Designing a mini-sandbox in a wiki?

[Yora]

As Morrus said, the main issue with such things really lies in the basic idea: If you have multiple people working on something, esecially if they are supposed to come up with things by themselves, can only result in a large pile of things, but won't create anything coherent. It's a large number of micro-settings placed side by side, with people adding aspects to things created by others without understanding the creators intentions. It can be done, but is very unlikely to create anything that anyone will really want to use except for one or two one-shots that ignore most of the content.

 

[Daztur]

As long as everyone has read everything it's not hard to get coherency since you can just slot you own ideas into what's gone before. Of course that means that the longer the project goes on the harder it is to join since new people have to read the backlog of everything that's come before to get brought up to speed.

I'm not sure if a wiki is the best way to do this though, I think just a simple forum thread is easier since you can easily see the new stuff and riff off of it. I've had a lot of success with the group hexcrawl setting building thread on this forum and while there are inconsistencies they're actually one of the best things about it, the real world is messy and inconsistent and fictional settings often don't have enough and also some really great ideas can come from trying to make apparent inconsistencies fit.

Also, a trend you'll see in pretty much any shared setting like this is that things will be MUCH weirder than your average setting. Most people think up the interesting weird and then have the rest of the setting be the mundane stuff in the background. But in this kind of setting you just don't get people spending a lot of time laying out the mundane stuff so you have five people putting in all of their weird ideas at once and it gets pretty strange. The best thing is just to run with it, which can make the setting go to interesting places once all of the different bits of weirdness gel together.

 

[Morrus]

I'm gonna give it a shot and see what happens. The worst that could happen is nothing happens, but we'll see!

 

[Gilladian]

Do you want us to just plunge in and edit the front page, or create our own pages with info referencing the front page?

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I don't know anything about the Night Below setting. I don't even remember hearing of it before, hehe. So maybe a little bit of background on the village would be in order for the benefit of anyone else in my boat .

I like wikis. I think if it is used wisely it can work well. IMHO it sure beats fishing through massive threads, and since discussion threads can be attached to wiki entries it seems like it should work fine.

 

[FreeXenon]

Perhaps you can use a combination of threads and Wiki.
A forum thread can be used as a method of discussing ideas and changes, and the wiki can be where the agreed upon changes can be solidified?

 

[Morrus]

Do you want us to just plunge in and edit the front page, or create our own pages with info referencing the front page?

No plan, at least yet. Just go for it!

 

[Morrus]

Perhaps you can use a combination of threads and Wiki.
A forum thread can be used as a method of discussing ideas and changes, and the wiki can be where the agreed upon changes can be solidified?

I think that's what the discussion tab of a wiki page is for!

 

[Janx]

One idea I had centuries ago when the 3e tools were popping up for dungeon, NPC, village creation was to wire it all together such that a random world map was generated. Each city/village was rolled up with each NPC rolled up. each dungeon was also rolled up.

All of it crosslinked together as a hyperlinked pile of documentation.

So the user could click on a city on the map, jump to the city page, see the city map and the map key, with each place tying to the NPCs found there and building map.

This kind of generator could feed into a wiki, so the content could then be edited, massaged, etc.

As far as using a Wiki, I'd recommend always starting from a map. People pick a place, and drill into the details on that place. I have no idea if Wikis accomodate image maps, but I always use them when hand-building campaign websites. I find that people are generally location oriented when it comes to game worlds. Where do I want to go, show me info about that, with child-places I can go to shown on the higher detail map.

 

[Halivar]

Should we keep it edition/ruleset neutral, or should we present both 4E/3.x stats if needed?