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  1. In Memory of LAJ_FETT: Please share your remembrances and condolences HERE

RPR Archive The Think-Tank: NSWRPF Flagship Planning and Discussion Thread

Discussion in 'Role Playing Resource Archive' started by Kalio_Dynkos, Mar 16, 2008.

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  1. Saintheart

    Saintheart Jedi Grand Master star 6

    Registered:
    Dec 16, 2000
    Which I seize and define as the Alt-Earth option. "It's Earth, Jim, but not as we know it."

    :D
     
  2. DarthXan318

    DarthXan318 Manager Emeritus star 6 VIP - Former Mod/RSA

    Registered:
    Sep 12, 2002
    Well, I'm glad to see we've got the Head GM sorted. Congrats, Elu! :D


    And come to think of it, I totally agree with WJ's point #3. I've always found it difficult to get into NSWRPF games because I wasn't familiar with the fandom (gj had to hold my hand through creating a Xaviers' character) so familiarity is a big thing... I'd hate to sacrifice the modern/sci-fi genres, but perhaps it's for the greater good. We've got the SWRPF for that, anyhow.
     
  3. PRENNTACULAR

    PRENNTACULAR VIP star 6 VIP - Former Mod/RSA

    Registered:
    Dec 21, 2005
    So...I don't get to see a cage fight?

    :(
     
  4. darth_nemisis

    darth_nemisis Jedi Grand Master star 6

    Registered:
    May 15, 2004
    Yes, congrats to you Darth_Elu.

    You know, the more I think about it, the more I like the one world (Earth) idea. Saints post was a good one. As everyone has pointed out, we definitely need to start out small, so one world would be fine. Then, as the game progresses, as more an more people join in, as the plot grows, then these portals/nexuses are discovered which can lead to different worlds. I think that would be a good start to the game.
     
  5. DarthXan318

    DarthXan318 Manager Emeritus star 6 VIP - Former Mod/RSA

    Registered:
    Sep 12, 2002
    We can have a huge free-for-all cage fight for the co-GM positions. I think that's a tougher race, anyway. :p
     
  6. Kalio_Dynkos

    Kalio_Dynkos Jedi Grand Master star 4

    Registered:
    May 17, 2004
    The one earth idea does nail things down nicely, but I must also say that from a player's standpoint it may be a little tight and because of space or imagination.

    Basically, we need to remember that these ideas are all great and in fiction, as a stand alone project will work fine. However, we're talking about a game and where people don't understand they will take liberties.

    I've had the pleasure of talking with Elu about his idea of a storyline. I think it works very nicely with at least two planets. Particularly, if we're talking about the Nexus as a sort of hub for the Preservers, I see no reason why if this gets large enough that they are involved in other civilizations than the ones we commonly see brought up.

    So as I see it, we're all for the the Nexus as a gate-way and a place. There are few, if any, interesting time-travel. We're just hung up on the one world/multiple worlds idea.

    I'm liking the idea of an alternate earth as well. That's nice.

    Maybe I missed this part, but, in so doing, could we be making multiple genre characters available at the same time in the same civilization? From this I'd say the same thing. Work of fiction, great. RPG with varying people and skills, I don't think so. I think you'll get a whole lot of people in one genre and not another. I think we'll become a fantasy/superhero world and that's it. If that's what the people want, that's fine.

    But rememember this is supposed to be the most accessible game of the RPF.
     
  7. SephyCloneNo15

    SephyCloneNo15 Jedi Knight star 5

    Registered:
    Apr 9, 2005
    That's almost the entirety of my reasoning behind multiple worlds/Nexus@start. If we set ourselves up a pretty broad scope to begin with, say, Steampunk, Supers, Sci-fi, we'll appeal to the broadest group possible, and I shouldn't have to say "if", so when we create our worlds with the utmost professionalism and creativity, that's how we'll keep that broad player base. From that start point, it'll be easier for people to accept additional worlds since we'd already have some of the greater extremes in time and believability.
     
