Posts made by surreality

Idelle just might be my hero.

(Edit: Seriously, who one of my alts at least is will be zero mystery after that based on PB alone.)

@Rook said in Strange Game Dev Inquiries from surreality (condensed):

Clearly they have had some idiots -cause- them to have to have this length of policy, damn.

Despite the dearly loved 'don't make us care about your TS' files and policies on Reno1, there were some people on the game, including some staff, who could not for the life of them leave the subject alone... ever.

As in, that is a warning to staff, too, that nosing into these things is absolutely not in any way OK.

(All of my writing about everything is pretty wordy. At some point in beta I will probably hand out cookies to folks for helping trim things down to something more concise where possible.)

@kitteh said in Strange Game Dev Inquiries from surreality (condensed):

@surreality It doesn't need to autosubmit, but for example something like what BSGU or some of the comic games have that can at least spit back out the scene without need for further cleaning. I'm aware you can do some of this in a client, but there's inevitably stuff it misses.

Something like that could definitely be looked into, yeah. I didn't know there were any that would do that; that could work.

@surreality said in Strange Game Dev Inquiries from surreality (condensed):

there are some areas of the grid that WILL be labeled NC17 by default

It makes more sense, and I highly approve of this. I've played my share of brothel workers etc, and at locations like this it makes sense that you'll have some degree of public sexuality. I'm thinking of any scene at the brothel in Black Sails, for instance. There's basically never a shot that doesn't have a boob in it, and people may be in laps, but people probably aren't straight-up fucking on the tables... most of the time.

Pretty much that. I have, too. They're often a lot of fun.

There will be a brothel specializing in, uh, 'the unusual', so mermaid prostitutes ahoy, mateys. Seriously, if this wasn't on the grid within a week of open I would have been stunned anyway, but I think it'd do best as an NPC-run 'open to anyone' faction, per the examples from earlier in the thread. If somebody wants to take that on as their PC to run it under those terms that's doubly awesome.

It's actually fascinating how much NOT TS these characters do on a lot of games that people rarely suspect. It's their job. Do you spend all of your free time doing what you do for your job? NAWP. Sometimes when I want to make a character that doesn't RP TS often I'll go this route, for that very reason. (Edit: Because... most people offscreen most of their dayjob on games anyway.)

@Arkandel said in Strange Game Dev Inquiries from surreality (condensed):

2. I think long policies in general attract idiots who try to find the loophole. "Don't be an asshole" should about cover it.

We have a policy for that, too.

We have tried 'don't be an asshole' in the hobby and it's my sincere feeling that it doesn't work.

Maybe for some, but everyone has a vastly different idea of what being a dick is, and even among the most respectfully-intentioned people, the difference in culture from one style of game to another can vary enormously.

On some games, if the door isn't locked, you can go right in and involve yourself, and anyone objecting to this is considered the asshole -- not the person who just walked into your bedroom. This is one of countless potential issues that even people with absolutely no nasty intent can (in this case literally) stumble into.

It's better to tell people what's not OK than expect people to just know, I think. There are very reasonable causes for folks to not know, and it's unfair of us (collectively) to expect that everyone is going to be on the same page about it by osmosis.

@Three-Eyed-Crow That's two, really. First bit down to 'resolution' is what displays normally. The rest is under 'additional notes', aka 'if that was not clear enough for people, click here, and here's where we get really blunt in spelling things out in greater depth', pretty much.

...as a double-post addendum to that, there are some areas of the grid that WILL be labeled NC17 by default, where folks should feel comfortable writing things like this and really should not be objecting to them in the same way you wouldn't go into a strip club on a WoD game and bitch up a storm if someone was posing a strip tease.

There will be brothels on grid. It would be absurd to not have more sexually-charged if not outright NSFW content going on in the public areas of a brothel.

...am I going to need to put up warning labels on the exits for these? I am hoping not, but I will if I have to.

This is our 'do not be a douche about TS' file:

• The common sense clause: If you want to keep it private, actually keep it reasonably private. The bigger a show you make of it OOC, the more people may react.
• TS is allowed in private areas of the grid. Don't TS in public areas. (If you ''absolutely have to bang the waitress on the bar after closing time'', make a +temproom for it. We know people do things like this in the real world and there's no reason characters in a game wouldn't do the same. Just use your common sense and be realistic about it.)
• Do not ask staff to care about who is or is not TSing who. It's not our business, and it's not yours, either, unless you're one of the people actively involved in writing the adult content in that specific scene.

