Thoughts on pre-planned Time Jumps to Retire Characters and Play Their Descendants

[Alveraxus]

@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.

[Gashlycrumb]

@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.

[Alveraxus]

@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.

[Roadspike]

@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.

[Faraday]

@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-Lastname or Firstname-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.

[Yam]

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!

[Rucket]

@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.

[Jenn]

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.

[Gashlycrumb]

@Faraday said in Thoughts on pre-planned Time Jumps to Retire Characters and Play Their Descendants:

You can rename retired characters without messing anything up. For instance Firstname-Lastname or Firstname-Gen1 (for generation 1) or whatever.

Because I want to (but undoubtedly won’t) do this for One Hundred Years of Solitude MUSH, I figured to lean into this confusion if it happened, since in the novel there are so many José Aurelianos and José Arcadios and Auraliano Josés and also that generation where there were seventeen Aurelianos.

And yep, would have retired characters rename from “José” to “José Arcadio Buendía no. 3” to clear up the names proper.

[Alveraxus]

Hey all. we appreciate all the feedback we got on this thread and the interest expressed by folks. We’ve been refining the game and building our initial content, and while we are anticipating announcing a soft open within the week on the Advertising thread, we are looking to get a few people who would be interested in coming in before then to look over and offer some feedback.

If you’d be interested, shoot me a PM and I’ll give you the address. We’re looking to get some thoughts on specific mechanics and systems, as well as overall feedback on the game itself.

As a thank you for early interest and offer feedback, you’d get a bit of an earlier crack at a character. We’ll be adding roster of characters shortly, but for now you could choose to create one of the soon-to-be rosters or create your own concept. We also support OCs, if that is more of your interest.

PM me if interested.

Otherwise, look for our real ad to come out probably Thursday or Friday (unless the feedback is all catastrophic, haha!)

Thanks!