New Discussion Thread

JoeNotCharles · Feb 12, 2009

covaithe said:
There were at least eight linked adventures, IIRC. One for each of the seven shards, and one related adventure. I think there were plans for more related ones, but the players weren't there.

Anyway, the problem was just too many eggs in one basket. One person running six concurrent games, including probably half the active characters in the living world. Inevitably, he burned out and disappeared, leaving a huge mess that we're still cleaning up.

I don't have much PbP experience, but I was assuming the current glut of adventures was just as temporary as the drought of adventures around Christmas. (Although, in hindsight, maybe that was mostly due to the holiday season...) I'd prefer not to allow multiple PC's until it's absolutely clear it won't disrupt anything, since once that bottle's opened it's very hard to stuff the genie back in.

renau1g · Feb 12, 2009

As for the linking, I'd imagine that we wouldn't want everyone in one thread, if we went with the previously mentioned ideas of a zombie plague, people could be doing whatever they would normally, backalley dealings, tavern crawling, etc. when it happens.

When the plague hits, the different groups would happen to be in the same area as the others PC's in their group. I think they should be relatively short adventures though, so about 6 months or so of PbP time, and if players drop out its easy to have them eaten by zombies

renau1g · Feb 12, 2009

Phoenix8008 said:
I was thinking about the second characters thing myself earlier. I had this thought: What if you can't start another character until your previous character is at 3rd level.

I personally would like to wait until the PHB II is approved (i.e. about 4 months from now) to make a second PC, but that's my preference. This would allow us to really get a variety of new PC's...especially primal ones. It might fit well if the linked adventure idea could come to fruition, perhaps a more tribal island, or frontier type land would be where it would take place.

hafrogman · Feb 12, 2009

renau1g said:
As for the linking, I'd imagine that we wouldn't want everyone in one thread, if we went with the previously mentioned ideas of a zombie plague, people could be doing whatever they would normally, backalley dealings, tavern crawling, etc. when it happens.

When the plague hits, the different groups would happen to be in the same area as the others PC's in their group. I think they should be relatively short adventures though, so about 6 months or so of PbP time, and if players drop out its easy to have them eaten by zombies

Yeah, I think it would work best if it was just a few concurrent adventures, run by different DMs, that were thematically linked, but didn't really share a plot. They'd all be in the city where the plague hits, but doing different things. One group might be trying to avoid zombies while getting to the boats to escape, another might be trying to fight off zombies to save civilians, a third might be trying to rescue an NPC from inside their home, etc. etc. etc.

I think that Lord Sessadore is right, and it would probably be better if it wasn't Daunton. But just a new city, that after the adventures were complete would become a new part of the world. The City of the Dead, and you could have all sorts of adventures there, get back in, recover X, escape. Etc.

So it wouldn't really be a Mega-Adventure. Just a handful of adventures that share an idea, sort of a world-event. And then even if they weren't in your group, you'd have a bond with the other players. "You survived the great zombie plague of '09? Me too!"

renau1g · Feb 12, 2009

It would make for some great conversations in the tavern as the adventurers could tell their harrowing tales of escaping. It would allow unaligned or evil PC's to look out for themselves, Good PC's might be interested in saving lives, etc.

covaithe · Feb 12, 2009

Hmm.... Here comes some pushback. Not saying that this isn't still a good idea, but some things to think about.

1. Impact on character judges. Having a zombie plague idea in place will encourage people to wait for their second characters, and lots of people make them all at once. This will put a fair amount of burden on the character judging process.

2. Turnover. In retrospect, one of the problems with LEW's mega-adventure was that it synchronized the in-and-out-of-adventure cycle for a lot of PCs. Under normal conditions in a PbP living world, adventurers come back from their adventures in small groups, two or three or five at a time. Sometimes there are spikes, when two adventures end at roughly the same time (e.g. Hoofchew and Necromancer's Skull), but usually, if you were to plot the number of characters in the tavern over time, it would be a fairly smooth curve. Not too many spikes. That's healthy. A synchronized adventure, on the other hand, creates a situation where a spike is pretty much inevitable. Even if it goes perfectly and everyone loves it, you're still going to find yourself with 20 PCs dumped into the tavern all at once at the end. What then? You need to have a handful of adventures waiting at the end, too.

stonegod · Feb 12, 2009

Folks have generally addressed my beef w/ the Mega-Adventure (MA), but just one more tidbit: The creator and runner of all those games was this boards second most prolific poster with a long history of being consistent and running things. Meaning: Any game can fail (and many will). Having that many fail is a huge burden of judges.

hafrogman said:
So it wouldn't really be a Mega-Adventure. Just a handful of adventures that share an idea, sort of a world-event. And then even if they weren't in your group, you'd have a bond with the other players. "You survived the great zombie plague of '09? Me too!"

Thematically linked works better, I agree. PbP does not work with time-syncrhonized or very long games. The former quickly become unsynched (Player/DM posting rate), the latter fail because longer games increase the chance of failure (Player or DM disappearing).

covaithe said:
Hmm.... Here comes some pushback. Not saying that this isn't still a good idea, but some things to think about.

covaithe's points are valid too. If you take all characters out into a synched game, then someone has to deal w/ them later.

My big concern is that big, long games that try to be synched don't work in a PbP environment. I could see several folks introducing zombie plague elements into several different games that otherwise do not synch; that would work. If you want linked stories, run them one after the other; don't try to bundle them at once. Players leave and DM commitment changes. No one should every try to run the whole AoW or ST in a Living World, for example (someone has proposed it): Its doomed to fail.

hafrogman · Feb 12, 2009

covaithe said:
1. Impact on character judges.

This is a good point. On the other hand, it is likely to happen if second characters ever get approved either way. But on the other hand, it's been established that character's needn't be approved to go on adventures, just to receive XP. So maybe we set up a temporary check system, where players review each others characters for glaring errors, and then official character approvals proceed at their own pace.

covaithe said:
2. Turnover.

Less of a concern, I feel. With different DMs and players and plots, I wouldn't expect that all the adventures would finish together. If it becomes a concern, you could even request that DMs submit adventures of different lengths.

JoeNotCharles · Feb 12, 2009

hafrogman said:
This is a good point. On the other hand, it is likely to happen if second characters ever get approved either way. But on the other hand, it's been established that character's needn't be approved to go on adventures, just to receive XP. So maybe we set up a temporary check system, where players review each others characters for glaring errors, and then official character approvals proceed at their own pace.

This still sounds very cumbersome and confusing to me. I'm against the idea of second characters in general - I'd like to get a poll asking, "Do you want a second character?" and "What do you want this character for, that retiring your first one and starting a sequential character won't serve?" I really don't like the idea of some people having multiple accounts while there are newbies sitting in the tavern who haven't even gotten in on an adventure.

Atanatotatos · Feb 12, 2009

Joe, a place where your pbp game is -relatively- assured to not end abruptly is not a very common thing, and if I can play more than one game there, for which I need more than one character, I definitely want to. Is that answer good enough?