Thoughts on pre-planned Time Jumps to Retire Characters and Play Their Descendants
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@Roadspike said in Thoughts on pre-planned Time Jumps to Retire Characters and Play Their Descendants:
The time it takes to disseminate the information on what happened over the last 18 years, approve/alter/deny everyone’s proposals for what their previous characters have been doing and how their new characters grew up, and getting everyone on the same page is not going to be insignificant, and you -need- to have something for folks to RP during that time. Maybe there could be a 1-month break at each time-skip where staff can put up a list of major events over that 18 years and players can do vignettes in the midst of any of them? Show how the previous generation matured and the next generation grew up through the major events of their lives?
I love this idea, and if you don’t mind, I’m going to pitch it to the rest of staff. We’ve been trying to figure out how to manage this part of the process for exactly this concern, but this is a really solid idea for how to do it.
Our plan (so far) was to kick off that during kind of the epilogue after the climax, when people know who survived and not, and get to kind of memorialize them and recoup. But agreed, that’s going to be a let down for folks whose characters have died and are now looking forward to kick off again. Thanks!
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@Roz said in Thoughts on pre-planned Time Jumps to Retire Characters and Play Their Descendants:
I think you can have player-created characters. But your houses are going to be part of your thematic framework in a much more lasting/enduring way, and IME it’s best for staff to take the lead on those.
Yeah. Exactly this. During our super duper soft start (which is soon, but not yet) we were planning to crowd source a little bit on individual houses from those who came aboard very early as minor encouragement to do so, but based around some of the feedback here, I’m thinking we might skip that and just take a bit longer to write them all ourselves.
We have a firm no-AI policy, so literally every word of theme and write-up and desc on the game is written by a human, so we were hoping to save our burn a little bit and reward folks who wanted to write-up some ideas of houses within a framework of what we wanted.
But it might be better to write it all ourselves.
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@Third-Eye said in Thoughts on pre-planned Time Jumps to Retire Characters and Play Their Descendants:
Have ‘secrets’ been mentioned by the OP or is this just a port idea from Arx?
Genuine question, I engaged in some skimming.
Answering here because it came up a few times - I did mention secrets, but as others noted, it’s really more about house/duchy/kingdom secrets and not character secrets. So not really a port from anywhere. Just literally things like, “This duchy and that duchy, despite being in rival kingdoms, have a secret alliance” and “The son of the Duke of this place is really the son of the Duke of THAT place” and bits of drama and plot.
PLAYERS are free to come up with clever secrets to their background if they want them (including adding a secret to a roster character if they claim them), but no, we’re not handing out secrets to everybody. The last thing we want is to someone to claim a character they really like from the roster and then have some sort of “twist” that they hate, but ties into something so they are stuck with it.
We want to empower players to come up with their own ideas. Like, if they want to decide that they secretly went against their own brother in succession 15 years ago, go for it.
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@Alveraxus My experience of player-created houses is mostly on Arx. While there were a small number of players who were able to craft houses that really fit and melded into theme, there were way more houses created that I know were probably more work for staff just to get them workable than it would have been for staff to have just conceptualized and written them from the start. I think you gain a lot from having the holistic view of your theme and being able to write very precisely and specifically to that theme within the construction of noble houses.
That said, I don’t think that would have to stop you from soliciting player ideas more generally! They might still inspire with vibes/themes/etc.
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@Roz said in Thoughts on pre-planned Time Jumps to Retire Characters and Play Their Descendants:
@helvetica said in Thoughts on pre-planned Time Jumps to Retire Characters and Play Their Descendants:
I would say don’t do secrets, either. Talk about a storyteller resource sink.
Double-post because I missed this, but I do very much think it’s worth thinking hard on the fact that the overall game setting and framework sounds like it’s gonna be catnip to a fair number of people, and you might end up with a crush of players.
