OOC Thread

[Cannonshop]

FWL was busy fighting the Adders, Marians had no player, and Marlin was the only Clan to go 'lets go hit those guys'

NIOPS didn't have a player and was rolled into the "SLDF Faction", which was then kept neutered until NIOPS could be destroyed, and Hugin was the only active player willing to play ball with destroying it, thus saving the "purity" of the game from leftover zaniness from the Chanman/Giovanniblasini period of NIOPS play-such as their "Genetic modded ethnicities" (the "Elf" genotype), or their extensive experimentation into sentient AI and "Consciousness copying".

[Marlin]

Not really. I think that plan was set in motion with the player before me.

I just followed it through.

[Iron Mongoose]

For the reasons CS offers, and more, we're all thankful you did.  Though I'd have rather seen a few more nukes fly twards the planet than away from it 

As for the MH, they were in an intresting spot last time I saw them.  On the one hand, they were unlikely to be in too big a pickle, since their chief enemies were either realing from their attacks and thouse of the other Periphery allies, or else locked incombat with someone else (in the case of the FWL and the Adders, one can only imagine the Marians laughing all the way to the bank, since both factions were strongly pro MoC).  But, the support institutions that had supported the MH's rise from laughable pirate state to semi-respectable star empire were just as equaly on the run.  The Terrans, who had failed to really lay the sort of hurt on the FWL that they had hoped to in the war a year before, were realing from their war with the Clans and wracked by internal trouble, eventualy to be torn appart by this combination of factors.  The Periphery Coaltion was disintegrating for other reasons (reason one: no players).  Leaving the MH to largely stand on its own, and largely no one to stand aginst.

Of course, over 20 years, one imagines the victorious FWL and Adders, with their massive terratories and resorces to call on, bouncing back faster than the defeated Terrans or dismembered CoPS, and thus alowing the MoC by extention to bounce back fairly well also.

Unless something happined in the last few months I missed.

[Holt]

Not really. I think that plan was set in motion with the player before me.

I just followed it through.

I am sparticus.




I set that plan in motion.....

[Daemonknight]

aving the "purity" of the game from leftover zaniness from the Chanman/Giovanniblasini period of NIOPS play-such as their "Genetic modded ethnicities" (the "Elf" genotype), or their extensive experimentation into sentient AI and "Consciousness copying".

I dunno man, Chan told me some of the stuff they did, it sounded pretty damn funny. I especially like the THC-based chemical weapons released on rioters in the MoC.

[Marlin]

Niops and the CoP had several things that made them unhealthy for the game. Thankfully that is now over.

[Daemonknight]

Define unhealthy. I think some of their stories are funny. It's just a game, shouldn't be taken too seriously.

[Iron Mongoose]

A little LSD can give you the giggles.  A lot of it can ensure you never get them again.  One can make the argument that Niops is such a thing.  I've got some very strong feelings about it, so if you really want I can vent over PM, but I'd sooner not say some of that publicly.

[Daemonknight]

No need to vent. I just think a little levity is good every now and again. God knows the GC could use a court jester now and again.

[Iron Mongoose]

Well, the GM's shouldn't have tried to kill of the Mandrills 

[Dave Baughman]

Just to clarify, lest any version other than what really happen become the 'canon version,' there wasn't any massive GM conspiracy to kill Niops.

The problem we had with Niops was that no one wanted to play them. So, we took the following steps:

1. We offered it to several people; both active players who had been talking about branching out and previous players who were thinking about coming back. The response was uniformly, "sorry, we  don't want to touch it with a ten foot pole."

2. We incorporated Niops into the SLDF metafaction in the hopes that we could entrust the SLDF faction to a player and thus move Niops off our hands. Unfortunately, no one wanted to/felt comfortable with roleplaying the Niops characters, which was a problem and just lead to Niops not doing much.

3. Player-driven activities that the GMs were not involved with lead to the Niops garrison being reduced. To emphasize again, there was no secret GM directive to strip the Niops garrison or otherwise render the hex vulnerable.

4. Other player-driven activities targeted Niops for destruction. Whether or not there was an OOC aspect to some of those plans is something I have asked my own questions about, but ultimately the decision was made that: A) the faction doing the attack was behaving in a believable way game-wise, B) the other factions involved were continuing patterns of behavior they had already previously established in-game, and C) regardless of the outcome, the activity itself was beneficial to the progress of the campaign, so we stood by and let the plot play out.

Its probably also worth noting that the GM team had adopted a policy at that time of not going out of our way to preserve microfactions in light of the problems with the size of the player base at the time, so if you thought we weren't exactly engaged in a big outpouring of sympathy for Niops it was a reflection of this policy, and not any kind of situation where were were steepling our fingets and going "eeeeeeeeeeeexcellllllllent" while we watch the Evil Master Plan played out.

So yeah, as much as I was not really convinced that some of the directions of the Niops RP were compatible with the "style" of the BattleTech universe, and thus did not really feel a great sense of loss when the faction was destroyed, the GM team did not deliberately neuter the faction's defenses, nor did we recruit any players to carry out any sort of faction assassination. Niops ultimately fell because no one wanted to play the faction, because several players identified it as a viable target, and some other players facilitated the hit in order to further their own faction goals.

[Iron Mongoose]

So yeah, as much as I was not really convinced that some of the directions of the Niops RP were compatible with the "style" of the BattleTech universe, and thus did not really feel a great sense of loss when the faction was destroyed...

Very diplomatic, Dave 

[Dave Baughman]

What can I say? I don't want to be a dick, but I don't want to misrepresent myself either. I liked Gio and the gang's RP, I liked a lot of their characters, but I'd by lying if I said Niops as a whole really fit in with the rest of the universe. The Niops-driven stuff that happened in the Star League Council and with the COPS was a really valuable addition to the game and I'll be the first one to praise that aspect of their roleplay. The problem was the "out there" stuff, a lot of which happened in the timeframe of turns 20-35 give or take, that created a stereotype about the faction which made it almost impossible to get players to be interested in it and introduced a lot of anacosmic material into the game; the fall of Niops allowed us to close the chapter on those aspects of the faction without having to roll in with the retcon brigade, and without automatically destroying the most important (and least counter-setting) contributions they made: the First Lord and the formation of the COPS.

So yeah, it would be dishonest of me if I tried to pretend I was really upset when Niops went down; honestly I was more happy with how the book got closed there (the result of player actions) than the way Randis fell during the Dark story arc (that turned out to be so unpopular anyway despite our efforts to tie it into the larger backstory).

[Iron Mongoose]

Yeah, if we'd have done Randis a year earlier I could have done a better job of it, I think.  But every time I think I've got it figured out how much time I'll have for this, something changes and I don't have any anymore.

[GreyJaeger]

The problem we had with Niops was that no one wanted to play them. So, we took the following steps:

1. We offered it to several people; both active players who had been talking about branching out and previous players who were thinking about coming back. The response was uniformly, "sorry, we  don't want to touch it with a ten foot pole."

I know I was in a conversation where Niops was brought up, and the GMs were saying they were having trouble filling the position. IIRC both myself and Cannonshop expressed having thoughts about it. But both of us said that we would have to do something about the more shadowrunny aspects.