I have been playing this game pretty intensively for 9 days now and want to drop my review!
tl;dr The cgen experience is spooky and awesome. It seamlessly yeets you into a liminal space that is eerie and as ‘wtf’ as I imagine you could get from a text-based game. The mechanics mostly contribute to RP and mostly do not detract you from an immersive experience. You can craft clothes, food, drugs, toxins, and artwork of various kinds. The community is great. The GMs are attentive, accessible, and pleasant. Silent Heaven is an absolute blast. Not a day has gone by without something utterly bizarre and interesting happening. I love it and I’m hooked.
Character Generation
I am a very chargen averse person. I prefer rosters. If I make a character, I need the game to have limited lore/theme I need to know and memorize.
The chargen on Silent Heaven is spooky and wonderful. There is no lore to memorize because it’s a mystery and figuring it out is the point of the game itself.
The character generation is like a little RP in and of itself. SOMETHING is happening to you and you are answering questions to describe how your character would deal with that something. Then you write a bit of a background, and voila! You’re in the game.
Your answers to the questions determine your starting skills sheet. So no mathing out dot appropriations. (Wouldn’t do you any good to be able to anyway because you have no idea what you’re walking in to.)
No background approval has to occur before you can start playing. But your background will get checked and approved. In other words, you can jump right into the game. I had a correction to make on my background and took care of it in less than a minute without interrupting RP.
Cgen seamlessly tosses you right into the town and you meet your first NPC who starts the ball rolling.
I would give this experience an A+ because of no barrier to entry, no chargen anxiety. The process was itself PART of the game, and that’s what I loved about it.
The Grid/Movement
The grid is just spooky. They did really well - really fucking well - to hit the vibe of an isolated ‘wtf is this place’ feel. And it has so much inherent mystery that you’ll find yourself reading the room descs with pleasure.
Grid movement is typical and all directional based. So, NSEW and up and Down. Doorways and building entrances don’t have special exit names. It took some getting used to and some memory is required to know “okay, the Cafe entrance is ‘west’”. This would honestly rub me the wrong way in any other game, but in this setting it adds to an overall feel of disorientation, so I vibe with it, even though I don’t love it.
I’d give the grid experience an A.
I’d give the movement a C.
I think the movement between rooms is just too slow.
It also uses two emits to move: “<character> is heading west.” and then “<Character> leaves west.”
So if you’re in a scene at the cafe and there are 5 people there and three of them leave at once, your poses are going to be scrolled off the screen by 6 movement emits, plus 3 more multiple-line emits of seeing those 3 people with their full short-desc “arrive” in the room you can see out the window. Three people leaving the cafe = as many as 12-20 lines of scroll up.
That may sound like an all too specific example, but the main places I’ve RPed have been the Cafe and the Club, both of which have windows. People arriving and going one after the other is VERY COMMON and poses scrolling away because of character movement is a giant pain point - especially for those of us that do a lot of phone RP (shout out to my Smart Phone RP Warriors!).
Mechanics
These I love almost everything about with a giant caveat.
What I love is, for instance, the eating and tasting mechanic. You get a small bump in skill from eating/drinking. As someone who has suffered through a lot of bar RP elsemu**, one thing I hate is posing what my character is doing with food and drink. Now I just don’t have to unless I specifically want to. I can just hit the mechanic. Now everyone knows what I’m eating.
I like setting a DOING (which is basically room_title for you Arx players out there). There is also an ALWAYS for the general disposition of your character. Scene setting is a breeze and you don’t have to re-type what is happening in the room every time a new person enters. They can just see it as part of the layout of the room. PROVIDED everyone in the scene is using the DOING command (which everyone so far is pretty well grooved in on). You can also just simply SIT or STAND and that will set your doing according to however the room has been coded with furniture.
COOKING is part crafting, part mechanic. I’ll talk about the crafting later, but the mechanic emits your character doing cooking and then drops the cooked food object.
So these are awesome, but you can probably see where this is headed…
The caveat is: when the mechanics are used to service the RP, it’s great. When the mechanics are used IN PLACE OF the RP, it is not so great.
Great example:
Susan enters the room and goes to take a seat at the counter. She looks over the menu and smiles at Joe, “Hey, I’ll have a can of tuna with a strawberry on top, please.”
