On Having piles of Crap and Nothing to Do with It.

[RedQueen.exe]

I agree completely with Oasis and Hedged, I've been rattling my cost-effective sabre for shorter travel times whenever I got the opportunity. Another part that makes it even worse is that towns are rarely willing to appropriately compenstate traders for all the travel time it takes them to move goods around, so not only does it take a lot of time spent outside of cities, but it may be cost-prohibitive as well.

Why not think in this direction: if this restriction had been mentally put aside, how could you create a special power for someone who has 10, 20, or 30 broadswords? How could you create a special reward for someone who has 10,000g of diamonds, or wears the most expensive golden crown ever to be made? In every case there's no limit to inventiveness, but the principle basically stays the same throughout - giving items and resource collections powers that influence their social use/meaning in the gameplay.

Perhaps you should give an example.

[masterekat]

I think that the only real problem here is that 'we' started assuming the piles of 'crap' we have ever became worthless in the first place. We have the power as players to make the game world smaller, yet we don't do it.... I look through my characters and I see roads and roads and roads that still need upgrading and I see characters that would love to be able to travel and connect with characters outside of their own little world, yet before they can even consider beginning to reach for their goals, they are forced to spend decades working for a decent vehicle. All the while there are cars and jeeps and rakers just sitting around untouched (or if they do get touched, then suddenly we do seem to find a good use for those broadswords). I don't know where some of your characters are that acquire everything they could ever need at a young age...maybe I just have 11 of the unluckiest characters in the game most of them are in their forties and still have a long, long way to go. Or maybe it's just that some other characters might find some benefit in reflecting on some new goals and reaching higher. The four that I have that are rolling in whatever they could want are still finding ways to make use of that stuff.

What I can't see is how decay (essentially, moving backwards, deprogressing, slowing things down even more for characters that want to move and shake) is going to solve anything. Generations of characters have worked their butts off for years to get the world how it is today and some of you are so willing to tear that down or throw it out of the game instead of finding a way to use that stuff in the game. Why? So you can just build the same things over again? Yes, it's easier to survive and flourish now in Cantr than it was 5 real life years ago. Isn't it much easier to survive and flourish now in the real life world than it was 500 years ago? There's absolutely nothing wrong with that! Can't we find a way in game to build upon that as a society?...Branch out farther. Maybe now that its easier to travel (no one should be walking anymore with the amount of vehicles that there are now, so we don't even have to think about that), try to form more multiple location provinces where all characters in each location know each other well. Simply use the piles of crap rather than ignoring them to turn into dust! Build beautiful homes with couches and kitchen tables and invite your good friends from a few towns over for a specially cooked dinner that you prepared and serve it on your silver plates you made or found. Care about your characters and the characters that are close to yours. Treat them how you would treat yourself. Don't just let them sit outside for days and days eating raw potatoes or the same type of meal everyday for years. And if you've got the selfish type of character that doesn't like to share with others, then I don't know...build yourself a mansion and hide away in it, or hire newspawns to build it for you and brag to them about how good you have it...hoard a bunch of things and then go pay the people in some poor town to move away so you can build it up all for yourself. Just do something different! Don't be content with what we already have....there's so much more that could be, even without implementing anything new.

I don't think "stuff" is what we really need to be focusing on. It's the characters themselves. Don't know what to do with the 30 broadswords? Do what hedgehogst suggested. Or simply leave them in storage, ignore them, and focus on something bigger.

We can still do for newspawns what we did long ago. Only now instead of bone knives and hide pants and wooden carts, it's steel peen hammers and silk dress shirts and station cars and rigged rakers. Let's see if they survive any longer when we help them get something worthwhile without them having to work for a real life year to get it. I'd like to see people easily getting from one side of an island to the other in five days instead of only moving three locations as most in five days.

[Cogliostro]

Bravo, masterkat! A person with heart.

And indeed, there are those rare town leaders who will give the intrepid noob the fully equipped raker they want. Of course, that's after the noob completes the 666 days indentured servitude that the town leader's calculator dispassionately recommends to them.

(Many would argue how righteous the town leader is, after all it does take that long to build that raker from scratch and outfit it. Others would just smile: the town leader with the calculator certainly didn't build the raker, but merely usurped it when somebody died in his town.)

Right there is the main problem why many noobs quit. There is nothing for them to do in Cantr's civilized areas except become wage slaves. They cannot challenge this status quo with violence either, because violence is nerfed, the table's always tilted in favour of the town leaders.

