Arx: @clues

[Cobalt]

@saosmash said in Arx: @clues:

@shincashay I love the idea of theories in theory but it reminds me too much of homework when I try to actually do it and then I go lie down and nap instead. >.>

Yeah, I don't touch +theories. I'm sure this means I'm missing out on some information and important plotfoo... But if someone can't tell me what they think in a scene, but expect me to read a gigantic +theory ...

It's not going to happen. And writing one? No way.

I think I've read all of one theory, and it was stuff that I already mostly knew OOC but with some history I didn't know.

[Pyrephox]

Yeah. I don't /hate/ theories, but I have very little interest in writing them, and only slightly more interest in reading them. I also sort of worry about tying them to orgs, because at least in the main Faith branch (I know that some of the branch orgs are having...issues with being clue dump sites), I've tried to get people to keep it to historical 'Church facts' and lore about prayers, traditions, and customs that pretty much everyone as member of the Church should know, with very few truly 'secret' sort of clues. Although I probably should go through and see if I can prune it, because I haven't looked in a while. But those sorts of things don't really lend themselves well to theories, although I could make some generic 'practices of the Church' and 'History of the Church' ones.

[thesuntsar]

I utilize the @theories for the IG because we have several people in leadership positions and our times to play vary wildly. I've found them helpful for me to scan to get the gist of a situation my character might know about. I don't think they should replace any RP if at all possible, but it's nice to have a "report" for back up.

That said, I try to be brief because no one wants a 70 page novel of my rambling BS.

[Darinelle]

As a player I LOVE theories. They're what helps me pull together plot, @clues, RP I've done, and so on, and condense it into one readable form that gives context to a bunch of clues. Every clue I get now has background RP with it, and so it lets me share a coherent view of a particular item with someone. And it makes me think about what my character knows and believes and how this shapes her. It makes a huge difference.

That being said, I literally never just share clues without RP - same with theories. The only person who does this to me has such a woven story with my character that even the context of sharing a clue has RP behind it - and it's never just a clue dump.

If I could punch people who clue dump in the face I would. It's not nearly as helpful as you think it is. But a theory, about which they can then ask for clues as they need them, or go find the clues themselves, or have some kind of coherent idea? Yes. Yes that helps a new player more than just "here are a bunch of clues go make sense of them."

[Arkandel]

@darinelle said in Arx: @clues:

As a player I LOVE theories.

I haven't played on Arx in a long time so this might be different now, but what I didn't like about it was people theorycrafting over pages or channels, or even at times breaking into OOC conversations in the middle of RP to the detriment of actually playing the game.

This isn't a game-specific issue by any means. The same sometimes happens on Mage for example - players spend disproportionate amounts of time chatting about how spells A+B+C could do whatever than actually being on the grid doing IC things (or, hell, discussing the same things but as characters).

More to the point, I had ran into at least one person who simply wasn't interested in scenes which didn't promote that agenda. Are there no new +clues to be harvested from a scene since he knew everyone there who wasn't a newbie? He openly said there was 'no point' in being there and declined to join.

Obviously these might be solved or anecdotal issues, I wouldn't know.

[Pyrephox]

Another thing that should be mentioned - not having the AP to share a @clue never means that you can't share the /information/. All it means is that you can't share the proof at that moment - a scribe hasn't finished copying the journals, you're not in the right place to break out that old book or scrap of artifact, whatever. But that doesn't mean you have to put off someone who you want to know something - just tell them the information, and then share the @clue when you have time. Not having AP isn't ever really a good excuse for not telling something what they may need to know.

But we do sometimes need to thoughtfully consider what other people actually need to know, and it's not always "clue hording" to not widely share around clues that could have consequences. ICly, we've already seen a lot of people - mostly NPCs but some PCs - get killed or worse because PCs felt the need to blab about everything they know in public.

[Darinelle]

@arkandel We really step on that hard. I'm of the personal belief, having had it proven time and time again, that if you spend too much time talking about a particular plot OOCly then it never really makes it IC because you've explored all the avenues of thought already and never get it done.

I know this is still done in pages and in the never-damned-enough faction discords, usually to the detriment of the playerbase and usually with wildly incorrect theories, but where we CAN see it, we kick it hard.

[Three-Eyed Crow]

I'll confess a lack of interest in @theories as well. While I've read some good, comprehensive ones, I've also read some wild extrapolations that I know are wrong, and it seems like codifying what's essentially a PC's opinion in a way that seems more from-on-high approved than it actually is. I generally take what's shared and make my own conclusions and talk about them, right or wrong. Idk exactly how I'll feel about more clue weight being placed on them (especially for orgs that only have one or two clues that, while not at all confusing, aren't connected) but I'd roll with it.

[Cupcake]

I don't hoard clues, but man, but I have so many of them it is very hard to keep track of them all. It doesn't help that I can't group them in some kind of order of subject so I can create a linear narrative to read through.

[Cobalt]

I don't mean to have sounded so hyper critically of +theories. I think that the code and the work behind them is brilliant. I just don't like to read super long walls of text, and a lot of +theories I've gotten have been like information overload with long walls of text.

[Tehom]

It's a fair point that nobody wants to read walls of text - my inclination towards requiring theories was mostly to avoid the mass clue dump situations, which have been a problem ever since clue sharing has been in. I'm not really that concerned about how liberally clues are shared, but more about information overload being a very negative experience for those on the receiving end of clue dumps.