SIT/DOING (get an emit for Susan sitting or whatever)
Bob nods at Susan and grins, “Comin’ right up!”
COOK emit
Object drop emit
Susan smiles and says, “Thank you, Bob!” She picks up the tuna and dips the strawberry into it and licks the tuna oil off its bulbous shape. “Yum!”
EAT/TASTE Tuna (with an emit)
(Even with 5-6 people following even a 3person pose order, this is manageable and I would say contributes to the RP and doesn’t detract from it)
Bad Example:
Susan enters the room.
SIT/DOING emit
Susan says to Bob, “Can I have a tuna with a strawberry?”
COOK Emit
Object drop
Susan takes the object
Susan eats/tastes the object
Bob says, “Sure, coming right up and here you go!”
Susan says, “Tastes delicious bob!”
(There’s no real sense of continuity between the mechanics and the posing here with what’s happening in the scene and with more people doing it, gets pretty chaotic.)
Worse example:
You are Susan RPing with Bob and your last pose was “Can I have a tuna with a strawberry please?”
3-5 people enter the room.
3-5 people all set their sit/doing command
3-5 people all order a sammich from the NPC chef at the same time
3-5 objects drop
3-5 people take the objects
3-5 people eat the objects with the emits associated with that
Bob says, “Sure thing Susan, coming right up!”
Now just take the simple Bob/Susan dialogue and imagine it’s some more in-depth discussion about the day’s events in the setting of a cafe (not uncommon) and then 3-5 players have descended upon the scene running 15 mechanic commands with none of them entrance posing, following any sort of pose order… It can get chaotic pretty quickly.
This would be totally fine and not even a problem if poses and emotes had a /history. But they don’t, and you have to scroll up through the mechanic emits.
On the website portal, that means your screen is auto-scrolling down every time there is a new emit and it can get frustrating pretty quickly.
So I love the mechanics in the framework of even a loose pose order. Unfortunately, at the moment, there’s not really a culture of following pose order or even 3per at Silent Heaven.
The easy go around on this is to go to a room that won’t be so obviously high-traffic to have your chat scene - and there are plenty of those to go to - but a lot of people like bar RP (myself included) for meaningful across the table meaningful chat scenes and that’s a hard thing to accomplish here.
So, I personally love the mechanics and would give them an A.
But they are very dependent on how people use them in the scene, and that can very quickly push that A grade to an F.
CRAFTING
I am not a huge crafting person. I crafted a bit on Arx and didn’t find it too intuitive or easy. The crafting in Silent Heaven is great, idiot-simple (perfect for me) and I had a blast doing it making some clothing items.
I also futzed around with the drug synthesizing and LOL - you can make just a whole mini-game out of that and seeing what it does to your sheet/people.
Describing your character I am putting here because it is itself a bit of crafting. You can set a long desc and be done with it, or you can also desc different regions of the body which is perfect for people who like to describe fingers, nail-polish, tattoos, muscles (or lack thereof).
And the body portions you can desc will be covered by clothing and only show when you aren’t wearing types of clothing. So a jacket will cover your arms and tats, but a t-shirt won’t. You have a lot of freedom to go into detail about your bit.
And the answer to the follow-up question you’re all wondering about describing your body is yes. Keep in mind, that is all OPTIONAL, not required.
The art crafting is great, and also very simple, and you can be as colorful as you want.
Food is also crafted with ingredients and flavors. Lot of fun. Very cool.
Crafting, for me, is A+. There is a learning curve on it and it’s nothing like you might be used to from Arx or other crafting code. But ultimately I think it is simpler and more intuitive.
Community
I love the Silent Heaven community. There hasn’t been a single drop of OOC drama that I could spot. People rarely need to use the OOC chat command at all. Everyone keeps it IC. So even when there is HEAVY IC DRAMA (and there is a ton), it is clearly kept IC.
Yes, there is a Discord server. It is the quietest server I have ever been on. No one is discussing what is happening IC. It’s just not part of the culture to do that. And this has been super refreshing.
Everyone I’ve met IC has been helpful. There is a very “we are all in this together” sense excepting some key character types, but that is all theme-relevant.
