Union: Founders Falls Meet IC Missions (Open to all)

Hey, all.

I've recently been thinking about something, and after discussing it a bit with various people, I thought I'd write something up to introduce the concept and idea to the everyone.

The Background:

The Founders Falls 9pm RP meet is the longest-running regular roleplaying meeting on Union server. In that time there have been highs and lows, laughter and fury, love and hate. The experience has run the whole gamut of possible RP situations, with occassional IC missions used to drive plots.
One trend that I've observed as a result of this is that many of the heroes who attend have spent very little time going out and actually being heroes. People will occassionally mention a scrap with some group or another, but there's very little depth to it. This is only natural, as unless someone is actively writing a story or plot with a purpose, the path of least resistance is to say "we fought, I won" and leave it at that.

And there is nothing wrong with that.

What I'm hoping to do, though, is to get a bit more substance to the heroic acts of the undoubtedly heroic community. Rather than "I beat up a pile of Council in one of their bases", doesn't "well, we went into a council base, and Ultraman split off from the rest of us, the gloryhound, but bit off more than he could chew, so we had to rescue him from the jail cells. Man, that was tough - who'd have thought they'd need that many guards for one prisoner!" sound both more realistic and more useful for expanding on the characters involved?

I'm kind of hoping that people say "yes" to that question.

Anyway, I thought I'd come up with some "guidelines" (definitely not rules) about how I think something like this should work. Feel free to debate, discuss, lambast or whatever, but each of these has been put in for a reason, which I'll try to explain, so I'd appreciate constructive disagreement if any is applicable.

1) Any level, any toon, any mission. I don't want this to turn into L50 all the time, so if someone with a L21 toon has a mission that they want to do, that is just as viable as battering Praetorians in a 45-50 arc. If people want to do a Safeguard mission at L10, or a radio mission at 40, or if someone wants to make an AE arc, it doesn't matter. We have a game with so much flexibility for teaming that it's almost unreal. So using it is never a bad idea.

2) We're in control, not the mission text. If someone wants to "borrow" a normal mission or story arc, ignore the clue text and detail of the objectives, that's fine. As long as the enemy group makes sense, and as long as objectives (rescue, glowies, defeat boss, etc) roughly match the player's background to the mission, that's fine.

3) Faceplant =/= Dead. I know pretty much everyone uses this anyway, but being damaged (and being dropped to 0 HP) doesn't mean injury or death. It's up to the player in question what it means for their toon. Yes, it should mean "something" (maybe knocked out? Stunned? Doesn't really matter), but the game mechanic of faceplanting doesn't automatically mean the character is significantly injured.

4) "I am THOR! God of THUNDER!" Don't feel required to play like a good little team member. The point of IC mishing is for the team to undertake an encounter together, not to stick together and waltz through the content like a perfectly oiled machine of destruction. If your stalker would race ahead, do so. If you notice a side-passage that everyone else has ignored and want to see what's down there, go for it, perhaps with a comment in local that you're going to do so. Playing IC doesn't just mean talking IC - it also means *behaving* IC.

I really like this idea. Especially as, with my rather limited game time, I don't have that much of a chance to actually play. I have a few toons that are currently languishing in the 30s and 40s who could really do with more levels!

Any thoughts on a particular night of the week? Personally I don't think anything should be set in stone, but it might be good to pick a night to get the ball rolling, as it were.

'ning.

Despite being something of an irregular visitor to the Station, I'm very supportive of this idea and would enjoy piling along on the shenanigans, be it on Rumour or Dishonesty or Acre, or whichever char I imagine would be fun at the time.

I agree with Fea on the choosing of a day to set for the runs, say, for a month or something to get people into the groove, but she's right that it shouldn't become a hard-and-fast day/time to run things, lest it become the only day on which such things are run.

I can't guarantee what with shift patterns and such that I'll be available for every IC-teaming, but I'd like to grab what I can.

Thanks for the responses, folks.

My original thought was to make this a weekly event, but I'm also well aware that fixing a day and time for it makes it seem contrived. I have no objection to mixing things up.

So, to grab the proverbial bull by the horns (and to give people at least a little notice) I'm going to tentatively propose Thursday of this week. Start time is a little trickier, since I can't personally guarantee when I'll get online, but 8.30 is usually a safe bet.

So, to kick this proposal off, and get people into the groove, Thursday, 8.30, meet up at FF station, and I'm going to start off light with planning to run two definite missions (I don't care what missions, where or what level) with an option to continue depending on time and willingness.

This is zero pressure for achieving success, and my personal emphasis is on RP, not XP. Feel free to swap out toons, whatever, and for the chronology, consider it to have taken place "some time on Thursday". IC reasons to end up in missions are down to personal choice, but odds are I'll be going for "got a call from X, asking me to check out Y, because Z" and just rolling from there.

As I've said already, I fully support this idea and definitely think it can work. Might take us a little while to get into the swing of things, so basing it on a definite day until we're settled and then "as and when" later is another good idea.

Beyond that... see you for missions!

As a quick note, because it's something we had to find out for our Star Patrol night, leagues do not share exp or drops or anything else but DO stay formed while the various teams are on their own missions, which means they're remarkably good for being able to use league chat as an IC format for RPing "radio" or "telepathy" or whatever.

That way, OOC chat channels remain OOC.

Thanks for the advice, everyone! Excellent idea to use League chat. Though I expect this to be small enough, at least to start with, that we'll be just a single team, but we'll bear that in mind.

I know I was only able to run one mission last week before getting called away by RL (Pesky RL! ), but I had a great time!

Any thoughts on when the next one should take place? May I suggest Thursday?

Thursday is good for me, subject to last-minute hiccoughs like last week. I truly want to mix it up and try to squeeze this in on different nights, to keep verisimilitude, but to start with, having a "regular" night isn't a bad idea.

So, I'm going to again push for Thursday this week, and maybe a different night next week?

Same time, same place, if that's okay with people.