From your lips to AresCentral’s ears…
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@Alveraxus said in Thoughts on pre-planned Time Jumps to Retire Characters and Play Their Descendants:
@Roz said in Thoughts on pre-planned Time Jumps to Retire Characters and Play Their Descendants:
@helvetica said in Thoughts on pre-planned Time Jumps to Retire Characters and Play Their Descendants:
I would say don’t do secrets, either. Talk about a storyteller resource sink.
Double-post because I missed this, but I do very much think it’s worth thinking hard on the fact that the overall game setting and framework sounds like it’s gonna be catnip to a fair number of people, and you might end up with a crush of players.
From your lips to AresCentral’s ears…
If you’re using Ares, you’re going to run into a naming issue at some point as entire swaths of character names become unavailable as they become part of a bygone generation.
In Occam I trust.
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Flat no from me. I enjoy playing the same character for years and years, taking my sweet time to develop their life path and experience them changing as the world changes around them.
However, I fully understand that others do get bored playing that way – and that my character will be experiencing a continuous coming and going of friends and enemies over time. That’s fine. I’m perfectly happy to be the neighbourhood sage archetype whom the young hotshots come to for lore.
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@L-B-Heuschkel Do you feel this way on games that have XP, where the longer you hold a character, the more omni-competent they become? I don’t ask that to start a fight. I’m just curious because I remember certain games where certain characters were too powerful for me to understand why anyone would still enjoy playing them.
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@GF I’m not the person you asked, but I have the same preferences stated.
And well, I don’t think that allowing a character to become that powerful is a good idea. I think a well-run game has to make XP spends make sense, regardless of the rate of XP gain.
So nah, I wouldn’t enjoy a game where everyone became so powerful that nothing challenged anymore. Every obstacle could be overcome easily.
But I don’t think the generational idea is the way I’d enjoy solving that.
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@Alveraxus said in Thoughts on pre-planned Time Jumps to Retire Characters and Play Their Descendants:
How would you, personally, feel about a game where there are planned time jumps, and so you know going in that your character will age out (or die) within X period of time?
Gimme
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@Coin said in Thoughts on pre-planned Time Jumps to Retire Characters and Play Their Descendants:
If you’re using Ares, you’re going to run into a naming issue at some point as entire swaths of character names become unavailable as they become part of a bygone generation.
I love Ares, but man do I wish names were more flexible.
But I suppose if people want family names, could always go with CoinII, CoinIII, CoinIV if we make it that long.
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@L-B-Heuschkel said in Thoughts on pre-planned Time Jumps to Retire Characters and Play Their Descendants:
Flat no from me. I enjoy playing the same character for years and years, taking my sweet time to develop their life path and experience them changing as the world changes around them.
We definitely figured it’s not for everyone. Buuuuuut…
However, I fully understand that others do get bored playing that way – and that my character will be experiencing a continuous coming and going of friends and enemies over time. That’s fine. I’m perfectly happy to be the neighbourhood sage archetype whom the young hotshots come to for lore.
…that’s why we wanted to setup ways for people to progress characters. So I am not trying to convince you to join or anything, but your perspective is one I absolutely want to tap into.
Would it be of interest to you, over the span of three or four years, to play your character at, say, Age 36, Age 54, Age 72, Age 90, and RPing with grandchildren or great-nieces and nephews, advising the now-grown kids of the people that your character grew up with, etc?
Because what you are talking about is EXACTLY something that we were hoping to see happen, someone keeping through character through generations and trading in physical ability for wisdom, that sort of thing. Being that “living sage” who “fought the invaders” two or three generations ago, and who people can come to for advice, guidance, etc.
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@GF No, power has nothing to do with it unless you count knowledge and connections as power (which it admittedly can be). I just like really immersing myself in a character and seeing how they are affected by living their life, so to speak. I’m perfectly happy for them to stay at the bottom of the command ladder, that’s not the point.
@alveraxus To be honest – if the rest of the game appeals to me, I’ll adapt to however it’s being run, whether there are time jumps or not. But if I get a choice I’ll stick to linear time and progress naturally (where, again, progression does not have to equate accumulating power).
I can definitely see the charm, though, in doing jumps ahead and working out how the character has changed from twenty to forty to eighty years old, too. That does spark some very interesting mind theatre opportunities.
