Big city grids - likes and dislikes

[Kay]

I thought I should split this into its own thread, since the big city is a popular setting for many games.

I plan on having my superhero game set in a bustling metropolis. I am looking for input on what kind of grid set up you guys like and dislike. What makes it easy for you to get around? What makes it easy for you to get immersed into the game? Pet peeves? Pet favorites?

[Runescryer]

I think having a big city broken down into major neighborhoods is a good start. You shouldn't need more than 10 to begin with, and it allows you to have different flavors or themes for each neighborhood. Later on, you can always build sub-neighborhoods or individual buildings/establishments to expand the grid. The 'neighborhood' approach also gives you enough diversity for characters to relate to without being overwhelming. Just my .02

[faraday]

I've become anti-grid these days. Just give me a scene system and a wiki page with a map and some established locations. Couple of reasons why...

• Almost everyone uses meetme anyway. You spend all this time building a grid and worrying about the exits and everything, and most of the time it's just wasted effort. (*)
• The concept of a grid is arbitrarily limiting. I mean - there's a whole city out there right? It's good to have some pre-defined hot spots for a starting point, but why does everyone always have to hang out at the same one or two bars? This isn't Hollywood where we have to pay for sets. Encourage people to use their imaginations more.
• Building is a hassle. Especially when you have to deal with private apartments and businesses and whatnot.
• I think the concept of a grid and rooms is one of the biggest obstacles to explaining "how mushes work" to new players.

(*) even before meetme, we had speedwalking. And the reason meetme caught on so much IMHO is because traversing the grid is not fun - it's just a boring task that gets in the way of actual RP.

[bored]

I think generally the trend on MUs in recent years has been toward grid minimalism. It's almost guaranteed to be less work (fewer descs!), and @faraday highlights some of the other benefits. That said it's not necessarily the only answer and there are some arguments against.

Firstly, to do the standard pompous intellectual bit, 'Explorer' is identified as one of the major player motivation-types in gaming. While RP MUs use this less than MUDs, they do benefit from it and there are players who enjoy it. I know many people who explored (and even mapped out) Firan's mega grid, and some locations that focused on this (including some coded exploration puzzles) were very popular. Visiting the sunken cave as a ritual of bravery was a standard of kid RP for a while.

Secondly, there's a benefit to certain kinds of players who enjoy spontaneous RP. While a big grid seemingly keeps players apart, it actually makes chance encounters more contextually meaningful. Bumping into someone in 'Big City - Western District' says basically nothing about what kind of RP might happen, while 'Big City - Western District - Sleazy Strip' (or 'Dark Alley' or 'Tech Market') might suggest quite a lot. Common RP hotspots (bars, shops, training centers, etc) can also be utilized players who may be interested in RP but who are too shy to ask on channel or commit to a planned scene in pages. The location serves not just to advertise that they want RP, but what kind.

Finally, the costs of a larger grid to players who don't like it can be minimized (+hangout and +travel code, +meetme, etc) whereas the reverse is not true in the same way. +temproom code can give infinite variety, but it can never offer spontaneous encounters nor true exploration.

Of course, Superhero games are also their own thing and inform this discussion in various ways. Exploration may not be relevant to a Metropolis setting, where the city is cast in grand strokes and encounters are likely to play out across the sky at high speeds. Here you might need no more than a few neighborhoods and iconic locations: the Planet, LexCorp, the Watchtower, etc... along with some access to off-grid spaces like Themyscira and Atlantis. On the other hand a Gotham game might be very different and benefit from some nooks and crannies to explore and give the city its depth and factional hangouts to be used by criminal gangs.

There's never a one-size-fits-all answer to this kind of stuff.

[faraday]

@bored said in Big city grids - likes and dislikes:

it can never offer spontaneous encounters nor true exploration.

You make good points about the Explorer motivations, though I've always wondered how much satisfaction those folks really get from wandering through a fixed grid of anything short of giant size.

I disagree though about the lack of spontaneous encounters. I don't really see a practical difference between wandering to "Big City - Sleazy Strip" on the grid and doing scene/start Big City - Sleazy Strip=public. Both can park your character in the Sleazy Strip with a hint (in the case of a grid) or an expressed intent (in the case of the scene system) of being open to RP in that location.

I get it's not everybody's thing, and that's cool. It's different, some folks hate it. But I like the benefits.

[Kay]

@faraday @bored @Runescryer - Thank you for all the feedback and comments! I apologize for any confusion: I'm not looking for input here specifically for my game, I am looking for input on big city grids in general. It's always helpful to know what's popular and what isn't, and might help other people who are looking to make MU*s too.

[Lithium]

I don't think a big city grid needs a humongous city grid unless there is a massive and major territory system in place. I think humongous grids stretch out RP, people get lost, it's hard to get involved. Which is why my return to CoH has stalled out so badly.

I like grids that are easy to navigate, but expansive enough to offer choice. Like. you could do a grid that was 9 major rooms set in a series of 4 squares stacked in a bigger square. Then you have 9 major rooms with which to build locations off of which should give you plenty of choice for different areas of a city.

