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Thoughts on pre-planned Time Jumps to Retire Characters and Play Their Descendants
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@Alveraxus My experience of player-created houses is mostly on Arx. While there were a small number of players who were able to craft houses that really fit and melded into theme, there were way more houses created that I know were probably more work for staff just to get them workable than it would have been for staff to have just conceptualized and written them from the start. I think you gain a lot from having the holistic view of your theme and being able to write very precisely and specifically to that theme within the construction of noble houses.
That said, I don’t think that would have to stop you from soliciting player ideas more generally! They might still inspire with vibes/themes/etc.
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@Roz said in Thoughts on pre-planned Time Jumps to Retire Characters and Play Their Descendants:
@helvetica said in Thoughts on pre-planned Time Jumps to Retire Characters and Play Their Descendants:
I would say don’t do secrets, either. Talk about a storyteller resource sink.
Double-post because I missed this, but I do very much think it’s worth thinking hard on the fact that the overall game setting and framework sounds like it’s gonna be catnip to a fair number of people, and you might end up with a crush of players.
From your lips to AresCentral’s ears…
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@Alveraxus said in Thoughts on pre-planned Time Jumps to Retire Characters and Play Their Descendants:
@Roz said in Thoughts on pre-planned Time Jumps to Retire Characters and Play Their Descendants:
@helvetica said in Thoughts on pre-planned Time Jumps to Retire Characters and Play Their Descendants:
I would say don’t do secrets, either. Talk about a storyteller resource sink.
Double-post because I missed this, but I do very much think it’s worth thinking hard on the fact that the overall game setting and framework sounds like it’s gonna be catnip to a fair number of people, and you might end up with a crush of players.
From your lips to AresCentral’s ears…
If you’re using Ares, you’re going to run into a naming issue at some point as entire swaths of character names become unavailable as they become part of a bygone generation.
In Occam I trust.
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Flat no from me. I enjoy playing the same character for years and years, taking my sweet time to develop their life path and experience them changing as the world changes around them.
However, I fully understand that others do get bored playing that way – and that my character will be experiencing a continuous coming and going of friends and enemies over time. That’s fine. I’m perfectly happy to be the neighbourhood sage archetype whom the young hotshots come to for lore.
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@L-B-Heuschkel Do you feel this way on games that have XP, where the longer you hold a character, the more omni-competent they become? I don’t ask that to start a fight. I’m just curious because I remember certain games where certain characters were too powerful for me to understand why anyone would still enjoy playing them.
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@GF I’m not the person you asked, but I have the same preferences stated.
And well, I don’t think that allowing a character to become that powerful is a good idea. I think a well-run game has to make XP spends make sense, regardless of the rate of XP gain.
So nah, I wouldn’t enjoy a game where everyone became so powerful that nothing challenged anymore. Every obstacle could be overcome easily.
But I don’t think the generational idea is the way I’d enjoy solving that.
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@Alveraxus said in Thoughts on pre-planned Time Jumps to Retire Characters and Play Their Descendants:
How would you, personally, feel about a game where there are planned time jumps, and so you know going in that your character will age out (or die) within X period of time?
Gimme
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@Coin said in Thoughts on pre-planned Time Jumps to Retire Characters and Play Their Descendants:
If you’re using Ares, you’re going to run into a naming issue at some point as entire swaths of character names become unavailable as they become part of a bygone generation.
I love Ares, but man do I wish names were more flexible.
But I suppose if people want family names, could always go with CoinII, CoinIII, CoinIV if we make it that long.
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@L-B-Heuschkel said in Thoughts on pre-planned Time Jumps to Retire Characters and Play Their Descendants:
Flat no from me. I enjoy playing the same character for years and years, taking my sweet time to develop their life path and experience them changing as the world changes around them.
We definitely figured it’s not for everyone. Buuuuuut…
However, I fully understand that others do get bored playing that way – and that my character will be experiencing a continuous coming and going of friends and enemies over time. That’s fine. I’m perfectly happy to be the neighbourhood sage archetype whom the young hotshots come to for lore.
…that’s why we wanted to setup ways for people to progress characters. So I am not trying to convince you to join or anything, but your perspective is one I absolutely want to tap into.
Would it be of interest to you, over the span of three or four years, to play your character at, say, Age 36, Age 54, Age 72, Age 90, and RPing with grandchildren or great-nieces and nephews, advising the now-grown kids of the people that your character grew up with, etc?
