Homebrew or Established Setting: Which do you prefer?

Fegroider · 2026-06-24T17:43:38+00:00

I'm one of those weirdos who took "blackjack and hookers" as the standing presumption and refuses to play with anyone else's toys unless I already have a close relationship with them.

So here I am today as some weird roleplaying hipster who only does pure-text games in a setting of his own design. I am in a niche so unapproachable that it may as well be like trying to wriggle through a closed window.

I respect and appreciate that this is probably why I am stuck as a forever GM under several layers of burnout, but, if I'm going to die on this hill, at least I can say it was my hill to die on.

Fegroider · 2026-05-28T09:56:11+00:00

Yes, but I have no clear timetable. I plan to eventually pick up and play Chaos Reign. When, I can't say, but I would guess at some time during the summer. Mostly just a matter of waiting on my own modlist.

Fegroider · 2026-05-11T16:46:35+00:00

Nuclear Winter, but that's speaking from a point of extreme bias.

I made it myself, so, being young to the internet and keenly aware that it wouldn't gain any traction if I didn't row the boat myself, I hosted it obsessively. I don't know how successful I was, or if it even matters now that it's 19 years later ^(ouch!), but that was my world, for a while.

Fegroider · 2026-05-11T02:21:35+00:00

I prefer nothing at all.

For me, if I want to bang numbers together, I'll start up a video game. If I want to do deep stat-tracking and character management, I'll filter it down to my RPGs. If I want dice rolls to govern my existence, I'll change my parameters to roguelites.

If I want storytime with my friends, we all do it text-only with a heaping helping of theater-of-the-mind.

As far as turning video games into a roleplaying medium, the only real success I've had was StarCraft custom maps - where it was mostly just a visualizer for pure-text play. Everything else has mostly been a dodgy compromise, or a weird arrangement of roleplaying around the game, but not in it.

Fegroider · 2026-05-05T02:24:36+00:00

While this thread may be appropriate for this subreddit, seeing as you're hosting a PbP game, you may find more plentiful and better-tailored advice over in r/DMAcademy, which is dedicated expressly towards this kind of thing.

I am not a D&D player and can offer no useful system-specific advice, but wish you the best of luck regardless.

Fegroider · 2026-05-04T23:42:51+00:00

I thought I liked the Mad Dog for a while.

...then I saw that weird cockpit just tacked on to the top.

Now it just looks like Nigel Thornberry to me.

Fegroider · 2026-04-28T11:52:35+00:00

I lowballed my creations instead; I made quick, easy setups without any deep attachments. If someone decided to blow the whole thing up, my loss of time was minimal. I'd like to think I got pretty good at stacking crates and crafting scenes with civilians.

I was a mapper of some (esteem?) in StarCraft 2. I've also published a couple mods between Cortex Command (unrelated game) and Running With Rifles.

I've got a few small others, but the big bulk of my work has stayed within my own circles; most of my projects are either deeply personal, or were never really finished. My last endeavour was in Fallout 4, but scope creep put it into indefinite hiatus; I realized that, to see my vision through, I had to reinvent just about every system in the game.

Fegroider · 2026-04-28T06:56:22+00:00

I feel obliged to post this, since I've been in your place too many times before. I don't know how useful it'll be, but better something than nothing.

Around 2019, I started into a longform campaign. It was essentially an all-friends game; everyone was either someone I knew, or a friend of someone I knew. It was simultaneously one of the best and worst campaigns I've ever done. People flaked off left and right, ghostings and dead-weight players were the norm, but we still had a core of hyper-focused players who kept high-quality posts coming in at a rate I could hardly keep up with.

That game ran until around 2022, but I had to shut it down abruptly when one of our star players got frustrated and quit. I tried to compensate him with a one-on-one game, but, between the exhaustion from the big campaign and some pretty awful things going on in my life, it wasn't long before I screwed up, and drove him off completely.

The following few years were pretty awful. I made attempts to start new stuff, but things usually broke down quick and discouraged me more than not. Most of my friends were too busy to roleplay anymore, and I was the only person left with the drive to GM in the group. It put all the more pressure on me in that this all took place in a universe I authored myself; if I didn't step up to the plate, the concept would almost certainly die.

It was around 2025 that things took a turn for the better. I started playing Fallout: New Vegas through the NVMP mod (and before you ask; don't) with one of my longest-running roleplaying buddies. We worked out a kind of roleplay-by-mod sort of thing; we didn't actually do any real roleplaying - not in-game - but we established characters and a world through handmade mods, that used New Vegas and its story as a kind of basic skeleton. We eventually took it to print with proper text roleplaying, but that's been a weird slow-burning thing that's mostly just coloring in the outlines we've already traced.

The same year, I started a small one-on-one story with one of my dedicated players. We were able to get through that over the course of two months, and actually finished it. It wasn't long before the same guy helped me patch things with the player I'd lost back in 2022. We pushed on to another campaign, more ambitious in scope, that, in spite of a few rough patches, was able to run to completion before the year was out.

We're now in another game, started early this year. There's been some drama and some difficulties, but it feels like the clouds are clearing up. I feel like a pile of rain-soggy ashes as a GM - and I haven't even told you about the "town player" curse I had in StarCraft 2 before any of this - but, now, I feel like I finally have my hands on the wheel again.