  8. Yuul_Shamar

    Yuul_Shamar Jedi Master star 4

    Registered:
    Nov 3, 2004
    This seems pretty good to me. Personaly i don't care for the whole supers thing but thats just me. And as I realize we need to do what's best for those that will be playing I won't make a big fuss about it.

    So have we decided to settle on a one world start, for at least the begginning?
     
  9. SephyCloneNo15

    SephyCloneNo15 Jedi Knight star 5

    Registered:
    Apr 9, 2005
    We haven't. People have expressed their opinions, but we've definitely not come to a decision.
     
  10. Yuul_Shamar

    Yuul_Shamar Jedi Master star 4

    Registered:
    Nov 3, 2004
    ah

    Should we do a poll then? Either way all these ideas make fascinating reading truth be told.
     
  11. CmdrMitthrawnuruodo

    CmdrMitthrawnuruodo Force Ghost star 6

    Registered:
    Jul 1, 2000
    Please tell me that this flagship is not going to be a giant crossover game? Frankly, every crossover like that I've seen has flopped within the month. Why? Probably because it has too many franchises, many of which no one knows about or ever heard of before and honestly some of these franchises just dont mix well together. DragonballZ and Star Wars, ie. DBZ is just too powerful to mix with Star Wars.
     
  12. Kalio_Dynkos

    Kalio_Dynkos Jedi Grand Master star 4

    Registered:
    May 17, 2004
    Think-Tanker's Agenda
    1. List of Think-Tankers
    2. Interested Parties for Flag-Master - COMPLETE
    3. Update agenda - COMPLETE

    4. Worlds vs. One World & Nexus vs. Time Travel
    5. RPF Poll conducted
    6. Set up sub-threads and work out all the details (at one point determining who all the GMs are)
    7. Finalize game mechanics/rules/first posts
    8. Late Items

    I changed the skyblue from #1 only because I could barely see it with this background. We've effectively mowed through #2 and #3, hence the color is gone. We are still on the worlds discussion.

    I hope I'm not taking too much liberty by saying I think we've covered and decided against gimmicky and IMO, frustrating, time-travel.

    And we've seen some nice arguements for either multi-worlds or single-worlds. Mitthy, the most recent post, makes a point that began with the first idea in the "Transition" thread, that of separating the genres for that reason. Particularly when you start looking at what genres are most popular amongst the developers. We have Steampunk, Magic/Fantasy, Heros, Earth-type, Sci-Fi and historical. That's the broader range of genres. Some just won't meld well and I, for one, love the idea of multiple threads.

    Moreso, though, because despite what the main storyline will be, we'll undoubtably also have player interaction that isn't related to the main action. We'll have some characters that are just going to do their own thing. We'll have some side-quests and adventures. Essentially, we're creating a world so we're going to have a lot of possibilities for our writers. Personally, that interests me from a standpoint of one following the game because this will generate interest by the players and make the game that much more realistic. People aside from the main characters are affected by in-game plots and actions. I love seeing how thing affect people more than just the generic action scenes.

    Like what does Little Johnny do when he goes home seeing Neo kick butt against Agent Sims? How do people react when the coffee shop they had a business meeting planned at suddenly has a car next to the espresso machine? I love seeing how big things affect little people. Maybe that can't work here, but we want people to be excited about the game and people do that when they feel a connection to the world their characters are living in aside from just the adventure of getting from point A to point B. Character Development makes things work, because if the players don't start to breath on their own, it won't last long. It'll just be another game. This can't be that. Does that make sense?

    So, what I'd like to see, whichever of these is going to work for the players is also the one that won't ostracize players but at the same not not try to grab everything.

    That was the reason we discussed the poll in other thread because we're doing a lot of conjecturing here. What if? How so? But, then? When really, once we see what the RPF community wants most for genres to play in, we may find that the most popular ones could be molded well and some that can't.

