Grid Construction and Planning

[ZekeTheG33k]

So I'm starting to layout a bit of the basic structure of a grid. My game is based in San Fran. Now in the original iteration of the game, we used a map layout used by Night & Fog, with permission, and I lost that original layout. So I have a question, how would you design the grid?

Any thoughts are welcomed.

[tragedyjones]

@Seamus I can tell you how I did the layout for City of Fog and Blood. But I don't personally think it was the best choice in retrospect. I am more and more becoming anti-grid.

[ZekeTheG33k]

My concern is that the original Twilight Moons' grid was HUGE. And I don't know if that's the way to go now-a-days.

[tragedyjones]

@Seamus said in Grid Construction and Planning:

My concern is that the original Twilight Moons' grid was HUGE. And I don't know if that's the way to go now-a-days.

It isn't.

[lordbelh]

@Seamus Less is more. Don't have big sprawling grids where the majority of the grid locations see no use what so ever.. If you have more than 10 area grid squares you've gone too far. You could probably make do with half that. Pack them full of places and stuff instead.

[ZekeTheG33k]

So what districts of San Fran would be the most desirable? I want to have a Chinatown to incorporate the Beast Courts., but beyond that I'm kind of open.

[Bobotron]

@Seamus
Do your San Francisco up by districts, and if necessary, break those districts down into sub-areas. I was looking at San Francisco as a setting for the original vampire game I'm doing before I switched to NYC, and ended up coming up with some areas (I found a district/neighborhood map) and then was going to fluff it internally for what goes where.

The maps I used (data hoarder!) were:
http://vanderwal.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83455b30d69e2016302d93602970d-800wi

and

http://www.thecitrusreport.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/san-francisco-on-a-sheet-blue.png

ETA: https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/564x/1f/b2/4e/1fb24e210a93bd57f7e6dd3f024625e6.jpg

Might be useful for you.

[Coin]

@Bobotron said in Grid Construction and Planning:

@Seamus
Do your San Francisco up by districts, and if necessary, break those districts down into sub-areas. I was looking at San Francisco as a setting for the original vampire game I'm doing before I switched to NYC, and ended up coming up with some areas (I found a district/neighborhood map) and then was going to fluff it internally for what goes where.

The maps I used (data hoarder!) were:
http://vanderwal.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83455b30d69e2016302d93602970d-800wi

and

http://www.thecitrusreport.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/san-francisco-on-a-sheet-blue.png

ETA: https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/564x/1f/b2/4e/1fb24e210a93bd57f7e6dd3f024625e6.jpg

Might be useful for you.

This is how we built Eldritch. i actually had each large area composed of 2-3 grid squares, and then within each grid square, people could make their neighborhoods, which focused and added details.

[Bobotron]

@Coin
Yeah; you get variety and locales for people to build out from but you don't get minutiae of a room being '5th and Vine' like I've seen on games.

With Houses, I'm doing NYC in the same vein; looks like I'll have 9 areas, with 2-4 rooms each. Like, Midtown Manhattan is set to be made up of Gramercy, Hell's Kitchen, Midtown Center, Greenwich Village and Chelsea.

[ZekeTheG33k]

Well I wasn't doing the 5th And Vine approach. The old TM grid, had "Castro" "Haight-Ashbury" etc as core areas, and then each neighborhood was built off that 'single' core room for the area.

[Bobotron]

@Seamus
And that's fine. It was more an anecdotal about grids and huge size and minutiae. Some of the rooms are small enough that you could probably get away with just one room for what it is, and then combine some of them under one larger moniker perhaps.

[ZekeTheG33k]

Oh TM we had 31 neighborhood rooms, and then umpteenbillion sub-rooms in each one, for businesses homes, apts, etc. Our grid massive, lol.

[Tat]

My personal philosophy of a grid is that it should be large enough to give people a clear vision of your setting and to spark ideas for RP, but not so large that no one can remember where things are or that they can get lost.

Couple this with a couple of flexible TP rooms (or whatever you want to call them) that can serve as anything players want, and re-visit your grid in 4-6 months.

The last game I ran had a grid I really liked - but several months in, I realized that while we had a lot of great different social spaces, we didn't have good spaces for characters who were quieter or introverted to publicly run into other characters, so we added some. Players are great for identifying what's truly missing after some play, too. So are those TP rooms - is there anything that's getting used consistently?