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I’ve played enough CK2/CK3 that this concept really intrigues me.
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My plan for doing this was to have the game have two copies of its grid.
When it’s time to time-jump, you open copy number two, and players are meant to go in and age up the grid descs, start their new PCs, etc, while the older version stays open for a couple months for people to wrap things up.
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@Gashlycrumb said in Thoughts on pre-planned Time Jumps to Retire Characters and Play Their Descendants:
My plan for doing this was to have the game have two copies of its grid.
When it’s time to time-jump, you open copy number two, and players are meant to go in and age up the grid descs, start their new PCs, etc, while the older version stays open for a couple months for people to wrap things up.
We’ve been thinking about doing that. There was an early proposal to leave all of the timelines up, since Ares does such a great job (when people remember to set them) of keeping track of scenes by IC date.
But we felt that it might take a bit away from the “here and now” to do this on the regular, although people could always do a flashback scene to a prior generation if they wanted.
One of the other debates was how accessible we wanted to make retired characters. If you retired your character who was someone’s father, could you pull them out and emit them afterwards as part of a scene?
These are some of the questions we want to hammer out during Alpha, or Beta in the case of generational transition.
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@Alveraxus I didn’t figure I’d actually make the game, but my made-for-funsies plan was that you could only use both grids for a short period of time. Maybe six weeks every 18 months you’d have two time-periods being RPed at once.
I wanted to encourage people to bring back their retired characters. PC is twenty-one for the first round, then I play a different one, and another different one, then go back to the first one, who is now 60, that sort of thing.
Being allowed to @emit the retired PCs so they’re still ICly around seems good, but I’ve always found that to be a your-milage-may-vary sort of thing. Some games, people are really good with that. Some games, people abuse it in a tedious way, and I’ve no clue why the chips fall one way or the other. My advice about it is to remember that there is no rule saying you can’t change the rules if they don’t work well.
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@Gashlycrumb said in Thoughts on pre-planned Time Jumps to Retire Characters and Play Their Descendants:
My advice about it is to remember that there is no rule saying you can’t change the rules if they don’t work well.
We’re not setting anything in stone, and probably not even in ink, until after the second generation. Which based on how things are looking, might be a year and a half. Because we’ll keep learning along the way, and innovating, and taking feedback.
So yeah, the rules will change as we go, and as we find out what our players like.
We’ll almost certainly tinker with some variants on those themes when we switch generations. I like the idea of being in touch with the older generation.
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@Alveraxus Credit where credit is due, I got the idea from Clockwork’s game The Network.
I certainly don’t mind you pitching it, but I just polished up how he handles Seasons and Hiatuses and made it specific to what you had presented.
Edit to avoid double post:
@Alveraxus said in Thoughts on pre-planned Time Jumps to Retire Characters and Play Their Descendants:One of the other debates was how accessible we wanted to make retired characters.
I like the idea of being able to emit older characters, but even if you swap servers (or change everyone’s name to CoinRetiredIV or whatever when a timejump happens so you can reuse names), you can always just refer to the past sheets and make any necessary rolls by hand. You don’t need the actual bit to be accessible – just still existent.
I would absolutely suggest having solid rules about when it’s okay to do this (I would say “for social scenes but not to use political weight or for use in combat” – but put nicer), because as mentioned, there are going to be people who want to use their character’s parents to provide weight for their character’s ideas.
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@Coin said in Thoughts on pre-planned Time Jumps to Retire Characters and Play Their Descendants:
If you’re using Ares, you’re going to run into a naming issue at some point as entire swaths of character names become unavailable as they become part of a bygone generation.
You can rename retired characters without messing anything up. For instance
Firstname-LastnameorFirstname-Gen1(for generation 1) or whatever.This isn’t just an Ares problem - even MediaWiki or Wikidot are going to run into issues with name collisions. And on Penn/Tiny you’d have to nuke the bits if you want to reuse the name (which has its own set of issues). You also have the issue of player confusion when “John” is no longer John, regardless of what tech solution you use.
