I thought I'd take Props up on this whole blog thing and add a query of my own.
Specifically, I and Dee have been talking about layout ideas for the grid. In the past we've of course gone with the 'tree' model of such, which'd be on our game something like Earth -> Europe -> England -> London -> Charing Cross -> Charing Cross Railway Station -> Charing Cross Railway Station Cafe. That kind of thing.
Now, whereas that's quite different to the generic MU* grid of streets lain out in the directions of the compass, it's still gotten a bit old hat to yours truly. ;D So, I'd like a third option. Something different from the above, but still easy to navigate and all that. Ideas?
ETA: Well, judging by your comments, the tree model is still the preferred choice. Let it be so!
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
12 comments:
Basically we find ourselves defaulting to what was vaguely set up on CC and attempted more aggressively with WoW. While I found this easier to navigate than trudging through a standard grid, other folks found themselves getting lost despite my best intentions. So, is there an option C and if so, do we wish to exercise it?
I am no wunderkind when it comes to grid layout, but to my novice eye, it seems that London is the center of everything for both our setting and our game. Outside of London every locale can be broadly grouped into two categories: Civilization (Paris, New York) and Frontier (Africa, India). Ordinary people would only travel to the former, but adventurers are going to go to both.
This would not affect the organization you talk about at the micro level (Charing Cross --> Charing Cross Station) but it would at the macro level. Rather than Earth --> Europe --> England, the center of the grid would be London with two (perhaps three, if we add The Heavens for the Moon and the planets) tracks leading out from it.
Alternately, we think of doors between rooms as laid according to mode of transportation. You take a ship from London to New York. So that's how the two rooms would link -- from the port --> New York. From the Cliffs of Dover --> Calais (the coast of France). From the Columbiad Gun Club's giant cannon --> The Moon. Think of it as "the Indiana Jones Red Line" approach. This might help immersion as well, since if you got onto (for example) the Orient Express, it would take you from one linked locale to the next.
The linking of transportation methods with their intended destinations is good in immersion respects, though PCs (and people) sometimes take a different route from the line. London being at the center works reasonably well, however, as much as a I cringe at yet-another single city centered game. CC memories I suppose. As long as events do branch out and happen away from London it should be okay.
I find the 'tree' system easy to navigate within a grid myself, in terms of 'big area room''neighborhood room''locale' as needed, which can be applied more broadly when dealing with larger regions--if we need Chennai, in India, we can add both India and the city room, and then specific places in the city as required. I'd wager that players who want to go to fantastic places might be willing to build them as well. I'd love to have +grps, but I have absolutely no idea how those were done.
'DB Bloat' isn't really a problem for modern games, but grid confusion is. We could also draw a picture map and put it up somewheres for people to use. I think +map is beyond my abilities at present.
Just want to briefly echo the sentiment that a single city game can feel a bit dull.
Victorian adventure fiction is all about adventuring to the frontier, be that the American West, Darkest Africa, or Venus.
Add some social venues like Paris, and we should be able to get people out of the city with ease. At least, I hope we do, and we should be able to facilitate that with events.
In fact, we could use The Season (the circuit of great cities through which every wealthy gentleman and lady was expected to travel every year) as a way of getting people out, organizing social and adventure stories around it.
Triv and I are discussing the layout today and we've dissected the strengths and weaknesses of a 'tree' versus a 'grid'.
The 'tree' setup I used for In Spiritus Nobilis (and later at WoW) has immense benefits in navigation due to its oversimplified approach, at least for most. Some have problems with making the leap from a standard grid, although I suspect this happens more with hybrids like CC. CC wasn't a 'tree' as much as a shrubbery; it had multiple 'trunk' regions defined by area and delineated into districts. The regions were meant for navigation, although they were used for RP once in a while, and there lies the big 'tree' concern: rooms that aren't designed for RP. Something like London --> Charing Cross would be a good example.
With a 'grid' it's possible to use every single room for RP. You get the immersive boons of aero-ship tickets from the aero-port, railway from Charing Cross, steerage passage across the Channel to France, etc. The issue with players 'finding their own path' to a destination is solved through a +travel code, perhaps confined to particular rooms. There'd be no London --> Charing Cross room to navigate through, just Charing Cross --> Railway Station and Kennsington --> Portobello Road (here's where the riches of ages are stowed) and the like. Although it ain't my druthers, I'm thinking that the 'grid' will be preferable over the 'tree'.
I suppose the best manner to keep away from the 'city-centric' (although we are, in fact, London-centric to some degree) trap is to make sure other Civilizations and Frontiers are integrated smoothly. We needn't establish an 'edge' to the map simply because that edge will be constantly redefined as play moves along. What we do have to establish is desirable size limits with major areas, such as London or Calcutta or what have you. How much detail is too much? How sparse do we wish things to be? Even totally RP-able rooms lose meaning if there are umptynine of them. Some felt CC was too big, some felt that WoW would have been too small. Where's our ruler?