Because what you are talking about is EXACTLY something that we were hoping to see happen, someone keeping through character through generations and trading in physical ability for wisdom, that sort of thing. Being that “living sage” who “fought the invaders” two or three generations ago, and who people can come to for advice, guidance, etc.
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@GF No, power has nothing to do with it unless you count knowledge and connections as power (which it admittedly can be). I just like really immersing myself in a character and seeing how they are affected by living their life, so to speak. I’m perfectly happy for them to stay at the bottom of the command ladder, that’s not the point.
@alveraxus To be honest – if the rest of the game appeals to me, I’ll adapt to however it’s being run, whether there are time jumps or not. But if I get a choice I’ll stick to linear time and progress naturally (where, again, progression does not have to equate accumulating power).
I can definitely see the charm, though, in doing jumps ahead and working out how the character has changed from twenty to forty to eighty years old, too. That does spark some very interesting mind theatre opportunities.
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I’ve played enough CK2/CK3 that this concept really intrigues me.
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My plan for doing this was to have the game have two copies of its grid.
When it’s time to time-jump, you open copy number two, and players are meant to go in and age up the grid descs, start their new PCs, etc, while the older version stays open for a couple months for people to wrap things up.
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@Gashlycrumb said in Thoughts on pre-planned Time Jumps to Retire Characters and Play Their Descendants:
My plan for doing this was to have the game have two copies of its grid.
When it’s time to time-jump, you open copy number two, and players are meant to go in and age up the grid descs, start their new PCs, etc, while the older version stays open for a couple months for people to wrap things up.
We’ve been thinking about doing that. There was an early proposal to leave all of the timelines up, since Ares does such a great job (when people remember to set them) of keeping track of scenes by IC date.
But we felt that it might take a bit away from the “here and now” to do this on the regular, although people could always do a flashback scene to a prior generation if they wanted.
One of the other debates was how accessible we wanted to make retired characters. If you retired your character who was someone’s father, could you pull them out and emit them afterwards as part of a scene?
These are some of the questions we want to hammer out during Alpha, or Beta in the case of generational transition.
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@Alveraxus I didn’t figure I’d actually make the game, but my made-for-funsies plan was that you could only use both grids for a short period of time. Maybe six weeks every 18 months you’d have two time-periods being RPed at once.
I wanted to encourage people to bring back their retired characters. PC is twenty-one for the first round, then I play a different one, and another different one, then go back to the first one, who is now 60, that sort of thing.
Being allowed to @emit the retired PCs so they’re still ICly around seems good, but I’ve always found that to be a your-milage-may-vary sort of thing. Some games, people are really good with that. Some games, people abuse it in a tedious way, and I’ve no clue why the chips fall one way or the other. My advice about it is to remember that there is no rule saying you can’t change the rules if they don’t work well.
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@Gashlycrumb said in Thoughts on pre-planned Time Jumps to Retire Characters and Play Their Descendants:
My advice about it is to remember that there is no rule saying you can’t change the rules if they don’t work well.
We’re not setting anything in stone, and probably not even in ink, until after the second generation. Which based on how things are looking, might be a year and a half. Because we’ll keep learning along the way, and innovating, and taking feedback.
So yeah, the rules will change as we go, and as we find out what our players like.
We’ll almost certainly tinker with some variants on those themes when we switch generations. I like the idea of being in touch with the older generation.
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@Alveraxus Credit where credit is due, I got the idea from Clockwork’s game The Network.
I certainly don’t mind you pitching it, but I just polished up how he handles Seasons and Hiatuses and made it specific to what you had presented.
Edit to avoid double post:
@Alveraxus said in Thoughts on pre-planned Time Jumps to Retire Characters and Play Their Descendants:One of the other debates was how accessible we wanted to make retired characters.
I like the idea of being able to emit older characters, but even if you swap servers (or change everyone’s name to CoinRetiredIV or whatever when a timejump happens so you can reuse names), you can always just refer to the past sheets and make any necessary rolls by hand. You don’t need the actual bit to be accessible – just still existent.
I would absolutely suggest having solid rules about when it’s okay to do this (I would say “for social scenes but not to use political weight or for use in combat” – but put nicer), because as mentioned, there are going to be people who want to use their character’s parents to provide weight for their character’s ideas.
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@Coin said in Thoughts on pre-planned Time Jumps to Retire Characters and Play Their Descendants:
If you’re using Ares, you’re going to run into a naming issue at some point as entire swaths of character names become unavailable as they become part of a bygone generation.
