I've been hankering to start something up on the board lately, and have been weighing the pros and cons of hauling out two of my favorite smaller settings, Cha's Metro City and Amanda's Strangeness in New York. There are very good reasons to use either one over the other, and of course I don't want to run two RPs on the board at the same time, so I must choose. So, here is a brief synopsis of each setting and the pros of using either one (assume a pro I list for either one isn't as much a part of the other):
Metro City
A city like any other, assuming other cities have a large superhero community. A place where the people who keep you safe are less likely to wear a blue uniform than they are to wear red tights. The tone of the setting is slightly toward the less serious end of the spectrum (I've always thought of the Teen Titans cartoon as a model for the tone), with Mike Haggar from Final Fight as the mayor and the more bizarre villains showing up every Monday to cause trouble.
Strangeness in New York
It's New York City, just like we know it, in the year 2007. Bush is president, Mike Bloomberg is mayor and both Rudy and Hillary are running for president in 2008. Well, maybe not just like we know it, with those inexplicable reports of property damage and otherwise perfectly sane people claiming to be able to see floating shapes and occasionally monsters. Those monsters are very real, though invisible to most, (and that property damage might be the fault of my character Niranjan), and it's the job of a secret organization to fight them, an organization that makes use of normal humans who have begun to obtain seemingly impossible superpowers. This setting I've compared more to Heroes except that everyone's a comedian (welcome to RPGWW, right?).
Metro City
-New characters can be introduced at the drop of a hat. "Hey, I'm a superhero living in Metro." "Oh, sweet, follow us to some villains to fight."
-No constraint on abilities (think Marvel superheroes)
-Larger existing playerbase
-Less introduction needed for new players to understand what's going on
-No need for characters to join any specific organization or be bossed around by Amanda's SiNY character Michelle
Strangeness in New York
-The idea I have for RP in SiNY is more developed (and probably more compelling) than what I'd probably come up with for MC
-More realistic style
-All the convenience of making RP decisions with a formal leader character nominated by an NPC higher power (it's my favorite form of railroading)
-Characters don't have that weird superhero "These are my powers, and assume everything else I do is just the height of normal human achievement" thing going on
-I'm pretty sure I like my SiNY character Niranjan more than I like my MC character Boreas, but not by much