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IC World Building After Action Review
robocop is bleeding
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Registered User regular
Link to the Game that Started it All
First off, big thanks to Red Berry Blue for bringing this idea to the forums and to all the players (especially Salt and Ranken) who worked hard to make it great!
Noticing now, however, that the game is pretty much dead (as of this typing, no updates in almost a week) or sleeping, I thought that it might be a good idea to open discussion about what it takes for a game like this to grow and thrive either in 'round the table' play or 'round the forum' play.
One thing that was certaingly not lacking from the initial game's launch was players and enthusiasm. The initial setup (Great Fish!) was awesome as well. But I think a series of hurdles sprung up after the initial opening waves that slowly dragged things down to our current standstill.
Some of these issues, from my point of view, include (and are certainly not limited to):
Scope
What is the scope of the game and how can it be better defined? We started off with Red Berry Blue' initial idea and let things grow organically from there. This lead to some confusion, I think, as to whether or not we were producing a world to later play in or if we were playing by producing a world.
Power Levels and Types
Looking over the list of gods and godlings, we see a wide variety of power levels and power types.
Power levels changed greatly from god to god with some deities having control over vast portfolios while others only have limited scopes. It also looks like the earlier one joined in, the broader the portfolio and thus the bigger the god's sphere of influence.
Power Types also varied. By 'type' I mean the type of god people are playing. Is your god a God of Stuff, a God of Concept, or somewhere in between? Each type of god has historical examples, but each type also has a different role depending on the stage of the game. Many of the Concept Gods are left out of actual world creation, while the Stuff Gods may fall by the wayside when it comes to race creation and development.
Moving Godly Cheese
This was a big issue. Players were either overly aware of not wanting to mess with other player's stuff or more than happy to do so. Also, I think the moving the cheese issue really highlighted the disconnect between Stuff Gods and Concept Gods. For example, take Lord Salt who rightly pointed out that everyone was moving his cheese - as the premier Stuff God, he had a lot of Cheese to move! Likewise, Ranken, a Concept God of Balance has a portfolio that would pretty much have to move people's cheese in order to maintain 'Balance.'
When too much cheese was being moved, things would get sidetracked OOCly as folks tried to figure out what was going on or to express dismay that things were altered in their absense.
When folks were not willing to move other folk's cheese (say, by waiting for Rose to breathe life into the initial races), the game slowed down.
Pacing
Red Berry Blue did a good job of keeping us all on track, but there were still some times where the pacing of the game was off. Newly minted gods were rar'n to get to work while other players were still joining. The game hinged for a moment on getting creatures living and off the ground. Some players focused on what future societies would be while others were still looking at primative organizations.
Lack of Common Tropes
There are certain tropes in a fantasy world or game, tropes that we did not follow for this game. While I think it's cool to invent new races that people have not seen before, I think it's hard to have a group collaborative game where not everyone is up on what's going on. Four armed asexual monkeymen are all well and good, but when they're introduced as a 'standard' race after folks imagined that they'd be dealing with humans, elves, and other standard fantasy races. Too much originality makes it hard for other players and observers to contribute, I think.
So what can be done? I don't think these hurdles are too much to overcome. I think a little structure would help out future games like this (but not so much structure that the game becomes unweildy like Aria: Canticle of the Momomyth did).
Some ideas:
* Define the scope of the game at its very start. Is the goal to play a game or create a place to play? Contributions change based on the scope.
* Set 'stages of development' that the player running the game advances the group thru. Stages could be added or subtracted as the game goes on depending on play, but would be communicated to all - For example, all games would have a 'Formation of the World' stage, but as things develop stages like 'The Second Age of Men' or 'Godswar' could be added.
* Use 'common fantasy races' - this makes it easier for players to collaborate and may aid in setting the game up as a future setting for RPG play
* Define gods' roles and powers. I'd love to hear ideas on how to do this. Perhaps an Amber-like bidding system?
* Define how interactions between gods function in a given stage. What can limit a god? A god of the ocean should certainly have the ability to flood the land, but would it fit the scope of the game for said god to simply sink the world beneath the waves? How could he be stopped?
