Subject:
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Re: .castle's problem
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.gaming.starship
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Date:
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Sun, 7 Sep 2003 19:13:24 GMT
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Viewed:
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3098 times
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In lugnet.gaming.starship, Andrew Engstrom wrote:
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In lugnet.gaming.starship, Richard Parsons wrote:
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Well, they both wrote a lot in the past three posts. Let’s see if I can’t sort
out some of my thoughts on the subject...
First, I apologize for this being off-topic, but we are a close-knit group here,
so I think we can handle it.
Second, I will point out that I am a cross-themer, meaning that I am just as
happy building castles as I am spaceships. I also have a lot of old Town/Train
sets and I touch on Pirates too.
Third, I don’t think that .lugnet.castle is dying or withering. IMO, they have
been holding rather steady at a point of indecision and misdirection since I
joined Lugnet a few years ago. Throughout that time, it seems to me that there
has regularly been a thread or two that devolves into how .castle isn’t what it
used to be. I don’t think this is killing .castle, but I do think it is
stagnating the group and in some ways. Although recently, there have been some
great community project ideas there that might take off. (For any .castlers
reading this, do realize I am also a member of that group myself.)
Fourth, Andrew’s question here is really one about gaming, not .castle per se.
Early in this year, just as Starship was about to begin in earnest, talk began
to circulate in .castle and .gaming on the subject of developing a community
game for the Castle theme, something that would have been inspired by the old
Castle World/IOM and would have been similar to Starship in that it would be
done mostly by email using websites and MOC pictures for reference. (You might
also note that credit is given to the IOM idea on the Starship site, so these
concepts are shared things.) Since at the time we all had just voted on the
Starship rules and were about to play, I was full of excitement. And as a
Castle fan, I jumped at the chance to reply to those threads with my own ideas
and suggestions. It was this sort of action that got me involved in building
Starship with you guys, and I was hoping for a similar reaction of “wow, this
could work and be cool” from the castle gamers. But alas, there were two
different threads at the time, each dominated by a different leader who had his
own ideas about what game was being developed. One wanted a true-to-IOM idea,
one wanted a D&D-like-high-combat-idea. People got confused about which rules
being discussed went with which game, or whether it was the same game or not.
The leaders of the threads got frustrated when people like me tried to offer
suggestions. When we developed Starship, someone offering a suggestion was
welcome and several ideas would eventually be put up against each other in a
vote. But attempts to organize the castle gaming discussion this way were
turned away at the time. By this point, I was a little disappointed, but also
finding my work for Starship to be more involving than I expected. So I dropped
from the castle gaming conversations partly to keep the peace but also because I
had to decide where my priorities were. (I had been elected GM of Starship and
didn’t want to let anyone down by working all the time on a medieval version.)
Fifth, I have believed from the start that the platform we developed for
Starship is wonderful and simple and is truly a community game. And I fully
believe that the platform concept could be adapted to work in Castle, Pirates,
or even Town. In Pirates, the Galaxy could be an Ocean, and Sectors could be
Seas, Archipelegoes (sp?), or whatever. Player Ships could actually be Player
Ships with a similar set of stats to Starship but instead of sensors perhaps
have something else like Supplies or something that could be a ranking of how
long they can sail without stopping. For Castle, it could be a Continent
separated into different Realms, and instead of Player Ships you might just have
a Player Party with a generic overall stat ranking for the group as a whole.
Even Town could get in on the action with the setting of Pirates (Oceans and
Islands) but their ships could actually have sensors and aircraft...or Town
could go peaceful and do a Rail Baron kind of setting on a Continent of
Provinces (or whatever). My point is that the concept is adapatable, if a group
really wanted to use it to link together several similar game scenarios for any
theme.
Sixth, Richard has it right. If anyone wants to start a new ABS-Inspired,
By-Email game, they need to develop a single solitary adventure scenario and
invite people in. This is what Sector 62 and Spraw did well before those of us
in Spraw decided to try to create a backdrop of a Galaxy to inspire more such
scenarios to co-exist. In playing out a single adventure, you can get a sense
as to how detailed the rules need to be, what kind of “mood” you want the game
to carry, and whether the target audience of players likes it or not. Only when
you begin to develop a community of participants is it likely that something
larger can develop. Then, if that time comes, I think involving all the
partipants in that development is important. ...During the orginal Spraw
adventure, players began asking who was going to run something next. Several
people said they might. Seeing the possibilities, I suggested a community idea
of having them all run at once, and so the discussion began. A couple of us
tried to give the discussion focus by collecting topics and then trying to stay
to one topic at a time. When one was resolved, another from the list could be
brought out. But everyone who wanted to could suggest ideas and discuss them,
and all the participants at the time voted on final rules decisions... It was
through this group-involving process that everyone got excited about the game,
and I believe it was the excitement that really made the game work.
Uh, seventh, If a game system developed in another theme, I would certainly be
excited by it. I might join in, but I cannot say at what degree of involvement
as Starship does currently require a decent amount of my time.
I wish the best to those brave adventurers everywhere!
-Galactic Mediator Hendo
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Message is in Reply To:
 | | Re: .castle's problem
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| (...) Late night post == Incoherent (...) Again, I couldn't make the words represent my real thoughts. A quick two-mile jog and now I'm sorted out again. What I wanted to convey was that I don't see why there should be a problem. We discussed this, (...) (21 years ago, 7-Sep-03, to lugnet.gaming.starship)
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