Resolution: Staff will remind you this is not high school, and if you continue to behave like it is high school, you'll quickly find yourself expelled. We make no apologies for having no patience with this behavior whatsoever.

Sexual subject matter and relationship-based roleplay is expressly allowed on this game, within the rules outlined in policy. I'll sum up: no child porn, consent is required for sexual themes, don't spy on people no matter who you are, don't TS the staff NPCs -- you know, the things that should constitute the usual common sense.

This doesn't stop it from generating mountains of needless drama. Let's not do that.

We ask: please don't ask staff (or anyone else) to care about anyone's TS. Please don't involve staff in your relationship drama, psychosexual exploits, real world relationship troubles, or those of others.

• We do not care that that other group over there is just TSing all the time. Guess what -- if they're enjoying themselves and not breaking any rules, we don't care.
• We do not care that JohnnyBones said he'd be SuzySweetheart's true love for all times then went and got his knob polished by SallySuckmistress. Don't bring us this kind of thing, because we don't care.
• "OMG HarryHardon is such a TS character!" So long as HarryHardon was built legit and isn't breaking any rules, we don't care.
• "Those two only ever spend time in their private room! You know what they're doing in there!!!" Hey, guess what? We don't care.
• "He promised he'd stay away from that bitch!" We don't care.
• "That bastard is TSing my real world girlfriend!" We don't care.
• "I don't think a ThisSplat would ever date a ThatSplat! DO SOMETHING!!!" We still don't care.

If it's going on behind closed doors and is not against the rules, we don't care. Don't ask us to care. This likely is not even your business, let alone ours.

(It's hard to get clearer than that, I think, about how little TS drama will be tolerated, I think.)

@kitteh Not yet, and I'm not especially inclined toward it.

There may be one, but to set up the XP stuff, people would have to fill out the form and check off the relevant stuff for their scene anyway. We are not reading everyone's logs and filling it out for them after the fact; that is something people have to do for themselves, so there's some honor system here, but we're not taking on the workload of reading every log submitted to the game to check them over to see if they fit stuff. It should be as easy as cut and paste into the template like a lot of games use for submitted logs, with a few extra checkboxes that will do all the math and calculate stuff for everyone to make things easier on everybody. (Less math, always win.

We may be able to set up a logger, but I think it may not be feasible with the setup unless an SQL genius is handy to tinker something up to work with the proper templates.

@Roz I don't think it's weird if people post it, which is why I proactively am saying: yeah, people are absolutely permitted to post this if they want and nobody's allowed to give them shit for it. I haven't seen it as something common on any game I've played on, though, which is why it seemed like it needed saying, since it's specifically addressing all the various downtime stuff folks do.

Most of what I've seen tagged NSFW is someone stripping at a bar in the background, someone snorting cocaine off of someone's breast or backside, or a mention of prostitution or something with a FTB other than the two examples cited. Considering some of the inspiration material? You pretty much can't get through an episode of Black Sails without an NC17 incident or two that goes well beyond what I've seen as the MUX posted log norm, and I'd actually strongly recommend Harlots on hulu for a glimpse at the inner workings of brothels around that time in much more civilized areas by contrast, which goes even further. Maybe this is TMI, but I certainly haven't seen anything remotely as explicit as the kind of things I've written ever show up on a wiki, either. That's not to say it hasn't, it's just that if it has, it's not on a game I've played on or have been reading logs from.

@Roz I genuinely don't care if people post it -- and would smite as needed if people were given crap in any way for doing so -- but I've never actually been on a game where posting it was at all commonplace. I have actually only ever seen it happen at all twice, once on TR and once on FC; the latter was a summary thing like what's mentioned I'd expect might be more common.

I would not feel personally comfortable posting more than a summary unless it was very tame and supremely relevant to story stuff, and even that I can't say I'd be comfortable entirely. Maybe not at all. And I have this really bad habit of interrupting TS with plot questions or some kind of serious something-or-other on the regular. (All those people who derail every scene to TS? I am like, their Bizarro mirror universe person, or something. It's not even intentional, but it is pretty funny.)

People's comfort zones vary, so there's no chance in hell I'd require this of people.

