HOW'S THE GAME

[paradisamods]

It's time for another round of Game Discussion, also known as

HOW'S THE GAME?

Here we come together to discuss the game, its plots, the settings, and just about anything we can think of that we'd like to talk about, expand upon, improve, change, etc.

This is not an HMD for players and their characters; this should be about the game's function as a whole and not the people in it. If there is something you feel is absolutely necessary to address that involves a specific person, please IM a mod first to discuss it. We can be reached at valawie (Valerie) or never die ftw (Ashley).

Anonymous will be on for this round. Sock journals are still allowed.

Please feel free to bring up any game-related topic you'd like to discuss. All topics will be linked in the main post.

➜ HOW'S THE STAFF
➜ PLOTTING 101
➜ SOFT REBOOT
➜ APPLICATION CHANGES
➜ ENTRY TAGS
➜ ORIGINAL CHARACTERS

Comments

HOW'S THE STAFF

[paradisamods]

Our current staff includes Valerie valerie and Ashley frisky as mods, with Jenn superheroine (general, ombudsman), Theresa submarine (applications), Sarah blackhearts (lists) and Pan pulped (events and scheduling) as helpers.

As always, we welcome and encourage any questions or comments you may have for us. All feedback will be greatly appreciated!

PLOTTING 101

[paradisamods]

We'd like your feedback on any plots you'd like to see in the future. We've also put up a survey on plots recently, so please fill that out if you haven't. Perhaps you have an idea but don't know where to begin writing it up yourself, or maybe you have a question about something you'd like to try but aren't sure how it would work. If it's related to plots you'd like to see happen, it goes here.

PLOT SURVEY RESULTS!

[lucre]

The survey is still open if you haven't filled it out, but so far the results show that people want to see more action and expedition plots with horror following close behind. We have an action and a horror plot coming up in the next three months and we'll try to organize an expedition in June. Considering the enthusiasm for adventure-y expeditions, we'll keep that in mind when we plan it. More detailed suggestions for that is most welcome too, so please submit your pitches here!

There's also a suggestion for mystery plots in case you'd like to weigh in on that too.

People also want more longer plots, which are more involved in terms of planning and running them. Right now I schedule just one long plot each month with a sprinkle of shorter plot(s), mostly due to my own time limitation and limited number of player-run plots. The other mods have been really great with picking up my slack but they're also busy with many other things. I'd love to schedule two long plots in a month instead of one, but I need you to help us out by pitching ideas and, even better, volunteering to run events. Any other ideas on how to make this work is welcome.

As for plot types, it seems that people are generally happy with structured and internal-driven ones, as well as external-driven plots with freeform following last. Noting this, we'll just make sure that we keep up the variety.

That's all from me. Thanks for letting us know your thoughts!

SOFT REBOOT

[paradisamods]

We've recently put the soft reboot in effect, both ICly in terms of the castle and city being quite drastically changed, and OOCly in terms of how information is organized. We'd like to hear what you think about the changes, what questions you still have and how the ideas can be refined going forward. Anything that has to do with the recent soft reboot goes here.

[unmanned]

I'm so pleased with the soft reboot it's ridiculous. It's a like giving your classic car a shiny new coat of paint :')

I did a lot of game shopping recently, and one thing I've seen in a few and think might benefit Paradisa is a sort of hey-this-is-what-you-get-upon-arrival page. Your character wakes up in a castle room, there's a journal, etc. I think that's one of the common questions I've seen from newer players--what do their characters first wake up to?

It could be linked in the acceptance comment for an application along with what comms to join. I might have missed it in the new pages, but I see a lot of world at large descriptions, so maybe a little blurb about coming to could be useful.

[superheroine]

It's a page in progress here! I just don't want to link it until we've got it finished.

[lord_wizard]

Will we be getting any revamped maps for the castle and the city? I noted with particular interest the blurb about a river running through the fortress in the profile page, but no abject mention of it in the city royale page itself (not including a few pictures). I'd really love a clearer idea of how that's situated and what it's like, exactly (wide or narrow, fast or slow, barren or filled with fish, etc.).

