Big city grids - likes and dislikes
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Because a code dug room is more real/lasting/permanent than a temp room. It exists as something more than a temporary description.
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@sunny said in Big city grids - likes and dislikes:
Because a code dug room is more real/lasting/permanent than a temp room. It exists as something more than a temporary description.
I guess this is where that immersion colorblindness comes in, because I just don't get that. The city exists ICly. It's permanent. Mama's Diner may have only been used in a random scene and not dug, but it's still there ICly (unless Meteor Chick burns it down). There's nothing temporary about it.
(Again please bear in mind I'm not trying to be "this is stupid!" about it, I'm honestly trying to understand because I just don't get it.)
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@faraday
If I had never had a scene there then I wouldn't care gridded or not, but by having five or six or x scenes in a place it becomes an important place to the characters story. It is where he met the crazy chick that shaved his eyebrows while he slept, or where he got into the bar fight with the scary biker, or where he met his best friend and where later they decided to start a band.
All those event are what makes Joe's important, but if we go with the RP room way where for scene one it was Charlie's then Franks for scene two, unnamed during scene three, and Joe's during scene four non of them become important to my character.Edit to add: For the Momma's diner thing, it would be like hearing that a random RL building burned down, a thought of I hope no one was hurt combined with a twinge of sympathy for the owner but no real impact.
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@thatguythere said in Big city grids - likes and dislikes:
If I had never had a scene there then I wouldn't care gridded or not, but by having five or six or x scenes in a place it becomes an important place to the characters story.
OK see I can actually understand that. I guess my perspective though is that the continuity - the shared story of a place - is independent to whether it has an @dug room to it. I can use a RP room a dozen times to reflect my character's personal apartment or Mama's Diner and then those places too have a story attached. They become more than just a name. You get to know Mama, get those shared experiences, etc.
Granted if there's a common hangout defined (whether via a scene system hangouts list or a grid) it's more likely that more people will develop those connections with a hangout spot just because it'll get used more.
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@faraday said in Big city grids - likes and dislikes:
@sunny said in Big city grids - likes and dislikes:
Because a code dug room is more real/lasting/permanent than a temp room. It exists as something more than a temporary description.
I guess this is where that immersion colorblindness comes in, because I just don't get that. The city exists ICly. It's permanent. Mama's Diner may have only been used in a random scene and not dug, but it's still there ICly (unless Meteor Chick burns it down). There's nothing temporary about it.
(Again please bear in mind I'm not trying to be "this is stupid!" about it, I'm honestly trying to understand because I just don't get it.)
I don't know how to explain to you in a way that you will understand. I've used all my words already in previous conversations and made no impact. I think it's just not going to happen.
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@faraday
Yeah if a common hang got used to the same degree as one that was dug I think it would grow to have the same importance. It is just that is not how I have seen RP/Temp rooms used for the most part. they become once shot locations often not even named.
In a kind of backwards example of my thoughts, for the most part I do not make private residences for my PCs and just use temp rooms for them though on the ones that get used for frequent RP, and therefore become important I end up building. -
There's a feeling of permanence to a @dug room. You will see other people use it on where, you will see the name when you go past the exit, it's there. It's like the difference between McDoc the NPC just being posed in the background of a scene versus being a fully fleshed out NPC on the roster. A feeling of something being a permanent and in varying degrees important part of the game versus something disposable, immaterial.
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@sunny said in Big city grids - likes and dislikes:
I think it's just not going to happen.
Maybe not. I am, at least, making a genuine effort here to understand. If you're sick of trying to explain it nobody's forcing you to. -
@faraday said in Big city grids - likes and dislikes:
@sunny said in Big city grids - likes and dislikes:
I think it's just not going to happen.
Maybe not. I am, at least, making a genuine effort here to understand. If you're sick of trying to explain it nobody's forcing you to.It's my hope that someone else who has similar views can explain it in a way that can be understood. When I say "it's more real" and the response is "no it's not", I do not know how to articulate what I mean by 'it's more real', because yes. It is. In how I approach things, it is more real. Flat denial of my POV (IE: "there's nothing temporary about it") doesn't change that my first statement stands. To me, it is more real. A @dug room is real, a desced-for-this-scene room is not. The grid is real. Somebody's bar they invented on the spot for a scene is not. Obviously NONE of it is real, but we're talking about perspectives and subjective reality here to begin with.