I more or less feel I've done my part in terms of playing bullet sponge to this particular issue in the hobby in the early days of the charge. I am totally the dude from Haven on this one that is the bullet magnet. In ye olden days, the amount of abuse I took for simply saying, "I do this and see nothing wrong with it," was more than enough to leave a mark, even if people have pulled their heads from their respective asses considerably since. (Seriously, in this very thread someone trolling from Shang is chasing down posts, and was flicking one of the ones in Random Bitching the other night on and off on the upvote thing so much it was visibly flickering between 1 and 0 back and forth for about a minute, probably hoping to have a zillion notifications pop up. I am definitely done with the role of bullet sponge in that regard.) RL has been worse than the hobby by miles on this front in ways 1) too personal for this board that aren't anyone's business and 2) would be a huge derail.

Even beyond that, I'm pretty private about those things, and always have been.

I don't feel I need to post logs of adult stuff to prove anything or make a stand; the right to do something in peace and without hassle or abuse includes the right choose to share it publicly or RP it privately without sharing with the crowd, too, without having to justify that choice to anyone, either.

@Ghost I actually figure that if people post those they'll likely, uh, just summarize those bits or ftb that out and fade back in for content but I made the NSFW tag thing just in case.

It is literally:

{{NSFW|<block of text goes here>}} <-- and then it turns into a little collapsible section that's hidden by default with a 'NSFW content under here' sort of thing.

...if people feel like putting it up there. (I may still just reflexively siteban anybody who doesn't edit that shit if it's all written in second person, though, 'cause nnnngh. THIS IS NOT THE KIND OF LOG ENTRY WE WANT HERE NOOOO. Ahem.)

But yeah, that's kinda the thing. It's a means of giving people something to do other than just OOC chat or randomly hook up between events, mostly, and make it count and matter. Encourages people to run things that give people some IC 'homework' in some ways as well, past the scene itself. Adds to the world.

It's sort of a carrot toward the 'teach a bunch of typists to fish' vs. 'give a bunch of typists a fish' approach. The game needs both but I don't see enough encouragement of the former and that's something I want to work on. Sometimes, really neat things evolve out of what begins as a casual scene that lead to very intense plot-story-etc. People just have to get out there and do stuff a little to even give that a chance to occur organically. Incentivizing 'get your butts on grid and do stuff!' will hopefully help enable that.

@Ominous ...that sounds incredibly neat. If you find out what that actually is I am tempted to look for it.

@Arkandel Jesus, that. All the fuck that.

I have a 'don't break the toys without permission' general standard that applies to major named NPCs flagged 'no killing off without asking plz', and things like 'do not have a major national power invade and overrun the island without consulting staff plz' -- but this is like that common sense 'don't set off a nuke on the grid and atomize everyone and everyone's everything' rule. (The named NPCs thing is because that's a toy in the box everybody's supposed to be able to share, and it sucks when somebody just goes around breaking all the toys in the room.)

You want an island whale to lurk nearby and get smote or try to hump the lighthouse? Have at. Legion of nightmare fuel looming up from the deep to kidnap random townsfolk to turn into appetizers? Go for it.

Some stuff, yes, people will have to ask. "I'm in the Spanish Armada faction so I decided to have Spain take over the island because whynot, there's a flag and everything!" isn't going to fly without cause. (See Black Sails for quite a few examples of cause, though.)

@Seraphim73 There are actually some things to do just that, or that have the potential to do so. This is a bit of a sidenote but it's one I think is worth mention.

Some folks are 'call me when it's time to go bust heads' folks, or 'call me when it's time for the political meeting' folks, and that's fine. That's the crowd that needs the structured events a little more, since that's what they're looking for.

Me? All RP has value, so far as I'm concerned. This includes making use of downtime for RP, rather than just idling in rooms to chat on channels or seeking boredom TS. (Boredom TS is fine, too, obviously, if it's somebody's choice rather than 'there's nothing else to do, may as well, I guess'.)

I do not believe in considering downtime between formally organized PrPs, plots, or even pickup GM'd scenes to be 'lesser'. A lot of times, this is where people find a great deal of organic back and forth (...with or without the boredom TS... <rimshot>) that helps people develop their characters, get into their heads, and let the "reality" of events in the game world sink in. This includes scenes like dressing wounds after a battle, discussing how some things worked and others didn't in IC terms, going off drinking to celebrate a particular victory, reuniting with a long-lost family member that finally arrived in the area, and so on -- all of these scenes can have a major impact on the characters involved.

