New RP Ideas Interest Thread

[Intern Nin]

Originally Posted by Krylo

but I've yet to see a Superhero RP that was done anywhere near good and/or got past two chapters

All the more reason to give it a try.

[Krylo]

Well, if you LIKE failing, I guess.

[Arhra]

Its time for... VOTE TALLY!

Option #1 - 2 votes
Option #2 - 3 votes
Option #3 - 2 votes

How very mysterious.

Yeah, I have to admit one of said past failed superhero RPs that crashed and burned was run by me. I believe the instabilities of the last one can be resolved by forcing player characters to collide at high speeds, creating the fabled 'super team'. I just wasn't forceful enough about putting people in groups last time.

And do a better starting plot then "There's a jailbreak and you should, like, stop it or something." Something clear and simple, like Godzilla.

[Krylo]

I think the problem with Super Hero RPs is that the Super Hero dynamic doesn't work well with group play.

You have three types of Super Hero 'groups' basically.

Solo, with maybe a sidekick--Superman. Batman. Nightwing. Green Lantern. So on and so forth.

Pre-Formed Teams--Things like the X-Men

Artificially created teams--Justice League

Now, here's the problem we run into, your solo play is RIGHT out because you've got to have multiple people.

This leaves you with recreating the X-Men or recreating the Justice League. Recreating the X-Men MIGHT work. The team aspect of it has, indeed, worked multiple times with the various "You're in a government agency, and you're special" RPs we've had in the past.

The JL recreation, however? Not so much. To understand why we need only look at the cartoons and comics of the same name. Even when you take all these big names and shove them into a group, they rarely actually work together. At least not well. There's too many large egos. Too many people that are used to working alone. In a normal RP this can be mitigated pretty easily... but:

The storyline. This is the second big hurdle for your Super Hero RPs. There's very little room for coherent escalation in a plot, at least if you plan on keeping the group together. Basically what I've seen happen is super villains being thrown at the heroes and the heroes have to go and defeat them. This is fine for a comic, but for an RP it causes things to quickly lose cohesion. There's little draw to keep coming back to see how the story ends.

Like, let's take Godzilla. Ok, everyone teams up to fight Godzilla. Unfortunately we're the JLU before the JLU was officially formed. So Batman goes back to his cave, Superman goes back to metropolis, etc. In order to stop this you have to present some kind of new and immediate threat to get everyone to stay together. No new threat immediately revealed? No one has an in character reason to continue working together. If the threat is also not immediately dangerous, we STILL have no reason to stick together, everyone going off to their own lairs to sleuth individually maybe sharing information. The cohesion falls apart.

Basically--all the various tropes used to create teams of wandering adventurers fall apart with super hero teams. The only way to make something like this workable is to create a pre-defined team, and to create a large overarching plot that is rarely endemic to the super hero genre.

Beyond that you have the fact that most people want to make down right ridiculous super heroes, and/or ones that would fit into a very specialized genre normally, and would therefore work poorly within a pre-formed group. What's the half-celestial doing on the same group as the kryptonian who is also in the same group as a mutant? Where'd this weird-ass group come from? The alternative is to limit your heroes, which just leads to less interest.


Or, tl;dr version: There's lots of difficulties involved in crafting a proper super hero story, which is why they've always burned hard.

If you think you can handle all of those as well as the general RP slump, go ahead, I won't stop you. I'm just saying that not mashing everyone together fast enough was the least of your worries.

[Arhra]

What I meant was I said to people I wanted them grouped into superhero teams from the start, but no-one really listened. So yeah, basically the problem of everyone was going solo.

Even with everyone grouped together, downtime is going to be tricky.

I guess that's the fundamental problem - superheroes are generally a reactionary force.

I have entertained plans like giving out a bunch of minor NPCs and even villains to be controlled by players for the time they appear to help avoid players having nothing to do because their character is off doing something boring on their own, but I'm not sure how feasible it would be.

[PhoenixFlame]

Since I seem to be getting some more time lately, I'll throw out that while I'm not terribly preferential toward any of the settings, I'd probably play them.

Because well, it's Arhra, and Arhra is awesome.

[secretskull]

I wouldn't mind getting on this if you'll have me, I've been eternally watching most Arhra RPs from the side.

That being said, superhero games can be amusing if you can get past the first hurdle, but I've got no problem with any of the ideas.

[PyrosNine]

I can play a super villain. I can play a super villain quite well.

[Relm Zephyrous]

Might as well throw this out there; Villains. What if we were a team of evil people? It'd be complex, but probably really fun once it was figured out, and I don't think I've actually seen an rp round here like that.

[Arhra]

Hmmm, seems that there's still no obvious leader still.

After going into seclusion to consult the RNG God, it has been determined that the superhero game will be the one I will run. This will be overturned if a significant number of people favour a different game.

It'll take a while to piece together the information for the sign-up thread into something understandable by human minds.

To give more detail, superheroes have become common over a period of the last fifty years or so and, as you can imagine, the existence of people who can lift and throw buses or shoot lasers from their eyes (and other places too!), has had a slight effect on society.

One of these effects is reasonably legal vigilantes!

Another is everything completely going to hell, but you can't have everything, right?

With such profound changes happening with single generations, society is struggling to keep up. The government is weak, sinister corporations can run slipshod over you and some people seem to think being able to breathe fire makes them a god. It is an unhealthy mix.

Of course, there's still heroes in these times, even when you have rift storms randomly dumping artifacts from... somewhere and the occaisonally genetic experiment getting loose.

Although the world is deliberately set up to be crappy, I don't expect it to be played too seriously. Excessive edginess is probably not wise and being a ravening little murder-beast is always a big no.

On the characters, I am still deciding on a few little points about superhero origins. Magic may make things a bit too much of a kitchen sink and one thing I am certain about is, at the very least, there will have been no contact with surviving alien civilisations. No idea on supernatural beings at this point.

On power level, there won't be any Supermen, but a power set of multiple abilities is still fine. Something like the (non-godlike) X-men are probably on the low to mid end of the power scale.

I've been debating about putting together a rough timeline of major events, mainly for fun. I'm curious if anyone would be actually interested in that.

So if you have questions, would like to suggest something or want to test out an early character idea, please say so.