Random MU* Thoughts... (long)
Jun. 30th, 2004 07:49 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
newnumber6Various MU* thoughts... things I'd like to see out there sometime, varying ideas on consent, elitism, etc.
Now that I have no MU* at all, I've actually begun thinking more and more about MU*s.. perhaps it's a sign I haven't grown out of the hobby altogether. Anyway...
Games:
Of course, one of the main things I'd like to see is a statless, full app game set in a canon time period. Perhaps now, but I'd really like a timebreak like CotA had... say about when the X-Men and NuMus came back from Asgard (I think that was the specific time CotA chose last time in fact, with an explanation that Loki decided to send them back to random places and times on Earth (although not too far off from the real-time) to allow for characters who aren't apped for a while to suddenly 'appear' and be back home as though no time had passed for them), because I like the early NuMus and the Hellions and we skip a lot of the
awful characters that came later (yes, we also skip a lot of good characters, but they could be let in by special app).
Other games are ones I've wanted to see for a long time... a good Wild Cards game for one, though I suspect it has a good chance of degenerating into a TS pit pretty quickly.
New Universe is another big one I've wanted for a while, but without a central location like New York is in Marvel, it's harder for everyone to interact, so that might be undoable without drastic changes.
Of non-superhero MU*s, the big one I'd like to see is a Firefly MU*. The major rule here; no canon characters. It's a big 'verse, and plenty of stories to be told, so although Mal and the Serenity are out there, they don't play any part in the MU*, laying low and sticking under the radar as criminal types do. I've never really been on a Space Game though, so I don't know how they work out things like travelling between different planets or making sure there's a good RP place. I suppose using the 'cortex' (Firefly's internet) you could communicate with almost anywhere, but it shouldn't be the main source cause, well, RPing on the internet that you're in Space talking to someone over the space-internet just seems a bit silly. ;) Actually, I've just today heard of someone working on one of these but I think it's in the early stages and I don't know how they plan to deal with all this stuff. But, hey, I'll take a look.
Another one that might be cool is Riverworld, or some modification thereof.. be anyone that ever lived, all resurrected on the same word (but spread all over it)
Characters:
There are some characters that are bubbling around the edge of my mind that I'd kind of like to play, if I could find someplace...
I miss Christopher. Yeah, I know he's the cheesiest cliche of MU*s, 'me with powers', but he wasn't exactly me and there were a lot of neat little twists with him, and I loved his powers. If I found a canon Marvel MU* that I liked and trusted to stay around, I'd probably try and make him.
Shortpack from Mystique kind of interests me as a character sometimes, though I don't know if I'd be able to play him. He is one of the better new characters to be created in recent memory, at any rate.
Then there's my Star Pilot Grainger homage... I suppose if a Firefly MU* ever comes to pass, I can try him there.. I'd have to ditch the whole 'mental symbiote' thing because there's no aliens in the 'verse (though I could just make him slightly crazy and _believe_ he's got an alien mind-partner), but his character would work remarkably well. I see him as a person who didn't care enough to get involved in the war (and too much of a pacifist to actually fight on any side), but now that the Alliance is everywhere he's chafing a bit as it's too much big government, and has drifted towards the border planets.
Of course there's the DC character I'm working on for another game, but I still have my doubts about whether I'd be able to do him with any justice.
And now, some random meandering thoughts...
Consent: One of the ideas I was fairly fond of for the last year of XET was fodder characters, who had a _much_ easier app (pretty much just powers and skills, and a paragraph or so of everything else) but had only limited consent powers... if it was important for the story or other characters that something bad happen, well, they can't consent out of it, and certainly not if ICA=ICC. It allows people like Sabretooth to actually, potentially, kill off PCs, even if only a certain class of them.
I was thinking of another way to play things in certain MU*s is that each player has a 'flag' so to speak, that marks any one of their characters as having 'no consent' right. They can have as many as they want, but only one gets consent rights, and others can be killed off as the story demands. You can switch which character is your 'consent character' once a month, though you have to play your characters at least once a month too or you'll lose them.
I dunno, probably wouldn't work at all anyway, just might be interesting to see. And of course, this would probably have to play out on a game without canon characters at all, otherwise things could get dicey (although, then again, it might be fun to try just once, a Marvel game with some form of stats and a 'dead means dead' policy, including for canons. That is, if something happens and Cyclops dies, that's it, he's dead in that world. Eventually the core X-Men would be replaced by OCs)
Speaking of which, any canon superhero game that allows both OCs and Canon Chars (and I wouldn't play on any game that doesn't allow OCs) always faces a certain problem. That is, of OCs overloading the main teams. It's a difficult problem. I tend to play almost exclusively OCs. And, as an OC, I like to eventually think about finding my way onto one of the big teams. At the same time, I hate looking at a +roster of a known team and see it mostly composed of characters I've never heard of (this is one of the smaller reasons I resisted just having Kirk officially join the X-Men to flesh them out in XET). I want to make one of the big teams, but I want to earn it. I don't want it to be a situation where you just meet one of the canon members of the team, and since you're a down on your luck mutant, they drag you home and put you on the team. Is it elitist of me? Maybe. Maybe even probably. But it also turns me off.