You can rename retired characters without messing anything up. For instance
Firstname-LastnameorFirstname-Gen1(for generation 1) or whatever.This isn’t just an Ares problem - even MediaWiki or Wikidot are going to run into issues with name collisions. And on Penn/Tiny you’d have to nuke the bits if you want to reuse the name (which has its own set of issues). You also have the issue of player confusion when “John” is no longer John, regardless of what tech solution you use.
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Mostly in agreement with @L-B-Heuschkel’s points, it’s a hard no for me. While I don’t mind a well-placed time jump, I’m not really interested in the end of a character’s story. Takes a lot of work to build stuff up again. That said, this clearly has appeal judging by the results of that poll, so godspeed!
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@Coin said in Thoughts on pre-planned Time Jumps to Retire Characters and Play Their Descendants:
@Alveraxus said in Thoughts on pre-planned Time Jumps to Retire Characters and Play Their Descendants:
@Roz said in Thoughts on pre-planned Time Jumps to Retire Characters and Play Their Descendants:
@helvetica said in Thoughts on pre-planned Time Jumps to Retire Characters and Play Their Descendants:
I would say don’t do secrets, either. Talk about a storyteller resource sink.
Double-post because I missed this, but I do very much think it’s worth thinking hard on the fact that the overall game setting and framework sounds like it’s gonna be catnip to a fair number of people, and you might end up with a crush of players.
From your lips to AresCentral’s ears…
If you’re using Ares, you’re going to run into a naming issue at some point as entire swaths of character names become unavailable as they become part of a bygone generation.
Just start naming people Coin_II, Coin_III, Coin_IV.
Blah, I should have kept reading since I see the same joke was already made. Damn, lmao.
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So, I’ve been reading and following this thread for a few days, trying to figure out why it didn’t seem appealing - from a purely personal reason.
Because the concept and theme seems unique, interesting from a continuing IC sociological perspective, and perfectly set up for flaws in a community to fracture, be mended, and fracture again in ways that will probably make for gorgeous, epic over-arching stories. I really hope to see this game open, and succeed. If it does… I may actually just lurk on the page to read well-written logs by those playing it.
And yet, I knew it wasn’t a game that fits what works well for me. It just took me a while to figure out what that small detail of why stemmed from.
And, from a player side… What I finally realized is that I’d have far too overwhelming imposter syndrome to ever have fun. I would, forever, be pretty sure I was getting some stuff wrong, potentially even BIG, plotty, thematic stuff.
For me… The most intimidating part of the game is reading through all the info and lore background, getting familiar with IC and OOC history, catching up on bboards, skimming census data and existing characters, and then trying to find a niche that neither has a dozen people already playing that, or that is of something I enjoy enough to want to make my own character’s thing.
I’ve realized that in spite of adoring the staff, players, culture, and writing at The Network, I can thrive in hiatus. But I’m not cut out to play through multiple seasons. Because the part of games for me that make the starting efforts worth it comes with the concept that once I’ve slogged through the backlog, now I just have to keep up in drops and pieces one at a time as they happen.
Eventually, the learning curve plateaus and it gets easier, I learn the character, how they fit in. I figure out where they came from, where they’re out, and where they’re hoping to go. Sometimes, it even starts getting EASIER, and there’s a history that propels things forward naturally without having to SEARCH for scenes you can kind of shoe-horn into, and people come up with something and think, OH! I know who could help with this! Let’s go find them and ask. And then I just get to sit there and type things and it’s so much fun. It’s so much fun I forget how hard it is to get started again down the road with the same process, different game.
For me… The investment of putting in all that effort, over and over again… It’s not even a new character and family in a setting I at least already know… But. When I think of where the world was in the eighties when I was a kid, in the aughts as I barely was an adult, in current days when I’m only starting to figure out a FEW things about the world…
Collapsing each of those vast shifts of culture and history, and figuring out in the course of a few weeks what did or didn’t happen to fill them as one character fades out and a new generation comes in? It’s all the work, and much less of the reward. For me, it’s not a sustainable mental investment.
But I want to reiterate, this is NOT criticism of the concept. I think the IDEA is cool as heck, and I hope that if it happens, both those building it and those playing it are able to have grand adventures figuring all of it out as y’all go. I’ll be rooting for all of you. Just… Wanted to give perspectives of some of what seems intimidating and perhaps barriers to play that might stem from the grandiose planned for accessibility.
