Best posts made by Tat

About Spirit Lake   ·   World Intro  ·   Policies  ·   Join Us  ·   Why Beta?

Set in the tiny Colorado town of Grand Lake, Spirit Lake is a game that explores what happens when magic re-enters the world. Grand Lake has long been known as the gateway to the Rockies. It turns out that it's also a gateway to other worlds. Portals have begun to open nearby, letting humans cross into other worlds - and letting things from those worlds cross into ours. At the same time, some have found themselves gifted with inexplicable powers that they don't understand and don't know how to control. Abruptly, the world is magical again.

Inspired by a host of modern fantasy and bump-in-the-dark sources such as The Magicians, Twin Peaks, and Stranger Things, Spirit Lake has its roots in stories about small towns beset by mystery, magic, and myths come to life

Characters can learn spells, find books, explore worlds, meet creatures, and uncover mysteries.

OOCly, Spirit Lake is about collaborative discovery and creating a world through play. Players are actively encouraged to run plots, write spells, create magical worlds, and invent creatures. We will build the world as we play in it, and we look forward to the surprises that lay in wait.

Spirit Lake is built in Ares and uses a modified version of @faraday's FS3 system for combat and spellcasting. After a fall spent Alpha testing (and many, many months spent developing), we are finally ready for open Beta.

Log-in and character creation will be turned on Wednesday, January 9. We hope to see you there!

Faraday once spent three days helping me debug a problem that ended up being a stupid server issue that had nothing at all to do with code. And when I say three days, I mean HOURS and HOURS over the course of three days. I definitely remember feeling like it consumed entire days.

She didn't know me at all beyond some passing forum conversations at the time. She's just that invested in helping people run stuff.

I can't even count the number of hours she's put in to helping me learn the ins and outs of everything Ares, starting from the existence of helpers all the way up to digging into javascript on the portal. I've never asked her a question and not gotten help - and I've asked her a LOT of questions.

I've watched the web portal on Ares go from 'hey this is kind of cool' to 'this is insanely revolutionary', mostly because she keeps listening to what people wish they could do, and making it happen. At a ridiculous pace, mind.

Faraday is a gift I'm not sure this community deserves, but I'm sure glad we've got her.

@A-B said in Spirit Lake - Discussion:

Hi, I'm trying to get in touch with a Spirit Lake staff member - I can't contact them through the MUSH system itself, for reasons connected with why I'm trying to contact them in the first place, and I haven't been able to locate any other contact details for them anywhere on the website. Can somebody contact me by chat? (I sent a chat message to Tat a couple of days ago but haven't had any reply - maybe e didn't see it.)

Hi, I'm going to be brief here, since a few people have brought this to my attention (I am an occasional, but not regular, visitor to MSB).

I wasn't active online when you were banned as a guest, but it was pretty clear why. There's no need to re-hash it here; I'll simply say that there are plenty of games out there, and we wish you well in finding one that is a good fit for what you want.

But please don't track me or any other staff member down across other platforms. It's creepy and just not nice. If your behavior on game wasn't enough to enforce the ban (it was), then doing this would be.

This player had also picked up a roster on Spirit Lake. Thanks to folks who shared info about him - after getting the new Ares security upgrades in, he's been banned from us as well.

His behavior on our game never crossed a line (that we knew of), but given what we've seen from him from people I know and trust, we're not willing to give him that chance.

@silverfox said in Getting Young Blood Into MU*'ing:

Regardless: Totally not trying to shovel shit. I'd gotten the misunderstanding that the main strength of the web portal was to allow for those longer scenes as people were able to pose. I didn't realize it was generally used almost as a replacement client. My bad.

It's kind of hard to really get how transformational something like the scene system and the Ares web portal really is to the M*ing experience until you play with it. I feel like I was a solid 6 months in before I stopped regularly exclaiming over something - and I still do it on occasion.

