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State of the Game - Follow-Up
Things and Stuff and Things
Hey Taxon! Thank you again for all the feedback you've given us in the HMD and in chat. We have read and talked over everything, and thank you for your patience as we try to come up with some solutions for the problems being presented. Behind the cut we have some stuff laid out, and we'd love to hear your opinions on it.
Some Planned Changes
To the City itself: Taxon will be getting smaller. We will put up a revised map once we create one. Basically it will feel more like a small city or large town, or it should, where everyone lives close enough to have neighbors and to see them on a daily basis.
Taxon will no longer have hatches. Being able to create almost anything as long as you can pay for it seems to be something that can rob players of important opportunities to be challenged. There will still be stores, but they will be drastically reduced in terms of what they offer. Many items that are now just handwavable as “I get this” will require either CR to get orrrr a trip to what we are lamely calling Adventure Zone right now. More on that below.
Tying into wanting to make things more challenging/less FREE STUFF, the rules on programmed possessions are being changed. Locations, especially large locations that allow you to bring numerous significant items that would really each need to be requested in their own right, will not be allowed in applications. If you currently have such a location as your character's PP in Taxon, you have a couple of options: if you want to exchange it for something smaller, you have a one-time freebie opportunity to do that, no penalties or anything. If you are, however, super-attached to the location you have brought and want it to stick around in Taxon, please tell us in the comments, so we can work with you and discuss either grandfathering it in or for there being a way for you to 'earn' it back into the city.
(DIEN: I know that in chat we did some discussion of whether Logan's school would have some plot possibilities, what with Cerebro being there and all. The last thing we want is for our rule-changes to NEGATIVELY effect plot planning, so, we are definitely willing to work with cases of PPs where players feel they have plot possibilities tied up in them. So, again, let us know if you want to keep them.)
Then there's Adventure Zone. (We are totally accepting less lame names for this.) The City will be a fairly normal small city (okay with weird architecture still!), but there will be a section where stuff gets... weird. This is an area where the City is outright dangerous, and it changes from month to month. Some months, the aliens will fill it with a sort of standard 'genre' area-- a medieval castle during a siege, a futuristic planet filled with cyborgs, Revolutionary France, a graveyard overrun with the walking dead... lots of things from stories. (You are more than welcome to suggest favorite books or movies to be inspiration for the aliens to fill the sandbox!) Other months, the aliens will get more personal with it: the Adventure Zone will reprogram to resemble a world that current characters are from! So it might turn into Genosha, or feature Sentinels stomping around in that part of Taxon. Or it might become a section of the O.Z., complete with Longcoats. YOUR WORLD GOES HERE.
We will be handling this on a “you suggest it to us, give us some fleshing out of what aspects of your world are coming through, and we vote on whose world it gets to be in advance” sort of basis. There will also be voting for the 'standard genre' worlds too.
The important thing about those times when Adventure Zone programs itself it to be people's own worlds, is that things can be brought back from Adventure Zone into regular Taxon. That picture of your character's family that got left behind? The home they miss? If you get into Adventure Zone, fight your way through the dangers it may pose, and reach the item or location you are wanting... there's a way to bring it back with you and put it in regular Taxon. Similarly, you can bring swords back from a medieval Adventure Zone, or transistors for your super-science project.
The exact details of how this would handle in play are something we are still working out, but this is the idea: that Taxon will always, glitches-or-no-glitches, have an area to go where things are 'dangerous' and where there are goals to try and accomplish, even if that goal is just survival.
Feedback or suggestions would be extremely appreciated here!
'Taxitecture' – previously, we've only had a Tumblr for this, which is basically a photo repository of neat places in Taxon. The Tumblr will continue to exist, but we're going to try and have some discussion of it on DW by posting a photo (or photots) regularly to the OOC comm, letting people talk about it and sort out what and where it is. You are also quite encouraged to post photos of neat places you find that you would like to be in the city-- not just places your character lives, but ANYTHING neat that you find that you think would be a cool location for characters to explore. Basically, we'll have one day a week where we encourage posting and discussion of neat city things-- a shop you'd like to exist, a playground, whatever.