Anyways, this is longer than I thought it would be due in part to my boss's vacation and the free coffee I found this morning. I hope it doesn't come off as critical, as that is not my intent. I'd love to hear your thoughts be you player of the initial game, observer, or just someone who thinks stuff like this is really cool.
First off, big thanks to Red Berry Blue for bringing this idea to the forums and to all the players (especially Salt and Ranken) who worked hard to make it great!
Noticing now, however, that the game is pretty much dead (as of this typing, no updates in almost a week) or sleeping, I thought that it might be a good idea to open discussion about what it takes for a game like this to grow and thrive either in 'round the table' play or 'round the forum' play.
One thing that was certaingly not lacking from the initial game's launch was players and enthusiasm. The initial setup (Great Fish!) was awesome as well. But I think a series of hurdles sprung up after the initial opening waves that slowly dragged things down to our current standstill.
Some of these issues, from my point of view, include (and are certainly not limited to):
Scope
What is the scope of the game and how can it be better defined? We started off with Red Berry Blue' initial idea and let things grow organically from there. This lead to some confusion, I think, as to whether or not we were producing a world to later play in or if we were playing by producing a world.
Power Levels and Types
Looking over the list of gods and godlings, we see a wide variety of power levels and power types.
Power levels changed greatly from god to god with some deities having control over vast portfolios while others only have limited scopes. It also looks like the earlier one joined in, the broader the portfolio and thus the bigger the god's sphere of influence.
Power Types also varied. By 'type' I mean the type of god people are playing. Is your god a God of Stuff, a God of Concept, or somewhere in between? Each type of god has historical examples, but each type also has a different role depending on the stage of the game. Many of the Concept Gods are left out of actual world creation, while the Stuff Gods may fall by the wayside when it comes to race creation and development.
Moving Godly Cheese
This was a big issue. Players were either overly aware of not wanting to mess with other player's stuff or more than happy to do so. Also, I think the moving the cheese issue really highlighted the disconnect between Stuff Gods and Concept Gods. For example, take Lord Salt who rightly pointed out that everyone was moving his cheese - as the premier Stuff God, he had a lot of Cheese to move! Likewise, Ranken, a Concept God of Balance has a portfolio that would pretty much have to move people's cheese in order to maintain 'Balance.'
When too much cheese was being moved, things would get sidetracked OOCly as folks tried to figure out what was going on or to express dismay that things were altered in their absense.
When folks were not willing to move other folk's cheese (say, by waiting for Rose to breathe life into the initial races), the game slowed down.
Pacing
Red Berry Blue did a good job of keeping us all on track, but there were still some times where the pacing of the game was off. Newly minted gods were rar'n to get to work while other players were still joining. The game hinged for a moment on getting creatures living and off the ground. Some players focused on what future societies would be while others were still looking at primative organizations.
Lack of Common Tropes
There are certain tropes in a fantasy world or game, tropes that we did not follow for this game. While I think it's cool to invent new races that people have not seen before, I think it's hard to have a group collaborative game where not everyone is up on what's going on. Four armed asexual monkeymen are all well and good, but when they're introduced as a 'standard' race after folks imagined that they'd be dealing with humans, elves, and other standard fantasy races. Too much originality makes it hard for other players and observers to contribute, I think.
So what can be done? I don't think these hurdles are too much to overcome. I think a little structure would help out future games like this (but not so much structure that the game becomes unweildy like Aria: Canticle of the Momomyth did).
Some ideas:
* Define the scope of the game at its very start. Is the goal to play a game or create a place to play? Contributions change based on the scope.
* Set 'stages of development' that the player running the game advances the group thru. Stages could be added or subtracted as the game goes on depending on play, but would be communicated to all - For example, all games would have a 'Formation of the World' stage, but as things develop stages like 'The Second Age of Men' or 'Godswar' could be added.