Some folks have no interest in scenes like this, and that's OK. Other folks practically live for scenes like this and enjoy them considerably more than the bouts of cinematic action, and that's OK, too.

Most games don't place much, if any, value on scenes in that second category at all, and base everything on how much someone is or isn't risking under the eye of a GM. Risk is definitely a factor -- but it's a factor, it shouldn't be the only factor that matters.

What matters should be: does this add something to the story of the game somehow?

So there are a number of incentives designed to kick in whenever someone submits a log; the form to submit the logs to the wiki has stuff to handle this (or will; if I can do it for CoD I can do it for this much more easily). XP for downtime scenes is a thing if they qualify for those incentives. It gives people a reason to do something in that downtime other than just chatter OOC or 'oh, well, may as well just write something sticky'.

The incentives are focused on things that are value-adds to the game in some fashion; there are additional ones for risk and events and such but these apply to absolutely any log posted•:

• The log applies to one or more game themes (checkboxes for which apply; these will be linked on that theme's info page so people can see what is going on in game related to that theme in play and how people are interpreting it)
• The log discusses events from an ongoing plot or recent PrP (add the name for either in an autofill box; it will link up that log to the plot or PrP page so people can see the ripples of the event/plot/etc. are spreading; the GM for the plot or PrP also gets a minor XP kickback for this, because not only did they create a scene, they created something that gave people something to RP about even beyond the confines of that scene; this also encourages side plots to grow from out of these logs)
• Discussion/investigation/exploration of/references to the lore/urban legends
• Is using public gridspace/hangout locations

There are a few more, though I'd need to double-check the list for the specifics (and the insomnia is winning on the clarity factor). There will also be things like a weekly legend or a monthly theme that gets an extra smidgen of a bonus, usually in the run up to something being planned around that theme. (And it's fine for players to request these if they're planning a public PrP around either or both, because then everyone involves wins, which... everybody involved wins, not seeing a downside here. )

• Yes, including NSFW content, if for some reason people want to post that. There are NSFW censor things people can use for this similar to the wiki spoiler template I posted a ways back in one of the help forums. There are a few common sense exceptions to this: no rape on the wiki, no child sex on the game period so obviously it should never be in a log, etc.

@Seraphim73 Metaplot is not a thing. There will be staff-run 'seasonal' plots as are discussed a bit more in depth in @tragedyjones's thread (er, one of the recent ones), but no single core metaplot.

There's a reality regarding how the world works; if people push certain buttons, the world will respond in a variety of ways. That may inspire anything from a monster of the week to a season plot, really, but the idea of one sweeping, over-arching metaplot to rule them all is one I stringently avoid.

That's writing a story and expecting people to play along.

Better, IMHO, is to make something that responds to what the people do effectively.

@Three-Eyed-Crow said in Which canon property/setting would be good for a MU* ?:

Is that what every person who starts a MU wants? No, though I'm not sure why. Big games are filled with terribad. Small ones are harder to sustain, but I find them a hell of a lot more rewarding to play when I hit on one that sticks.

I agree with this so much.

In the earlyish days of Reno1, it was about that size. It was just small enough that people had to more or less behave themselves and cooperate (containing their drama and nonsense) if they wanted to have anything to do.

It was amazing how effective 'we're small' was at keeping people civil, and that's in addition to the workload and plot stuff.

My cats are lazy and cowardly. I am reasonably sure the only ass they could kick would be each others', if they had the nerve to find out beyond the occasional hilarious round of rock-'em-sock-'em robots they go through whenever they meet on the stairs. (After which they run and hide for at least an hour.)

We adopted them as adults, and have no idea what on earth their former owners were like.

Probably, assholes. We were told the one was not really friendly (and she's always on the back of my chair if I'm in the chair) and the other we were told was absolutely not a people cat, and would barely let anyone pet her, let alone pick her up, she'd never sleep on the bed, etc. She is, of course, the one that prances down the hall like a Disney princess singing trills at us until she can race up to us and headbonk the dickens out of us until we pick her up.

I have no idea what on earth their previous owners did, but I would kinda like to kick them in the shins more than just a little.

@Cupcake I getcha, and definitely.