Changes to the economy are sort-of touched on a bit already, in that there will be no hatches, but also: 1) Credit transfer between characters will be allowed, and 2) the allowance will go away. Characters will get a one-time bonus when they enter the city to help them buy basic supplies and get settled, but after that, you have to find some way to get what you need.
While handwaving your character getting a job at a coffee shop is the simplest way to do this, and will still be legal if you really like, there are more interesting ways to do this that create more CR. If your character has a skill that doesn't lend itself to a regular job, they can exchange that skill for credits from other characters. They can also adventure in Adventure Zone and find treasure/loot-- the pirate island may have a map that leads to a nice trove of credits, for instance. Also, characters don't have to really participate in the credit economy at all-- as long as you have other ways to get what you need, like working in the community gardens that do exist to get your fresh produce.
Some characters are thieves-- we're considering scaling back the Sheriff so that theft doesn't just get you auto-arrested with no save vs death, as it were, but it DOES put you on the 'wrong side of the law' and Taxon Extras may start to chase you. Consequences, in other words, just not consequences-that-are-impossible-to-fight. Opinions?
Metaplot! *doom doom doom*
We do have some ideas for how some bigger metaplot may happen in the city. Changes to what characters have currently been told or believe about why they are here, and if escape is possible. For now, we're not going to go into any specifics, but, we are rolling over ideas for Bigger, Long-term plot and how characters might be able to interact with that.
NPCs
This one is a tricky one. In an ideal world, we as GMs would be able to write and pilot and and all NPCs you guys needed, giving them personality and letting them interact and conflict with your characters. However, one of the other major problems in this game is tag time lagging, and to be candid, none of your GMs feel that committing ourselves to also run dedicated NPCs is going to solve our tag-time problems.
Our current, tentative suggestion, is something like this: a few of the city's more regular Extras, such as prominent shopkeepers or others as they occur to us, will have personalities written up and photos somewhere, where they can be seen by all y'all. You are more than welcome to use those in your own threads, to give yourself an idea of what you're interacting with rather than Bland Generic Extra #321. If it's a major thread where you want in-game consequences, talk to us and we'll see if we can't help out in playing a (brief) NPC thread, or in giving you tips on what the NPCs would react like. You are also more than welcome to pilot the NPCs for each other. You're also welcome to come up with your own NPCs and have them flesh out the city!
As a sub-note to this, the Extras are no longer strictly 'robotic'; they react much like civilian people in the real world would to theft, violence, and threats. If you talk to an Extra long enough, yes, you will exhaust their programmed scripts of responses, but on the surface, most Extras should seem like “normal people” at first interaction. Some Extras do things like pick pockets, but the Extras as a rule do not engage in violent crime-- in Regular Taxon. In Adventure Zone? Oh yeah. Walk down the streets of Psuedo Gotham and you have an extremely high chance of someone trying to mug you!
If you guys have any suggestions for how we, as GMs, can help give the NPCs/Extras 'personality' without making many many more tags for us to keep up with, we're delighted to hear them.
Finally, Group Chat. There's been a lot of unofficial chatting happening anyway, but we'd like to institute a regular one that people know will be there-- you don't have to make it, but everyone is welcome!-- once a week. Suggestions for what day this is are welcome. Friday may be a good day for people, since most of us do not work Saturdays after, I thiiink?
And finally-finally, a brief note on things like game speed and activity and participation with each other: Taxon is and has always been a backtagging-friendly game; this is not going to change. That said, aiming for a goal of one tag a day to people you are threading with is a reasonable goal. This is directed at us, your moderators, as much as it is at you (maybe more so, coff-coff). If you do not feel you can keep up a tag-per-day pace, let your RP partner know. It doesn't mean you're a bad player or not allowed in Taxon, it just means you and the people you thread with need to agree on a pace for tags that works for both of you.
In my own experience, it does help to move threads along if you feel you have a concrete goal with the thread. If characters are just chatting for the sake of chatting, you can wind up feeling bogged down in a thread where nothing is really developing. We encourage OOC communication with each other to agree on directions to take threads. And that goes for us too: if you feel bogged down in a thread with a mod, please PM or IM us to let us know and see if we can't come to a satisfactory wrap, together.