* Use 'common fantasy races' - this makes it easier for players to collaborate and may aid in setting the game up as a future setting for RPG play
* Define gods' roles and powers. I'd love to hear ideas on how to do this. Perhaps an Amber-like bidding system?
* Define how interactions between gods function in a given stage. What can limit a god? A god of the ocean should certainly have the ability to flood the land, but would it fit the scope of the game for said god to simply sink the world beneath the waves? How could he be stopped?
Anyways, this is longer than I thought it would be due in part to my boss's vacation and the free coffee I found this morning. I hope it doesn't come off as critical, as that is not my intent. I'd love to hear your thoughts be you player of the initial game, observer, or just someone who thinks stuff like this is really cool.
robocop is bleeding on
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I had a blast playing with you dudes in creating the world, and was lucky enough to chance into the role I had. It sort of gave me a way to meddle with everythign that was going on without limiting my scope, and I appologize of I stepped on any toes in the process, but that's sort of how these things go when there are no firm rules set.
In retrospect, having a clear goal and domains pre-established so that people can pick from pre-existing roles would make things probably run a lot smoother. We had a lot of initial interest, so all of the good roles were snapped up, which left a lot of people grasping for other roles that were more esoteric and less ocncrete, and which frequently fell under another player's domain.
Once we got through the Awakening period, everything sort of slowed down, I think because we really had no idea how we were doing things and where we were headed. I think defining a game engine, such as d20 generic or GURPS or something, would have been helpful so that we could have something to work towards to make it a playable game world.
That said, I'm curious to see what others think.
The first while was very much the domain of the gods, creating the world itself. But once we got down to the point where we had the awakened races it became something where the actions of the races would have been the most important. It completely shifted focus, and really the thread needed to do so as well to keep things moving.
Some basic rules or guidelines would help greatly. And having a Wiki set up right from the very start. I tried to update the wiki with all the info in the thread but it was just too much stuff to put in after the fact so I just gave up trying.
Another point that could be useful in future would having a some guidelines for posting in the thread. I loved the IC stuff but it really did make it hard to extract the useful information.
I guess this depends on how well they're used and whether or not they really become necessary. In The Scale, we all moved into the new phase, but we also all stopped. I'm sure we all had our reasons, but the biggest was probably that it was a huge change and many of us weren't as interested in the new 'level'.
Yes. As soon as it was decided that our 'base races' for the game would be tentacled monkeys, centaurofish, and whatever the mountain people were, I didn't really have much hope left. The game became far too alien to make an interesting campaign setting, I think.
I don't know about this; I think it worked out alright with every god being basically omniscient, and most players were good about not stepping outside of their own domains. Putting limitations on gods? I dunno, man.
And I guess this is why you need limits. I presented this idea early on because I'd done something like it before and enjoyed it; in that game, however, there were no limits, and one god basically exploded the entire planet (and the game had to reset.) Do we make it so that you need to speak with the overgod VIA PM before you can do something major? It would give him a more invested role in the game, and also make sure things are fairly 'scripted', as well.
The Wiki also needed a lot more contributors. I went through all my posts and tried to add everything mentioned in them I felt was a notable event or add articles when they warranted it. If the bestiary was more expansive and every deity's entry included their major actions it may have been easier to develop more accomidating and detailed contributions.
Speaking of the bestiary and more accomidating contributions, I do have to admit there's some issues with the designs of the first races. I have no issues with them being unique and departures from cliched racial archetypes (in fact I think the whole point of doing the Scale is to avoid such), but the actual results are flawed, indistinct, and unrelatable. Frankly most of them are a mish-mash of physical traits and bodyparts to the point of being truly alien, and thus difficult for anyone to create characters and pioneer their civilization. The centaur-like Riisaans are one thing, but how is one supposed to easily get into the mind of a tree-climbing tentacle 'creature'? This major element of the story was not created by multiple writers and could have been prevented with some more careful choices.
Finally, I still think a gradual transition into writing a mortal history would be the best route, steadily reducing the amount needed for purely writing and abstracting events, thereby increasing the tangibility of the world with more rigid interraction within it. Attempting to develop the freshly-made world by creating 'chatacter' characters with defined ages and items is simply jumping the gun, let alone futzing together classes and attributes.