At first I was like... 'wait, was there some scandal involving The Rock and cats? Do I need to google a thing here? Do I need to check facebook about something because I know it'll be there but I really hate checking facebook ever for anything... '

@Ganymede I'm looking at options for that. That gets the little hand-wiggle gesture tipping back and forth. If there's a feasible, reasonable, low maintenance for all parties way of going about it that doesn't require a landslide of code and micromanagement, I'd like to.

There are skills and tasks, for instance, set up for cultivation of various sorts that I think would key into this very well, and could encourage building and development of neat and/or original and interesting areas. (I am an old school grid person. I like sprawl with weird nooks and crannies.) At the same time, I don't want folks just building things to get the equivalent of free bennies out of the deal.

I also don't want to turn it into a grind.

Thematically, resources of various kinds and scarcity are very relevant to the setting. The task I know everyone will immediately mock the crap out of, for instance, is 'find water' under the survival skill, despite the fact that it's literally the #1 survival skill noted in every 'how to not die if stuck somewhere inhospitable' guide ever written, and the entire grid more or less counts as such. Running out of fresh water without means of acquiring it was absolutely a ship killer as much as any cannon fire, as an example, and people trying to establish plantations or settlements on islands surrounded by sea water are absolutely going to need wells and irrigation and similar. (On some things, system-wise, I want to try to avoid going off into the weeds, but that one specifically is relevant enough to the realities of the setting that it's getting included.)

That said, I wouldn't make an issue of it directly in terms of 'how much water do you have access to' unless something in the IC story side of things warranted it -- for example, if someone's ship was adrift thrice as long as they planned for, or if someone was settling a camp and setting up a plantation on completely undeveloped land, yeah, somebody's going to have to roll that eventually and 'we might actually die' is an IC reality for people to have real concerns about. Would I ever demand a group all actually die and lose their characters from that? Uh, no. But IC, it's something the characters would have on their minds and have real cause for concern about.

The whole economy/commodity economy issue isn't something that would be player-created and managed in quite the same way as the things I'm describing, though, beyond, say, someone crafting items for sale or trade. I'm tackling forms for the input of stuff like the above and skills primarily at the moment, so those skill-focused things (crafting/etc.) are being considered in those terms first.

I have no desire to turn the place into something more MUD-like, where people need to mine X amount of gold before they can make a ring to sell, and similar things. By the same token, a farm is only going to produce so much of whatever it's growing, regardless of how many rolls somebody does.

The most likely thing will be a trait people can buy that accounts for 'what is the maximum productivity of my holdings in X', and people can put in rolls to see how much of X the get out of it every <interval>.

There's a huge issue, though, and it is... there is no overstating the hugeness of it. It's 1715. People are considered to be a commodity in this period in a variety of very not-remotely-OK ways. That... yeeeeeeeeah, that's going to require some very hard looking at. I refuse to handwave the ugly reality of that out of the world itself, but I'm coming down pretty hard on the side of 'there are some commodities we will not be using for trade here' on that front.

@Arkandel Well, ideally, I would have about two to three of these going at any given time. Start one, let it build steam. About halfway through it or maybe 2/3, start seeding for the next, and so on, with one always overlapping the tail of the former. That's essentially what any given television series tends to do: aftermath or tail end of the previous season is handled in the first quarter or so of the season, you have your current primary season plot ramping up as that one ends, after you hit a few major dramatic points and are closing in on some heavy duty action in the current season, you start to see threads of what's to come next season.

(Again, Black Sails is so beyond brilliant with this it's a mind-blower. Probably also why a lot of folks think of it as a slow starter; there's no overlap in the initial few episodes as there is in later seasons.)

• Picking this back up.

• Leaving all the stuff where it is so people have full history so they can decide for themselves if all the things are horrible or I'm evil or whatever else. The thread's history is the thread's history; the record is the record. It's relevant to some folks and I'm not going to fuck with that.

• Please try to re-rail and divert tangents to tangent spaces.

• Please look at what is actually presented, not what you're afraid might be the case.

• If you're afraid something might be the case, please ask before slinging shit at your assumptions or fears and trying to hit me in the face with it in the process. You'll get the most straightforward answer, even if it's brief, available.

• Sometimes that answer will be "I don't know yet./I haven't decided yet."