Newbies coming into the game have no problem getting the help they need and finding their footing, and even getting into the whole mess and mystery of what’s going on right out the gate.
I saw some concern about no OOC way to find RP. It just hasn’t been a problem. People are at the cafe or the club regularly. People are whispering on the wind. You can see who is around IC using that system and immediately hook into something. In fact, I would say it’s been 10 times easier for me to find ready RP whenever I want to with 10-20 people on-line using these IC methods than it ever has been checking “connected players” or “+where” and paging at folks with 50+ players connected and active.
The caveat here is, obviously, that you as a player need to be willing to RP with whoever is around. If you’re more of the selective type, it’ll probably be more difficult.
Total strangers willing to take a brand new person on grid adventures to get a flashlight, fight a wolf-bat, or score some drugs? Check, check and check!
It can get chaotic because you have a mix of people like me who are MUSH players from Ares and Arx, and people who clearly are more MUD-oriented and just do a lot of rapid-fire “say” dialogue commands. It takes some getting used to but hasn’t been a deal-breaker. People from MUD environments also seem to be used to people just breezing out of a room with no farewell or to-do about it, so if the rapid-fire “say” emits are too much, you can just leave and no one will blink at it. That can be a pain in the ass - especially if you were there first - but I imagine it will even itself out as time goes on and the game gets more settled community-wise. Honestly, it has only been annoying a couple times where a couple players drop in and run “say” up to 5 or 6 times in a row and you don’t know what they are talking about, or who they are talking to. I’m sure they know what they’re responding to, but I have no idea. I think that will balance out as the player base expands with more people coming over from Arx/Ares. I don’t want to go into this too much because there is a whole thread open on Pose Lengths.
I give the community an A+ without reservation.
GMs
They have been very helpful and very attentive. I asked for a scene with an NPC (which is very simple to do! You just say to the NPC “I want to talk to you about…” and it puts in a request). Got my scene the very next day and it went beautifully.
For some high drama on-grid stuff that went down, an ST was puppeting key NPCs and they appear on ‘WHO’ just like players and can be hissed at and interacted with.
JumpScare has answered every question and helped me out when I needed it. Very open and friendly.
Giving them an A.
MISC
There’s no IC expectation of privacy anywhere but your hotel room. This is a big turn off for a lot of people, I know. But it is theme-fitting, so what can I say? I haven’t run into anyone who seems like the sort that’s going to spy on your TS. I mean, I don’t personally care. If you want to read my awful attempts at smut, be my guest - you have only yourself to blame for the disappointment. But knowing some stories I’ve heard about elsemu**s, I definitely think this should be made against policy, if for no other reason than stuff like that can get OOC creepy really fast and I don’t see how spying on TS would forward the game in any way.
The Journal system is great and easy to keep track of what you learned, your RP, who you have met, etc. You can even use it to just drop OOC notes to GMs. They do read the journals, from what I understand. You can categorize your journals and search them by category for easy keeping track of discoveries, relationships, etc. You get daily XP awards for writing journals.
Skills - I haven’t been on long enough to comment too heavily on this. But, the rolls are built into the mechanics. There are not free form checks on skills. So if a passage way needs to be found, you SEARCH for it and it rolls your skill. If you try to HIDE, there’s a roll, etc. But no sitting across from someone and aggressively rolling EMPATHY at them, and no checking strength against an opponent. It’s all factored into simple mechanics, which is very nice.
Wrap up
I can only speak for myself and I have been having an absolute blast. It was easy to get into. Easy to stay engaged. The learning curve was not that bad. The RP is easy to find. The drama is hot, fast and heavy. Attentive, friendly staff. Great characters. A lot of room for creativity. And very, very creepy/bizarre.
I think the RP/mechanics issue will balance out eventually. I think the in-game culture will balance out to accommodate more RP-minded folks like myself. The peeves I mentioned I believe will disappear given enough time. The game is still pretty new and all the players are learning what is expected as they interact with each other. But a lot of fun is being had and, what can I say? I’m hooked.
ETA: Searching the grid more and more I have seen a LOT of art that’s been crafted by players. Mostly in the form of paintings. These are lovely, horrifying, spooky and everything in between. So the crafting code is well loved and well used. Very colorful stuff, too, with gradients and all of that.