    I know that we all have our own idea of what would be cool and interesting and fun to play in, but we're going for the community game.

    So, we're actually getting ahead of ourselves a little. Particularly in those worries that have been mentioned of characters essentially overpowering the other characters. Why not, see what the RPF wants and we go from there?

    That said, I think we can decide on this pretty simply. I think we're pretty decided on the whole idea that we can find difficulties with either genre/planet/civiliziation. The arguements are all sound, but built around the big "what if" when it comes to who we're dealing with.

    I motion, that we bring the RPF Poll up on the agenda and make that the first step before we conclude this discussion. The poll, as I've pitched to I_H, is something of a community census.

    We list each genre with a few ideas as to what they could play and do. This has
     
  13. SephyCloneNo15

    SephyCloneNo15 Jedi Knight star 5

    Registered:
    Apr 9, 2005
    I don't know if that's a good idea. As long as we've got time waiting for the RPF awards to be done, we might as well finish nailing down the World vs Worlds battle. Once that's nailed down, instead of just loose ideas of genres, we can submit the poll with more fleshed out ideas that relate back to the connecting thread, like my Steampunk post. Would you rather vote between five or six concrete plots, or between five or six bulleted lists of ideas? I'd go with the concrete.
     
  14. CmdrMitthrawnuruodo

    CmdrMitthrawnuruodo Force Ghost star 6

    Registered:
    Jul 1, 2000
    How exactly are you doing this "World vs World" idea? Is it where the players get to choose a character from different genres/franchises and they get stuck together as a group and travel to other worlds to save the day or is it something like "Sliders" where a group of everyday people or D&D like adventurers suddenly find themselves sliding from one world to the next fighting evil and doing good while at the same time trying to find their way back to their world?

    I scimmed through the thread so i only know of the general idea but not the details. *is tired from researching Animal Abuse all day*
     
  15. Kalio_Dynkos

    Kalio_Dynkos Jedi Grand Master star 4

    Registered:
    May 17, 2004
    A good question Mitthy. I'm not sure how it started over at the DreamWrighs (an off-sight place where Elu started an idea) but here in the "Tranisition" Thread, I was looking a world inspired by Terry Prachett's DiscWorld. The main question that was being discussed was what you bring up, multiple characters from multiple genre = boring or too hard. So, I thrust in a idea that a super race of aliens, The Preservers had ripped from fiction groups or genres of people that would co-exist, but only those that were of a certain genre-type isolated together. Thus, the one-planet idea, where on a single planet controlled by the Preservers (the race that traveled the galaxy through "saving" dying civilizations and in this case, the better parts of their imagination.) Each genre would be a culture unto themselves that woud be self-sustaining. The Fantasy-genre would encompass character-types such as, but not limited to, orgres, fairies, wizards, witches, hobbits, etc. They would have their own thread and their own storylines.

    Another genre would make up a separate cililizaions - we suggested earth-fiction. Mobsters, mafia, detectives, etc. And so on and so forth, so that these people were not, at the beginning all thrust together. The Preservers would, later, be a "mysterious" element handled by the Flag-master exclusively until the fate of the one planet they were on was only to be decided by, what had been happening over time, the various civilizations finding each other. The Fantasy would meet the Gothic, the Miltiary the earth, the Horror and so and so forth - but not like that. Just that, by random happenings, in-game developmed plots and Co-Gm/RPer interaction the greater mystery of their existence would be understood until things started going haywire and the only way to survive was that these people, the differing civilizations would have to either work together or be destroyed - with either actually able to happen, leaving the fate of the game in the hands of the RPers.

    Actually, in this way, the idea has no correlation to Terry Prachett, except that on Discworld - essentially - all the myths of the world co-exist and live like regular Joes.

    However, then we found out that Elu and DreamWrights had been working on a somewhat similar idea but were working off a template of another story idea they were thinking of a multiple world system to do the same thing.

