bridge of a Star Destroyer. People were always worried about the Empire building a new superweapon, but really, what were the odds of that happening? The idea of killing a whole planet (or star system) was just cartoonishly evil, and no one would really do that. Right? After it had failed… how many times?
But Chandrila changed that. Suddenly the idea that these people would murder an entire planet, not just once but many times over, became terribly real. And all the rumors, the speculation, the inaction of the Jedi, nobody really doing anything to go after this one big problem all came crashing down on her head.
And I decided that she wasn’t going to stand for it. So I started working with Empire players, Rebel players, and staff on how to bring about a change. What might kickstart a renewed effort to stop these things before they get deployed? (Nevermind that at this point I didn’t know the planet killers HAD been deployed before at least once.)
Eventually we settled on a two step plan: Step One: Defect to the Rebellion. Step Two: Take the planetkiller schematics with her. Quitting in style, basically.
Well, no plan ever goes that smoothly, and it ended up with my poor Captain in a locker room, struggling against computer checks three times what she could reasonably crack. She had Black Widowed her way into getting security codes, then further Black Widowed her way into arranging a brief window where she could be alone with specific a code cylinder, an uplink point, and a datapad. But it wasn’t going well. I had failed too many rolls, and if she wanted to get out, she needed to move. Now.
But this was important to her. More important than anything else had been because the idea of little frozen bodies floating in space amidst the rubble of a dead world was too much for her to bear. If she ran and that happened? That was on her now. So she stayed, blew through the last firewall that she could, and uploaded the data. She didn’t get the schematics–but she did find out where they were, who the project director was, who the lead engineer was, and where they had originally been built. It had to be enough as the security team broke in and stunned her. Game over.
But, luckily for her, Captain Derp had made a lot of friends, and in something between Mass Effect and Doom, lightsabers and blasters and some really, really lucky rolls got my character out. And she got exfiltrated to the Rebellion! She lost everything–wealth, status, a luxurious private shuttle, and command of a Star Destroyer. But, because of her, knowledge of the planet killers was out in the wild. And that made me really happy. I had poked the world and made an indelible mark on it.
And that felt a lot better than any mountain of credits, gear, or rare junk I could have gotten my hands on.