How's The Game

[wearethecrystalmods]

HOW'S THE GAME?

Welcome to Cosmographia's first "How's the Game"! This is essentially an open forum for discussion about where to take the game from here and anything that might need changing. A lot has happened in the past week and going forward we feel it's more important than ever to have a discussion like this.

This is not a place for criticism of specific players or characters. This is purely about the game itself. Please save player specific criticisms for the upcoming How's My Driving. Any disregard for this or out of hand conduct will be frozen or deleted.

We are inviting not just all current players (old and new) to participate in this discussion but also past players that have left and new potential players considering the game; we encourage everyone to pitch in their two cents. That being said, since this is the game's first HTG we are currently going to do it without anon or sock journals (for future HTG this may change).

Like said this is a completely open forum. We have a list of topics we want to discuss (listed below), but after all those have gone up players are completely free to start their own threads with anything not covered by the other sections.

Current sections (please wait until all these are up and linked to post your own they're all up now!):

The Staff
Applications
Setting Suggestions
The World Outside Waverly Bay/Potential World Plot
Event Schedule/Power Distribution
Player Plot Approval
Power Limitations/Guidelines
Fate of Cosmonet
Network Comm?
Day Cycle Comments
The Temp. Drop System
Future Event/Plot Suggestions

Comments

[hasmovedon]

So, I'm going to show my age here and ramble a little about Mayfield.

Mayfield had a regain system that, like this one, rewarded players for participating in events with a regain. We had a dedicated regain page and after every event you could go there, state your character, link to your participation in the event and detail what you wanted your character to get. The mods would then respond saying 'yo that's fine' or work with the player to make what they wanted plausible if it required nerfing.

I like the idea other people have brought up of allowing item regains as well as power regains. This will allow people with characters who have less powers to gain more faster, while players who already have a lot of powers can get a nice sword or a favorite book instead.

As mentioned above, I really don't like the idea of making some arbitrary standard of participating 'enough', but never fear! The way Mayfield did it meant you could save your regains until you knew what you wanted to do with them, because it was very easy to check who had claimed their regain for a particular event already and who had not. In Mayfield it was mostly just used to get double regains once you knew what you wanted, but I propose that here, if you save up enough regains, you can 'buy' bigger things.

Say I wanted Roland to regain his stupid magic bag that makes money, which is a thing he has because Stephen King is ridiculous. That's pretty powerful on its own. If I wanted to regain it in stages, I could use one regain to get the bag, one regain to make it able to produce a fixed (and probably small) amount of money, and presumably future regains to up the amount of money it could produce in a certain time frame. If I saved my regains, I could get all that at once. Some people will want to do it in stages and some will want to save -- allowing for both playstyles seems like a good idea! Especially since some people want to do powers in stages, which I think is a great idea and would work well with this system. People who wanted stages could have stages, people who wanted to be patient and gain more amped-up powers could do that.

You could even make a little 'store' on the regain page detailing how many events something is worth if you felt like it, but having the mods have to okay all regains would make it easy for you to monitor what players were asking for and keep the process fair across the board. That's definitely my suggestion.

[foolreversed]

Do you have a link to the old Mayfield pages for this? So far I think this is the one I like most but I'd love to see it as it was in action (mostly for my own point of reference since that tends to be the best way I learn).

[hasmovedon]

Sure! Let me go digging back into ye olden times.

Here we are. As you can see, there's a focus on describing what you want if it requires description and while the mods usually do approve regains, they sometimes ask for changes before approving or impose limits (see the regain requested by Dist/buildstherobots for an example).

Also I misremembered -- apparently there was no actual link required and it was just a personal thing of mine to include one. I'd recommend requiring one if you did adopt a system like this, just to be thorough.

[foolreversed]

Thank you!

I think it would be easy to turn this into a form and do something similar. We'll still have to do a whole lot of discussion obviously but I like this; it feels like it'd the easier to transition to.

Now we'll just have to figure out what exact restrictions to put in place...

+1

[nailed_it]

I haven't been in a game yet where things like activity/event participation can earn characters regains but the more I see of the concept, the more I like it as opposed to the old standard of "You must tag this much per month to remain in the game". Cosmos' AC is already fairly easy to pass so I think this would work out well for encouraging even more participation and CR in events and the game in general.