    Since then, people have been talking about right-off-the-bat melding cultures together. Which really isn't going to work.

    The actual game motive is something close to what you imagine, I suppose. What with characters working together and such.

    So, long story short the "World vs. Worlds" is some people arguing wether the scope of the game should be regulated to just one planet or if we should include a multiple planet system, and both have their merits.
     
  16. CmdrMitthrawnuruodo

    CmdrMitthrawnuruodo Force Ghost star 6

    Registered:
    Jul 1, 2000
    0_o that sounds a little too complicated.

    May I suggest something here? An idea that would still preserve the multi-verse idea but make it less complicated. In fact this is an idea that was used for a D&D Game I had participated in. Whole group loved it and were disappointed when the DM brought us back :( to the proper world.

    The adventurers accidentally find themselves in a dark universe where the laws of physics do not exist. If a fire arrow is shot into the darkness, it never comes back down and seemingly reappears behind the group minutes later but with a duplicate arrow. Now the arrow becomes a threat to the group and they learn not to toss objects around.

    They are on a stone bridge that extends into the darkness as far as the eye can see (or as far as your light source shows). On either side of this bridge is emptiness. There is no sky. There is no stars or sun or moon. It's pitch black. The adventurers walk for hours, possibly days following this bridge until they come to a staircase that leads up and down from the bridge. They take the down route. Things happen that separates the group, weird events, but eventually they all regroup at the bottom of this strange dark universe.

    Now they stand on a mirror-like land and discover it is inhabited by a people they know as the Gods. The Gods deem them worthy to go through their tests of virtue. The adventurers, wishing to find a way back to their world, find themselves in a lush forest with a field of columns that have doors on them. They start opening the doors and discover each one leads to a different world. One is a desert. One is a ocean world, its water spilling out into the forest they are in. Another is a jungle. Curiosity gets the better of them and the one they take looks like a red, desert world (think Mars) with a crashed, rusted out starship. They encounter the villain of the story, think he's mad and decide to stop him from destroying their world. They foil the villains plot but in doing so the resulting explosion sends them to another world. But this world, the villain is good-aligned for some odd reason. Turns out when the explosion detonated, different alignments of themselves were created. Now the group has the villain to destroy and their evil counterparts too. Each world also has doorways leading to other worlds, some are hidden in caverns, others are in the middle of a library via mirrors. But they all have one thing in common. They are a hallway of doors.

    I could go on and describe each of the worlds we went to but you get the idea. Anyway it was fun.
     
  17. Hammurabi

    Hammurabi Jedi Master star 4

    Registered:
    Jan 14, 2007
    Okay, first things first: this thread keeps getting messy, and I've got a solution. It's pretty easy, so I don't know why I didn't think of it before. Anyways, the idea is this: we use basic formatting (like in any RP) to make it easy to tell what we're talking about. Just put a boldface heading at the top of your post, and then again for every individual topic within your post. I'll be doing it for the rest of this post, just so everyone sees what I mean. I've even thrown in subsections, though I don't know whether or not we need them.



    Single vs Multi:

    A List - Where We Stand

    I've updated our roster with four new names. I've also gone and tried to gauge everybody's viewpoint on the Single vs Multi issue. If anybody feels differently from what I've posted, please correct me; this is a quick rough list. A couple names I've had to list as neutral, because I honestly couldn't tell. And some folks just haven't commented on the issue, which is fine. But I've opted out of listing anything for them. But this is all a very rough and sketchy outline, so don't hold me to any standards. So out of sixteen total people, I'm seeing seven in favor of single world, two in favor of multiple worlds, and seven neutral/undefined so far. Here's where everybody seems to stand:

