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Ways to make the game better for off-peak players.

This is a game for roleplayers. We want your ideas how how to build the better game. Post your suggestions here.
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Noidea
Dreamer
Posts: 223
Joined: Mon Oct 13, 2014 4:25 pm
Character Name(s): Blue; Neveren (inactive)
Location: Great Britain

Ways to make the game better for off-peak players.

Post by Noidea »

I've been struggling as usual because of my time zone (I'm British). I currently know of at least one other European player, I don't know if they're on here. I've been thinking about what could make the game better for people who have to play "off-peak".

I often feel left out of the roleplay storylines. (There have been glorious exceptions over the years I've been dipping in and out of the game, but a lot of the time, I don't get much of a look in). It seems to me that the essential reason for that is that there's almost nothing a dreamer can do that has any visible effect that can be seen by someone who comes along later (unless a GM helps) - so essentially, if nobody was there to watch you and tell everyone about it, it didn't happen.

If you're in a House it's better because you can stock up (or raid!) the House's vaults, complete board missions and leave notes for the others. But at present, I doubt if many off-peak players would hang around long enough to find that out!

So anything that would help with that would make a huge difference to "quality-of-life" for people playing at odd times.

Easy thing: Pretty much the only thing you can do that other dreamers will see later is leave a codex, so any improvements to codices would make a big difference to us. In Shades of Truth, it used to be possible to read them without picking them up (very handy if you're full, and avoids them all being put back in the wrong order, anyway). And the text appeared in its own pop-up window and could be copied and pasted. (Invaluable for working out task reports in advance!) Can we not just copy that code from SoT into this version? (It's been mentioned before - see viewtopic.php?f=9&t=288&p=3516#p3516 ) Also, by all means this: viewtopic.php?f=9&t=1743&p=7960#p7960

More difficult thing: If there was anything in the game that could be built up or depleted in some way by the actions of players (like a prime can, but not a prime, since they're always locked away - say, a wall that bad guys have put up and good guys are trying to break through), then that would really make a difference - anyone could take a bash at that at any time, and everyone could see the accumulated results.

I made a suggestion once (on the SoT forums) that you could put a pseudo-"creature" in a room, which is invisible or looks like a statue or whatever but you could cast arts on it, deplete its Dreamsoul or whatever, to represent all those roleplays about mending/enchanting/doing something-or-other to some room which are so common, but for which there isn't really anything in the game mechanics so you can only mime the whole thing. That would be PERFECT for this (so long as the effect on the "creature" could be made persistent), because, of course, you could do things to it and the effects would be there for all to see. But I don't know whether that's as easily codeable as it sounds. (If not, I'd be interested to have some idea of why, I'm always curious about how the programming works.)

Failing that, if you could just fix a prime-like object to the ground somewhere to represent something, and we could build it up or drain it down, that would be fine! (Only problem is that you'd need to be able to examine the object without picking it up, which doesn't seem possible in this version - see above about codices.)

The other big difficulty when playing off-peak is not being able to catch up with a teacher to report. It's the single biggest obstacle to my playing, that. I don't know if it would affect game balance in other ways, but what would make all the difference here would be some kind of asynchronous tasking system - where once you had a task from a teacher, you could use a board or something to send your report to them, and perhaps send messages back and forth a few times if necessary, and once they were satisfied they could grant the art/plateau remotely. It's been mentioned before better than I can, see viewtopic.php?f=9&t=742&p=3842#p3842 .

What do the team think? And what do other people think, are there problems with these ideas or have you other ideas?
Efforts yield rewards, not words alone.
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