A system like this has several main benefits, but by far the biggest one is the freedom from the need for a constant, active telnet connection, and the correlation of that connection to a single character bit.

Last night I was in a scene that went late, and when we decided to pause, I just closed my client and went to bed. This morning, the whole scene is still there, waiting for me. I can recall it in my client, or read it on the web portal.

I have small kids, and I often write up set poses for things I'm GMing that night during the day. On a persistent web platform, I can write it, start the scene, and leave it sit there until start time, when the other players can join the scene and see what I've already written while I finish up bedtime.

I go home for lunch. I don't have to pause scenes anymore. Instead, I can leave a scene I was RPing slowly in at work and toss in a pose while I'm home at lunch, from the web portal. Or shoot off an IC text on my walk to a meeting. We have players who RP on their long commute home, on their phones - another way the portal helps timezones be less of an issue.

If I'm going to be 30 minutes late to a scene, I don't have to be sure to log on and drop my character into the room or find someone to paste me what I'd missed. I just pull it up on the portal and read it. (Incidentally, this also cuts down on the need to 'scene set' every time someone new joins a scene, which is freeing).

I can GM for people in timezones vastly different from me over the course of a day or even two. It's not my ideal type of scene, but it lets me involve players who previously would have just had to suck it up and not be in GMed stuff on games that I run.

I can RP in other scenes while I do this. I can RP in several scenes at once, if my time, attention, and internal timeline allow. I can finish up that scene from last night, and also have a text scene throughout the course of my work day about something that's pressing to another character. I personally don't like to double up on 'real' scenes very often, but the CAPABILITY is so freeing when I want or need to.

These are the sorts of limitations I didn't even realize existed with telnet only until I was freed of them. And they're just the ones revolving around RP. There are dozens more. The ability to set up my character in a graphical interface. To search logs. To see the same thing on the game and the web according to my mood. To not spam my screen with 'combat' a billion times - or to spam it and not care, because the log will be clean anyway, and I can always pull up the scene on the portal to see it without the HUD displayed. To casually page someone with something and know that they'll see it as soon as they log back on (or check the web portal - it's basically the same thing these days). To organize and filter jobs and respond to them in a graphical interface.

All of these things that we've gotten used to are things that are barriers to entry, for new people (whether young or not). They increase how much you have to WANT to do this hobby. Most of them, we don't even notice anymore, I think. Until suddenly they're gone.

Noticing these things, and figuring out how to remove them, is important. And hard.

@auspice said in Alternative Formats to MU:

You are trying to bring people that do not exist into a hobby by alienating the people that do.

You want to add ultimately pointless bells and whistles to things that will eliminate the people that phone MU.
You want to cut out the people that prefer (or can't for health reasons) not to use a mouse just to RP.

All to gain the one or two college kids that actually do enjoy reading and writing?

Wow. I mean. I just--

We know there are good RPers out there. It's a fact. I can link you to games full of people writing stories.

Speaking of stories people apparently aren't writing... Have you seen archiveofourown.org? Have you seen the drabbles on tumblr? The Secret Santa challenges with dozens, sometimes hundreds, of participants? Have you heard of Nanowrimo? People aren't /writing/? The internet is FULL of people writing! It is FULL of people living and breathing in franchises they love. They are so eager for this experience that they /RP on Tumblr/ where it is /horrible/. Imagine what they can and will do when they are given the tools we take for granted.

But beyond that, look. I'm pumped about the idea of new blood. But these bells and whistles? I want them for myself.

I want to be able to read bbs without cluttering my backscroll, I want to be able to arrange combat via dropdown menus instead of remembering commands, I want to look at a HUD without adding a second character to combat while I'm GMing just so I can keep track of the flow of the scene AND who's injured.

I want a web-based game for purely selfish reasons. Because after 20 years of M*ing, I'm fucking tired of things being harder than they have to be.

