A Suite Proposal

[cherrywood]

see what I did there with the pun

Hello Chelonauts! As part of our game changes, one thing that I'm looking at is a suite realignment: that is, condensing the Foreigners who are spread out across the housing blocks into smaller groupings to help encourage new CR to be built.

There's a couple of options that I'm testing the waters with and they are: keeping everyone in separate suites but filling the housing blocks (so basically the same setup as now, just with more neighbours) or condensing everyone into roommate/flatmate housing, and with OOC versus IC logistics for both options. Either way there will be IC justification (Evandau orders them, etc) for the change, so this post is for discussion and ideas of what players would like to see.

The primary goal for this change up is to open new CR for characters (which translates to more plotting, more character development, and easier ways to make AC!) so while you're welcome to use your characters as examples for or against various options, this is mostly focused on what you as players feel would benefit you the most.

Based on the outcomes of this discussion, there will be a poll put up later for people to actually make their votes on the matter. This is just for people toss out their ideas and the poll choices will be built from these.

Comments

[denyamenti]

The missions have been written with both some physical and moral issues to tackle, and ones like the Endai one where the most prudent course of action was also the least morally clear one, have tried to give characters opportunity to develop by taking them outside their comfort zones. I realize that missions have only been up 2 months but we went from something like 50 signups to 12 between March to April. There will be some events that ask people to work together in upcoming weeks that focus on the current siege of the city but I don't see how that's going to be more emotionally impactful to chars if similar options were already available?

[parallels]

I'm not trying to be critical for the sake of being so and I apologize if I'm not being very clear in what I'm saying. But I think a big issue for the missions is that they are optional and slightly secluded. I do think that there can be an exciting urgency in situations that are thrust upon characters versus ones they icly opt into.

So I think missions are a cool addition but they're also just that, an addition. And the Endai mission isn't ringing a bell off my head but the first and only mission I signed up for definitely had the feel of "go place, do a thing, reap a reward" and also unfortunately never really went anywhere. So perhaps if there were a way to make missions feel more imperative and maybe a bit more structure to them to help move things along. I also agree with what was said below that it would be really cool to utilize the dreaming and death planes more. In the meantime, I'll be excited to see how characters can come together in the siege. Maybe that will be a really great jumpstart!

Anyway, this is just my 2 cents and my experience. I may be totally alone in these thoughts and I don't have any modding experience, so obviously am speaking from a place of ignorance when it comes to implementation.

[denyamenti]

This is as good a place for any! How can I make missions more imperative? Some things I've considered are shorter time frames to complete them, more obstacles, or bigger variety of outcomes. Though I really want to be careful to make them "challenging" without being so hard they're not fun to write out OR that only certain types of chars end up able to do them.

As far as structure, where would you like to see more of it in the missions? (If you could use examples from the missions we already had in March and April that'd be awesome so I know what to change.)

[parallels]

Well, starting off with structure, I feel like it might work better for the mods to kind of set up stages and then allow players to branch off ideas from these set stages. One thing that I thought worked really well was when we the plot with the Tu Vishan being poisoned back in like June or July of last year where players were put on a team and they were given options that they could vote on that lead to a specific outcome.

Though if the mission were to be more open than that, perhaps the mods could post the missions and just simply have stages that are preset. Like for the mission Clara went on, perhaps we could have had a few prompts about what is going on at the party and what is happening in the rioting crowds etc instead of putting it all on the players. Though I know this is more trouble on the mods so perhaps it would only work if there ended up being less missions to choose from.

As for being imperative, I think all the ideas that you have would really spice up missions to play in, but I do think it would really help to just try to come up with better IC incentives for missions. Perhaps promises of returning home, or someone returning, or something that would really make characters want to do it. Even if those promises are false or loopholed.

Or maybe missions that focus on exploring the characters that have to do with dreaming, like something popped into my head where maybe characters are in the world of dreaming and there is a riddle that relates to one of the characters and everyone has to reveal something like a dream, a bad memory, a guilt that plagues them and they have to find who it relates to the most? Honestly, I just pulled that one out of my ass but just things more like that. I hope that's maybe a little bit helpful!

[andaway]

I really like the idea of doing something more in the style of the missions during the turtle's poisoning! It was a fun, like an RPG inside a RP. However I think that would work better in a fast, quick tagging way that let the mods weight in with the consequences of what was happening at the moment- and I understand that kind of tagging isn't for everyone (it isn't for me, honestly) and that it would imply a lot of work for the mods.

But maybe something between that and the logs where we get to interact with a NPC? Like the turtle (or baby turtle) dreams, they were extremely dynamic and helped move the plot forward a lot. So maybe instead of giving us x mission and let us thread it out we could have more NPCs to interact with that could change the way the plot went?

IDK if I'm even expressing myself clearly...

[cherrywood]

I understand that interacting with NPCs does open up some avenues of plot exploration for players, but the reason that we've only been providing framework for missions so far is so that it didn't rest too much on us to keep the actual mission rolling forward.

That's not to say that I want it entirely hands off, because I'm already working on incorporating some different elements that were suggested on the HMD post, but we've been wanting to run an average of 5 missions a month and being NPCs for those in a dynamic or guiding role equals a LOT of tagging. For reference, the baby turtles dream log has 1100+ comments to it, just that one log alone. So that's 600+ comments for the mod to be writing, not including other tags, not including modwork, even if spread over a month that's a lot.

Not to mention if the mod in charge of that NPC isn't available for a few days (like myself, this week's been crazy with back-end modwork) I wouldn't want players to be stuck and unable to progress a mission log because they're waiting.

I definitely want to keep those NPC logs like the baby turtles in play, I do want to do another one again in the near future, but I can't feasibly see this as being a regular enough occurrence to replace players generating their own interactions, like on the missions.