My ideas:
Some sort of power level inversely proportional to scope. So where the "god of Earth" still gets to do something big (making the Earth and sky and whatnot), someone like the "god of lightning" can override him in regards to lightning things, but in the realm of static-discharges-coming-from-shuffling-your-feet-on-the-carpet, the god of static-discharges-coming-from-shuffling-your-feet-on-the-carpet is the ultimate authority. You could assign numerical values to it so that Earth was 5 or so, lightning 3, and static-discharges-coming-from-shuffling-your-feet-on-the-carpet was 1. That was the spirit of things I beleive, and fits in with the idea that I beleive RBB was looking for, just formalized. It would help resolve conflicts , and could be extended to cover what a God can do outside their sphere of influence, so static-discharges-coming-from-shuffling-your-feet-on-the-carpet would have a 2 relating to other static things, a 4 when it comes to common lightning things (weaker than lightning god, stronger than earth god), and a 6 if he wanted to make water flow or create a species or something. Just an idea.
My second idea would be forcing a sort of rule thing, and may or may not be too good an idea, but it would be some sort of point system (you pay a certain amount per day or some such) based on what you wanted to do, so that making a race would take a lot out of a God, and proginators would have to take the backburner for a while leaving the dark fire god free to keep raining dark fire while man-god rests. This fits a precedence in creation myths where the creators end up sitting back and hanging out for a while. Or all their points get tied up doing minor miracles like feeding the hungry and curing dieseases. But that might make things too gamey, too crunchy.
I also like the idea of a bidding system suggested in the OP, but I understand Salts fear of limiting gods. If this was thought out before hand, everyone could agree on what everyone would be ahead of time, and the confusing, "I take the brain" "Uh, its already taken" could have been taken care of, not that that's totally a bad thing.
I also definately think the stages concept is win.
Edit: I understand why you wouldn't want to systemify things, but a system gives rules on what can and can't be done meaning that people don't have to be careful about overstepping their bounds and would give rules on what can me changed or not changed and how other people could change things. Maybe people didn't fix centaurofish because they didn't want to step all over centaurofish maker's dick. But with rules, there's a certain amount of dick stepping allowed and expected.
And on the other hand, I see where the rules would make things more convoluted and troublesome and limit things. And I'm indecisive, so I try to take both stands. I'm honestly inclined to agree with you Salt because of my respect for you, however.
The one area of contention I did feel was too much stepping one other's toes was the repeated attempts to counter Salt (I don't recall who the first one was done by or if they were from the same person), which perhaps should have been intervened with some clarfications on just what the scope was of these declarations.
Alsthough I do think INeedNoSalt could have made it clear in the first place how encompassing he intended his actions. I adore the extreme character of Salt but with just how intense his declarations are there was little neutral context of what he was going to do. If a player character is going to shout "I'm over at your house, shootin' your dog!" and is actually just greasing my cardoor handles or something, I'd sure like to know whether I can see him holding a .50 semi-auto or a jar of vaseline.
EDIT: "'I take the brain' 'Uh, its already taken'" could have been taken care of if people read before contributing. I may have made a wordy first contribution but I did read up on available domains and that all the creation scales and other parts were taken, so I worked up a complete background to fit in. My only mistake was not noticing that Duo had mentioned stars an hour before me among the bizzare mess that was his post (honestly I hate it when my groups get RPers like that, they're hard to GM).
I feel daft, but I'm not quite sure I get the jist of this part of your post. Was I being unclear? Was someone else?
Was someone saying A and meaning B? I never noticed anything like that.
In freeform, the wizard player would have to think, "Alright, I don't want to do things that encroach on Jim's territory and make myself the be all end all, so I don't know whether or not I should lift the rock."
With rules, the wizard player knows he can't lift the rock so he doesn't, or knows he can, and so he might as well since Jim isn't doing it.