Difficult CGs (a web form only gives this a new interface; it doesn't make the core of CG easier)

No. Sorry. Totally not true.

I've run the same CG on Ares via telnet and via the web. I can tell you which one is a BILLION times easier. It's not the telnet.

And that's a pretty simple system. The numbers aren't complicated, there's not a lot of math to be done. But the UI makes it SO MUCH EASIER to track where I am, what I have left to spend, what things are at the right levels, etc. And I'm pretty sure that there's lots of room for improvement on what Ares has so far, even. Helpful error messages, tips and hints, auto-calculators, ALL KINDS OF THINGS.

I for one am PUMPED to welcome new players into this hobby, and I'm PUMPED to get to use these bells and whistles for myself.

@ganymede said in Regarding administration on MSB:

@meg said in Regarding administration on MSB:

I have no way of knowing if she was speaking as just another poster or as a moderator.

We're working on making this clearer, and I'm not perfect on this either. It is safe to presume that unless I mark my comment clearly, I'm responding as a sour-old lawbot, and not as a moderator.

I don't think it's fair to ask people to make this presumption, at least not until there is a very long and clear history of clarity. And even then, I'm not sure. It sort of puts the onus on the people who are not moderators to not accidentally cross a line, and I really feel that it should go the opposite way. The burden should be on moderators to be clear, not on posters to interpret correctly.

I feel that it would be much safer to either not say things that sound moderatorish if you aren't in your mod suit, or label everything.

ETA: Whoa wait. @Auspice Not recognizing a voice that has been used inconsistently when not recognizing it means you might GET IN TROUBLE is not being /obtuse/.

I've had bosses like this. Bosses who were not clear about when they were joking around and when they were serious. I couldn't tell the difference. It was a nightmare. And they were not good bosses.

If you want to be a good moderator, be clear, and don't semi-insult people for not reading your mind. I mean. Man. We aren't in your brain, we cannot discern intent, even if we think we ought to be able to.

@Seamus

I'm sorry @Auspice but I really don't think they told them wrong. Faraday is real quick to say "no" to anything she doesn't agree with. And as you said, it's her right. But warning someone... That's a good thing too. I've contributed a "Dark Skin" for Ares.

This is bullshit.

I don't usually engage in this sort of stuff, but this is BULLSHIT.

Faraday is hands down the most patient, level headed person I think I've ever seen. I have seen her say no, firmly. I've also seen her spend a GREAT DEAL OF TIME explaining why she's saying no, what her philosophy is, and why it doesn't fit within that philosophy. Patiently. Clearly. Politely.

Including to you.

She's also spent a ton (and I mean a TON) of time helping me implement things that are never going to touch Ares core - some of which she doesn't particularly love philosophically. At least one of these things is now up as an Ares Extra for others who want to implement it.

Faraday is not only open to people modifying the server, but she actively supports it. I would not be half the ruby coder I am (whatever that is) without her continued patience and help.

I've also witnessed people being incredibly rude in the face of her helpfulness and generosity. Repeatedly. And it's bullshit, too.

@reason

Your game should, IMO, be largely done before launch. This means that, as @bear_necessities says, your theme files are in place and fleshed out, your policies are clear, your chargen guides are ready, your grid is built and desced, and you know what sort of RP you expect players to engage in on day one.

It also means that if you have extra systems - like, say, magic - that said system is LARGELY functional. I opened a game in Beta (technically it still is), and we did sometimes make some changes to the system over time, but the core of it had already been tested, the code worked (...mostly), and the policies surrounding it were things I was fairly certain about.

Personally I would not do that early 'is this even feasible, does combat break all the time' testing on an open game. That's the sort of thing I do with a small, trusted group of friends. Systems that don't matter to gameplay are fine to add later, but if it's important to your theme, I think you should have it at open.

All of these things will change - I update documentation constantly, I adjust policies as things come up, we expand the grid as we see what's missing. The magic system has grown as players have chased different things ICly. Growth is good. That's different from opening an unfinished game, though.