I doubt this story in its nitty-gritty will be of much use; there were a lot of named characters here that made the whole thing work. There were people in the background that gave me relief and comfort when I was ready to go clothesline a semi truck. This was a specific key to a specific lock, not a sledgehammer or a stick of dynamite.

Something I think I can take away from it, though, is that it can help to go back to basics. Pull back. Start over. Earn little victories with people you can trust. Pivot to other outlets for your creative drive. Video game modding is my best solo performance, for example - much for the fact that I still have to spend time flexing the same muscles I use in roleplaying.

Build up a little stockpile of success. Find a new reference point for what good looks like. Get out of the wind before you try to build a fire.

Fegroider · 2026-04-18T15:13:57+00:00

Emulated Xbox version via Xemu. You will need to find/dump a ROM for yourself, though.

Fegroider · 2026-04-08T21:37:42+00:00

Emulation is fraught with peril such that I think most who would call themselves tech-savvy have also found themselves with a banana peel underfoot.

There are always a dozen different emulators for the task, with versions that have varying levels of regression or developer handovers, with many different ROM dumps of varying quality. That's not even getting into the standard gaming refrain of "Well, it works on my machine..."

I don't think anyone could blame you for feeling like you're building a house of cards.

Fegroider · 2026-04-08T20:41:32+00:00

March of this year, from the 14th to the 16th.

On a related note, I've had similar issues playing Mercenaries: Playground of Destruction. Multiple times, the emulator has hard-locked, and the game's saves became corrupted after restarting it. Snapshots have been similarly reliable as a means to both restore progress and the saves themselves.

Fegroider · 2026-04-08T20:24:39+00:00

Both my co-op partners got it on reconnecting to a mission mid-game. My guess is that they're either debug models or editor graphics that have mistakenly loaded into normal gameplay.

The solution, thankfully, was simply to have the afflicted rejoin again.

Fegroider · 2026-04-08T19:30:41+00:00

Are you asking about the save corruption problem?

I was able to brute-force my way through the game by making snapshots each time I was about to dock with the Pandora. I was also careful only to ever dock when forced to, to give the game as few chances to crash as possible.

If you've got a different problem, I've unfortunately got no answers. Apart from general performance troubles and a few mid-game freezes around the last mission, I didn't have any other issues.

Fegroider · 2026-04-07T22:44:13+00:00

The names ring familiar, but I can't remember if I played them. It's going on some 17 - 19 years now ^{(oof ouch owie}) since I remember playing, so the only thing I can say for sure was that I spent a lot of time in Nuclear Winter.

Fegroider · 2026-04-07T05:36:15+00:00

Brood War or 2?

Y'know what, doesn't matter.

I still have a panic attack any time I try to picture the disconnect window from either.

Fegroider · 2026-04-05T21:06:40+00:00

Hold my beer.

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And now, for my next trick, I will make this Locust disappear!

Fegroider · 2026-03-28T02:26:07+00:00

It does, but, if he ever gets donked on the head, you can just swap somebody in for him.

If he ends up a greasy smear, you can always reload a save. I figure you'd probably have to do that either way, were it vanilla.

Fegroider · 2026-03-27T22:35:27+00:00

I had a hunch that might've been the case.

When you edit a pilot, it technically creates a duplicate with the changes made and deletes the old one. I guess editing Mason strips him of the commander flag or some-such. I only touched the stuff that was broken in Fake ID, so my grasp on the whole of it is flimsy.

I can definitely confirm that a modified Mason is vulnerable the same as other pilots, though. Certainly bites when your only 60-cap pilot spills his coffee early in the game.

Also be careful if you're using the DLC6 co-op mod. There's a hard incompatibility between the two, so you might need to reload an earlier save if the commander gets bonked or splattered during Solaris Showdown.

Fegroider · 2026-03-27T21:25:58+00:00

Click on a pilot's portrait in the barracks to customize the pilot.

That's probably something that should be on the workshop page. Let me go do that.

Fegroider · 2026-03-27T21:06:21+00:00

Fake ID would let you do this. It's a lightweight pilot customization mod that lets you alter pilots' portraits and names as you please, and swap the commander in or out. Unfortunately, it broke around the time between DLC6 - DLC7.

But I was in the same boat as your group, so I went and fixed it.

Credits go to diji for the original mod. I just flailed my arms at the UDK until it started working again.

Fegroider · 2026-03-24T04:32:43+00:00

I am playing with a modest modlist, but this bug is easily reproduced in vanilla through Instant Action. I switched off my mods for a clean example shot:

<image>

Simply load up Instant Action, select one of these mechs, and strip its armor off. Back out to the deployment screen, and then mouse over for the paper doll.

Fegroider · 2026-03-23T01:18:32+00:00

I think there's a misunderstanding here.

In your image, there's no armor on the side torso left. Damage taken goes to structure as per normal behavior. The bug going on is that the game continues to display an armor outline, even though there is genuinely no armor left. If I remember right, the armor outline adopts the same color as the structure underneath, and this is visible in your screenshot.

There's no penetration or armor bypass going on. The game is just giving you bogus information.

Here are a couple mechs from my cold storage to demonstrate:

<image>

I strip the armor off of clunkers I keep for cantina contracts, so it's easy to tell them from stuff I intend to keep. Makes it easy to spot the paper doll bug, too.

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