Generally the idea of breaking a city down into 'districts' and then building rooms off of them works really well in my opinion. We're set in NYC (primarily Manhattan), and our grid has Harlem, Upper West Side, Central Park, Midtown, Greenwich Village, Mutant Town, Lower East Side, Brooklyn, and Queens.

If I were going to do it again, I might leave off a lot of those northern bits, because they get very little RP. Our focus is in Mutant Town, and so the areas around there get RP. Do you know where the 'center' of your RP is likely to be? I'd build that up more and go thinner in other areas.

As far as San Francisco in particular, it's nice because it's already got neighborhoods with really distinctive personalities. Check out maps and then look them up on wikipedia for flavor.

Offhand, I'd probably do:

• Chinatown
• Mission
• Downtown
• Fisherman's Wharf (maybe 'North Waterfront' with this a room in it)
• Haight Ashbury
• Castro

If you want slightly bigger, you could add:

• Presidio
• Soma
• Sunset
• Sausalito
• Oakley
• Berkley

[Roz]

@Bobotron said in Grid Construction and Planning:

@Coin
Midtown Manhattan is set to be made up of Gramercy, Hell's Kitchen, Midtown Center, Greenwich Village and Chelsea.

one of those places is not in midtown OH GOD NO I AM BECOME THAT NEW YORKER

[Thenomain]

@Seamus said in Grid Construction and Planning:

Well I wasn't doing the 5th And Vine approach. The old TM grid, had "Castro" "Haight-Ashbury" etc as core areas, and then each neighborhood was built off that 'single' core room for the area.

You know, I still really disliked that grid. There were more than a few times, call it about ever fourth scene I had on the game, where we had to decide what the room was at any given time. The Temproom code is because of this game's grid, so that I might never have to do it again.

[skew]

I like the idea of building a grid based on points of interest, not geographical locations. When helping construct BITN's Grid, we basically reviewed the area (admittedly large) and found the sites/towns that were interesting, and put those into the game. I then compiled a spreadsheet of all the different sites, and listed out a "type" for them, and reviewed that list to make sure I had "something for everyone". Poor area, rich area, wild area, commercial area, etc. From there, we had players requesting additional areas, and I believe it worked pretty well.

The grid became more about what was conducive to play than what was realistic. You'd skip a dozen towns/places/areas going from point A to point B, but there was very little value in that. I like to think of it a bit more like Baldur's Gate's map, rather than a logical map of the city. Skip over a few miles, cause they're boring (or more likely, redundant).

So, maybe shoot for 5-10 neighborhoods (those are your "grid squares"), and then shoot for a few locations within each. Assuming, of course, your game works like that!

More practically, use tools to build your grid! For individual rooms (and/or small builds), I have a tool, here: http://musoapbox.net/topic/850/a-tool-for-grid-building-digging

For doing big areas at once, use MUSHroom: http://mushcode.com/MushRoom

If you'd like any advice on either, feel free to give me a poke. Just a TOW BIG WARNINGS on MUSHroom: if you choose to start from the current room instead of a new room, it will overwrite your current room and if you create a big space in MUSHroom, you will eat up your input buffer. Break it down to sending 30-50 lines at once, otherwise you'll end up unsure where it cut off.

Cheers!

[ZekeTheG33k]

@Thenomain You played on Twilight Moons, Theno?

[Collective]

@skew said in Grid Construction and Planning:

For doing big areas at once, use MUSHroom: http://mushcode.com/MushRoom

If you'd like any advice on either, feel free to give me a poke. Just a TOW BIG WARNINGS on MUSHroom: if you choose to start from the current room instead of a new room, it will overwrite your current room and if you create a big space in MUSHroom, you will eat up your input buffer. Break it down to sending 30-50 lines at once, otherwise you'll end up unsure where it cut off.

Cheers!

I'm curious, are you running Windows 8 or 10? Because I'm using Mushroom and I ended up having to set up a Win 7 box on a laptop to get it to run. If I can avoid that, it would be awesome.

[Thenomain]

@Seamus said in Grid Construction and Planning:

@Thenomain You played on Twilight Moons, Theno?

Did I? No, I meant Victorian Reverie. Did I get you confused with someone else, again? I was worried that I might've.

[ZekeTheG33k]

Yeah, my Ex, Traveling Man ran Victorian Reverie.
I ran Twilight Moons, back in the day.