So, heard about this new book realm coming out (forgot the book) and was wondering, if we had a chance to develop our own realm, what would we have in it? Anything from original concepts to certain guildskills...

As difficult as it would be to capture the magic system exactly right, I'd like to see a world based around the Wheel of Time. I just love the idea of the weaves each being individual or possibly combining into other magics. Also, playing a character like Lan with the Swordmaster 'moves' like 'boar runs over the hill '(or other such stuff) just sounds fun.

Jeeze... They've got so many realms already... They need to work on what they have a bit more, get some publicising done and get the player bases up by about 50% before making a whole other new one!

Something that would be interesting is a realm that sort of takes place in a war like the Elder wars, where the players are acctually born as new gods with certain powers... And there are several different key lines that the various gods follow, destructions, creation, peace, war, etc etc... I don't know how it would be implemented, and it would have to remove hunting for some other form of experience gain, but it would certainly be unique...

A near-future (say, 50-100 years from now) sci-fi setting with no interstellar travel and no aliens, but with elements from transhumanism and the remains of cyberpunk, somewhat similar to the GURPS setting Transhuman Space. Replace city/commune/etc. with corporation or organization (let the forestal types be enviroterrorists working for Greenwar or the Sierra Club Liberation Front). Replace orders with memetics, and Gods with high-profile celebrity memeticists (think a cross between L. Ron Hubbard and Karl Rove, only more so, and with some of them also having ethics). Replace planar travel with shuttle travel to Terra, Luna, Lagrange-5, Mars, and asteroids (if I were doing it, though, I think I'd arrange that in the history that passed between now and then, something crashed into Ceres and utterly destroyed it). Use GMOs, nanotech, and cyberware for super healing and skills; this fits the IRE affliction model well because you either have the nanobot/retrovirus/etc. in your bloodstream or you don't. Races would include variations on genetically altered and cloned humans, robots, sapient AIs, uplifted animals, and things that are blends of these.

Make sure conflict isn't just "rob the miners on the enemy megacorp's asteroid" but also stuff about the big questions of bioethics and transhumanism: is a sapient AI a person? How about a genetically engineered brainless bioslave? How about a gestalt intelligence? What are the legal and ethical rights associated with a self-aware robot, and with the people who invested money to design and build it (and what if those people are themselves robots)? Etc. Do you want to go "rescue" those enslaved semi-sapient genetically modified miner-workers, or do you want to go recover the stolen property that was taken when some left-wing fruitcake "rescued" our highly valuable genetically modified miner-worker resources?

Okay, so, it'd never make a profit. But you asked.

There are already a number of Wheel of Time MUDs out there and unfortunately the problem with basing a MUD off a book, or a series of books, is it has two inherant issues.
1) it caters to a very small group of people (anyone who has not read the series is shunned, out of the loop, or generally considered not of the 'elite')
2) those people it caters to are such purists that any slight deviation for the sake of game mechanics causes them epileptic seizures.

Imagine reading a book, and completely loving the book, and following the series indepthly. Then a year later the movie comes out. This is the same flaw that MUDs who base off of books have.

Anyways, on topic I don't think IRE should be coming out with more MUDs it should be trying to look internally at what it has and sorting out many recurring issues that seem to travel from game to game.

Heh, they already started working on it though, Sarapis gave Achaea to Makali and Clementius so he could work on it together with the new coder he hired for it. He's expecting for it to be a pretty big hit.

I am aware of that, and luckily I have read the Riftwar Saga, and the Daughter of the Empire Trilogy. So I could if I wished move easily into the world. This doesn't change the two flaws in MUDs based off books though.

There are many more issues than this. The cost of licensing, and the difficulty of dealing with the licensor, which adds all kinds of legal and logistical difficulties. And the fact that the things that make a book successful are very often going to make it a bad massively-multiplayer game. For instance, most of the events of a book will revolve around a small number of people and places; take them out (since we can't let some player play Luke Skywalker or Frodo or Dorothy or Thomas Covenant) and it often turns out there's not that much left for a large number of players to do. By the time you add on stuff to give them something to do, all that's left of the original license is the name, so you're paying a lot for the marketing advantage of name recognition. And that factor is going to be quickly eroded by word-of-mouth after the purists start with the seizures you mentioned.

Fixing recurring problems seems to have been something Lusternia has done wonderfully, actually. The restrictions on "getting class" are few and far between here, the PK rules are not retarded and resulting in billions of issues, it's not the same damn game again like Aetolia was and Imperian to a smaller extent actually is, guilds actually do have a part of the city, there are similarities in class from community to community without actually having the same class like 5 times, communities actually have -reasons- and a history for being as they are, trade is open to everyone, the admin is more responsive, and so on and so forth.

I only actually started to properly appreciate that as I wrote it, but whatever.

Anyway. I have no idea about the Raymond E. Feist world because I got bored of Magician by like page 100 (plus pug is a stupid name for a protagonist ), but I kind of hope planar travel has -more- emphasis than we do here, as in several parallel planes being important in their own ways to each community TO THE SAME EXTENT rather than a lot of things being on Prime and a few scattered things on relatively small other planes. The kind of thing that would make tesseract an awesome skill as opposed to what it is now, which is...not really awesome. That would be wonderful.

Agreed, however I was viewing from a gamer's aspect, not a corporate aspect. Having played the entire gambit of Wheel of Time MUDs I have yet to find one that truly captures the feel of the books. The only thing left of the books was a a landscape, some guilds, and the way magic worked, and even that was an iffy situation based on game code needing to be written to accomodate.