If I have my druthers, I think we should make our grid's rooms ones that specifically give rise to RP or at the very least have a specific purpose in mind (i.e living area).
Ergo there'd be a poverty stricken area of shacks and sewage, an uppercrust one, a particular shopping district, one railway station, the harbour/port, a few parks etcetera. This should also help keep things in a small scale OOCly, and perhaps even make it more intuitive to navigate.
I think I found option C.
It's different from grid patterns I've seen previously, along with removing artificial boundaries like city-edge, too-few exits between bordering boroughs, and overly-complex ASCII maps.
London is the focus? We separate it into boroughs/vestries (of interesting Borough -> District -> Place rooms) that don't connect by exits to anything other than their ilk. The rest of the world? City/Continent -> District -> Place groupings of their own. It's just that simple. It keeps London as the Center of the Universe, yet establishes no real center.
Look at it this way... 90%+ of online roleplayers don't walk anywhere farther than a room or two away. They use +travel. They use +meetme. They use +home. We're some of the few folks who'd actually walk a grid to get to know it. We're the aberration here. So let's just skip it.
I can make little borough maps showing the half-dozen-plus public rooms that exist in, say, Westminster. If you want to get to Kensington from Westminster, +travel there and say it was the railway or a carriage or whatever you like. It's likewise as simple to get from anywhere in London to Africa -> Sahara Desert -> Empty Quarter.
Opinions? It'd mark us as geographically different from just about any other MUSH, while playing up the strength of travel we've decided we need to maintain. London went to modern boroughs in 1900 from the parochial vestries of the 1600s, but they were the same despite over-complex English system and we'd likely not desire 28 detailed boroughs anyhoo.
I'm not adverse to this option as long as we focus on having the existing rooms be ones that promote RP.
I.e with the example of railway stations, whereas there're several ones that are historically important, from a RP point of view we only need one or at most two.
I'm also not certain that having the dividing point be boroughs/vestries/districts/whathaveyounot is the correct approach.
That is to say, if we should divide the grid up in the abovementioned way why not make it the compass-oriented parts? Certainly stories about London often mention 'The West End', 'North-East part' etc. I think that'd be more intuitive than Kelsington this, Bethnal Green that.
I'm thinking that the compass rose doesn't make much sense with room naming conventions when there's no real 'grid map' to apply West to, or North. With an island like Manhattan the Upper East Side only really has one direction, whereas West in London could be Kensington /or/ Chelsea. I guess I just like the vestry names. Flavorable. Districts would work too, though.
Sure, the vestry/districts (in the sense of vestries grouped together) names are neat. They're also more within the span of our timewarp thing than the boroughs.
I'm going to send an email to make sure our two fellow creators are aware of the discussion so they can give their thoughts.
Re: Compass directions, my notion was that following Mid's suggestion of grid groups combined with my own desire for rooms-with-rp-purpose, each compass direction would hold within it those particular areas/streets that contain particularly intriguing RP possibilities.
Example: Charing Cross would be in the 'Center' grid area, along with say Piccadilly Circus, the Victoria Embankment ( from which'd be an exit to the mentioned floating swimming baths -- http://www.ilnpictures.co.uk/ProductDetails.asp?ProductDetailID=75475 -- ) and so forth and so on.
I guess I'm still not entirely understanding why one'd need mention of the specific borough/district/vestry/whatsit other than in the room desc, but then I haven't had any coffee yet today.
Lots of chat here.
As I so often admit, I am not a grid expert. Whatever you two come up with -- as far as the structure and layout of the grid -- is fine by me.
What I would like is to preserve historical accuracy and reinforce immersion by using actual place names and actual descriptions of those places. I am all for exaggerating things towards, for example, the spooky or the steamy, in order to make a setting. But if we have the chance to use the names of actual burroughs which would have been used in the Victorian age, then I urge us to do that.
How will the rooms be organized? Dudes, you two are the experts.
Thematic room names are nice, I think, though I tend to like to avoid building too many rooms even for the sake of proper descriptiveness of a place, not for 'db bloat' or whatever, but because it just gets hard to figure out. I liked WoWo's grid, and I recall that there were plans to expand it when it was able to fully open.
I guess what I mean there is that I think lumping a few boroughs into a single room is probably worthwhile for ease of mind, since travel code and such are OOC mechanisms to assist play. I think you all have some interesting specific layout ideas--go crazy, have some fun with it. We'll figure it out.
Post a Comment