Yet there's really no good solution I can think of. Maximum
'quotas' of OC members on a team is unrealistic. Mandating
'the X-Men aren't recruiting at all, so unless RP sets you on that path another way don't expect to get in' or 'The X-Men are extremely selective' tends to make it so only friends of existing members get in and causes bad feelings. Actually, quotas do all that too.
Leaving the team completely closed to OCs stagnates (and leads to justified charges of Canon favoritism), especially when the canon characters aren't being held by the most diligent of RPers, and letting the team completely open to new people tends to make them no longer the 'X-Men' anymore (or NM, or whoever, I just keep using X-Men because it's convenient), and usually leads to extensive team bloat (though that happens even without OCs, owing to the huge number of X-Men there are). Maybe that's the only solution you can do because at least it's somewhat fair (elitism and cliques will still form preventing certain unliked people from joining up and making it spectacularly easy for friends). I just kind of wish individual _players_ of OCs would use more discretion and not try to rush the X-Mansion.
As one such player, my history has generally been as follows: 1 OC character (on my first MU) joined the New Mutants (though it wasn't called that, that's what they were), although it was after quite a while and being on another team first (though I do admit and regret that I jumped ship on the other team very fast when I was offered a position on the NM... although the NMs there were almost exclusively OCs anyway) (another char on that game joined a team named after Excalibur, but shared none of the concept or characters). In the second incarnation of the same character (on a rebooted version of the same MU*), he completely avoided the big teams altogether, and actually started and got involved with a mostly human 'team' of young kids in a halfway house. I was actually quite surprised and pleased at that, we got a team of mutants and humans together, mostly humans, that actually played well together and had some longevity (although people did drift away). We even grew our own stable of NPC humans in the area to play off. From what I recall of other teams, they stuck pretty close to canon exclusivity, almost to the extent of being elitist but with a few OCs on various teams spread out.
The third incarnation, my character started solo, but eventually formed a friendship that brought him to the Mass. Academy, although he never actually joined the Hellions. As I recall there the Mass. Academy were pretty open, other teams didn't really have a whole lot of OCs in them but I wasn't paying too much attention and activity was waning by this point. I always sort of thought to myself that my character _might_ have made the jump to the NM, eventually, but he never quite did and he was at first oblivious to the nefariousness of the HFC, then later it seemed like it might be going away and be okay. However, I believe at least the X-Men had a 'we're not looking for new people' policy of some sort.
Then of course, with Kirk on XET, he got into the NM team on the ground floor, but as it turns out, was ill-suited for it owing to him being college age and all the other NM candidates being teens. So, I maneuvered him into a new team attached to the X-men but not officially part. Still pretty close to horning in on the ground floor so I'll call it a case of such. My other characters (although most were Canons, they were obscure enough that almost nobody heard of them), they either joined teams which were described as being 'big and open recruiting', like the Brotherhood, kept solo, or were outcasts and wound up with the Morlocks (who I don't consider it a big deal to have a lot of OC Morlocks). And, I'll admit it, to a small extent we tried to shoo people away from the X-Mansion on an admin level to the point of having the X-Men be ultra paranoid about security and so trying not to let people just be found and wander in. (Early plans in fact had only the X-Men staying at the mansion and the NM all be college age and actually in college, living on residence, but as we all see that didn't work out and wound up having a young teen NM group in the mansion and a separate college age team)
On a couple other games I played with pretty open membership or quotas, I never actively lobbied to get a team, but seeing people just wind up on the teams because they were pushy and went out and went for it sort of annoyed me (especially where it was a canon game like the Ultimate MUs) and I usually wound up losing interest in the game (although the lack of interest was due to a large number of reasons).
With the exception of that first character (and hey I was young) and Kirk (it was my first 'Year One' game where that sort of thing was explicitly going to happen and even canon characters wouldn't necessarily wind up in the same places), I never specifically lobbied or tried especially hard to get onto a canon team. I don't think I ever asked OOCly in any other situation to join, and I think at least once I was asked OOCly and said 'if a good reason for it occurs in RP, sure...' My point of view was always, if it happens, I'd love it, but I'm not going to make a pest of myself trying.
Hrm.. okay, this has turned into a lot more of a rambling rant than I had in mind. So, in summary, I just wish OC players would let things happen without forcing it.
Now that I have no MU* at all, I've actually begun thinking more and more about MU*s.. perhaps it's a sign I haven't grown out of the hobby altogether. Anyway...
