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Post by smashingBrawler on May 5, 2016 1:24:27 GMT -5
While I think a metaphorical 'clean slate' would be good, I'd like to keep this place and the events that transpired as part of the canon. I like my characters that exist here and their stories, and also the overarching feel of this place. Especially because of the death that the forums underwent - it's like exploring relics for pieces of a puzzle. I can see why somebody new would have some trouble with getting in, but honestly the most important thing is to read some or a bunch of the Glitch FAQ (to get a handle on classpects) and then hop on the forums and use the resources available - and by that I mean: start asking questions.
A good example are both absentAbsolute's log and trepidatiousPacifist's log - Both OCs are asking questions frequently and getting frequent answers (usually from horrorTerror, with a bit of chiming in from smashingBrawler, sanitysController or faultyCoordinator. People who've been around and are familiar with this sutff can make things a lot easier.
There are a TON of things to learn, and it can definitely be daunting, but honestly if you learn enough of the basics to get by (reading a chunk of the glitch FAQ is probably all one actually needs) you can be fine. Honestly, for in-character stuff I'd argue that the Glitch FAQ is the bulk of the reading one really needs - it's got all the basics in there, and some... pretty potent advanced stuff from time to time, but it's a solid read nonetheless and the more heavy stuff can literally be passed off as 'this OC was not gonna read this because it gave them a headache just looking at it'. The history of the forums itself are less required stuff simply because, if one is bringing a character to the forums, they're brand new to them. They wouldn't know all about the backlog of information - they'd learn it slowly over time as they get open spaces in their very busy schedules (Not dying can be a 24/7 gig sometimes).
tldr: I don't wanna lose this place as part of canon, asking questions can help, GGTG's glitch FAQ is basically the meat and potatoes of the lore, asking questions in and out of character is always pretty effective (either somebody has an answer or there isn't one and that means somebody can make an answer, if it contradicts what somebody else said way back, well, maybe it's just where the characters found themselves in the furthest ring having different universal properties.
tl again, dr again: Keep this place imo. Use Glitch FAQ. Ask questions OOC and IC. Nothing is necessarily set in stone.
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Post by Interested on May 5, 2016 2:27:32 GMT -5
That totally makes sense! Again, I was just voicing my opinion of what would be most appealing for new people trying to get into the story, which is in no way more valuable than the people who're already a part of it.
That being said, I still back technicolourCapitalist's idea of making a new forum, because this one currently does seem very confusingly organized; it seems like there's a fair few redundant subforums, and I have a hard time telling some of the IC areas from the OOC ones. Of course, now I have to decide if I want to go ahead and try to jump in here, or wait until TC's done creating the new board...
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Post by technicolourCapitalist on May 5, 2016 12:26:05 GMT -5
Sorry about the little bit of radio silence there, I've been working on putting the new forum together! One of the things I'm trying to incorporate is definitely easier to access and clearer site lore, while allowing for room in which players can expand on new and existing ideas - because this site reached a point where I couldn't keep up with the lore, even though I was the one to make the forum! Right now my plan for doing this is to have a "site lore" board, where all of the lore is stored, and using a kind of 'contents page' to allow members to quickly and easily find which thread they're looking for. I've also added a "development" sub-board where players will be able to talk to each other about what they'd like to see added to the lore, and then from there popular and well thought out lore will be moved over to the main lore board and become officially canon to the site. Other updates include a proper character profile board which is sorted into "derse" "prospit" and "other" based on the characters native dream moon - with other being included because some members play characters which don't have proper native moons because of glitches or because they're SBURB NPCS (others, angels, consorts - SBURB's broken enough that all of theses could and do occur). By having set and required character profiles, it should be a lot easier for members to keep track of their own characters and find other characters that they're interested in roleplaying with! Plus the profiles look really nice. B) On top of these profiles, the mini-profiles are actually functional (!) and include a small and large avatar, as well as information upon hovering: the amount of posts a player has, the characters native session, a link to the characters profile and who the character is played by. This should help streamline the roleplaying process, as all the information needed to interact with a character can be found immediately. In addition to this, I've added a bunch of 'player features' which are essentially big lists to help people out. These lists are: - The character list, which is a basic masterlist of all the characters on the board. Whenever you make a character, you can reply to this list to add them to your repertoire of characters once you've made your profile, allowing everyone on the site to see who you play as well as making an easy way to check out other characters.