APPLICATION CHANGES

[paradisamods]

Since the last round of How's The Game, we've allowed game imported/CR AU characters and opened all types of applications all year round. We've also condensed the application pages into one for your convenience. Let us know what you think of the changes to applications here and how it can be continually improved.

[forsometimenow]

I don't have any suggestions, but I do want to say I personally love the changes made- especially keeping apps unscreened. I'm a former app mod myself and I just love seeing new ones come in, and it can help give potential appers a good idea of what the mods are looking for. So I say keep on keeping on with how it is now!

ENTRY TAGS

[unmanned]

I thiiiiiink this was brought up Back in the Day (LJ times), but I'd like to revisit it now! Currently, we only have the poster tagged on the entries in the main comm. Why not tag all the characters involved? If a character needs more comments for AC it'd be easier for them to find, and it'd be a lot simpler to follow a character in the game. Like if I were interested in seeing what Lucrezia was up to, I'm missing a lot of journal content between her last two entries.

I don't think we'd need to do anything too fancy like have different tags for active/inactive characters or indicate who the poster was, just the plain ol' name.

sure did just not check the journal I was logged into before posting

[fearbringer]

+1! I used to be strongly in favor of having posts tagged only with their maker's tags in journal games, but I've been changing my tune lately. And if anyone wants to see only a specific character's posts, communityname.dreamwidth.org?poster=journalname is a simple way to do that even if commenter's tags are added to a post, too.

Re: ENTRY TAGS

[eaglet]

The only reason I could think of for why we don't let everyone who commented on a post add their tags is that this is how AC is checked. But as is mentioned above, you can easily check any journal's posts with the /?poster=username code... though this doesn't take into account when people use loss-specific journals -- but I guess that's a simple enough correction to make when AC goes up anyway.

So yeah, basically I'm in favor of it :V

[deadlybanker]

This is the convention? In that case, I'm afraid I have been messing this up since I apped in. Sorry about that!

I have been tagging everything I replied to since the rules page also mentioned comments counting for AC and how else would you find these comments without a tag? I can stop of course, but I completely missed this rule some how.

[pulped]

STALKER

I agree with this, it would help a lot with the players checking their own AC and for stalking purposes especially now that comments count toward it to. I don't think it would be too difficult to implement since it's just a matter of telling everyone to just tag everything they tagged into.

[givetheslip]

+1, it makes it tremendously difficult to check up on people the way it is. And I don't mean that just because I personally enjoy reading what everyone's been up to in the past! It's helpful to look at past threads castmates have done to get better context for their development, for example.

+1

[theflyingone]

All of the above comments. I even check noncastmate posts. It helps me get a quick feel of what sort of style and genres a player likes to do, so I'm not blindly slamming into their open log with something they might not enjoy. Instead of playing 20 questions via awkward PMs, I can just skim their past stuff and save us both time.

I was also not aware of the rule about only the OP tagging their entries! D8

ORIGINAL CHARACTERS

[frisky]

I would like to gauge everyone's interests on allowing original characters to apply into Paradisa. Now that we have allowed returning characters to apply freely as well as imports from other games, I'd really like to start the push in this direction, but of course, if everyone is okay with it.

This is how I propose the application for will go, the big differences highlighted:

► On top of the regular applications, these will be far more scrutinized, of course, to ensure consistency on the player's part above god-moding and mary sue-ing. (I know the latter two reasons are what a lot of games are trying to ward against, but really, that can always be argued about many canon characters as it is.)

► In lieu of series and canon point, I would like to see a 500 word minimum on the character's world and how they fit into it. Are they a powerful mage in charge of keeping their lands safe? Are they an unassuming castle ward who is secretly a werewolf? Or are they just a regular person who runs a sandwich shop? I'd like to know their history and how they've grown to become who they are now! Essentially this is a history section, which we do not require in our normal canon character apps.

► A longer personality section. I feel like 1000 words minimum is a good standard, especially since we essentially require 1k words for the character import applications. Again, this is to ensure consistency on the player's part, and also have an insight to how they think, since we obviously can't pick up a book to read about their thought processes or watch how they handle a dying friend.

► An emphasis on abilities. Nothing different from what we normally judge, but the knowledge that we will keep an eye on this section for anything potentially gamebreaking, if applicable.

