Stats seem a bit much. Trim it down some and I think you would be fine. I just think the number of stats your giving could be a bit overwhelming. Just keep it simple. The only other thing I have looked at is the custom characters. The two powers they are limited to will it be the same for the archetypes? Is it possible to purchase more powers or are you just limited to two?

Also how will items be handled? For example you mentioned vigilante style character would use gadgets and such, what about characters that are say super soldiers and use weapons(think Deadpool or Captain America) I could rattle off a few more but you get the jist of my question.

Initiate plans for Harold!

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All seriousnessingly though, I like this concept, and I’d be willing to throw in my hat to help.

Question becomes what are the goals? Thracs suffers from too open endedness. Will there be opposing nations at war, with the supes forced to decide soldier vs peacekeepers, or a big-bad? What?

Also, your stamina idea would mesh very well with either setting to ensure no constant battles.

The only benefit of Risus is that it’s simpler, easier, which is saying something when compared to Savage Worlds, plus it’s a free game.

As for the style between PbP and PBEM, with this group, they may enjoy PBEM, but can tend to be lazy when doing battles, which would close the game rather quickly, like the last RE.

Therefore, go with PBEM, with only major battles and events needing a battle writer.

*shakes his dicebag in front of BM*

If you have not heard, I have been considering making superhero RPG as of late. I am still in discussion with Scarth, Flession, and sometimes, Blackmage, on game mechanics, but these are the few details I have been considering for the game. I would like your feedback. These are only the basics, and there will be a lot more features; I just want to make sure to get these out of the way.

Powers

There are going to be two options for joining. The first option is the Archetype, which is a character with a designed set of stats with a specific purpose. Archetypes are essentially oddballs that do not fit in the category below. For example: Vigilante (No powers, but fancy technology and gadgets), Alien (Depends on race but do not expect kryptonians jumping around), Jumper (Teleporter), Super Soldier (No powers, but enhanced skills), Covenant (Elemental based magic), Science Experiment (Choice of 1 power from a list, which will be slightly upgraded from the customization option), etc

The other option is customization. Customization will allow you to pick from two weaker powers from a list (Possibly have to have them be related). With a custom character, powers will upgrade both independently and dependently. For example a character that can fire and absorb energy, would be able to do both and power up the strength of his attacks.

Stats

I was having this discussion with a friend of mine a couple days ago, and I think it’s something that could help new webmasters understand the qualms of getting people to write.

First off, it’s important to understand that battle writing is the lifeblood of what makes these RPGs. It’s what makes us different from other online RPG communities (of which there are many), and in my opinion, it’s what makes us better. But it’s also what makes our games more stressful and shorter lived than many others.

There’s basically two ways webmasters organize battles and issue them to writers. The way that Marcus and I do it/did it, and the way most other people have been doing it recently, which as far as I know was popularized by Berrik with Future Imperfect.

If you look at statistics of the last bunch of large games the last couple years (OYW4, FI, OYW5, RE and FI2) you’ll find that the OYW games consistently updated earlier, had battles in on time more reliably, and had drastically fewer battles that went unwritten or updates paused due to writing problems. I hate to sound all egotistical (I really don’t), but this analysis is simply true. I think the biggest reason for this difference is the way in which I hand out battles, and I shall explain why.

The current way most RPGs hand out battles that I’ve seen is to post them on a battle writing message board, and let writers who can write that day take them at their leisure. This seems like a very civilized way to operate and puts very little stress on the writer, but is based on a bad foundation. If you expect somebody to volunteer for something, they won’t do it.

I’ll draw a parallel. If you take an emergency first aid class, one of the first things they will teach you is to never ask people to volunteer for things. You have to tell them what to do. For example, you never say “Somebody call 911!” Instead you point to somebody and say “You, call 911.” (http://genuinecuriosity.com/genuinecuriosity/2011/7/30/you-call-911.html) Psychological studies show that it is MUCH more likely that 911 will actually end up getting called if you tell a specific person to do it, rather than request it of a larger group. When you request it of a group, what happens is everybody expects that somebody else will do it, and it doesn’t get done.

The way that I get writers to battles (and the way Marcus used to do it) is to figure out what the battles are, and then assign them to specific writers at a specific time. This ensures that no battles go unclaimed. It also allows you to identify a problem such as too few writers on in a given day early in the evening, and attempt to fix it before it’s too late at night. Both of these things go a long way towards updates being done at a reasonable hour, since battle writing is 90% of the time what holds up an update.