Okay, opening up the floor to discussion and thoughts and anything you feel we may not have touched on! We're planning on trying to implement the changes next weekend, so none of this is taking effect right now. If you have suggestions for ANY of this, please share!
Hey Taxon! Thank you again for all the feedback you've given us in the HMD and in chat. We have read and talked over everything, and thank you for your patience as we try to come up with some solutions for the problems being presented. Behind the cut we have some stuff laid out, and we'd love to hear your opinions on it.
Some Planned Changes
To the City itself: Taxon will be getting smaller. We will put up a revised map once we create one. Basically it will feel more like a small city or large town, or it should, where everyone lives close enough to have neighbors and to see them on a daily basis.
Taxon will no longer have hatches. Being able to create almost anything as long as you can pay for it seems to be something that can rob players of important opportunities to be challenged. There will still be stores, but they will be drastically reduced in terms of what they offer. Many items that are now just handwavable as “I get this” will require either CR to get orrrr a trip to what we are lamely calling Adventure Zone right now. More on that below.
Tying into wanting to make things more challenging/less FREE STUFF, the rules on programmed possessions are being changed. Locations, especially large locations that allow you to bring numerous significant items that would really each need to be requested in their own right, will not be allowed in applications. If you currently have such a location as your character's PP in Taxon, you have a couple of options: if you want to exchange it for something smaller, you have a one-time freebie opportunity to do that, no penalties or anything. If you are, however, super-attached to the location you have brought and want it to stick around in Taxon, please tell us in the comments, so we can work with you and discuss either grandfathering it in or for there being a way for you to 'earn' it back into the city.
(DIEN: I know that in chat we did some discussion of whether Logan's school would have some plot possibilities, what with Cerebro being there and all. The last thing we want is for our rule-changes to NEGATIVELY effect plot planning, so, we are definitely willing to work with cases of PPs where players feel they have plot possibilities tied up in them. So, again, let us know if you want to keep them.)
Then there's Adventure Zone. (We are totally accepting less lame names for this.) The City will be a fairly normal small city (okay with weird architecture still!), but there will be a section where stuff gets... weird. This is an area where the City is outright dangerous, and it changes from month to month. Some months, the aliens will fill it with a sort of standard 'genre' area-- a medieval castle during a siege, a futuristic planet filled with cyborgs, Revolutionary France, a graveyard overrun with the walking dead... lots of things from stories. (You are more than welcome to suggest favorite books or movies to be inspiration for the aliens to fill the sandbox!) Other months, the aliens will get more personal with it: the Adventure Zone will reprogram to resemble a world that current characters are from! So it might turn into Genosha, or feature Sentinels stomping around in that part of Taxon. Or it might become a section of the O.Z., complete with Longcoats. YOUR WORLD GOES HERE.
We will be handling this on a “you suggest it to us, give us some fleshing out of what aspects of your world are coming through, and we vote on whose world it gets to be in advance” sort of basis. There will also be voting for the 'standard genre' worlds too.
The important thing about those times when Adventure Zone programs itself it to be people's own worlds, is that things can be brought back from Adventure Zone into regular Taxon. That picture of your character's family that got left behind? The home they miss? If you get into Adventure Zone, fight your way through the dangers it may pose, and reach the item or location you are wanting... there's a way to bring it back with you and put it in regular Taxon. Similarly, you can bring swords back from a medieval Adventure Zone, or transistors for your super-science project.
The exact details of how this would handle in play are something we are still working out, but this is the idea: that Taxon will always, glitches-or-no-glitches, have an area to go where things are 'dangerous' and where there are goals to try and accomplish, even if that goal is just survival.
Feedback or suggestions would be extremely appreciated here!
'Taxitecture' – previously, we've only had a Tumblr for this, which is basically a photo repository of neat places in Taxon. The Tumblr will continue to exist, but we're going to try and have some discussion of it on DW by posting a photo (or photots) regularly to the OOC comm, letting people talk about it and sort out what and where it is. You are also quite encouraged to post photos of neat places you find that you would like to be in the city-- not just places your character lives, but ANYTHING neat that you find that you think would be a cool location for characters to explore. Basically, we'll have one day a week where we encourage posting and discussion of neat city things-- a shop you'd like to exist, a playground, whatever.