A very real, very sore issue! Though, in this thread I was talking about something else. No magics. But imagine how cool it would be if, for a simple example, having 30 broadswords allowed you to build a special building in your town (the swords are used up in this process), with training machines inside, that raised a person's broadsword skills. Not general combat, but broadswords only. And the owner had the key for this, so they could let who they want in, and deny others. And being a broad sword master was attractive and actually mattered in the larger scheme of possible power struggles we could envision ourselves invovled in as excited newspawns, joining BillBob's broadsword school.

[masterekat]

I'm sorry, but I really don't see the point of going through all of that when you could rp your way into the hearts of a few other characters who'd live or die next to yours. Seems like the effects would be nearly identical (being able to kill whoever or whatever you wanted or needed to). Wouldn't the experience be more meaningful than simply finding thirty broadswords locked away in an abandoned storage and building another building? But I suppose the answer to that is subjective.

Anyway, I think the point I was trying to make was 'don't fix what ain't broke', at least mechanics wise. I honestly believe all that's needed when it comes to piles of crap is a little paradigm shift. I've met more who are still trying to aquire things than who have every need and desire already met.

[Cogliostro]

Do not feel discouraged by that kind of misunderstanding! Indeed it's when you can play your characters with this level of compassion (which I think for yourself, you can clearly identify as transcending both game and RL concepts of property, meaning, attachment and detachment) that Cantr starts to live up to its society simulation promise, and maybe...more than that? For the lucky few.

The simulation of violence, if it's satisfactory and useable, is very much like a catalyst that first, draws the competetive spirits into the game (they are an indispensably necessary part of any functioning society), and second, agitates the connections you mention, that have formed between people playing different roles, characters. It's when those connections are stimulated, almost to the point of breaking, that they produce their loudest, purest echoes in the hearts of players. I harp about this a lot in the other post on the entire "violence is more important than you'd think" theme.

One thing for certain, if you are one of the special people who manage to connect to another player, "rp into their heart" as you put it, then you need nothing from the game except some way to talk to that other player and explore the unbounded together. Isn't that true? This discussion is for players and characters who can't really do that, either not right away, or not at all - all they've got in their hearts are the boring piles of crap they'd collected. I stress that this is through no fault of theirs, I want to talk about the possibilities that such characters can have satisfying sustained Cantr experiences too. For now they're a bit shafted, unfortunately.

[Jaxon]

I once had a character with a pile of stuff and nothing to do with it and I began to give out stuff for free. Anything a person wanted, I gave em if they were cool. Then one day, three people I gave weapons attacked me, dragged me into a locked room and killed me for my possessions.

Moral of the story: People have piles of crap because if you give it away for free you're going to be killed.

[Cogliostro]

Ha ha ha! Jaxon, that's a truly beautiful experience. You just don't know yet how lucky that character of yours was to die that way. I am completely serious.

That masterekat paradigm of broad-hearted kindness was never for the weak. People biting the hand that feeds, stabbing you in the back in every way imaginable - that's just a little test, to see whether your character really has some character, or just doing it all for petty benevolent show-off reasons. By dying, I bet you you passed it easy with flying colours that time.

[Cogliostro]

Some people regard the life of a character or a person merely as a span of time, in their paradigm, obviously the longer that span is - the better. But there's another view that would more compare a character's life to a book, a story. Then who's to say that a rambling 300 page trashy novel is somehow better than a beautiful poem that says it all in five tiny rhymes?

[Jaxon]

Ha ha ha! Jaxon, that's a truly beautiful experience. You just don't know yet how lucky that character of yours was to die that way. I am completely serious.

Yeah....real lucky.

[RedQueen.exe]

Some people regard the life of a character or a person merely as a span of time, in their paradigm, obviously the longer that span is - the better. But there's another view that would more compare a character's life to a book, a story. Then who's to say that a rambling 300 page trashy novel is somehow better than a beautiful poem that says it all in five tiny rhymes?

The problem is, in actuality, it is more often like reading a thousand plus page epic that ends suddenly when you find someone ripped the last 50 pages out and a lot of the story arcs are left unfinished.

In any good story, even when the hero dies, there are rules about who can die and when, and the instant "surprise deaths" in cantr almost always violate good storytelling.