This one might help. Maybe. The NPC thing is a really good example. For me, a grid location is an npc. It is a character in its own right. It reoccurs, it builds a history, it has its own life and its own existence. If it only exists when I pull it down from a list, it has the weight (to me) of NPCs that are just emitted. They don't have +fingers or +sheets or a history, they just have a name and maybe a description.
ETA: It also has context, on the grid. I know what buildings are nearby. I know what the neighborhood looks like. I know who lives here (or if my character lives here) or whatever. I know that I should RP leaving at 9pm, because by 10pm the neighborhood my PC has to go through becomes a warzone. All of these things come from places having locations in relation to other places already established. I don't have to figure out how they relate to each other. I get a framework to play in, meaning I don't have to invent a bunch of details unless I want to.
ETA2: I want to save my heavy mental lifting for the parts of the RP that matter to me, not worrying about inventing a location, the mood and theme of that location, where it is in relation to other places, what's going on, etc. Yeah, this is a hobby that uses the imagination. YMMV, but mine is a limited supply. If I use half of it for the scene set, I only have so much left for the RP.
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@sunny said in Big city grids - likes and dislikes:
Obviously NONE of it is real, but we're talking about perspectives and subjective reality here to begin with.
I think that's the key point in our different points of view. It's perspective. It's like that silly dress picture a few years back.
"It's blue"
"WTF do you mean - it's gold"Both statements are true from own points of view. You saying "It's more permanent than a temp room" and me saying "Huh? There's nothing temporary about it" strikes me as the same kind of situation.
It was my hope that maybe there was some way to reach a shared understanding of why we see it differently, but maybe it's just how our virtual eyes are wired.
Because heh - the NPC thing is the same to me. Sure there are times when it's just "the nameless bartender plot device" but I don't need a roster or a wiki profile or a +sheet to get attached to Larry the Bartender, who we've emitted several times a week for two years, who's developed his own personality. Permanence comes from the story not the code -- for me.
ETA - In point of fact, two of the most memorable NPCs in my decades of MUSHing had no such codification. They existed only because somebody kept using them and made them interesting. One graduated into a full-fledged PC because he got such a legend attached, and another caused a huge ripple when he got killed.
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@faraday said in Big city grids - likes and dislikes:
Because heh - the NPC thing is the same to me. Sure there are times when it's just "the nameless bartender plot device" but I don't need a roster or a wiki profile or a +sheet to get attached to Larry the Bartender, who we've emitted several times a week for two years, who's developed his own personality. Permanence comes from the story not the code -- for me.
To stretch this a little more and maybe get somewhere: in that case, Larry is your NPC. Not mine. Not shared. I would not feel comfortable using him in a scene for something. Same with rooms. If Larry has a sheet and a history and so on and everyone checks him out and then puts him back or w/e, that's one thing (aka having a scene on the grid). If he's just something that you created and have been running for 2 years off and on, he is your NPC. I'm going to make my own bartender to avoid stepping on your toes.
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@sunny said in Big city grids - likes and dislikes:
If he's just something that you created and have been running for 2 years off and on, he is your NPC. I'm going to make my own bartender to avoid stepping on your toes.
Maybe that's a game culture issue? And maybe that's part of the disconnect. On the games I've been on, there's no such stigma attached. Lots of people use the community bartender. There's a tacit assumption that you won't kill him off or anything without talking to the person who created him, but otherwise you're free to use him - no code involved in "taking him off the shelf" or anything.
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IMO: If a room is not dug, I may forget that it exists or never know at all. I still use in-game resources to discover locations and get a sense of the setting. If the character can go there any time, then it's persistent. If it's not, then it's not.
Or put another way: An existing room shares the same amount of reality to everyone, while one from a log or a list of locations that may be created on the fly does not.
It's Ten Forward vs. The Holodeck.
“If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.”
― Carl Sagan, Cosmos -
@faraday said in Big city grids - likes and dislikes:
It was my hope that maybe there was some way to reach a shared understanding of why we see it differently, but maybe it's just how our virtual eyes are wired.
Because heh - the NPC thing is the same to me. Sure there are times when it's just "the nameless bartender plot device" but I don't need a roster or a wiki profile or a +sheet to get attached to Larry the Bartender, who we've emitted several times a week for two years, who's developed his own personality. Permanence comes from the story not the code -- for me.