Rules both limit and liberate. A certain amount of politeness is required anyway, because when the DM says, "You can't lift the rock, you don't have the strength" you nod your head acceptingly instead of standing up, saying fuck you, and leaving. Control is required either way, but rules make it easier to know how much you should control yourself or not. Adhering to the rules is a measure of politeness and control just as not destroying all of someone elses work is.
I hope that made sense, because that's how I see the use of rules. If helping people define their own limitations and what ground they should step on is something we want then more rules is good. If we like the idea of everyone defining their own rules without contention, then more rules is bad. Hopefully reducing the concept to that level helps to understand the position I take and why rules help or hinder.
I think granting favors and what not supports the idea of a rule system as players can bid for undefined favors of a certain value and then use those favors with 'aligned favor points' becoming some kind of currency. The god of earth needs a favor from the god of life, the god of balance, the god of sentience, the god of intelligence, and the god of language to make dwarves or whatever. There could be an interesting play-dynamic in this collection if we cared about the play dynamic. That doesn't mean that it has to be done, I just mean it could be something interesting and fun. But it really depends on scope and purpose of the entire ordeal. Things that are fun to do on the way can probably hinder the final product, and so if the final product is a roleplaying world then specific enough rules will tighten the end result. Of course, they could also help keep everything from being too alien as well.
But those bogged-down discussions are a far cry from 'oh yeah well I blow up the planet then lmaolz' or other big problems.
That was pretty much the goal I gathered, but the main point was the actual journey of developing the world through such an organic, multiple-contributor writing process.
On the other hand, you can't have folks randomly popping in and blowing up the world (well, you could, depending on the stated scope of the game. If the game's intent is to make a campaign setting, eesh, no. If the game's intent is to just be a game, well, maybe...).
I like the idea of encouraging gods to gather allies, but a god of fire that has to convince the gods of music, technology, and left handed scissors to let him burn down a forest isn't much of a god at all.
Hrm. Perhaps if godly actions came with a statement of player intent and that intent needs to be agreed on/voted through/whatever? Again, the question of scope is what matters here. Is the game's scope to create a playable world or to have gods duke it out?
The whole issue of playing a god and defining its powers is pretty hairy. I think that would be a good reason to shift the game's stages a bit. Something like this:
Stage 1 - Creation
Players play Gods as representations of impartial forces
Stage 2 - Age of Eden
Players play Gods as personified representations of the same forces alone together in some common eden.
Stage 3 - Age of Myth
Players play the avatars of the same gods loose in the world of mortals.
Stage 4 - Age of Heroes
Players play followers/priests/disciples/messiahs/whatever of the gods.
Stage 5 - Age of Now
Players play characters living in the world created.
Obviously each of these broadly stroked stages could be broke down into smaller rounds or something (so the Age of Myth could include a Godswar round, an Atlantis-like Utopia, etc). Between each round, players could check in as their initial, personified gods from Stage 2 for some wrangling and RP if they like ("You killed my priesthood! I shall inspire the kobolds to take my revenge!"). You wouldn't be locked into a single 'character' for Ages 3-5, mind, but could end up playing a variety of different folks (maybe even entire groups of folks in 3 or 4) as rounds move on. Thus new players can contribute without the need to play catch up ("I need someone to play the Vengeful Kobolds!")
All that's pretty muddled. Am I making any sense?
And we do have an Overseer for a reason, which helped many of those trouble spots. But really even at this point of the game we've a mix of both PCs and GMs, so if you can't regulate yourself and act out your characters for the sake of the story itself, you probably should wait untill campaigns are available.
The list of stages seems to be close to what we've been following, with 1&2 being early and late creation (assigning domains + creating the world followed by the demigods and shaping the world), with the 3rd initiating when the game wound down. Stage four and five sound a bit like my suggestions of transitioning from almost exclusive in-character writing to a mix of playing/writing and finally to pure playing. The world needs a lot of godly contributions still but it also needs the first ages of heroic 'characters' and orders, known more for what they added to their culture and history than what sort of personalities they were. From there we could move towards more personal and physically-defined PCs that would start wars, make incredible discoveries, shoot down Angels, forge kingdoms, and generally lay the groundwork for later and increasingly less 'epic' events, wherein we can finally create real starting characters to slay trolls or golems shadow creatures or whatnot.
