rpanons | Your privilege at any time is only as strong as the wifi signal

Your privilege at any time is only as strong as the wifi signal

Rundown:

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Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Setting
Having a desert right there is maybe a little too convenient if the rest of the small kingdom is wet and wooded, but that's a minor thing.

Worldbuilding
Having some kind of post where players can add their own setting details, businesses, local legends, notable NPCs, common knowledge, etc. is a great idea. Other games have done that and it works very well without much mod oversight. Just ask that players check with you before adding major elements that might break your setting.

Pantheon
Sounds good to me. How would you handle minor supernatural beings, like demons or nature spirits or vampires or ghosts? Would those things be playable?

Plot and Plot Hooks
That's a good start. You could add in more mini plot hooks while you're setting up the worldbuilding, too - maybe elves and dwarves don't like each other, or maybe there's some political tension between two major court factions, maybe there's a new cult in town that's rejecting the old gods, maybe some townspeople trust the local thieves' guild more than they trust the king's guards, etc. You don't need a lot of detail, but it's always good to have little conflicts simmering in the background to jump start player plots (and then as the game becomes more established, players can start filling in their own subplots).

Classes
That's all good, too. Definitely include some ideas for non-adventurers.

Magic/Abilities
I'm glad you're keeping a distinction between Divine and Arcane magic, because I was going to suggest something like that. :D Even non-magical characters with minimal training could use an enchanted weapon or mix up a simple potion, so you could have a lot of minor everyday magic going on while still maintaining the idea that sorcerors with powerful innate magic and wizards with advanced magical education are relatively rare things.

How would you handle psychic abilities like telepathy, mind control, extreme good luck, or other things that could be godmode even at basic levels?

Pacing
For a game like this, I think slower is better. A 3:1 ratio is as fast as I would go. But I like games with flexible pacing - for instance, where 1 OOC month equals 7 IC days, and new threads can be set at any point during those 7 days. That works out to a roughly 4:1 day ratio, and dovetails very nicely with monthly AC, monthly plot writeups, and monthly plot brainstorming sessions. Then you don't have to worry about referring to a calendar, and you can backdate/forwarddate a little so events occur in a logical order.

Applications
Plot-heavy AU games are just almost always small. There have been a few exceptions over the years, yeah... but I don't think there's been an AU game with enough size and sustained player turnover to justify having real app periods since The Sky Tides closed, and that was several years ago. I'd leave them continuously open to start, and then temporarily close them for a few days if you get a backlog of apps. It's not like you have to deal with apps immediately... people usually start to get antsy if they haven't heard anything in two weeks, but if there's an event going on then mods aren't expected to process apps right away.

Activity Check
15 comments is probably fair, especially if this is going to be a game geared towards prose writing. I don't know what kind of rewards would actually motivate players in an AU, though... I guess you could have players pick from a list of things that might be beneficial to their character? A rare/expensive item, or recognition from a superior that increases their status in the game, or the ability to handwave their character learning a significant new skill. Or you could assign a small number of points for completing threads, and have players be able to save up points and OOCly "buy" from a list of rewards. I don't know! It's easy to reward characters in memory loss games or jamjars, but not so easy in AUs.

Setting
That's true... I'm not going to lie, I was mostly drawing from various video games I've played in to come up with this, and most of them had a desert so I thought it could be interesting to include one here! Maybe I'll alter it a little so it starts getting drier and drier but doesn't actually become desert until much further outside of the country's borders.

Worldbuilding
Okay, that seems like it would work really well! Thank you for the suggestion.

Pantheon
Those things would be playable! Some might appear more often as NPCs/player plot devices/etc than as player characters, but there's no reason why people shouldn't be able to play them if they want to.

Plots and Plot Hooks
Great idea, thank you for your input! I had some things in mind in the writeups I have for some of the cities and towns already, but they were mostly in terms of rumors of treasures being hidden out in different parts of the kingdom near the towns. I'll think a lot more about inter-race tensions too. (Is it just me or do dwarfs and elves always seem to argue?)

I definitely want to work in some plot hooks that are geared towards political intrigue and interpersonal conflicts, as well! It's equally fun to RP out those sorts of situations as it is to RP out epic quests for treasure.

Magic/Abilities
I think things like that would almost have to be handled on a case-by-case basis, but a general rule of thumb might be to have mandatory permissions posts for those types of powers. It could work on people who give the OK, and for people who don't, characters can attempt it but it could fail - we could ICly chalk it up to interference from the magic in the air, or something.

Pacing
The more I think about it, the more I really like the flexible pacing you suggested. Entries could be tagged with which day of the week it is, too, so that people could more easily find posts set on a day when their character is free to jump in. Of course that depends on having people tag them, but I think it's simple enough! And if worst came to I believe being an administrator of a comm gives me the ability to go in and tag posts myself, if people slip up once or twice.

Applications
Oh, I definitely don't want to leave people hanging for more than a few days! Ideally I'd like to see a 24-hour turnaround on applications, though that may not always be possible depending on when the application is submitted and how quickly it can be seen.

For a game of this size, would a team of two or three people including myself to look over apps be a good number, or would I need less?

Activity Check
Ooh, actually I really like the idea of points being used to buy rewards. I think I'll brainstorm a little and come up with some things for that list! Thanks for your input, anon!

This all sounds so cool. For someone who hasn't modded on DW before, it sounds like you have everything pretty well thought out!

And yeah, if you use a flexible time system, you'll have to have players specify the dates on their logs, and it does really help to have them tagged with the in-game date too.

You don't necessarily need 2-3 comods, but if the game is going to be heavy on plot, they'll be good to have around so you can let them write part of the monthly update posts. Anything that saves you work makes modding a lot less of a chore. It probably won't be necessary for all of the comods to review every app (some games use that system, but it tends to slow app processing to a crawl) but it's good to get at least one second opinion.

Having modded on forums definitely helps, I think! It's mostly a matter of figuring out how to make it work in a different format. The core of it remains the same.

I'm thinking I will definitely be using the flexible time system you described. Once I start getting the comms and mod account set up, I'd be glad to credit you/the game you played in for the idea if you don't want to de-anon here!

Honestly, while there will be an overarching plot, I'm not sure I want it to be heavy on it. From what I've seen by lurking around here, games that are described as plot-heavy also tend to have limitations on player action, and I want it to be open to as much player action as possible. That being said I also want people to have the chance to just relax and play rather than worrying about always running their own plots too... I'm sure there's a balance somewhere! I'll just have to find it.

This is probably a silly question, but how would one go about looking for comods? So far I've been doing this myself and have been bouncing ideas around in anoncomms, but I don't really have anyone in mind for a comod. Or since it's likely to start out slow, would it be better to mod alone at the start and then take mod applications after a few months into the game?

You can unanon here and invite interested people to PM you now, or wait until you have a comm partially set up. It looks like there might be decent interest! Modding alone can be a challenge, but it's doable.

This AC sounds more realistic than what you were discussing before! Big thumbs up.

One suggestion, though. When you do reward systems, sometimes it can be really easy to reward players who do nothing but sit around and RP all day (and fuck up in school) and incidentally penalize more responsible players who try to balance real life and RP. Don't let the rewards get too far out of hand, and do try to do stuff like maybe "doing at least 20 posts 3 months in a row gets you the same reward that 30 posts in a month would."

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Your privilege at any time is only as strong as the wifi signal

Re: Fantasy AU Game

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