A wiki or something like it just facilitates some kind of coherent continuity and provides reference material. That way, even if I'm new to the game I can interact with the environment in ways that make sense and don't contradict the reality other PCs have been inhabiting, even if I wasn't there for all those interesting scenes that actually gave it shape.
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@faraday said in Big city grids - likes and dislikes:
@sunny said in Big city grids - likes and dislikes:
If he's just something that you created and have been running for 2 years off and on, he is your NPC. I'm going to make my own bartender to avoid stepping on your toes.
Maybe that's a game culture issue? And maybe that's part of the disconnect. On the games I've been on, there's no such stigma attached. Lots of people use the community bartender. There's a tacit assumption that you won't kill him off or anything without talking to the person who created him, but otherwise you're free to use him - no code involved in "taking him off the shelf" or anything.
It's not a stigma. That's not the problem. It's not related to the code. I don't have the context I need to play Larry. I don't know who his kids are. I don't know that he's married. I don't know what his favorite color is. I have no idea if you've established any of these things about him, and I would rather make up my own bartender than do it wrong and mess with somebody else's continuity in their head because now they have to justify why Larry didn't mention anything about the fish all dying in the house fire we just saved him from, and they were HIS LIFE'S WORK.
Eta: (caps were for emphasis of how important they were to Larry, not indicative of something else)
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@thenomain said in Big city grids - likes and dislikes:
It's Ten Forward vs. The Holodeck.
@faraday, I think this is the perspective Sunny is trying to explain.
“It is better to live doing the things that you like. It is foolish to live within this dream of a world seeing unpleasantness and doing only things that you do not like.” -- Yamamoto Tsunetomo.
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@faraday said in Big city grids - likes and dislikes:
I hate them, along with weather emits. They either don't really add anything (do folks really care that a cool breeze whispered through the alley or a bird fluttered by overhead? maybe that's one of those immersion things I don't grok again...) or they're just incompatible with the RP already going on.
This is a big thing for me... what if weather is showing that it's a rainy spring day, but we wanted to RP a baseball game, so it has to be not-rainy? And then in the midst of RP, the system says that the rain changes to a drizzle? That's going to break immersion for me.
@thatguythere said in Big city grids - likes and dislikes:
Essentially every scene now takes place on Holodeck 1 and we just slap a different image on the blue screen.
I kind of think that's what we're doing anyhow. We've just agreed on some settings for the Holodeck (Joe's Bar is a default setting in your example, Frank's Bar is a custom setting). And while yes, if you just create another nearly-identical bar after one burns down to set your RP in, you could be making the burning-down RP meaningless, but if instead you spent all the time at Frank's complaining about how the pool table was better at Joe's and how it sucks that there are only two stalls in the bathroom here, but Frank is way cooler than Joe, then I think that you're actually enhancing the RP--it's allowed to continue, but it's changed by the damage to Joe's. It's certainly better than if you just stopped doing RP in a bar because Joe's burned down (or had Joe's get repaired far too quickly because people needed some place to play pool).
@thatguythere said in Big city grids - likes and dislikes:
Edit to add: For the Momma's diner thing, it would be like hearing that a random RL building burned down, a thought of I hope no one was hurt combined with a twinge of sympathy for the owner but no real impact.
I think it's important to remember that just because you've never RPed there, that doesn't mean that your character's never been there. After all, the characters live lives beyond what we put "on-screen," so maybe if Momma's Diner got blown up by Meteor Girl, you decide that your character always went to breakfast at Momma's before church, every dang week, but this week, you got talked into going to Dad's Diner instead, because your friend was in town, and oh-my-goodness isn't that lucky? You could have been killed. Viola, you have a connection.
@sunny said in Big city grids - likes and dislikes:
I don't know how to explain to you in a way that you will understand.
I think I'm somewhere in between the views of Grid-Is-Necessary-For-Immersion and Common-Experiences-In-Rooms-Is-All-That-Matters (yes, I'm using some hyperbole for clarity's sake), so maybe I can try to step in and take a swing at explaining the difference for @faraday. Warning, I am trying to generalize arguments, so please don't take anything I say as putting words in people's mouths.
On the one hand, having a sense of permanence by being on a grid can definitely lead to an IC location becoming one that characters (and hence players) interact with regularly. I thought that a similar sense could be inspired by having room descs stored and available for "loading" into scene rooms whenever people wanted them. It appears that that didn't exactly work. The Pro-Grid folks (if I'm synthesizing correctly) need to have the location on the grid, connected to everything, where they can walk to it, in order to get that sense of permanence. I can understand that to some degree, there's an ephemeralness to a room that simply disappears when you're done with it, even if the IC location (and the room desc and everything else) remains available.