    Saintheart: NEUTRAL
    Kalio_Dynkos: NEUTRAL
    darth-nemisis: SINGLE
    Darth_Vaders_Cousin: MULTI
    Darth_Elu
    DarthXan318: NEUTRAL
    Lightwarden: SINGLE
    Yuul_Shamar: SINGLE
    Hammurabi: SINGLE
    MASTERPRENN
    SephyCloneNo15: MULTI
    Jango_10
    Imperial_Hammer
    Ktala: SINGLE
    Winged_Jedi: SINGLE
    CmdrMitthrawnuruodo: SINGLE


    On Balancing a Single World
    If that were true, we wouldn't have 193 nations on this planet. If anything, history favors entropy. Your best example is Rome, and even Rome was overcome by barbarians. The Greeks never held a substantial empire for any length of time, and the Europeans certainly had influence, but rarely did they sustain lasting colonies. Even in their most solid colonies, they generally faced strong insurgencies which often expelled the Europeans. Force fields didn't topple Rome or cast out Spain and England. It was barbarians and insurgents. Chaos prevails. And besides, even if one force gains advantage, we get to play out all that insurgency stuff. Which would be fun. And GM intervention isn't always as clunky as big force fields. How about sowing the seeds of an internal rift within the dominating faction? Split 'em up like Microsoft.




    On the 'One Earth' Plan

    Well, from the beginning I've been imagining our world in terms of how it relates to Earth. Let me restate one of my earlier world ideas:

     
  18. DarthXan318

    DarthXan318 Manager Emeritus star 6 VIP - Former Mod/RSA

    Registered:
    Sep 12, 2002
    Actually, I'm kind of on the fence now ... Both one world or many could work really well. So put me down as Neutral.

    My main argument against one world was the limited factions, but that just means we have to think up more interesting ways of explaining the different factions. Say bring up Atlantis as the sci-fi faction, say, explaining it as a super-advanced group of humans who discovered alien technology or somesuch some millennia ago.

    Let's put it to vote! Easier that way. :p

    edit - Wow, way to hit 5600 posts..
     
  19. Yuul_Shamar

    Yuul_Shamar Jedi Master star 4

    Registered:
    Nov 3, 2004
    =D= =D= =D= =D= =D=

    Excellent job Hammurbai! I love it!

    It lets us fit in the more in demand ideas and does it nicely, I don't think I can add much to that
     
  20. SephyCloneNo15

    SephyCloneNo15 Jedi Knight star 5

    Registered:
    Apr 9, 2005
    The Nation-state is a relatively new invention, and largely a product of non-mercantile economies and the Nuclear age. It's only very recently (roughly 300 years) that we came up with ways to get rich without conquering new lands, and it's only within the last hundred or so years that trying to conquer new lands for money got to be too suicidal to be worth it. Prior to that, the only reason not to expand was that your nation wasn't done exploiting its own resources or that you lost your colonies in a poorly fought war. I'm not saying every colony was happy to stay colonized. Keeping people conquered is never easy. If colonies never revolted, I'd be a happy citizen of the "Queen's Happy and Healthy Colonies in the New World" instead of the "United States of America".

    Now, not that I'm done pushing for multiple worlds, but that was a very well-thought-out premise, Ham, better than anything else I've seen suggested by One-Worlders, but that may be largely because there's more meat than anyone else's, and I like the concept of 1950's America having supers, if only because I could be a gaudy, ridiculous Golden Age superhero...

    Unfortunately, you're also the first to make the One World concept seem ridiculously cramped. You've essentially given us a continent (two if you count the possibility of Atlantis) and a few islands for the entire game, with the knowledge that the rest of the planet exists after a certain fashion. It's easy to imagine the Steampunkers players all being neighbors in cramped London tenements while the fantasiers have turned Greenland into a big feudal village where news travels by hearsay from one end of the island to the other in a matter of hours. Only the American section seems to have empty space, given its frontier nature, and that excludes their cities which are probably just as cramped as London's, but given the splits, probably just with NPCs with one piece of information per person ("The cave to the North is blocked by a thick sheet of ice. Use the FIRE ROD.")