Acting as the overseer, I felt that the game could very nearly have run itself without my intervention - I only needed to step in to rule in favour of one side or another in the few diputes we had that didn't settle themselves. It may be possible to replace the overseer altogether with a democratic circle of gods/players who debate any serious issues that come up and vote on actions to take.
I still think it's nice to have someone in charge to make calls (nobody wants to wait days for a dispute to work out), but I don't think it was fair for you to miss out so much just for taking on the role.
I'd like to see something start anew, although I'm going to miss Salt.
A baby is born...
This way we could skip the 'forming the universe' and 'making people' parts that we've already covered in the Great Fish Project and move on to the 'building history' aspect of things.
So the stages would be:
1) Arrival of the Gods - Players pick their gods, figure out who arrived with whom
2) Gods-as-Avatars - Gods discover the world for what it is, pick places to hole up/build power bases
3) Age of Myth - World and gods get used to each other
4) Age of Heroes - Players start playing mortals that drive history
...and so on. It'd be kinda cool to have a 'players play as groups or nations' round tossed in there for some macro history/world development.
Thoughts?
The races, while alien, didn't bug me as much.
Regardless of how the Gods are born, if they're created or borrowed from real world mythology, I love this idea by robocop. I'd love to be involved with the next game, if there is one, and with hopefully more to contribute.
But this time can it go from start to finish this time?
Stage 6 - Age of Grief and Ruin
Players play as characters living in the world that is now drifting away from religion and is seeing increased sins, violence and corruption.
Stage 7 - Age of Infidels
Players play as cultists/heretics/demagogues/rabblerousers/skeptics in violent opposition of gods and magical thinking, with no faith left anywhere at all.
Stage 8 - Age of Anger
Players play the avatars of the gods loose in the world of mortals, this time unleashing their vengeance upon the world and perhaps against other gods.
Stage 9 - Age of Hell
Players play the same Gods as personified representations of forces in a hellish era where the world is being torn apart at it's foundations.
Stage 10 - Heat Death/End of time/Collapse of the Universe
Players play as Gods representing impartial forces, bringing everything to a brutal end, until there is only a silent oblivion of profound nothingness.
The first four sound really specific and the last one doesn't exactly sound like it'd be a fun campaign setting. ("You're all in a void. You don't even exist." "Awesome, I..." "There is no you." "Well, uh...")
I guess your real-gods game might be enjoyable, robocop, but it doesn't sound interesting to me (and I probably wouldn't involve myself thusly.)
I updated it a bit to explain what I mean
It's basically like a "dark" opposite of the first 5 stages. in reverse
Summary:
Stage 1 = Initial World Building out of nothingness.
Stages2-9= God characters progessively participate less in favor of more mortal characters, until all faith disappears in which God characters begin to return again in a pissed off mood.
Stage 10= Closure, bringing the very universe that was created and all it's Gods to an end.
Is anyone actually going to use the resultant world for a campaign?
We could build a world... and then destroy it in reverse steps. How about we destroy this world that was just created IC?
If it was good, someone might.
Hey man, it's really up to you what you're into, but I'm not feeling this.
If you decide hey maybe let's go back to the Scale and break it, Salt and most of the other gods will probably destroy you, if that's what I think you were just suggesting.
O RLY?
I'm gonna destroy it.
As the God of Peace, I will have to kick your ass. With irony.
Planeswalker
Will of the Council - Starting with you, each player votes for death goblin.
Nintendo Network ID: AzraelRose
DropBox invite link - get 500MB extra free.
Do I have time to prepare?
Have you not read the thread?
Salt is goddamn malevolent. Destroying the world wouldn't do anything positive, however.
That makes you Neutral Evil at best. I'm looking for CHAOTIC evil.