I think you should be more specific more often about which rules you think would improve combat, because you claim to be against the pointless "instant" type of indefensible killing, yet when you actually mention the combat "nerfs" you disagree with (e.g. tea) it is clear that you are in fact, very much NOT opposed to it at all. You seem to be calling for a return to rules that allow it, as though things like the Dory massacre or the Seatown area killing rampages somehow made the game better.

In fact, it is still well possible for a middling group of pirates to fly up into a town, take out the town leader, and loot the place - they just can't massacre the whole town in the process. This means *gasp* someone might be left behind to warn other towns. The real question is, why aren't pirates willing to tolerate some of the risk that their victims have always had to live with?

The problem I have with your posts on the subject is that while they at first glance seem to be thought out, when you read through them it is a bunch of "My ideas are so persecuted!" filler packed around the idea that a cantr with no danger is bad, therefore any changes that made violence more risky or difficult were a mistake. There's no nuance, you don't bother to tell us how you think the line should be drawn - just that more violence is more better.

Your Galileo complex is getting awfully tiring, and seems to be taking up progressively more of your posts. It isn't enough to have people think you're nuts to fit the part of persecuted genius - you also have to be right.

[Henkie]

Your Galileo complex is getting awfully tiring, and seems to be taking up progressively more of your posts. It isn't enough to have people think you're nuts to fit the part of persecuted genius - you also have to be right.

Humpf you beat me to it..
And I forgot it was called the Galileo complex

[Doug R.]

People are invested in their characters. When they die, their passion for Cantr dies. It's a simple fact. The Noniwrok conflict between the Blackrocks and everyone else was the most epic story of all time, culminating in a Homer-esque like war in which scores of characters on both sides were killed. Epic! But, you know what? After it was over, players that lost their favorite characters either quit or lost interest. Those that had characters around the characters of those players then lost interest. It was a domino effect of apathy. The talk on the forum revolved around how people on both sides were allegedly cheating, turning the OOC social atmosphere poisonous.

In summary, the game experienced a massive social implosion, from which it never recovered, and indeed is still in decline as a result of. I used the Noniwrok war as an example, but this is true for any conflict in which characters die, but that war was the largest (in the English zone) and had undeniable ramifications.

The only good way for a character's story to end is on the owner of that character's terms. Anything else creates negative consequences on the game.

So, no Cogliostro, you are wrong. The short poem is only better than the trashy novel IF, and ONLY IF, the creator wanted to write a poem from the outset.

[Cogliostro]

That's funny, the creator and demiurge for you guys is only the individual player. Their story a finished, shrink-wrapped product, just as they intended it. Any "meddling" with it by other players is inherently evil.

I don't think the same way about it. You can see that there is no individual demiurge, but a collective of chaotic forces, many players participating in the story at once. That is what for me makes Cantr interesting.

So if you would like to see life unfolding my way, as a story (it's telling that classical epics and famous works of world lit are frequently available to us only in unfinished form btw, which in no way lessens their importance), then I should be doubly right, frowning somewhat on the "trashy novel" and heralding the coming of the "poetic player" and epic conflicts.

[Cogliostro]

RedQueen: It would be good if my recent post was un-moderated and un-rejected, then you could see the specific suggestion and comment about it. You have good comments, with a nasty tinge and a deep hatred for clickfesting that I appreciate.

[Doug R.]

That's funny, the creator and demiurge for you guys is only the individual player. Their story a finished, shrink-wrapped product, just as they intended it. Any "meddling" with it by other players is inherently evil.

I don't think the same way about it. You can see that there is no individual demiurge, but a collective of chaotic forces, many players participating in the story at once. That is what for me makes Cantr interesting.

So if you would like to see life unfolding my way, as a story (it's telling that classical epics and famous works of world lit are frequently available to us only in unfinished form btw, which in no way lessens their importance), then I should be doubly right, frowning somewhat on the "trashy novel" and heralding the coming of the "poetic player" and epic conflicts.

You confuse ideals with reality. I agree that's what Cantr should be, but the reality is that Cantr is not more than the sum of its parts. If the individual players are not happy, then the game suffers. Individuals have their own ideals and conceptions. A book written by 1000 authors will not result in even a majority of them being happy with the outcome. Every single participant believes their vision is the correct vision of how the story should unfold. When you've been working on staff as long as I have, you learn to recognize this reality and work with it, not against it. Making changes to the game based on ideals is a one-way ticket to failed and nerfed mechanisms.

There is no way to force an over-arching, greater than the sum of it's parts, vision upon the players. Almost no one is playing for anyone but themselves and their own personal amusement.