• I am not going to get into the weeds of a lot of detail yet. There's plenty, but it takes a lot of time to put that into the game and the wiki as it is, so putting it here before it's ready is not helpful to anyone: you don't get the full picture and the full picture becoming available to anyone gets bogged down if not stalled out entirely.

• I am probably going to ignore the standard doomsayings and wishlist-demand stuff on the whole as best I can.

• I'm interested in doing a number of things differently. Some of those things address a number of the wishlist and doomsaying things; in a lot of ways the game is an experiment designed to see if the over all approach works.

• No, I don't know if it will work. I do think it's worth finding out. If you don't, that's OK, too.

There is, actually, a reason I'm asking the stuff I'm asking now, rather than earlier or later. It ties in pretty directly to the 'doing things differently' approach I have in mind and also to the question I want to ask.

I am looking to create a cooperative, collaborative environment on the game. This means, in part, that the 'final tiny details' bit isn't actually a thing, but is intended to be an ongoing process on the game while it's running. As in, the game world is meant to be organic, and to grow with player contributions in a more direct way than is normally the case.

All info that is not required to ensure player privacy (IPs, alts, complaints, personal info, email, etc.) or related to the resolution of currently running plots (read: the 'here's the list of ways to resolve this' final chapter of any given game module) is public. Sheets are public and on wiki. (This means the sheet's page histories, along with who adjusted what and when, are also 100% visible to players and visitors alike, not just staff and the individual charobj; if anybody is up to some funny business in that regard, it's exposed to the whole world.)

This means:

• Players have access to all the same information about the world and how it works as staff. No 'staff only' secrets (save for that 'last chapter of the module' note above; this applies to player plots as well!) that could prevent players from being able to run something "because it would interfere with that thing we can't tell you about" (that sucks for everyone).

• It gives players the tools to construct things that really do fit the game world in a consistent way. No WoD-style 'and this is how this splat thinks it happened... ' over and over with no clarification as to what really happened. This gets problematic because it doesn't give much of a guide as to how to handle the inherent contradictions; that's handled. Each group has its own ideas, but that's for the characters to believe IC. Players get the tools to know the real scoop, and that gives people a better ability to make things -- be it a character, build, new power, urban legend, etc. -- that don't break things.

• ...and this is important because players will be able to add things like that. Some at any time, some at specific times. Custom content powers will have submission periods, for instance, but new build areas (even as 'I think it would be neat for there to be a... ' projects people wish to take on) or creative interpretations of events or creatures in the game world can be added as lore at any time, to serve as plot seeds or shared resources for the entire game.

• This means that no matter what skill a player has, they are able to do something to contribute if they want to. This is something usually reserved for staff, and while staff would need to check things over with a glance to make sure nothing breaks? It's something valuable. It is awesome to see the things you made being enjoyed, and that's a privilege players absolutely should be able to share in as much as possible. People want to have an impact on the game. Opening up new avenues of doing so creates options beyond the usual 'blow shit up if anyone lets me, which usually they won't' by letting people create, too.

• Recognizes that there aren't only some talents that are valued as contributions to the community of the game. Someone may not be comfortable enough with the rules to run a plot or a monster-of-the-week style event, but they may have a brilliant idea for one they can add to the game's lore, or to the list of random weird creatures -- which in turn can inspire a scene runner to pick up that idea and run with it when they're looking for something to do. Again: cooperative, and collaborative. Let people use their strengths, whatever those strengths are; recognize their value.

I think of this in terms of 'toys'.
The grid is a toy. Creatures are toys. Story seeds (lore) are toys. Powers are toys.
Any given game is, essentially, a toy room with some rules to keep the peace and prevent people from pulling each other's hair or doing all of the other things we learned as far back as kindergarten were Not Nice and Equally Unnecessary.

I'm interested in the OOC side of the game also functioning as something of a toy workshop, where people can make contributions to the game world over time. This shapes the ultimate direction of the game a lot, and it's based on what people are actually interested in, not what people guess players might be interested in from staff side, or from a random poll question or bbpost every so often. (It also means... there's no 'final polish' point to ask some of these questions.) Part of the fun, here, is intended to be in being able to take part in the game's ongoing creation more directly than is currently the norm, and sharing the new toys (ideas) that emerge along the way to create an engaging, entertaining, and fun story for those who want to participate with those things.