But if writing theories is too annoying for people, or the theories themselves are too verbose to feel good when receiving them, I should probably try to find some more lightweight rate-limiting deal.

[Cobalt]

@tehom You're pretty brilliant, but I'm not sure even you can code tl;dr into some of the verbose mofas in this hobby.

[Roz]

@arkandel said in Arx: @clues:

@darinelle said in Arx: @clues:

As a player I LOVE theories.

I haven't played on Arx in a long time so this might be different now, but what I didn't like about it was people theorycrafting over pages or channels, or even at times breaking into OOC conversations in the middle of RP to the detriment of actually playing the game.

Note that she's talking specifically about @theories code, which is IC, not conversational OOC theorycrafting.

[Arkandel]

@roz I know.

[Darinelle]

I am apparently a huge lore geek (I'll pause while y'all try to hold back your surprise) so the way I write my theories is generally with color-coded paragraph headings. If you read one of my theories, there are 3-4 lines with paragraphs that support each one, so you can easily scan a theory and see what it's about quickly, and then bore in for more detail.

I suspect that would work if we included some of that formatting in the description rather than just wall of text (which totally takes formatting things) but in the realm of "what we need coded" I'm not sure how high it is on the priority list, tbh.

[Bananerz]

@tehom said in Arx: @clues:

It's a fair point that nobody wants to read walls of text - my inclination towards requiring theories was mostly to avoid the mass clue dump situations, which have been a problem ever since clue sharing has been in. I'm not really that concerned about how liberally clues are shared, but more about information overload being a very negative experience for those on the receiving end of clue dumps.

But if writing theories is too annoying for people, or the theories themselves are too verbose to feel good when receiving them, I should probably try to find some more lightweight rate-limiting deal.

@theories/tldr <theory id #>=<280 character limit desc>

[Jeshin]

Theories can be very useful for characters that are briefing heads of houses and voices. ESPECIALLY if they have new players and bajillion clues and insufficient journal records to help them contextualize that information. What theories I have access to all come in at 1.5-2 pages long in a text editor but that's with titling and spacing since they're broken up into subjects and quickly run through information and summarize it.

[brent]

So I've had the King for pretty much a year now. I've got 66 clues, which probably puts me in the bottom quartile of Arx players. (minor anecdote: over 10% of them came from a deal where somebody was like "come to my thing!", and I was like "okay I will come to your thing!" because I try to say yes to that as much as possible when people ask, and when I got to the thing it turned out to be basically a @clue-sharing meeting, and I was like lol I have zero actual @clues to share on this meeting topic, and a much of people were like yay! I get to help the king!, and then I got a bunch of clues about semirandom stuff, the end. Anyhoo)

I would say for me, theories and RP about them are way more important than the clues. I don't need to get lost in the weeds, I need the Big Picture more than anything. And the Big Picture doesn't come from clues; the clues are too zoomed-in on the details. I do feel I'm swimming a bit against the common player cultural stream on this one; some people are a lot more than others when I'm OOCly like 'yeah, I don't have any @clues about this stuff, sorry!' in an IC discussion about Game Topics and such.

I think the big thing about @clues is that, despite the name, the great majority of them are not discrete clues in the "Mr. Boddy was killed in the conservatory" sense. They are little vignettes, fragments of bigger documents, accounts, events, and such. This makes them pretty cool to read and collect, but what this also means is the point of them is to include lots of extra world details as much as the actual hint the original investigation was trying to get. Moreover, once they exist on their own to be shared about the context, circumstance, and so on of that original investigation is generally lost. And then all these factors put together leaves you with this old RPG saw in semi-fresh memetic form:

Now take a big pile of self-service @org clues (or any sort of bulk @clue dumping, really) and you get this times 50.

[OldFrightful]

Theories are tricky. I've written concise ones that (I feel) relay all the relevant information, which tend to result in anyone who reads it having 4-5 questions - which in turn kind of defeats the point of a theory for me, because I'm already doing 2 to 5 scenes a night and don't really have the AP or time to share clues and fill in the blanks for everyone. A lot of people don't like the longer ones. I've taken to just writing my theories out as lectures and arranging events to talk about them/get people to chain share the clues and that works pretty okay for my usual purposes.

I'm definitely apprehensive over the idea of tying them to org briefings, since there's no guarantee the person writing the theory will actually have sensible context in the first place. There are some BIZARRE ideas floating around out there, and no werewolves are not the solution to every plot in the game please gosh leave werewolves alone leave them alooooone.

I don't think there's a really good way to contextualize clue briefings, but I think it would help if there were more organizational tools for it.

Moreover, once they exist on their own to be shared about the context, circumstance, and so on of that original investigation is generally lost. And then all these factors put together leaves you with this old RPG saw in semi-fresh memetic form:

Also this, a lot. I'm pretty concerned with the 'rumor' system they've been talking about (being able to get clues lots of other characters have) since there's definitely no context coming with those.

Addendum: I really think someone should kill the heck out of the briefing perm and make it rank 2+ or 3+ only. I also don't think it would be a bad thing if briefings were removed entirely. Cool idea, great in moderation, not super practical.

[Darinelle]

@brent I see you've met Tolamar Brand, the big bad guy of Season 1, who began life as a minor detail in the middle of some other information entirely but the players Just. Couldn't. Quit. Him.