From a code-side, a scene-room with a ready-made desc is just as real as a room on the grid. You just can't walk to it (in my experience, most people use meetme anyhow, but that's neither here nor there). From the story side, as @faraday mentioned, it's just as real also (although harder to track what's going on around the location or in the history of the location unless it has its own steadily-evolving desc or wiki page). From a player-side experience, however, I can definitely see a level of disconnection between having to "create" the room before using it rather than just walking into it.
As I mentioned earlier, we tried to split the difference on T8S. We put up a Locations page with room descs. Some of these rooms were on the grid, some were simply ready-to-be-used scene rooms. By the time RL really swallowed Staff whole, we had linked several more of the rooms to the grid (and added some more to the ships), but the idea was still the same: a small grid that could be expanded at will. For some people, it worked fine, for others, it clearly felt like there weren't enough locations to RP.
This may be one of those Coke/Pepsi, Windows/Mac Blue Dress/Gold Dress (thanks for the third example, @faraday) things where each side believes wholeheartedly that they're right, and just can't understand how the other side can believe what they do.
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Mmm, I think that having something as a coded accessible construct means that people knows there are inherent rules with how people will treat it. Like if an NPC has a bit or does not, and is referenced only inside a pose, yes, by terms of the world they are equally as real, but players will react differently because the unspoken or spoken rules of how you interact with them are different, and so are the consequences.
So basically, the only way to have the same feel, would be to impose the same kind of consequences to PCs from things that don't have coded constructs, and people won't do that. Like I can't think of any well run, popular game that's going to arbitrarily kill a PC off because they mouthed off to a nameless npc given as background contextual flavor, and in order for PCs to treat codeless constructs the same way, that would be necessary.
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@sunny said in Big city grids - likes and dislikes:
I don't have the context I need to play Larry.
Again, that may be a culture issue. In the games I've seen, the whole point of him being a community NPC is that everyone is free to chip in to define that context. Maybe in one scene somebody mentions his beloved fish and now that's a part of his character. As @peasoupling said, it helps to have a wiki page or something to record those little tidbits for everyone's common reference.
@ganymede said in Big city grids - likes and dislikes:
@thenomain said in Big city grids - likes and dislikes:
It's Ten Forward vs. The Holodeck.
@faraday, I think this is the perspective Sunny is trying to explain.
Yeah sorry, I don't get it. The Holodeck is by it's very nature ICly fake. What I'm talking about is more the difference between playing a scene in the @dug Ten Forward or a temproom for the Head on Deck 12. Staff maybe didn't see the Head as being important enough to @dig a room for it, but ICly it's still there. It's permanent (ICly). It probably doesn't have enough interesting RP happening there for folks to care about it too much, but it can be a fun diversion sometimes. And if you do Battlestar - it may come up enough for it to actually be an amusing non-standard place for people to run into each other.
:helpless shrug: I think maybe @sunny is right, that it's hopeless trying to explain it to me, but I appreciate the attempts.
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Why was there a Head in the ship on BSG:U?
The way I figure it, and maybe this will help, digging and linking rooms to a lot of us feels like we're creating something permanent and of worth on a game. Sure, we know that these places we make may go ka-boom if we idle out and don't reassign them to permanent builder bits, but, for the most part, these places have a sort of permanence that isn't matched by object rooms or temp rooms.
It could very well be that Sunny and I, who are, for lack of better term, really fucking old MUShers -- Twin Cities by Teatime old -- are just used to the idea of having permanent rooms on a game, rather than these seemingly-new-fangled knick-knacks and doo-dads like temp rooms and temporary RP rooms, and proxy PCs, etc.
I know that a location created via Public/Private scene are no more or less permanent in the IC world than the Head, but the part of me that cannot sever my OOC mindset, experiences, and ancient ways still finds them less permanent than a @dug room @chowned to my PC object.
So, maybe it ain't even a culture thing. It could just be an age thing.
Sunny and I are old. Really, fucking old. Like, I ain't lying, I think as quickly as zefrank narrates sometimes, no bullshit.
“It is better to live doing the things that you like. It is foolish to live within this dream of a world seeing unpleasantness and doing only things that you do not like.” -- Yamamoto Tsunetomo.
