Making an Isolated Theme Work

[Arkandel]

I mean it's your funtime, but those... are about the opposite choices I'm making in my gaming. You seem to prioritize peeves a lot more than I would.

To each their own.

[faraday]

Everyone has different tastes. It also comes down to what kind of theme you're going for.

I've heard several suggestions about having multiple grids/communities/etc. but that's kind of going against the theme of isolation. If you're doing Battlestar, and the central theme is "this fleet represents the last survivors of mankind", then it gets a little jarring (for me) if you're constantly running into other survivors. Occasionally it's fine (like in the new BSG when they came across Pegasus). But do it too often, and you're disrupting your central theme.

Now it would be totally valid to structure a different theme where your goal is "round up other survivors" or "become a bastion of civilization where other survivors can congregate" or whatnot, but those are fundamentally different, not-so-isolated themes.

Asking what kind of playerbase the setting can support is a totally good question. A Battlestar fleet with thousands of people is totally different than a single plane crashing on a deserted island.

[Ghost]

@faraday oh, I probably should have mentioned with my 5-6 grids idea, that the grids were disconnected from one another. 5-6 groups of survivors within 150-200 miles from each other and no way to "wander" from grid to grid without staff involvement.

[Ganymede]

@faraday said:

I've heard several suggestions about having multiple grids/communities/etc. but that's kind of going against the theme of isolation.

I concur.

I'm working on putting together the theme and setting files for a Mortal-only Chronicles of Darkness game set in an apocalyptic setting. Intrinsic to this game is code that will deplete necessary resources for every PC, so it requires people to occasionally log-in and participate in a survival mini-game. That mini-game is made much easier if the PC takes certain steps to maximize the returns on the time their PC spends in such mini-game.

I'm also working on finishing off my homebrew Mass Effect system so I can develop a game based on Omega, and set during the interregnum between Aria T'Loak's and General Petrovsky's regimes. The PCs would engage in a similar mini-game, but would be focused on keeping their resistance faction/gang alive.

In both cases, there are ways to get new PCs into the game. Integral to both is enforcing the isolation theme. Staff will have to make sure people are "RPing straight" to keep it up, but, in each game, the system employed will assist.

[Three-Eyed Crow]

MU*s are just inherently transient environments, both fortunately and unfortunately. A couple new players can really invigorate an IC group, but it inevitably means people will leave, often suddenly and without explanation. I think this means you sort of have to build in a way for people to cycle on and off, even if it's just "gone to the farm upstate/come back from the farm"). In BSG it was fairly easy to just say there were other ships in the Fleet people could wander on from, in addition to the main battlestar center of RP. I'm not sure the claustrophobia that's often part of the drama in survival stories is ever going to be possible to replicate on a public game with an ever-shifting playerbase, and I'll admit I'm also disinterested in stories where the apocalypse turns into constant social RP bake-offs and camp fire sing-alongs. The middle ground is probably about the best you can do.

I'm not big on rosters, but I can see the necessity for important IC positions (leader/sheriff/whatever). I'd really want the option to have my PCs die off rather than be picked up by some rando if I idled out (I've seen some chargens with a 'Last will' section where you enter what your preferred method of off-screening is, and that's nice).

[Thenomain]

@faraday said:

Asking what kind of playerbase the setting can support is a totally good question. A Battlestar fleet with thousands of people is totally different than a single plane crashing on a deserted island.

And that's why Battlestar works. Even if the fleet had only a thousand people, you couldn't possibly see them all the time so people coming is fine.

So here we can be isolated, but not in a tiny group. Even something like Walking Dead's prison has enough people to sustain not-really-newcomers for a while. Ice & Fire's north wall is also isolated, but has a reason to interject newcomers. It is cut off without being entirely bereft of contact.

So as you said about themes else thread, what kind of isolation are you going for?

[Arkandel]

A MU* also shouldn't have to make a choice about certain things regarding its theme but it should at the very least consider them while making game design choices.