Changes to the economy are sort-of touched on a bit already, in that there will be no hatches, but also: 1) Credit transfer between characters will be allowed, and 2) the allowance will go away. Characters will get a one-time bonus when they enter the city to help them buy basic supplies and get settled, but after that, you have to find some way to get what you need.
While handwaving your character getting a job at a coffee shop is the simplest way to do this, and will still be legal if you really like, there are more interesting ways to do this that create more CR. If your character has a skill that doesn't lend itself to a regular job, they can exchange that skill for credits from other characters. They can also adventure in Adventure Zone and find treasure/loot-- the pirate island may have a map that leads to a nice trove of credits, for instance. Also, characters don't have to really participate in the credit economy at all-- as long as you have other ways to get what you need, like working in the community gardens that do exist to get your fresh produce.
Some characters are thieves-- we're considering scaling back the Sheriff so that theft doesn't just get you auto-arrested with no save vs death, as it were, but it DOES put you on the 'wrong side of the law' and Taxon Extras may start to chase you. Consequences, in other words, just not consequences-that-are-impossible-to-fight. Opinions?
Metaplot! *doom doom doom*
We do have some ideas for how some bigger metaplot may happen in the city. Changes to what characters have currently been told or believe about why they are here, and if escape is possible. For now, we're not going to go into any specifics, but, we are rolling over ideas for Bigger, Long-term plot and how characters might be able to interact with that.
NPCs
This one is a tricky one. In an ideal world, we as GMs would be able to write and pilot and and all NPCs you guys needed, giving them personality and letting them interact and conflict with your characters. However, one of the other major problems in this game is tag time lagging, and to be candid, none of your GMs feel that committing ourselves to also run dedicated NPCs is going to solve our tag-time problems.
Our current, tentative suggestion, is something like this: a few of the city's more regular Extras, such as prominent shopkeepers or others as they occur to us, will have personalities written up and photos somewhere, where they can be seen by all y'all. You are more than welcome to use those in your own threads, to give yourself an idea of what you're interacting with rather than Bland Generic Extra #321. If it's a major thread where you want in-game consequences, talk to us and we'll see if we can't help out in playing a (brief) NPC thread, or in giving you tips on what the NPCs would react like. You are also more than welcome to pilot the NPCs for each other. You're also welcome to come up with your own NPCs and have them flesh out the city!
As a sub-note to this, the Extras are no longer strictly 'robotic'; they react much like civilian people in the real world would to theft, violence, and threats. If you talk to an Extra long enough, yes, you will exhaust their programmed scripts of responses, but on the surface, most Extras should seem like “normal people” at first interaction. Some Extras do things like pick pockets, but the Extras as a rule do not engage in violent crime-- in Regular Taxon. In Adventure Zone? Oh yeah. Walk down the streets of Psuedo Gotham and you have an extremely high chance of someone trying to mug you!
If you guys have any suggestions for how we, as GMs, can help give the NPCs/Extras 'personality' without making many many more tags for us to keep up with, we're delighted to hear them.
Finally, Group Chat. There's been a lot of unofficial chatting happening anyway, but we'd like to institute a regular one that people know will be there-- you don't have to make it, but everyone is welcome!-- once a week. Suggestions for what day this is are welcome. Friday may be a good day for people, since most of us do not work Saturdays after, I thiiink?
And finally-finally, a brief note on things like game speed and activity and participation with each other: Taxon is and has always been a backtagging-friendly game; this is not going to change. That said, aiming for a goal of one tag a day to people you are threading with is a reasonable goal. This is directed at us, your moderators, as much as it is at you (maybe more so, coff-coff). If you do not feel you can keep up a tag-per-day pace, let your RP partner know. It doesn't mean you're a bad player or not allowed in Taxon, it just means you and the people you thread with need to agree on a pace for tags that works for both of you.