As Dennis Leary said: Good block, bad bloock, oooh!

[bored]

@faraday said in Big city grids - likes and dislikes:

I disagree though about the lack of spontaneous encounters. I don't really see a practical difference between wandering to "Big City - Sleazy Strip" on the grid and doing scene/start Big City - Sleazy Strip=public. Both can park your character in the Sleazy Strip with a hint (in the case of a grid) or an expressed intent (in the case of the scene system) of being open to RP in that location.

Well, I think there's a difference if that location is on the grid or in the temproom hub. I realize it can be done seamlessly on grid in nuFS3, but it's not a common feature in generic MUSH/Mux. Other than that, I agree there's not much practical difference.

That said, a common RP partner of mine quit 8th Sea over precisely this distinction. I don't think there's any logic to it beside player psychology. Yet I feel like it must come up fairly often since that game actually made expanding their grid part of their effort to renew the game after the initial opening failed.

[TNP]

Those who like a well developed grid will be unhappy if there's grid minimalism.

Those who don't care about a large grid will just ignore it and use temprooms and/or meetme for everything.

Err on the side of keeping most players happy so big over small.

[Seraphim73]

I don't have huge issues over how big a grid is so long as every room in the grid has 1+ RP hooks and a specific purpose. Like, don't give me 3 "city street" rooms in a row, that doesn't help RP any--in my mind, the only purpose for that is if you have wandering mobs to fight and need room for them to wander in. But if you have 3 city street rooms to indicate a descent from a high-class neighborhood into a slum, I think that's useful, especially if each one has a particular hook to it that can encourage spontaneous RP.

I'm not quite as gung-ho about going all scenes-code as @faraday, for precisely the reason that @bored brought up: for some players, if you can't just walk into the room, and have to "teleport" in, it feels more private, and there's a barrier to entry. I think that our hobby would be better off with more scene code if we could get past this, but I don't know how to get past it. Heck, I ran T8S and I felt some of that barrier to entry myself.

I also think that there's a value in having rooms with set descriptions--we actually did this with scene code on T8S, about half of the "grid" wasn't actually attached, but could be used as a scene-room with a ready-built desc. Because there are already too few players interested in starting scenes in interesting ways, I don't want to require them to come up with a room desc every time also.

That being said, having the scenes code on-hand is freaking awesome, for when you want to create your own room for the RP (like @faraday said, we don't have to pay for sets except in the creative juice to write the desc), or for when you want to be able to go back to a location and have the room desc saved (mail it to Staff, they can plop it into an unconnected room and viola, you can go back there any time with the scene-code and not have to remember the room desc).

To get back to the original question though, I like the "neighborhood" solution put forward by @Runescryer and others, one big room to describe the general feel of the area, and then smaller rooms where most of the RP will happen (that being said, I still think there should be a specific hook or two in the neighborhood room). But please, please, please put RP hooks in all of the room descs. Not just "it's a tavern, there's a pool table, a dart board, some tables and chairs, and a bar along one wall," but "it's a tavern, the bar has nicks and chips out of it, most of the pool cues have epoxied-over breaks in them, the wall around the dart board are almost as shredded as the board itself, and the tables and chairs look like they came from about a dozen different garage sales" (hey look, there are lots of bar fights here).

[faraday]

@seraphim73 said in Big city grids - likes and dislikes:

if you can't just walk into the room, and have to "teleport" in, it feels more private, and there's a barrier to entry. I think that our hobby would be better off with more scene code if we could get past this, but I don't know how to get past it.

Sometimes I feel like this is a no-win situation. If there's RP on the grid, some people are tentative about joining without an invitation. If there's RP in a scene room - even if it's got (OPEN) emblazoned all over it - some people are tentative about joining without an invitation. This is a people problem, not a tools problem, and I don't know how to get past it either. Maybe we can't, and just need to look at the other pros/cons and call the comfort zone/invitation problem a wash.

[Sunny]

I love the idea of the scenes code.

I think it should be implemented alongside a real grid, not instead of.

I am one of those players that needs an actual 'physical' grid for a variety of reasons that I have tried to explain until I am blue in the face, and I will not go into them again (as I'm uninterested in further thinly veiled insults directed towards my person in the form of 'anybody who likes this is stupid' that inevitably result).

But yes, people like me do exist, and while I am sure I would (and have) try games that use a new way of doing it, I inevitably wander away because I cannot find RP with the tools provided to me. It's not how my brain works. The virtual-physicalness of it matters to me.

[Seraphim73]

@sunny said in Big city grids - likes and dislikes:

I love the idea of the scenes code.

I think it should be implemented alongside a real grid, not instead of.

Yup! I love it too. And that's actually exactly what we tried to do on The Eighth Sea. We had about 30ish rooms (by the end) on the grid, but about 1/2 of them had pre-desced scene rooms that were ICly in that location that were listed below the room desc. Players were (of course) free to create their own scene rooms as well.