For example a player may want to play an outsider/newcomer or the person who's always been there but the other PCs just didn't know personally. It's not 'wrong' to say either can't be done but it should be taken under consideration when staff's figuring out their game very early on, since it's not the kind of thing they can easily change after the fact.

[bored]

@Ghost

It's unfortunately almost a rule of MU design that if you split your playerbase your game will die or at least suffer horribly until you integrate them. It's not that the idea doesn't sound cool, but it's just one of those things with the size of the hobby etc. Really the only way to combat it is doing the thing you said not to (alts), and even then it tends not to work.

[faraday]

@Thenomain said:

So as you said about themes else thread, what kind of isolation are you going for?

Oh, I wasn't going for anything in particular. I asked this after my friend and I were discussing some of the challenges involved with isolation on Battlestar games. Even with a big fleet, most of your players are going to be military in small to mid-sized departments, so isolation is still a problem. And then we got to talking about whether something like a 'deserted island' type of setting could ever work without either rosters or a deus ex machina system feeding the island with new people.

So I was just curious what experiences others had.

[Thenomain]

Civilian Draft. Fixed! (... Maybe.)

[bored]

@faraday

I think you really have to think about it in your game design and particularly in your CG rules.

For the BSG version, for example, you could say that after some reasonable point, new military PCs are not going to be 'always been there' sorts, but new recruits off civilian vessels, which is both accurate to the show and would nicely explain bringing them in without them knowing everyone. It's just going to make some people unhappy when they want to play their Caprician elite military family Adama clones. And you just need the staff-balls to say tough shit at that point. On the other hand, you'd want to make your advancement policies friendly enough that these new guys can catch up and not feel like a permanent set of second-class military citizens.

A zombie game is going to be way, way less restricted. Almost anyone can be out there and the stories/justifications for them showing up are equally endless. You may have to limit 'settlement' PCs after some point to avoid the 'I was always here' stuff, but I don't think that's terribly onerous. Again, design matters: if you are gonna limit people in the settlement, you probably want to make sure that coming from the outside is still an attractive option, that they still qualify for jobs in the settlement quickly, etc.

[Ghost]

@bored said:

@Ghost

It's unfortunately almost a rule of MU design that if you split your playerbase your game will die or at least suffer horribly until you integrate them. It's not that the idea doesn't sound cool, but it's just one of those things with the size of the hobby etc. Really the only way to combat it is doing the thing you said not to (alts), and even then it tends not to work.

I have often had to come to terms with the realization that what I or a small group of mushers would think to be cool would never work for the larger mush community as a whole.

For the most part, it seems to me mushers want to choose where they show up on the grid and to be accessible to the OOC beau they made a character for, and that splitting up the grid on an isolationist game like that might lead to players leaving because it would be unfair that their former pop star can't immediately shag her former Marine she met at USO. Then again, with my kind of thinking, that above "make characters for each other" concept would be against the spirit of a survival mush where you can't choose which group you get taken in by, so fuckem? I dunno.

Some ideas are just better left to tabletop.

I'm willing to bet that isolated zombie game idea, especially with high mortality and the right rpers, could take in maybe 20-30 unique IPs

[Arkandel]

@Ghost said:

Some ideas are just better left to tabletop.

Yes.

[bored]

@Ghost

There's nothing specifically anti-genre in survival about pre-existing couples, but yes, if your premise is totally random strangers only it obviously messes with that and probably won't work great in a MU environment, separate areas or otherwise.

Generally the issue with splitting the playerbase has less to do with splitting up OOC couples (I've never seen people split randomly as you're suggesting, typically it's a choice of apping to play in X region or Y region) but simply one of population density and the whole 'critical mass' concept that is a feature of game survival. Splitting people up reduces chances for public interaction and self-sustaining RP, and encourages people just to RP in their insular groups. And as much as it seems like that's often what people want, they also demonstrate a propensity for growing bored when they don't have the alternate option. At the more cynical end I'd say its because people want an audience for their PDA, on the more generous I'd say its because outside stimuli makes even the personal RP more interesting.