DISCUSSION: To Plot and Beyond

[thusiamods]

Hey guys, your resident mods here with a... not quite a full-out discussion post, but we'd like to get some ideas and points of note out there and your feedback on the matter. Particularly involving the latest plot and currently running plotlines. There have been a few discussions on plurk, but we'd like to have something more formal to make sure everyone has the opportunity to read and get their input on things that'll affect them.

There's a few things we'd like to touch upon with this post, the main points revolving around current/past/future plots and how we as mods can make things more fun for you in the way we handle them. Also on our agenda are things like State of the Game, God Functions, Player Accessibility, and probably more. To keep things organized, we'll be using header comments to cover specific topics and linking them in the post for easy navigation, so once you see a topic linked here, feel free to jump right to it.

CURRENT PLOTS: Moving HQ | Bitey Dogs | Weres

Week of my Life Posts | State of the Game | Affecting the Gods | Nature

Comments

Re: STATE OF THE GAME

[supraliminally]

So I wanted to riff a little bit of the idea above of "active world" versus "reactive world." I don't know precisely how you guys define "sandbox" or "world plot" or any of those terms exactly, but I think that the example provided (of a world that acts versus a world that reacts) is a very useful one.

First of all, I think that there is actually a spectrum here rather than a binary choice - to some extent, every world is going to both act and react, and it just becomes a question of how much reaction versus how much action is going on. I think this is a very, very important point to consider here, because I think it would be disastrously bad to stop entirely having any kind of primary action on the part of the world whatsoever. Especially since to some extent you can consider any kind of mod event, god-based event or status effect, nature flavor text or really nature doing anything in general to be "world action." I really would be incredibly disappointed if all of that was nixed.

I don't know that anyone is arguing for this, but I just think it's worth saying that I really think it would be a mistake. To be honest, I think even a massive reduction would probably not be great. I get the desire for player freedom to move their characters as they like, and I think that's an important thing to have. But if we're talking about removing all external stimulus (or "declawing" it such that no threat is really a threat) then I think it's more or less inevitable that this will become entirely a slice-of-life game without any real character-to-world interaction. And to be honest, I can't really say that I wouldn't be disappointed with such an outcome. If people don't want to participate in world interaction and prefer to focus on their CR, that's fine, but I think there are a lot of us here who do want to interact with the world and who are interested in the setting as more than a backdrop.

If the idea is that currently the world is applying too much pressure, and that the reactions of players/characters are being forced in a particular direction, then I can agree with that, and I agree that it can be fixed by reducing (not eliminating!) the pressure. In particular, I think that in some cases, the world can seem to be so overwhelmingly dangerous that interacting with it becomes unfeasible. I think that it might be a good idea either to make the beasts of nature less dangerous or to allow characters to regain more of their power (or to gain new power), because as things stand, it is true that the characters are absolutely beholden to living in a certain place in a certain way in order to even survive. We have a big world, but players cannot live anywhere other than the HQ without being killed or chewed on by spiders. We can't really do anything to affect the jungle because we're too weak, and it will just grow right over anything we attempt. That is a thing that I think could be changed as we continue developing the game.

Re: STATE OF THE GAME

[fates_end]

Yeah, I never really intended it to be entirely binary, it's just simpler to explain it that way: I was more trying to bring it up as a point of discussion, as theory never hurts.

I think I agree with a lot of what's being said here as well, but... I haven't actually been here long enough to make declarations on that, so I'm leaving it to you all to discuss until I get my bearings.