In my own experience, it does help to move threads along if you feel you have a concrete goal with the thread. If characters are just chatting for the sake of chatting, you can wind up feeling bogged down in a thread where nothing is really developing. We encourage OOC communication with each other to agree on directions to take threads. And that goes for us too: if you feel bogged down in a thread with a mod, please PM or IM us to let us know and see if we can't come to a satisfactory wrap, together.
Okay, opening up the floor to discussion and thoughts and anything you feel we may not have touched on! We're planning on trying to implement the changes next weekend, so none of this is taking effect right now. If you have suggestions for ANY of this, please share!
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I'm thinking about the Sheriff questions. I like the idea that the more you steal the more negative the consequences. Maybe... hrmmmm... It feels like there should still be a Sheriff but maybe it becomes more of a cops and robbers sort of thing? It would take more NPC time, which could be a drain on the mods, so I wouldn't want it to too intensive but, at the same time, it could be interesting to have a car chase or something once in awhile.
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About PP options
And I feel this has worked. He's done several threads with others working on the tower, as well as discussion threads for working on it and trying to get it back up and running so he has a feasible home and a working device to get in and out of the suit.
Does the new rule mean he's going to lose one or the other? I admit, I'm not sure I'm misunderstanding or what and so here is me asking questions and how this needs to be handled.
Re: About PP options
We mostly came up with this partly to shrink the city and also to come up with more challenges. Like when the palace was here Emma and I were basically able to get away with coming up with the library with all the info on the O.Z., and the ballroom, and Ambrose's old lab, and all this random magical tech stuff to sort of handwave fall back on. That wasn't a bad thing, we had fun with it, but it also made our lives ridiculously easy.
So we were thinking as mods that maybe taking that crutch away going forward will be beneficial, plus keep the size/scale of the city more manageable. Additionally it could allow for swapping out programmed possessions that aren't working as well for people, like I'm definitely ditching the hedge maze in favor of...I don't know, maybe Demilo's wagon.
tl;dr - you're fine for getting grandfathered and will be able to keep both, especially since it's been plot-beneficial for you.
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Mr Gordo?no subject
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Anyway, I'm okay with Raziel losing the Tomb of the Sarafan, since it's more just a landscape feature that only he can get into than anything.
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Otherwise, there's nothing much associated with him. He could get the physical blade, but if he ever touches it, he'll be trapped back inside it, which seems a little pointless to have about.
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I can also see him hating the idea of getting a job working for a robot so much that he'll regularly go into Adventure Zone to try and make ends meet.
As far as Extras - maybe the more you interact with one of them, the more fleshed out they become, as the hamsters respond to what their prisoners are doing. The ones nobody talks to are generally the same, but if you try and have a conversation, the A.I. will adapt as much as it can to become a Real Boy. Therefore, if you get a job working for one of them, the more time you commit to it, the more complex and in-depth that extra becomes - and hence, it'll earn itself a unique individual profile as a character others can interact with, too.
Although I guess that leads to the danger of robots becoming so seemingly real that people might want to start relationships with them or something, which might be hilarious but would probably just be problematic...
THOUGHTS. I will have more, I'm sure.
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I really like this idea! We'll see if we can do something with it. Thanks for the suggestion, Andy.
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Metaplot -- :DDDDDD I can't wait to hear.
Adventure Zone -- we talked about this a little in chat and in IM, but I think this is a fantastic idea and I look forward to seeing it implemented. <3
NPCs -- I put in my thoughts in a reply to Andy's post above; in short, I like his idea of NPCs growing as PCs interact with them more and as aliens, presumably, invest more in their verisimilitude too. This could have some thorny edges in implementation, but basically I think it'd be cool if we could app these over time? I'm thinking more, 'after you've played several scenes where you establish that your character Billy Bob spends a lot of time at the zoo, and play him at the zoo, you app the existence of a zookeeper NPC, Zookeeper Joe, who's a creep who's always whistling weird songs and saying philosophical things,' or whatever. Maybe one or two max per character, and again, they have to be built-up and justified and sub-apped? IDK, I'm just thinking out loud. And like I said to Andy, they could be player responsibility, with the option of getting a friend or frequent RP partner to play Zookeeper Joe if you like.
I also love the idea of PC law enforcement in general, and the plot/conflict potential that presents, so yeah. Woo.
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