It also allows you as a webmaster to exert a level of quality control over your battles even if you aren’t writing them. For example, in order to keep things fair in OYW, I tried to as routine assign battles where EF won to Zeon writers, and battles where Zeon won to EF writers. This would generally prevent NPC losses on the losing side from being too dramatic. Additionally, certain PC’s I’d assign to the same writers repeatedly, so they’d not only not have to read new RP threads all the time, but they would know what had happen in a characters previous battles because they had written them. For example, if there are 5 events with Thomas in them over a 2 week period, I might assign them all to Chan.

Of course, there are problems with this system, which mainly have to do with stress on the writer. If you do it the ‘battle board’ way, then when people don’t want to write they don’t have to. This means that writers tend to not burn out as fast. The assignment way feels more like a job, and even though you’re getting paid in the game, I tend to have a reasonably high turnover rate on writers. If you’ve written for me and aren’t Chan, you’ve quit your writing position at least once. But to me, this is kind of a normal and expected thing. In an ideal world writers would be rotated on a regular schedule so that they aren’t writing for long lengths of time. Our games usually are not ideal, so writers tend to not get ‘rotated’, they tend to quit instead, which causes a scramble to find a new writer who then is magically there where he wasn’t when you didn’t need a new spot. These sorts of things cause drama, but at the end of the day they’re pretty natural and shouldn’t be unexpected.

Personally, I’d rather have a game where the updates are regular and the writers are rotated than a game where the updates are irregular and the writers stay the same.

In regards to repairs, there’s several different things you can do.

The traditional Gundam repair system works for 3 reasons. 1, it’s very simple and doesn’t confuse people. 2, it does a good job of keeping people from being in battles repeatedly, which doesn’t overwork writers. Finally, you don’t need to specify what exactly the damage is in that system. Because people cannot fight while damaged, there are no concerns of “Well his bazooka blew up in the last battle so he can’t use the bazooka in this battle.” Stuff like that can create a lot of errors in writing.

You could opt to do that system, but let people fight while damaged, and just prorate their EXP level based off of how much damage they go into battle with. This way whatever the writer writes is still kosher, and the writer can simply adjust the pilots EXP level rather than having to read previous battles and figure out what exactly the damage is.

If you want to do a more complicated damage system, you could do something like the following:

Have seperate status entries for the pilot and the mecha.

Rather than damage + a number, have a few grades of damage (OK, Light Damage, Moderate Damage, Heavy Damage, etc)

For pilots, you can prorate their EXP level based off whatever injury grade they are. Perhaps minor injuries is a -10% EXP level, moderate is -50%, and heavy injuries are hospitalized and can’t fight.

For mecha, you have your overall damage level, then in parenthesis list what specifically the damage is. For example “Moderate Damage (Left Arm Destroyed, minor hull damage)”

Then you have a repair action, in which each repair action takes you down 1 damage grade. Moderate to Light, Light to OK, etc.

Basically what this does is gives you the same system as repair days, but allows for more detail in RPing and writing. However, with more detail comes more responsibility on the part of writers to write things correctly, and on updaters to not make mistakes.

Roleplaying will not be required, as explained by Eld, though I would like to make the individual runs somewhat tied together so that characters (at least the ones that survive) *will* be seen again in the next iteration as a result of their faction’s gains and losses during the previous run. This *might* give incentive to roleplay, but with a sub par history of RPGs actually restarting after a planned hiatus… well, that’ll be iffy.

As for damage, I’m still tinkering around with it. Giving two auxiliary actions would be a choice (repair + scout/train/etc) but then that’s almost the same as giving a free pass on repairs, so yes, this is up for debate.

Battles would most likely be written over a few days, or even perhaps in segments to be uploaded each day until a complete battle is all said and done, but with everything else that’s being proposed testing will be required to determine the feasibility of ideas.

Thanks for the comments guys!

Ultimately, it is battle writing that is the biggest hurdle, takes the most time, requires the most effort, and ends up killing the most games.

OYW5 was probably the biggest, most complicated and difficult game to date update wise, and even that took at most 2 hours to update. Getting a quality event written in 2 hours is a miracle.

You can always do an update and just post battle results, but that tends to kill the fun and momentum of the game if you do it too much, and once you do it once it becomes okay to do it again and starts becoming a regular occurance.