I was discussing this with Hugin the other day, and seeing as how all of my other RP games have dried up, and I have been having some trouble coming up with storylines for my Falcons(not entirely sure what I want to do with them, and I accidently misplaced some of my paperwork for them, which has thankfully since been recovered), I have really been looking for an IS RP opportunity. Unless CJF gets booted out of the IS, I forsee it being quite some time before I can have said participating in the FGC.
That being the case, I'm seriously considering trying my hand at Battletech-Mercenaries again. I've made a unit once before, and while it was okay, I didn't have a playerbase to really make exciting stories. As most of us know, its more fun when you actually have people to play with and against. And thats when the idea came to me.
For those who don't know, Battletech-Mercenaries is a website/game that essentially serves as a backdrop for several player-run RP campaigns. The website maintains a staff of people that operate the core of the game, the behind-the-scenes framework nessecary for the rest of the game to function. The actual 'play' part, is 100% player controlled. All players are members of user-generated Mercenary units. Units accept contracts(generated by the site staff), and the unit's players then RP their way through whatever that contract is. They know(based on the contract) the relative strength of their opposition(aswell as the faction of course), the length of the contract(both real-time and game-time), aswell as various aspects of the contract. Payment is done on a $/word basis, with all contracts having a minimum word count to 'complete' the contract, and often a supplemental bonus(either bonus $/word after the minimum, or more often a lump sum if a higher word count is reached).
This means the game lends itself very well to groups who like to be able to take a mercenary unit and really have fun with it, and flesh it out however they want.
My idea is to make a unit, and then, if we had say 4-5 people, have a single person either volunteer or perhaps be nominated by the group to act as the GM and play the NPCs(or even just the bad NPCs with the players controlling all friendly NPCs). This way it wouldn't just be every many for himself, each contract would be given more direction and it could be more like a traditional RPG where its the GM vs the Players. But everyone is essentially on the same team so we don't have as much competition.
Of course the other benefit is that so long as there are a handful of active players(say 3 of us), anyone else who signs up and makes a character as part of the Unit on the website is free to contribute as much as they want(honestly anyone can contribute as much as they want anyways since the staff wouldn't be checking these forums to make sure only registered players were involved lol).
So yeah, I am really interested right now, and we could definetly have a brainstorm about what type of unit we wanted and the lineage before I would be submitting the Unit application.
Thoughts? Comments? Sign ups?