Games:
Of course, one of the main things I'd like to see is a statless, full app game set in a canon time period. Perhaps now, but I'd really like a timebreak like CotA had... say about when the X-Men and NuMus came back from Asgard (I think that was the specific time CotA chose last time in fact, with an explanation that Loki decided to send them back to random places and times on Earth (although not too far off from the real-time) to allow for characters who aren't apped for a while to suddenly 'appear' and be back home as though no time had passed for them), because I like the early NuMus and the Hellions and we skip a lot of the
awful characters that came later (yes, we also skip a lot of good characters, but they could be let in by special app).
Other games are ones I've wanted to see for a long time... a good Wild Cards game for one, though I suspect it has a good chance of degenerating into a TS pit pretty quickly.
New Universe is another big one I've wanted for a while, but without a central location like New York is in Marvel, it's harder for everyone to interact, so that might be undoable without drastic changes.
Of non-superhero MU*s, the big one I'd like to see is a Firefly MU*. The major rule here; no canon characters. It's a big 'verse, and plenty of stories to be told, so although Mal and the Serenity are out there, they don't play any part in the MU*, laying low and sticking under the radar as criminal types do. I've never really been on a Space Game though, so I don't know how they work out things like travelling between different planets or making sure there's a good RP place. I suppose using the 'cortex' (Firefly's internet) you could communicate with almost anywhere, but it shouldn't be the main source cause, well, RPing on the internet that you're in Space talking to someone over the space-internet just seems a bit silly. ;) Actually, I've just today heard of someone working on one of these but I think it's in the early stages and I don't know how they plan to deal with all this stuff. But, hey, I'll take a look.
Another one that might be cool is Riverworld, or some modification thereof.. be anyone that ever lived, all resurrected on the same word (but spread all over it)
Characters:
There are some characters that are bubbling around the edge of my mind that I'd kind of like to play, if I could find someplace...
I miss Christopher. Yeah, I know he's the cheesiest cliche of MU*s, 'me with powers', but he wasn't exactly me and there were a lot of neat little twists with him, and I loved his powers. If I found a canon Marvel MU* that I liked and trusted to stay around, I'd probably try and make him.
Shortpack from Mystique kind of interests me as a character sometimes, though I don't know if I'd be able to play him. He is one of the better new characters to be created in recent memory, at any rate.
Then there's my Star Pilot Grainger homage... I suppose if a Firefly MU* ever comes to pass, I can try him there.. I'd have to ditch the whole 'mental symbiote' thing because there's no aliens in the 'verse (though I could just make him slightly crazy and _believe_ he's got an alien mind-partner), but his character would work remarkably well. I see him as a person who didn't care enough to get involved in the war (and too much of a pacifist to actually fight on any side), but now that the Alliance is everywhere he's chafing a bit as it's too much big government, and has drifted towards the border planets.
Of course there's the DC character I'm working on for another game, but I still have my doubts about whether I'd be able to do him with any justice.
And now, some random meandering thoughts...
Consent: One of the ideas I was fairly fond of for the last year of XET was fodder characters, who had a _much_ easier app (pretty much just powers and skills, and a paragraph or so of everything else) but had only limited consent powers... if it was important for the story or other characters that something bad happen, well, they can't consent out of it, and certainly not if ICA=ICC. It allows people like Sabretooth to actually, potentially, kill off PCs, even if only a certain class of them.
I was thinking of another way to play things in certain MU*s is that each player has a 'flag' so to speak, that marks any one of their characters as having 'no consent' right. They can have as many as they want, but only one gets consent rights, and others can be killed off as the story demands. You can switch which character is your 'consent character' once a month, though you have to play your characters at least once a month too or you'll lose them.
I dunno, probably wouldn't work at all anyway, just might be interesting to see. And of course, this would probably have to play out on a game without canon characters at all, otherwise things could get dicey (although, then again, it might be fun to try just once, a Marvel game with some form of stats and a 'dead means dead' policy, including for canons. That is, if something happens and Cyclops dies, that's it, he's dead in that world. Eventually the core X-Men would be replaced by OCs)
Speaking of which, any canon superhero game that allows both OCs and Canon Chars (and I wouldn't play on any game that doesn't allow OCs) always faces a certain problem. That is, of OCs overloading the main teams. It's a difficult problem. I tend to play almost exclusively OCs. And, as an OC, I like to eventually think about finding my way onto one of the big teams. At the same time, I hate looking at a +roster of a known team and see it mostly composed of characters I've never heard of (this is one of the smaller reasons I resisted just having Kirk officially join the X-Men to flesh them out in XET). I want to make one of the big teams, but I want to earn it. I don't want it to be a situation where you just meet one of the canon members of the team, and since you're a down on your luck mutant, they drag you home and put you on the team. Is it elitist of me? Maybe. Maybe even probably. But it also turns me off.
