MU Peeves Thread
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I guess, for me, I don’t assume that staff has ever written a grid so THEY can tell stories. A grid has the basics so that characters less familiar with the setting have ideas and places to congregate, the concept of where are folks most likely to gather. Putting together a bar, diner, movie theater, park, etc for the playerbase to run amok from and through.
But staff has a much deeper understanding of the greater world or finer details. They may not want to destroy the main dog park on grid that’s super popular. But. Someone MIGHT ruin a totally different background park that won’t ruin the more established places.
To each their own, and your points and positions are valid. You’re absolutely welcome to prefer a grid where staff mostly focuses on the pre-built stuff. And if there’s an easier way to get to that Throne Room that doesn’t require a bunch of folks to wander through a bunch of rooms to get there… That’s never going to bug me that getting to the story was simplified, even if the room itself is still there as a reference or for other uses. But that’s just me. YMMV.
We're all mad here.
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@Jenn said in MU Peeves Thread:
But staff has a much deeper understanding of the greater world or finer details. They may not want to destroy the main dog park on grid that’s super popular.
I will fully admit to having terrible bad guys blow up the most popular ic location (a cafe) on one of the last games I staffed on. The bad guys wanted to send a message, and so destroying a cafe and killing a beloved NPC was how we did it.
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@MisterBoring said in MU Peeves Thread:
It sends a signal to me at least, that staff is fully willing to abandon major projects on a whim and aren’t super dedicated to the game, or at least have changed course on how they approach it.
I dunno, that’s a big leap to make. Personally I’d see it as, ‘hey this is a closed scene and we don’t want other PCs randomly joining just because it’s on grid’.
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@catzilla said in MU Peeves Thread:
Personally I’d see it as, ‘hey this is a closed scene and we don’t want other PCs randomly joining just because it’s on grid’.
Being off grid in RP Rooms doesn’t stop everybody though. Also, some games have commands that make it very apparent that the scene is closed.
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@MisterBoring said in MU Peeves Thread:
@catzilla said in MU Peeves Thread:
Personally I’d see it as, ‘hey this is a closed scene and we don’t want other PCs randomly joining just because it’s on grid’.
Being off grid in RP Rooms doesn’t stop everybody though. Also, some games have commands that make it very apparent that the scene is closed.
It could just be me but isn’t joing an RP Room uninvited like, universally unallowed?
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@catzilla Yeah. But people can be dicks.
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i love real, tangible, simulationist grids and i’m sad the hobby keeps leaning away from that more and more :C
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@Roz said in MU Peeves Thread:
i love real, tangible, simulationist grids and i’m sad the hobby keeps leaning away from that more and more :C
I don’t want a simulationist grid, but I want a grid with enough spaces for multiple groups of social RP and a decent number of spots that are going to be key to the primary storyline.
Oh, before I forget, for me, this peeve only applies when Staff is attempting to run a main plotline for the game. If they’re just doing a sandbox thing based on PRPs with no central plot, then hell, they can just have an OOC lobby and 20 RP rooms for all I care.
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@Roz said in MU Peeves Thread:
i love real, tangible, simulationist grids and i’m sad the hobby keeps leaning away from that more and more :C
I love them in theory, but I can’t really tell if I love them or if I just yearn for the life I had when they were the norm. The same with everything I have nostalgia for.
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@Jenn said in MU Peeves Thread:
I guess, for me, I don’t assume that staff has ever written a grid so THEY can tell stories. A grid has the basics so that characters less familiar with the setting have ideas and places to congregate, the concept of where are folks most likely to gather. Putting together a bar, diner, movie theater, park, etc for the playerbase to run amok from and through.
Yeah, I think this is part of it for me. A lot of rooms aren’t built specifically for storytelling purposes, they’re being built to give folks places to RP in outside of that? Or because staff thinks this is what players want. That they want this kind of immersion, that they want the streets and all the intersections.
I personally am not a fan of big massive grids. I’d rather build exactly the places I think people will go and no streets and call it a day.
Because grid bloat sure is a thing.
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@tsar said in MU Peeves Thread:
I personally am not a fan of big massive grids. I’d rather build exactly the places I think people will go and no streets and call it a day.
Yep. I don’t like massive grids either, but I also don’t like small grids where none of the rooms have a point.
My ideal grid (for a game with a central staff driven plot line) would be maybe 20-30 rooms consisting of:
- 3-6 hub areas to represent different neighborhoods of the city or regions of the kingdom or whatever
- 3-4 rooms in each neighborhood or region to represent common social areas of that region / neighborhood
- A few rooms in each region that are earmarked by staff as key locations to the central staff driven plot.
I’d probably also allow player builds if they wanted to add their characters houses or businesses to the grid, but have those set up so that they are turned invisible and locked if the character that ‘owns’ it goes idle.
And if the game required faction specific RP places, I’d probably throw 1-2 of those out there for each faction that needed it.
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@MisterBoring said in MU Peeves Thread:
but have those set up so that they are turned invisible and locked if the character that ‘owns’ it goes idle.
This is a good solution to the dead grid issue that a lot of older games face. Something I tried to do, which I didn’t do well because I’m not much of a coder, is set up the housing system in DI to be linked to your approval. If you were set to unapproved either through staff freezing your bit or the idle freeze, you’d trigger a script that checked builds linked to your bit and then cleared them. I couldn’t get this to work for builds that weren’t created by the rental system since that operates differently.
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@somasatori I really feel like most grid bloat in most games is from PC builds from idle / dead / retired PCs that just didn’t get cleaned up after they leave. I think most games just forget to clean that stuff up when characters idle out, but I have seen a few that will post up a bbpost about PC owned grid spaces that will be removed in an effort to allow other PCs to claim them if they’re popular.
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No matter the grid layout, another key feature games should have is the capacity to change the description in an RP room, at least temporarily.
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I love a well-designed grid! If you’ve got nostalgia for a grid, please feel free to be a tourist and walk around Silent Heaven for a day. There are roughly 45 rooms in the main RP hub, and they’ve acquired quite a history in 2 years.
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@tsar said in MU Peeves Thread:
I personally am not a fan of big massive grids. I’d rather build exactly the places I think people will go and no streets and call it a day.
Fully serious question. How do you really expect staff to build a limited number of places people want to go to when you have a constantly shifting player base who all want different things?
I think the grids are there because staff wants to put all possible options out there for people and people can pick for themselves and ignore the ones that don’t. In theory it seems easy enough for a player to pick the places they like and use them, and ignore anything they don’t want to use. If there are 5 places you want to use and 1000 that you don’t, the other 1000 are irrelevant anyway. Just ignored them.
But reading the thread I see people saying that it is a negative if a game has rooms they don’t want to use. I don’t understand that, personally.
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@Warma-Sheen I think that depends a lot on how easy to navigate your grid is, or how accessible the locations you might want to visit are. And I guess this is largely dependent on the type of game; I’ve been on plenty of Star Wars games where the grids were expansive, but people pretty much only stuck to Spaceports and Spaceport-Adjacent Cantinas, in no small part (though I’ll fully agree that the “space” aspect keeps people close to ships, etcetera) because figuring out how to get to the deeper locations is confusing. In this kind of case, I think having a grid chock full of “filler” rooms can be more of a detriment than a benefit. Yes, you can ignore them, but unless there’s a handy system for teleporting to favourite locations, you’re still stuck navigating through them to get where you want to go.
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@chorus Agreed. I hadn’t considered that there might still be places without the ability to jump to a hangout spot directly. Its 2025.