Is there a critical mass of initial staffers? - Yes, but the number depends on your game. Some can run with one person. Some really need a team. You should have an idea of what work you have to do and how much time it will take, and have a team to fit that. If you DON'T have an idea of that work, then you need to figure it out. Understanding the work you're getting yourself into is an important part of running a game.

Critical mass of initial players? - I personally would never work on a game I didn't know at least 6-10 people wanted to play - but I'm sure people HAVE and have gotten traction. Most games that look to be crafted with care and thought these days seem to get a pretty good crowd, so if you feel confident in your ability to design an interesting game to completion, I'd just go for it. But a few early sign ups can def ease the nerves.

An existing metaplot ready for day 1? Metaplot, no. An idea of what characters will be doing and fast ways for them to get hooked into it? Yes. Sometimes this IS metaplot, sometimes it's just flash in the pan stuff, sometimes it's parties. What you don't want is characters wandering the grid going 'what am I supposed to do?' for a week.

I think the process of building a game is in many ways preparation for running one. If you don't have the patience to get all your ducks in a row before opening, I suspect you'll struggle to have the patience to actually do all the minutiae that comes with game running. This doesn't have to be an arduous process - I've helped run games we took from idea to open in 6 weeks. I've also worked on games for 2 years before open. Your ambition, the game's complexity, your available time, your enthusiasm - these all vary. Understanding how they fit together is a really important part of the process, I think.

@WTFE said in MU and Data Organization:

Question 2

I'm going to come down on an unpopular side, I suspect. MU* servers are UTTERLY FUCKING TERRIBLE for navigating complicated or lengthy information. If the only "news" entry is "our web site at address http://foo.bar/baz contains all game information we have" then I'd be absolutely ecstatic (presuming it's an actual web site and not just "news"-style files hastily wrapped in <html></html> headers).

That being said, the advantages of web sites are lost if you don't make use of their advantages. Inline topical links (not links at the bottom where in news it would say "see also news foo, news bar, news baz") are vital. As is, unlike MU*-oriented information, not chunking the information at arbitrary levels. (That's what "paragraphs" are for, not entirely new pages.)

I'm with you. Put that shit in a window where I can read it in multiple tabs and it doesn't scroll my game screen. My /preference/ for this is a good wiki, because I think a good wiki, configured right, takes a lot of stress off staff and lets helpful players be helpful. But even a good webpage will do.

I'm actually kind of shocked that there are people who'd prefer to read things in their client still.

Games full of people that give you so much joy, creativity, and imagination that it's heartbreaking to bring things to an end.

Sometimes this hobby gives us a whole lot of awesome. It's a strange joy to close wishing there was more. Keep being amazing, guys.

@faraday said in What's So Hard About Ruby?:

@cobalt That gets to what I was saying about how to learn the entire package, not just the language. Getting an attribute out of a room has very little to do with ruby itself, because the core language knows nothing about MUSH rooms or Database attributes. You'd have a similar challenge with coding in any modern full-stack application, regardless of language.

I'm someone who started from a base knowledge of 'can tweak some formatting stuff in PennMUSH and coded a couple of basic commands in MOO a few decades ago' who has now coded a fair number of Ares plug-ins, including a really, really large one that integrates magic with Ares' FS3 system.

From my perspective, what Faraday says here is true - but when I started, I didn't get enough about how modern code languages worked to even recognize the difference between 'the language' and the Ares framework (for lack of a better word). All I knew was that I didn't really understand where things were stored, how to get to them, how everything fit together, and how to make stuff GO.

It's actually really easy to find great documentation on almost everything in Ruby. Want to manipulate a string? Play around with an array? Do some math? Tons of examples!