Currently, the tools set up or in the works for this include:

• Lore: Look at something in the game mechanics, world cosmology, history, etc. and come up with an urban legend, sighting, 'historical account', or similar thing regarding that thing, with a twist of some kind. It can be a very realistic interpretation, or it can be a complete hoax. It can be the sighting of a whale that someone mistakes for a sea monster, or the corpse of a giant squid washing ashore that is clearly a sign that the Kraken is real (we get these today, still, after all), or similar twist that someone can use as a story seed or incorporate into a plot. Others can then add further 'accounts' -- from their own dealings as a PC, or from fictional NPCs -- to enhance the story, call it out as clearly bunk (whether it is or not), and so on.

• New Build Areas: "Why don't we have a creepy skull island? We should have a creepy skull island!" OK! Suggest it. Either run with it and build it, or get some folks together interested in doing so. You don't have to own it or run it; if you think it's something that would be cool to add and explore and fun for yourself or others and it fits the setting? You are welcome to build that thing. "Why don't we have a... " is a problem everybody can have a part in solving if they want that thing and it makes sense.

• New Traits and Powers: These get submission windows, because they're grindier to examine. Guidelines for how the various powers and so on balance and are set up cost-wise/etc. will be available for folks to work from. (This is why one of the first questions was a general call for ideas like this; I want to have a good sampling of them up and running from the start not just as options, but as examples.)

• NPCs: That guy that keeps coming up as a random reference at the last stool in the tavern? That baker who you mention every time you're in the market? That gossipy barmaid? Write up a little blurb on them on the wiki. Let others use them. This helps sustain the game's consistency when everybody knows who Molly the Loudmouth barmaid is, etc. (These aren't the same as things like retainers and so on in WoD that you 'own'. You can obviously write those up, too, but these are NPCs for people to share on the game and use as/when needed, or to potentially use as a redshirt/roster 'extra' for a scene.)

• Factions: Players can absolutely create their own factions in game. These can be families, secret orders of this-or-that, a private militia, a pirate crew, etc. and manage them as they see fit. (Staff-run ones will be present that will accept all interested parties, player-run ones can be invite only if they want, etc.; any major political organization ex: British Navy, Spanish Armada, French Nobility will be staff-led factions as they should be open to all, but players are welcome to build a specific crew of a ship in either as a player-run faction without stress within that sort of organization.)

• Shared Timeline: Still being tinkered with codewise, but a shared timeline for the game. Players can add information about their own histories (or the histories of the elements above they've created) for this, to create a shared timeline of events. Logs will show up by date within the timeline, including cutscenes and backstory logs.

• Equipment and Widgets and McGuffins: Pretty much what it says on the tin. Adding standard, existing items from the period that aren't extraordinarily obscure isn't much of an issue. (Impossible tech, is, however, out. First person to pitch a mobile phone gets a temp ban so I can prove I'm a petty tyrant.) Weird, enchanted, magical relic, or similar items aren't out of the question but the guidelines for them and their creation are still in the works. Crafting will be a thing, see the previous re: guidelines.

• Old-School Ambience Emits: These have fallen out of favor (sometimes for a reason when they're horrible or overdone), but I'm using them. Some are simple things people can turn off like weather or time of day and so on. Others are something a little more complex and intent on specifically adding something cool as story-food to the game: a haunting that happens in a room every night at 3am, a ghost ship that's sighted from port every night in January, a ghostly procession climbing the mountainside carrying torches on a special night of the year that's long been rumored. Simple things to throw into a randomizer on a public build or complex ones to tell part of a story or add to a plot are welcome. Want to write up something that reinforces a lore element or plot? Go for it.

PrPs, one-off events, rumors, and business or residence builds are a given. (And there are probably some of these I am forgetting.)

Player XP incentives will be granted for contributions of these kinds because they all add something to the game -- they become new toys in the toy room for people to share, play with, and enjoy. (Amounts still in the figuring. XP is also a different sort of thing; not going to discuss it right now; too big a derail.)

I get that a lot of people probably think this is ridiculous and will not work, is a dumb idea, or does not sound at all interesting or worthwhile. That's OK; I'm going to do it anyway.

Question: are there other aspects of a game you have wanted to see opened up to input this way? Small or large. Sometimes something that seems incredibly trivial at first can wind up adding great value to a game in the long run.

Question: while all of these things have a variety of options, are there any specific options you'd like to see included for any of those listed above?