You are quite correct though, that in the end you are left with nothing but the name.

well, i know that many of my friends would really like to see a new game that would be in the future or near future.

i'd like to see one that didn't have magic. like no mages or druids or wiccan or guardians or anything like that, just bows arrows swords and other weapons, and possibly guns, like in imperian. other than that pretty similiar to lusternia. so it could have potions, different weapon skills(it'd be neat if there was something like

blunt-both one and two handed, since there is very little difference between 1 and
2 handed blunt weapons than 1 and 2 handed bladed weapons. weapons would be things like flail, morning star, mace, 1h hammer, 2h hammer.

swords-both one and two handed, weapons would be like shortsword, katana, saber(because other rapiers are pointed and it wouldn't work the same way as other weapons in the skill), longsword, broadsword.

waraxes- either one or two handed, or one or two bladed, but they can't be anything that would have been used for throwing, mostly two bladed things.

handaxes- mostly one bladed one handed things ment to be thrown, but also with the ability to be used in combat.

javelins/spears- all spears or javelins that could be thrown or used in hand to hand combat, and they would be two handed.

handcannons- well, ussually two handed, and it's where the thing that is used to shoot from powers the projectile. it would also include some sorts of early guns.

handrockets- ussually 1 handed, and it's where the projectile powers itself, not the thing it's being shot from powering it, like in a gun.

bows- two handed, and you need arrows.

unarmed- well, that's simple.

and possibly, siege- some require multiple people to use, and weapons would be things such as catapults balistas scorpians and trebuchetes. i'm also thinking that these people should have crossbows included in this catagory, since almost all of these would be really hard to move anywhere, and require more than one person.


Fighting would possibly be oriented around conquering city to city(or commune, if that could somehow fit in) and each place would be modeled in a fuedel like system, where there is the king or queen(like the leaders of communes and cities) and then there is the lords(like the guildleaders) under them. and then there is the knights and peasents. people when they first enter the game would be peasants, and eventually become a knight/some other type of warrior depending on location, for example, maybe there would be a desert area with nomades and instead of lords and kings they have chiefs and an emperor, and they are warriors instead of knights or something. also, there would be similiar alignments to in lusternia, such as good vs. evil(or maybe something like tainted vs. untainted?) and chaos vs. order.
there would be castles, and groups would fight to conquer the other castles of other cities or communes.

eh...i'm thinking too much into this, after all it would never happen, heheh. well, now you people know what i think would be a good game.

Actually, the Chaos vs. Order thing made me think of a series that I think would be a neat concept idea. Not turning the series into a MUD, but using the same conceptual ideas in the series of Order and Chaos.

L.E. Modesitt Jr.'s, The Saga of Recluse.

I think one of the main reasons magic is used in all IRE realms, is that's what the majority of people that play these types of games are looking for.

That said, I would like to see a game start at the begining, when mortal races are just being formed. All the games so far have been deep into the history, with fully built cities, etc. Starting from the begining of time could be an interesting change.

that would be interesting. expecially if one group of the races broke off of the rest of the group and started a eugenics program to make their own races.

That would be unbelievably chaotic, with the way players powergame politics here.

Awesome in theory, though.

Mmm, it would work perfectly fine with IRE model indeed. Imo, it would be awesome.

Why do you think it wouldn't succeed? Because sword & sorcery settings get more attraction?

That's the reason Estarra gave in another thread, yes: futuristic type MUDs don't really produce attraction.

Another thing that Gwylifar's probably considered but I want to know the solution to anyway is that a futuristic setting such as the one proposed would have to have considerably more "ignored background complexity" than a fantasy setting. There's a lot less to an economy based on gold pieces and selling bread than one with computers which even in the modern day have a billion and one important uses, although at the moment anything I could use to demonstrate this escapes me, and the knowledge you'd need to exist in such a world that functioned remotely as it logically would is far beyond what can be expected of any MUD player, unless it would be basically discarded which could potentially lead to lots of annoying inconsistencies. It works better to ignore "magic physics" than real physics, and I don't mean aura of rebounding making weapons go screwy, I mean the things your skills and existence in general would be based on.

I think I know what kind of complexity you mean...

It reminds of dilemmas I had when I was considering running some futuristic/cyberpunk RP sessions. I realized I had no idea how so many things actually work in modern world.

I played a game whose world was pretty blank and empty except for the race names and general attitudes and their villages and a brief blurbs about the gods and the history. Everything was left completely to the players. Even thought I didn't think it worked well with that game (I haven't been back since, so things could have improved), I'd love to see that.

Also, as for features of the RP I'd love to see it classless. It'll work kind of like how out SKILLCHOICE works. A player would be able to pick a certain number of combat skills, tradeskills and misc skills. The guild the character is able to join depends on the roleplay. If anyone noticed, I'm not really a pvp or basher, so there will be ways to advance that do not include either - quests, influence, etc.

Yeah, a friend of mine asked me to help her come up with a campaign world once (freeform) and while I had a load of probably cruddy ideas for fantasy worlds, when it came to a futuristic setting I couldn't see how anything would really hold together if someone accidentally explored an aspect of it the GM hadn't prepared herself to cope with. Obviously Lusternia has a lot more planning time, but there's only so much they can encompass and the game would feel less immersive if it was missing things that would logically be there and would make good features but that the people just hadn't had time to come up with yet.