Shadowrunner MMORPG Project Need Intersted Persons Options

[warrior_allanon]

(Cringes as he says this) maybe some of you should look at D&D online in how they do their character advancement and quests. maybe mix something from that with a rippoff of GTA3 i'm a decent concept guy, the doing is where i fall through.

[Ori0n]

I really wish we could translate the game mechanics 1:1, but that'd be very hard to do without licensing bliggity blah. I would just like to make it as absolutley close as possible.

So you'd be able to take a run from P&P, and go play it in this game, and at the least feel no loss of fun, and hopefully a great deal of extra adventure

[Shadow]

Then the focus will be on skill advancement, and you will have EQ in the future. You should have all the skills that SR has, plus the extras it it needs, but like SR the skills ou start the game with are the ones you pretty much have for the life of the character. Your starting load out will be vital. Advancement cannot be the reason for playing the game, other wise your just making Wow.

[James McMurray]

Advancement isn't a reason to make a game, it's a tool within that game to satisfy the primary reason: creating something enjoyable. I'd like a system very close to Shadowrun's own: doing stuff nets you experience points (we can't really call it Karma, but the two are practically identical). You then spend those experience points to increase attributes, skills, get new spells, etc. an increasing price like SR's should also be used, although the exact multipliers might need some tweaking just to skirt the rim of legality. Example:

Speaking of legality, do we have anyone here with law experience? It'd be great to be able to skate the line as close as we can, but without someone qualified enough to show us where that line is we'll need to stay as far away from it as we can and still have a manapunk game based on running the shadows.

[eralston]

Intellectual Property litigation is pretty much the only way of ensuring companies such as WK make money. We're probably already crossing some line by discussing this on their own forum.

Keep in mind that we are "inspired" by shadowrun, not attempting to make a generic version.

If we name too many skills, attributes, or concepts the same or use them in the same way as SR we will be exposing ourselves far too much to ever hope to make money (which is part of what leant us to making a Manapunk game instead of SR). I would stress to prospective members of both the World and Game Mechanic design to forget SR and just focus on treatments of the idea of cyberpunk+magic.

Anyone seriously suggesting any partial ripping off of SR or any other MMO title should drop from the project, it'll just bite us in the ass later.

[Dranem]

[James McMurray]

That almost definitely will not happen. For Fanpro/Wizkids to give any input into this game, especially things that will make it more canon, would be stepping on FASA Studios's license. I would be surprised if we ever got more than a passing opinion (i.e. "I like it" or "It sucks"). Going much deeper than that could result in legal troubles for FP and WK.

It should be pretty easy to get something incredibly close without tredding on toes. If we abandon the d6 system, rename the skills we don't drop, add skills, and geenrally avoid any and all references to SR material we should be ok. Of course, all that leaves for us to do is the flavor of SR, but that's as it should be.

[Dranem]

[Dranem]

[eralston]

BTW, if we find ~2 concept artists, we could break into teams and start development tasks as soon as this week. Everyone's asking their highly artistic friends right?

I can agree with the "NPCs are not gelatinous bags of experience" comment, especially when such a system would make Johnson double crossing really profitable (he could pay you for the mission with money and XP then you could shoot him and get money and XP).

Try to think of other resources to advance as well, such as reputation amongst entities in the game.

I might be off my rocker because it's so late, but could I bring up one issue with this death we haven't talked about? What if it was within the power of magic to bring people back from the dead? Since we're writing our own universe, why not put in something about divine magic and an afterlife system? It would be within our power as designers to even go as complex as a deity system so why have we dismissed ressurection out of hand? As anti-SR as that sounds, it's a very utlitarian answer to a very sticky issue

[Shadow]

I had an idea about reputation. Lets call it Heat and Criminalocity. Heat is generated by doing things that are illegal. It is a temporary stat that goes down over time. Criminalocity is point based. You get points for completing missions (well). However, if your heat goes up you start losing Criminalocity points. The higher your Heat, the lower your Criminalocity.

So do a mission well, don't generate a lot of Heat, and you get a high Criminalociuty. Now you can demand a higher paycheck from the johnsons, have some street cred and generally are a good criminal.

Walk around shooting people, do missions with a high body count, Heat goes up, criminalocity goes down. Now you can't demand a lot of money, so you get the low end jobs.

Now if your Heat goes to high you get activly persued by the police etc. Anyways it was an idea I had and I wanted to get it out there.

As for the IP stuff, as long as we don't use any copywriten material we are okay. We can use all the stats, skills, etc we want. But we can't call it Shadowrun, or the bosses Johnsons, ets.

