@Tez said in Episodic Games & ‘Down Time’:
I’d actually be curious to see how Alveraxus handles this, when they get there. In many ways, a generational jump is episodic, and I know it’s a thought I’ve kicked around as a problem to solve when thinking about generational games or time jumps. Anyone playing there that can speak to it?
tldr: We are still figuring some of it out and might change anyway, but the nutshell is that once we have the Dramatic Conclusion to our Third Act plot (the war that we are kicking off this weekend), we’ll have about a one month period while we sort out everyone’s future characters, during which we’ll have non-ST guided soft RP where players can do epilogue RP for this generation and once their next-gen character is approved, begin prologue/flashback RP with those characters.
So if there’s interest, we can circle back in a few months after we do it and say how it went. I’m sure there will be some good, some bad, and some awful as we stumble our way through things.
Longer version:
We haven’t really fully announced how we’re planning to handle the downtime, and we’re making some changes in our planning now as we are gearing up for what is effectively the Third Act of the Alpha to kick off this weekend, but I can give some general guidelines about the plan. Bearing in mind the Captain Coldism about how long the plan lasts (almost as good as the Mike Tysonism). So I don’t expect it to go entirely how we expect it. BUT.
Current idea is that after the dust settles from the climactic war, we’re going to segue into a period of maybe a month or so of soft epilogue RP while we do the administrative details to setup the following generation.
Staff will not be running any plots, although player STers might. The players will have plenty of interesting drama to RP about, based around the outcome of the war, who lived, who died, etc.
OOCly, that’s when players will sort out what they want do for the Beta Generation. Characters who survived - will the survive the 22 years in the time jump? Where do they want to be? Who wants to play children of the existing characters, who wants to do something completely different, etc. We’re going to let the players sort out how they want their relationships to be and what they want their characters to do, and then as those approvals start coming through we’ll likely blend Epilogue into Prologue.
Assuming that we can sort out everything that players want within a month (there may be some succession to attend to as well - our succession mechanic test did NOT go very well, so we’re going to try to learn from that), we’ll plan on kicking things off similarly to how we did the Alpha generation. A lot of ST run social events to let the new characters get to mingle and meet ICly, and then hopefully off to the races.