    That's why my vote is still for multi-worlds, because nothing will give the illusion of space like having your entire cosmos to yourself. ("Never compromise. Even in the face of Armageddon."~Rorschach)
     
  21. LightWarden

    LightWarden Jedi Grand Master star 4

    Registered:
    Oct 11, 2001
    And nothing will kill your game faster than having a world to yourself and absolutely nothing to do. What are you guys aiming for in the game? Is this going to be another BoP "everyone attempts to wipe out everyone else" or is it going to be more of a cold war or even more neutral with people just running about and adventuring? A setting should be designed to provoke a specific style of play. It won't do you much good if you just slap together something aimlessly.
     
  22. SephyCloneNo15

    SephyCloneNo15 Jedi Knight star 5

    Registered:
    Apr 9, 2005
    No one's slapping together anything aimlessly, Light. Lots of thought is going into everything, and we need to know how things will fit together before we can decide whether we're going to be out to conquer other worlds/genre-locales or Cold Warring it or uniting on some grand quest or whathaveyou.

    That's another beauty of the Multi-worlds: Modularity. If a genre flops, it's easy enough to close off the portals and either try again with a new world or keep going with the other worlds. And, if things start to go really south (no offense to anyone living anywhere that could be described as 'south' of any particular location), each world would, theoretically, be a modular unit, able to sail as its own game should the Nexus and everything else fall. Hopefully we'd never have to use the modularity, but it'd be comforting to know it was there.
     
  23. CmdrMitthrawnuruodo

    CmdrMitthrawnuruodo Force Ghost star 6

    Registered:
    Jul 1, 2000
    Question: Does the flagship RPG really have to have multiple threads? From what I remember none of the flagship RPGs started out as multiple threads. They all started out as one thread and then as it got too large for that single thread to handle, they expanded into more.


    Have you all tried to ask what the community wants in a game? Before you start thinking about a plot, a background or what genres to include, perhaps you should ask what the users want to do?

    Do they want action and adventure? Do they want romance? Comedy? Space-combat? Ground combat? Scientific thinking (ala Star Trek)? I suggest putting up a poll asking that first then you can figure out whether to do a multiverse, single verse, and so on. Because if no one wants to do 2/3rds of these genres you choose, you got a flopped game.

    Go ask I_H or Saint to start a poll in NSWRPF and announce it in the RPF. Once you know what the people want, then you can start building a game rather than just discuss it among a select few.
     
  24. Hammurabi

    Hammurabi Jedi Master star 4

    Registered:
    Jan 14, 2007
    You're still ignoring my broader point - even though some powers rise above others, it is very rare for any single power to completely dominate.

    Well, the seeds of expansion are in there. As I said, some within England are keen on expanding into the continent, and of course, that opens up all of Eurasia if we so desire. And the Icelandic faction is also still expanding. I didn't mention this, but I kinda see the Americans and the magic-faction expanding into Canada and potentially coming into conflict. If we wanted to add to that, we could easily throw in a remaining British colonial presence.

    But I personally am almost in favor of limiting the early game to England. I prefer a tight game to a loose, broad game - as LightWarden said, too much space is often worse than too little space. Honestly, Great Britain is more than big enough to sustain a decent RP. London alone could probably do it. Throw in some cramped tenements, an industrial sector, a government sector, and a wealthy district. Want to expand outside London? Add another industrial town (Liverpool or something), a frontiers-y town, and a Gothic castle. Maybe add a Steampunk floating city. At that point, I think we've maybe even got too much space for a starting game.
     
  25. Kalio_Dynkos

    Kalio_Dynkos Jedi Grand Master star 4

    Registered:
    May 17, 2004
    That's been the intention. Some people just haven't agreed with that up to now.

    EDIT: And I_H received a PM outlining poll over a week ago. We're waiting on conversation here. Don't ask my why. :p
     
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