Ares is well-documented, too, but the entire CONCEPT that I needed to learn Ares and not just Ruby was one that it took me awhile to wrap my head around. I think sometimes that's where some of the hurdle comes for folks (like me) who have very little coding experience. They GET how all the pieces of a MUSH fit together - but Ares fits them together somewhat differently, and you have to learn that structure, too.

One of my very first questions to Faraday was 'how do I make a command execute other commands?' (something I'd done in MUSH) and she told me 'that's generally a bad idea, use the helper functions instead'.

I don't know that I ever admitted that I had no idea what helper functions WERE, let alone how to use them. Now that I do, I understand why they're a better choice, but that mental leap took me awhile - as did figuring out where those functions lived and how to access them (pro tip: getting a real code editing program and learning a few shortcuts makes this much, much, MUCH easier).

I do think the Ares tutorials are very good (and getting better all the time, as I know Faraday makes adjustments as people find things that confuse them), but there's a bit of a mental shift that I think can be difficult if you're expecting Ares (I'd guess Evennia too, but I've never tried it, so I can't be sure) to function like a MUSH-but-with-different-syntax under the hood. It is-- but it also isn't.

Overall, I found Ares-and-ruby MUCH easier to pick up then PennMUSH. In particular, I find it much easier to learn how to do Big Stuff than I ever did in Penn. I doubt I'd ever have managed this sprawling, integrated, complicated magic system on Penn, because it's clunky and hard to read and there's no version control for when I really screw up and no easy-to-read config files. The leap from 'I can change the formatting on WHO' to 'I can code a new system' was much, much easier.

Also I can't say enough for the Ares discord community at large, who've helped me more than once on problems small and large and been really, really patient with questions of all sorts.

A game full of players who take on the challenge of an extremely buggy Alpha plot and make it interesting, complex, and kind of sad to hit the end of. And their endless patience with 'shit, I broke combat again, one minute' in the midst of an otherwise badass scene.

Bonus: Their complete willingness to dive headlong into engaging with and running plot in ways that I can't wait to play with later.

Seriously, I know there are a lot of M*ers who suck, but there are a lot who are SUPER FREAKING AWESOME, too.

@cobaltasaurus

Oh, another thing I'll mention is that in Alpha, we found that Ares is AMAZING for really adapting to different playstyles and needs. The ability to start a scene live, then hop over to the web portal for a bit, then restart live later, is just fantastic.

I had several scenes where I RPed for maybe an hour in real time, then slowed down to a play-by-post type crawl (sometimes posing from my phone) while I went home and got the kids in bed, and then sometimes moved back to real time later, or sometimes just wrapped up. I know some players had scenes entirely in the web portal as time allowed through the day, often from mobile devices. It felt very refreshing and freeing for someone with more time constraints than I used to have.

When a scene you've spent a lot of time working on comes together and runs so smoothly and so awesome and players are so invested in what's going on, and also laid back and rolling with the chaos of something large, and it's just amazing.

Watching tiny character moments come out to shine during a huge combat is so rewarding. It can be so hard to track what's going on, so seeing people really focus on what their character would be doing - who they care about, who they protect, who they help - instead of just on winning and taking down the big bad , is so, so, SO cool.

I feel like I'm still running off the high of this scene, because there's nothing more rewarding than writing stuff for players who take it and run with it and build on it and turn it into their own. Cooperative writing like that is why I'm in this hobby after 20+ years man.

Putting up a post asking for people to run some one-shot stuff and having 4 events in the making without blinking.

Having players who dive into running things is AWESOME. Having players who are invested in getting new players into things is ALSO AWESOME. You guys are awesome players. AWESOME. And we are lucky to have you.

@ganymede

I think the biggest thing that would help is a clear separation of 'mod voice' and 'poster voice'. By which I mean, make it very clear when you are speaking as a mod, and when you are not.

In fact, it's probably best to kind of steer clear of things that /sound/ like moderation if they are not meant as moderation, at least until you have an established pattern of said clarity.