Yet there's really no good solution I can think of. Maximum
'quotas' of OC members on a team is unrealistic. Mandating
'the X-Men aren't recruiting at all, so unless RP sets you on that path another way don't expect to get in' or 'The X-Men are extremely selective' tends to make it so only friends of existing members get in and causes bad feelings. Actually, quotas do all that too.
Leaving the team completely closed to OCs stagnates (and leads to justified charges of Canon favoritism), especially when the canon characters aren't being held by the most diligent of RPers, and letting the team completely open to new people tends to make them no longer the 'X-Men' anymore (or NM, or whoever, I just keep using X-Men because it's convenient), and usually leads to extensive team bloat (though that happens even without OCs, owing to the huge number of X-Men there are). Maybe that's the only solution you can do because at least it's somewhat fair (elitism and cliques will still form preventing certain unliked people from joining up and making it spectacularly easy for friends). I just kind of wish individual _players_ of OCs would use more discretion and not try to rush the X-Mansion.
As one such player, my history has generally been as follows: 1 OC character (on my first MU) joined the New Mutants (though it wasn't called that, that's what they were), although it was after quite a while and being on another team first (though I do admit and regret that I jumped ship on the other team very fast when I was offered a position on the NM... although the NMs there were almost exclusively OCs anyway) (another char on that game joined a team named after Excalibur, but shared none of the concept or characters). In the second incarnation of the same character (on a rebooted version of the same MU*), he completely avoided the big teams altogether, and actually started and got involved with a mostly human 'team' of young kids in a halfway house. I was actually quite surprised and pleased at that, we got a team of mutants and humans together, mostly humans, that actually played well together and had some longevity (although people did drift away). We even grew our own stable of NPC humans in the area to play off. From what I recall of other teams, they stuck pretty close to canon exclusivity, almost to the extent of being elitist but with a few OCs on various teams spread out.
The third incarnation, my character started solo, but eventually formed a friendship that brought him to the Mass. Academy, although he never actually joined the Hellions. As I recall there the Mass. Academy were pretty open, other teams didn't really have a whole lot of OCs in them but I wasn't paying too much attention and activity was waning by this point. I always sort of thought to myself that my character _might_ have made the jump to the NM, eventually, but he never quite did and he was at first oblivious to the nefariousness of the HFC, then later it seemed like it might be going away and be okay. However, I believe at least the X-Men had a 'we're not looking for new people' policy of some sort.
Then of course, with Kirk on XET, he got into the NM team on the ground floor, but as it turns out, was ill-suited for it owing to him being college age and all the other NM candidates being teens. So, I maneuvered him into a new team attached to the X-men but not officially part. Still pretty close to horning in on the ground floor so I'll call it a case of such. My other characters (although most were Canons, they were obscure enough that almost nobody heard of them), they either joined teams which were described as being 'big and open recruiting', like the Brotherhood, kept solo, or were outcasts and wound up with the Morlocks (who I don't consider it a big deal to have a lot of OC Morlocks). And, I'll admit it, to a small extent we tried to shoo people away from the X-Mansion on an admin level to the point of having the X-Men be ultra paranoid about security and so trying not to let people just be found and wander in. (Early plans in fact had only the X-Men staying at the mansion and the NM all be college age and actually in college, living on residence, but as we all see that didn't work out and wound up having a young teen NM group in the mansion and a separate college age team)
On a couple other games I played with pretty open membership or quotas, I never actively lobbied to get a team, but seeing people just wind up on the teams because they were pushy and went out and went for it sort of annoyed me (especially where it was a canon game like the Ultimate MUs) and I usually wound up losing interest in the game (although the lack of interest was due to a large number of reasons).
With the exception of that first character (and hey I was young) and Kirk (it was my first 'Year One' game where that sort of thing was explicitly going to happen and even canon characters wouldn't necessarily wind up in the same places), I never specifically lobbied or tried especially hard to get onto a canon team. I don't think I ever asked OOCly in any other situation to join, and I think at least once I was asked OOCly and said 'if a good reason for it occurs in RP, sure...' My point of view was always, if it happens, I'd love it, but I'm not going to make a pest of myself trying.
Hrm.. okay, this has turned into a lot more of a rambling rant than I had in mind. So, in summary, I just wish OC players would let things happen without forcing it.
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no subject
Date: 2004-06-30 05:10 pm (UTC)It'd rock.. If only I had the time =)
heh...
Date: 2004-06-30 07:20 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-06-30 07:16 pm (UTC)Yep...
Date: 2004-06-30 07:21 pm (UTC)And I'm gonna play a pilot! ;)
Re: Yep...
Date: 2004-06-30 07:22 pm (UTC)Re: Yep...
Date: 2004-06-30 07:26 pm (UTC)Re: Yep...
Date: 2004-06-30 07:30 pm (UTC)