[eralston]

I like the direction, but I think it needs some finer granularity. "Heat" with Knight Errant would be different than "Heat" with Lone Star, etc

It's not a bad idea, I think it should track individually for each entity (all the crops, mafia, yakuza, maybe gangs, etc). Heat should also be a more general team for "pisses off in the short term" since tweaking a mobster doesn't get you in trouble because it's illegal so much that it's just a bad idea.

I would take it one step higher and say that, under such a system, a constant increase in social cred with a single organization could allow you access to missions/services not normally available. Perhaps even allow you to "join". That would allow quite a bit of freedom. For instance, if you puckered up to Ares long enough, they might hire you full-time for anti-runner security (or, given dangerous freedom) lame wage-slavery.

PS I think "reputation" or "street cred" might ring more bells than "criminalocity"

[Shadow]

Yeah, Criminalocity was just the word I came up with to explain it.

[Laser]

Not to cause any uncomfortable parallels here, but this concept of heat sounds a lot like faction from World of Warcraft. Too low, and members of the group attack on sight. High enough and they give you stuff, cut you deals, that sort of thing. We would, of course, have to work on how it gets changed, since we're looking for more of a short-term effect that can decrease slowly over time (depending on the group. Some have an elephantine memory for slights against them).

[eralston]

Well, the "heat" mechanic and the "reputation" mechanic would probably differ in that "heat" could only go negative and "reputation" could go either way. One angle I'd like to take is that reputation is core to the advancement of characters as far as opening up "higher level" tasks and runs. It attacks the "I must pwn things to advance" idealogy we all seem to hate. It would make it so one must be judged loyal and capable enough to perform a task, as it would be in the shadows. I certainly wouldn't hire a loose cannon for my important job even if he could kill a green dragon by himself.

Just reputation (without any "heat") might be enough if its behaviour was defined to spike at certain actions then slowly settle down over time (not unlike gas prices. Sudden changes that shock people then roll back to a "comforatble" levels ultimately leading to a net change). Reputation lending to a "live" nature to the game, especially concerning consequences would be important social regulation.

[JesterX]

[JesterX]

[Ori0n]

Shadow, that Idea about Heat and Criminalocity, is brilliant.
It sounds like a perfect way to handle things.

Also instead of Karma, perhaps, as lame as it might sound, we could go with Luck. Or something else like that. Your Luck randomly comes into play during, a shootout, and, say a snipers shot bounces off your sunglasses or something.

But seriously, you guys all have great ideas, and I think this is starting to shape up really well.

Our own skill names, weapon names, dunno if Location could be considered. I mean Seattle is a great game setting.

[Ori0n]

I am currently setting up Noth.slyhost.be as the "official" discussion site for this. As long as I can figure out how to set all this up on a Content management system. But I don't think it'll be hard.

It's got user login, boards, and other stuff

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Well that didn't work. I've never been all that great with designing websites.

Can anyone help me, or point me in the direction, of setting up a website in which we can have our own forums, a place to share files, user logins etc?

Thanks

[eralston]

I checked that site and I regretably failed the "sanity check". The instructions weren't terribly helpful, but on the other hand I didn't try too hard.

I would actually really support a luck attribute for the purposes of just giving wiggle room for how frequently bullets are hitting people. High luck people would be more likely to dodge than just purely athletic people, bladdy blah I think this also lends to the conclusion that everything I learned about RPG design can be traced back to Fallout


So, I was thinking it would be cool if our tradeskill system (hate to be so directly comparing to another MMO, but in this case) could allow for things such as contact-like occupations. I did some development on the idea in the last project. Basically, it would allow you to establish yourself as skilled in a specific area of expertise instead of a general purpose shadowrunner. Example occupations would include:

Talismonger
Street Doc
Fixer

Basically, one could achieve this through a secondary skill system (such as knowledge skills) and adjudicating a player's occupation based on their actions and their expertise.

That could lead to elven mages who are talismongers or alternatives to that such a paranormal animal experts, or deckers who can specialize in making programs or making decks. There could also possiblby be odd crosses, such as a mundane paranormal animal expert and riggers who are gunsmiths or something.

[James McMurray]

Luck as an attribute should apply to everything. So if you've got a 10 luck stat you've got +10 to all activities, etc. It should be harder to up than skills or other attributes though, because of how pervasive it is.

[Smilin_Jack]

[James McMurray]

www.bytehost10.com looks ok. It's one of the few free webhosting sites I've found with PHP and mySQL support, which could come in handy for problem tracking later.

[Shadow]

I have my own domain, so I made a sub-domain called

http://manapunk.shadowgames.us

I can have a good invision style forum up on it pretty quick.

[James McMurray]

Do you have MySQL and Perl support? If so, and you've got access to the server itself or can have them run a few short scripts for you, I've got a fairly decent problem report and task tracker I can dig out and we can use. Once we get to that point of course.