I don't know how to do this. Maybe separate accounts for modding. Maybe bright red text. But it's been a point of confusion several times now.

What I desperately want is something that combines a web portal like what Ares is becoming, but on steroids, with the option of a separate client that's focused on the real-time aspects of the game.

For those who haven't explored much on Ares' web portal yet, it's freaking amazing. Here is a list of things I can do easily through the web interface that I have traditionally HATED having to do on telnet:

• see system information such as weapon and armor stats
• see combat HUDs
• make changes in combat, such as adding NPCs, changing their status, adjusting weapons and armor, etc etc etc.
• reply to bb posts
• read and reply to jobs
• go through cgen
• explore the grid
• read helpfiles
• see upcoming events on a calendar (that I can sync with my own calendar)
• see who's online
• see the roster
• see the list of taken PBs
• see the census (with whatever info the game admin had decided to include)
• see a list of players
• see a list of characters

It's freaking incredible. I'm in the super early stages of playing with a set-up for a game, and I pretty much default to the web portal whenever I can. This list just covers the user side, not the admin side, where I can ALSO do things like configure the settings for basically everything.

The trend here is pretty clear to me - all the OOC things that clutter up your screen, and ESPECIALLY the ones that require remembering a lot typed commands, are moving to web. And I love it. I will probably never go back if I can help it, I love it that much.

And yet, despite the really nice web client also available there, I will almost certainly be using a separate client for the RP aspect. That's because I want my real-time stuff to be broken out into it's own 'space', because it works better for my head and my attention that way. It's the same reason I use the slack PC client instead of its browser-based one, why I use an email client instead of webmail, and why I freaking hate facebook messenger. I want that stuff in its own box.

To me, the ideal is a client that interfaces with the web capabilities, with the OOC minutia living on the web where the interface is so, so, so much easier. I look forward to the day that I don't ever have to type +jobs in a client, but can do it ALL online. Where players can submit requests in a little box and choose the category from a dropdown menu and click 'submit' instead of remembering a long command. Where game mail is basically email, and pages are PMs.

It's gonna be AWESOME.

So I'm someone who had a rudimentary coding knowledge in PennMUSH and MOO who decided to build a game in Ares. I started in late July, and I feel pretty comfortable saying that I MOSTLY know what I'm doing in coding for Ares now. I recognize more errors than I don't (this is a serious accomplishment). I am not a coder by profession or by hobby, and I have a lot of gaps in my knowledge when it comes to things like 'usual programming workflow'.

I haven't looked at Evennia or Python, but here are the things that were helpful and hard when picking up a new codebase with external documentation available, that might also apply to thinking about Evennia docs.

1. Remember that people probably aren't going to read your documentation in order, from start to end. They're going to skip around to what seems relevant to them. This is why reminding people to start virtual environments or whatever is important every time.

2. I knew how to log into a server shell and do basic commands there, but I lacked the language to even google how to do something more than basic. Give your readers that language whenever possible. It's hard to solve your own problems when you have a vocabulary gap.

3. Github was a ridiculous hurdle for me. I didn't (and still only barely) understand the workflow of how to code, see it on a game, push it to git, pull it into another game, not get conflict errors, resolve conflicts, edit text in the shell... I MOSTLY have this worked out, but just yesterday I fought a battle where git thought there was a conflict and I couldn't find it. Git tutorials often assume a different sort of set-up or a work flow that I didn't have, and were less than useful in figuring this stuff out.

4. I did some basic Ruby tutorials, and they were helpful for vocabulary and the basic way things work. What was more useful were the Ares-specific tutorials that taught me where things lived, how Ares calls certain things, how Ares stores things in its database, etc. I'm not actually sure I can code anything in Ruby, because I'm not sure where Ares ends and Ruby begins. And I DON'T CARE.

