PD: Excel sheets, sharing links to online tools and more

[MattWithoos]

This is targeted at Players Department and other staff, but please feel welcome to share thoughts and discuss.

I am curious about two (or three) things after a post by SekoETC.

Obviously using an excel sheet to help you manage your characters in leadership positions is reasonable.

Seko raised a good question, though - if she were to ever hand over the reigns, would she be allowed to hand off that excel sheet to the new leader, perhaps with Players Dept handing the transaction?

Another question - there is a tedious task that I have to undertake for one of my characters, similar to translation. It can be made easier and faster by an online tool. I am wondering if there is ever a situation where I can communicate OOCly to another character the online tool I use, so that when they start doing this task, they don't waste a long time putting effort into it.

Then a general question - is sharing online resources via OOC acceptable? The most recent one that came up was me wanting to share the Cantr ticks fan-built website which updates the timers for projects/land and sea travel/hunger etc. Another example is the question above; sharing a Google Drive spreadsheet, or perhaps even Google Translate so a player can translate the emotes of another character.

Thanks for any response!

[nateflory]

I have (in a long past year, long dead character) worked with another character to share a sort of "spreadsheet" tool (this was before Google docs, etc etc) in the running of a small settlement. We found it much easier to automate the mundane process of keeping track of notes and things for trades. Similar to how the Bauer Atlas is technically "magic" with it's mouse-over popups and links, our note was a small database on a website with simple PHP form that each of us could "edit" when resources got traded around. The data was taken from event logs and "entered in the trade registry" via emotes daily, but was so much more convenient than passing notes back and forth a few times a day. For THAT sort of info, I think it's a great way to effecivelty prevent Player-headaches, for something that the characters would spend a good hour doing "manually in-game" that was just made Player-convenient.

Likewise, I would imagine that if you had some sort of cypher code that needed worked out, and it was fairly simple, Copy-pasting would be acceptable for the same reason. Save player-ooc-time for something your character could technically do "manually" by transcribing from their note. However, in that case, I'd want the characters to have a physical copy of the Code-Key in-hand in-game also. Otherwise, it might seem oddly cheating to "remember the code" so well? Others may disagree.

Good thoughts though. I'm following this thread to see what Staff-ish folks think.

[sanchez]

Thanks for this thread. PD should discuss this.

Short of an official policy, I can say that it’s going to matter quite a lot the types of information being shared. Things like Wiki pages, or also Joo’s tick timings I think, are things that all players have access to already, so probably OK, but OOC communication in game should be limited, if you can find a way to share the information in char.

Things that may never be shared OOC are maps, resource locations, information about other chars or game events that are not available to the char in game.

Where there is grey area, is in sharing of spreadsheets or other calculators. If what you’re sharing is a general price list, or trade value comparisons, etc., even if they are town-specific, my opinion (which may be contradicted by policy once that’s set) is that it’s probably fine, so long as it’s all information which is already fully available for the char in game. What’s probably not OK, is to share more specific information such as inventory lists, or information about other chars, history, plans, notes, and the like, even if the char could find them in game with effort. So, tools to manage information the char already has, probably yes, but any new information, or information that must be gathered in game and may change, should be avoided.

Again, this is just one PD member’s opinion, but I hope we can get back to this soon with a more clear statement.