@faraday Yuuuuup. Totally agree. It's definitely a culture/people problem. Emblazoning "Open Scene" on open scenes is about as much as you can do from a tools perspective to help out.

[Coin]

@sunny said in Big city grids - likes and dislikes:

I love the idea of the scenes code.

I think it should be implemented alongside a real grid, not instead of.

I am one of those players that needs an actual 'physical' grid for a variety of reasons that I have tried to explain until I am blue in the face, and I will not go into them again (as I'm uninterested in further thinly veiled insults directed towards my person in the form of 'anybody who likes this is stupid' that inevitably result).

But yes, people like me do exist, and while I am sure I would (and have) try games that use a new way of doing it, I inevitably wander away because I cannot find RP with the tools provided to me. It's not how my brain works. The virtual-physicalness of it matters to me.

In something as absolutely linked to creativity as MUing is, it would be stupid to think only one way works for all people. Anyone arguing that "if you like a big grid you're stupid" is actually being really ignorant, since the immersion (however applicable to any one person) granted by a grid to some people might be a key factor in them being able to fully integrate into the game.

As a game dev, someone can definitely decide they don't want a grid, but they can't then turn around and go "all these people who don't come to my game because I don't have a grid are stupid" and expect people to take them seriously. If you want activity and players, you cater at least a little to their basic expectations and preferences, or you shut up and deal with the fact they don't wanna be around.

[Bad at Lurking]

I tend to like a compromise. Hub rooms to represent neighborhoods and then a few places each to represent places of interest. With exceptions for parks, hotels/housing, of course.

I do enjoy exploring a grid, but generally, I only do it once. And nobody else ever goes to that cool room with the ocean overlook unless they decide to build a house there.

[Coin]

@bad-at-lurking said in Big city grids - likes and dislikes:

I tend to like a compromise. Hub rooms to represent neighborhoods and then a few places each to represent places of interest. With exceptions for parks, hotels/housing, of course.

I do enjoy exploring a grid, but generally, I only do it once. And nobody else ever goes to that cool room with the ocean overlook unless they decide to build a house there.

I had a lot of fun (and suffered a lot, by turns) building Eldritch's grid. 30 rooms, one big, sprawling, metropolitan city including its suburbs and wildlife areas. The descs were sometimes poetic but always utilitarian and short by MU standards.

I'm glad @Thenomain has it all saved. Once I move and have a little income to spare I am considering gathering up a bunch of people to pay for a joint server with various ports where were can each set up games for whatever use we want.

[BobGoblin]

I personally like big city girls. They know how to work their goods.

[Sunny]

@bobgoblin

Please stop trolling in game development. I'm not a mod or anything, but I think folks would generally prefer that threads not get taken over by that sort of thing in this forum section.

[faraday]

@coin said in Big city grids - likes and dislikes:

it would be stupid to think only one way works for all people. Anyone arguing that "if you like a big grid you're stupid" is actually being really ignorant

Well, MSB is filled with people calling other people stupid for liking or not liking the particular style of play they prefer. I don't think that's excusable, but it's par for the course.

@sunny - For the record, I don't think anybody is stupid for liking a grid, I just honestly don't understand it. I accept it as a preference, I just don't get why it matters how you get to a scene. It's like somebody speaking a foreign language to me - it just doesn't compute. If that failure to grok has ever unintentionally come across as intolerant, my apologies.

From a purely practical (not preference) standpoint, the idea of a grid is an obstacle to new players understanding how the game works. I've heard this from a number of people, and also from my own experience trying to write a 'MUSH 101' tutorial and explain it. For example:

@wildbaboons said in How did you discover your last three MU* ?:

A few months ago I spent about half an hour with the help of half a dozen other people trying to help someone new to MUSHing (came from forum RP i think) to understand the concept of a room and grid. They never did figure it out before they decided it wasn't for them.

It's also a barrier to some of the more advanced web integrations. Ares lets you play from the web, for instance (not with the telnet-y MU client but with a dedicated scene page), but the seams between the web side and the game side are messy when the web side doesn't really have a concept of which room you're in.

So I personally think there's a bit more to the issue than just pure player preferences.

[Apos]

@faraday said in Big city grids - likes and dislikes:

@seraphim73 said in Big city grids - likes and dislikes:

if you can't just walk into the room, and have to "teleport" in, it feels more private, and there's a barrier to entry. I think that our hobby would be better off with more scene code if we could get past this, but I don't know how to get past it.

Sometimes I feel like this is a no-win situation. If there's RP on the grid, some people are tentative about joining without an invitation. If there's RP in a scene room - even if it's got (OPEN) emblazoned all over it - some people are tentative about joining without an invitation. This is a people problem, not a tools problem, and I don't know how to get past it either. Maybe we can't, and just need to look at the other pros/cons and call the comfort zone/invitation problem a wash.

When it comes to the feel of commands and immersion I think it is incredibly difficult to get it right. A single word choice in the output of functionally identical commands will make it popular or dead.