5. And this is why general language tutorials aren't always that helpful. They are GREAT when I'm trying to figure out how to manipulate an array or something, but not so great in a 'learn Ruby by reading tutorials' sort of way. Much of it doesn't apply directly, or it's really hard to make the connection between what I'm trying to do in my game-specific environment and what they're trying to do out in some other environment.

6. Tutorials teaching you how to do basic, specific things that you want to do in a game are really, really, really helpful. For every language I've learned, I've started with 'store and retrieve data on an object/character/place/whatever'. Helpfully, @faraday's first tutorial teaches me how to do that. It explains what it's doing and shows me how to do it. The next tutorial steps it up by teaching me how to manipulate that data, etc. These first two tutorials were hands down the most useful thing for me when I started trying to code for Ares. This is also what helped me build my vocabulary enough to google smaller problems.

7. Remember that the people who are learning a language to code a game are interested mostly in building a game. This is the other reason that general ruby tutorials were only helpful for me in the super basics. I never did find a tutorial that taught me how to store and manipulate data on an object. Maybe I would have gotten there eventually, but I'm not here to learn to code Ruby. I don't want hours and hours of general Ruby education. I'm here to code a game, and I want education that will help me do that.

8. Document basic stuff in easy to find lists. Maybe you already do this, IDK. But I want quick references for things I'm going to want to do. For example, what are all the ways I emit a message? To a person, to multiple people, to a room, to the game. How can I format text? Those sorts of things.

9. Teach them debugging skills, and link to them OFTEN. I didn't discover the debug/dev mode in Ares until way too late in the game, and it could have saved me a lot of strife. I didn't know how to write info to the debug mode, so I was constantly trying to emit to my character, sometimes in complicated ways. Link to how to debug on every damn code tutorial page I swear.

Some of these may not be as applicable to Evennia/Python, and I know that you folks don't have the 'game in box' goal that Faraday does, but I'm happy to elaborate about anything that might be helpful.

I like to be sure that my grid does a few things:

• Builds on theme in some way. I LOVE writing little traditions or plot hooks into the description. For example, when I built a Mutant Town, I decided it had a graffiti culture, and that went into a lot of rooms and later characters wrote it into their concept. When I built a space station, I decided that the elevators were gang-controlled, and we had plots around them later. We once had a projectile space-cactus in an office that became the center of a number of scenes. Little details that hint at things about the setting, theme, and culture can go a long way. I'd rather some color of that nature than a strictly descriptive paragraph or two. The locations you choose should build the theme, too. Are the majority of your rooms in the rough part of town, or the upscale one? Are you highlighting ritzy night life or dive bars? You probably want some of each, but where you focus will affect how your game feels.

• Provides easy reasons to RP with people randomly. Bars and coffee shops are the usual go-to for this, but sometimes there are more creative ways to go. Grocery store is a good one. Laundromats, if appropriate for your theme. A plaza or park filled with food trucks. Maybe a bookstore or a library. A gym. A pool. Anywhere strangers might make small talk.

• Provides places for a variety of 'moods'. I once built a grid that I realized a few months in was GREAT for group hangouts and drinking and debauchery, and great for private scenes in private rooms like apartments, but didn't have a lot of space for quiet, introspective characters or RP in public rooms. So we added a chapel, a botanical garden, an dimly lit observation deck filled with stars.

• Gives people places to become 'regulars' at. These are usually your bars and coffee shops, but could also be a book store or a much-loved food truck or something. They should also build your theme, but in my experience, these are the places where player-created traditions are born. That place loves us because we tip well, this place hates us because we got into a bar fight and broke a table, etc. So on a WoD game, these are probably your 'safe spaces', but it's nice to be thinking about variety and mood for these, too. Where do we go to get into trouble, where do we go for a quiet drink, etc.

Finally, I almost always revisit the grid with player input about 6 months in. They usually have suggestions for things they've wished they had but don't, or maybe temp rooms that are getting more RP than grid rooms because of some unexpected IC hook. If you do logs, you've probably also noticed trends and things that work or don't.