► For the first person journal sample, since we do allow linking to threads, I would like to see an example of the character interacting with any established canon character, whether they are already in the castle or not. There will be no real standard for this, but it will be strongly encouraged for the first person sample's "passing".

That's it, really. It's pretty basic, I feel, to really get us a good grasp on how a potential apper perceives the character and how they think.

So, please let me know your thoughts! For the time being, I'd like to see if we could test the waters with strictly characters from original universes and completely your own creation, and broach the topic of fandom ocs at a later time. If you any have thoughts on the latter, let me know.

If we were to eventually allow fandom ocs, my thoughts on that would be that they cannot have any direct relationship to any established characters in canon. For example, for Homestuck OCs, my fantroll would not be able to blame Vriska for feeding a friend to her giant spider mom. On a broader scale, if I were to apply as someone from the Mass Effect universe, I can't have my character directly have fought against or alongside Shepard or be on a personal level with her, but they can know that she saved this or that.

But again, I feel like we would need to see how original characters go down first.

Let me know!

[preformthisneigh]

Those all look like pretty fair standards to me! So many games accept OCs now, I see no real harm in us doing suit, especially with good app standards like that to keep to.

As for fandom OCs, I agree it's a good idea to hold back and see how regular OCs pan out first. Practise makes perfect and all that jazz.

Re: ORIGINAL CHARACTERS

[eaglet]

I would personally not want OCs in Paradisa. I don't really have any points to argue, it's just not something I would like in the game.

Re: ORIGINAL CHARACTERS

[strangewonders]

The biggest issue I can see against it, is the way the game uses losses. If it's an OC, that has the potential for abuse, because someone can say 'oh, well, they had this thing that was important, I'll give that up' when it didn't really previously factor into the character's background anyway. (This is more for secondary losses/changing losses, since I would assume the original app would have to give good reason for an initial loss to even be accepted).

If some way can be found to make sure the 'I make my own canon' factor can't be abused, I see no huge reason to reject the idea, though I'm not that big on OCs, personally.

[molotov]

I am also not in favor, personally. I just don't think the setting is appropriate for OCs.

[keelahs]

I would actually like seeing original characters in this game, I both OU and Canon OC's tbh. I think it would really add something that the game doesn't already have and open it to potential new players. Even for an older game like Para, growth is never a bad thing!

The only thing that would make me shy away from the idea of OC's is how the mods handle apps and the policing of those characters. But I think the mods here are already very good at that aspect of their jobs and would handle OC's fairly.

I think the points above are valid ones, but I think a lot of the points given can be said (as Valerie said) for any character from any fandom. I agree that OC's are hardly different than highly obscure characters and I also disagree on the fact that they couldn't have "canon mates". I have numerous old OC's from many different universes that all have canon mates. Who's two say two or multiple people can't collaborate and bring in several characters in from the same original universe.

[pulped]

Canon characters are just someone else's original characters, so I think the issues raised regarding losses and character development apply to canon characters too. Development and finding things for characters to do would come down to the individual players, regardless of whether they're canon or OC. So TL;DR I'm all for original characters! I don't see any reason not to allow them, especially since it would lead to us seeing more new and awesome characters to play with!

My one concern with having OCs around would only be in judging whether they're being OOC in the day-to-day, when the player is also the character's creator. So I'd just add that all OCs must post their application on their journals for all to see. This way, they can't suddenly decide their talking octopus character is actually the long-lost son of Cthulhu just because they feel like it.

Other than that, yes yes yes! I don't mind fandom OCs either, as long as the requirement that they have absolutely no direct contact with any canon characters is strictly enforced.

[both_neither]

I'm going to have to say no to this as well, mostly for the reason someone already stated that it's simply a matter of taste and there's not a concrete argument I can put forward against it.

That said, I'd maybe suggest putting this forward again in another few months, as I'd really prefer to see how the game handles the transitions with CRAUs before another drastic change to our app criteria is made. It may just be a matter of "too much too soon" in terms of game changes.

[rightchoices]

I'm a little late to this party, but I'm all for OCs in Para. Those app standards seem fair, and some of my best CR in others games has been with original characters. A lot of people put so much love and energy into their OCs and it shows. I think it'd be great.