- The GUC list (aka Global Usage Characters), which is a list of characters that you can use to add flavour to your own character - while they aren't going to be available to roleplay as (at least to start with), these are characters that your character may have been in a session with or may know a good story about. This goes from 'Community Legends' such as gentlemanMannerism to 'PKs', 'Active Players' and 'Permadead Players'. These should be a great way of adding some flare and consistency between characters, hopefully!
- The session list, which is a list that tracks the current sessions of all the characters. You can respond to be added to a random session, and you can also request to be in a specific session if you see one that you like. You can request certain things from your session too, such as "no space player" or "missing derse", in which case you will either be added to a session with those traits or a new session will be created for you with those traits. (I'm still working on this!!)
- And finally, the group list! This will let your character join and create groups, which they can then create threads for by prefacing the thread subject with their [GROUP NAME] in that format. Current groups include the Derse Fanclub and the Prospit Fanclub, who are vaguely competitive rivals. This should be another good way to get characters to interact with each other and create plot points.
The OOC areas at this point are divided into 2 - "OOC: Welcome" for most everything OOC, which includes an essentials board, a lore board, a questions and suggestions board, and a chat board; and "OOC: User Login" for character creation nd discussion, which includes a profiles board, and a data board. The IC areas are at this point divided into 3 - "Casual Pastimes" for non-SBURB talk, which includes an introductions board, a chat board, and a forums game board; "Help" for bad times, which includes emergency situations, and general advice boards; and "I Hate This Game" for other SBURB talk, which includes game stories, classpects, and moons. Right now, I'm working on adding the base lore to the site with everything from the Classpects to common glitches. I'm also working on properly setting up the lists so that it's easy for members to respond to them and for me to update them, and I'm trying a couple of things out - I've made multiple accounts, tested the profiles to see how they work for human and troll characters, and I'm making a couple posts here and there to see how things fit together. That's all the information I can think of now, but please feel free to ask me questions and continue making requests! I can't promise I can answer them all, but I'll give it a good go! B) EDIT: I also totally forgot to mention that I'm working on the plot for the new site, and I'm trying to incorporate this site quite closely into it. The basic idea for the plot is going to be that this site had a time related meltdown, which was causing characters to be harassed by future, past and doomed timeline versions of themselves almost constantly. As a result, many players left - creating a kind of time capsule (haha) which players were afraid to touch because of the serious headache time things can cause at the very least, and the dangerous time related circumstances it had the potential to create at its worst. Eventually this led to the creation of what will be the new site, which is hoped to be far stabler and more reliable due to some serious game breaking and Other bargains. Essentially, I'm trying to create a plot which will widely acknowledge this site's existence and everything that occurred on it through IC occurrences, while allowing me to improve all the things that were wrong with it - the lack of organisation, the hard to follow lore and the difficulty for new players to get involved.
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Post by horrorTerror on May 5, 2016 14:42:08 GMT -5
Ooh, almost forgot to ask. Is there any way to embed whatever IRC we're all going to use into the page so it's just sitting there at the bottom of the main page or everything like RJ did with the Aeiou chatango? Having it so that the random guests can reach 'hey people are here' with a matter of scrolling down might make it easier for people to just roll into the OOC chat and get greetings done.
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Post by technicolourCapitalist on May 5, 2016 14:51:38 GMT -5
There is actually a C-Box at the bottom of the page! Whether this would be entirely IC or OOC would be up to which you guys would rather have, because it's not something that would be hard to do either way or anything (it would literally just be a case of adding "this is OOC" or "this is IC" in the rules next to the box).
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Post by horrorTerror on May 5, 2016 15:52:19 GMT -5
On the new forum or this one?
*scrolls down*
oh you mean the new one got it
If we can't have it use IRC channels, an IC box would probably see more use since the OOC sections are more character concepts and planning than immediate discussions.
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Post by transfixedThumomancy on May 5, 2016 16:29:33 GMT -5
On continuing where the classic!verse left off:
Yes.
Hell yes.
Hell fucking yes.
I really don't think we should have any Others/Angels, though, especially not Angels. And I'd really like to stick close to things that actually happened in the classic!verse - aka, prior to May 2014 - as well as the things that are on eternity-braid's blog. We should also probably pick a genre/set of genres and stick to it; iirc, RV Classic dissolved partly over arguments about tone and partly over sheer amount of separate storylines.
Other than that, I'm all for starting a new forum, possibly with both an IC and an OOC chat. If it's possible, I'd also like to set something up to automatically archive the logs from both somewhere.
I had a few characters kicking around in my brain already; I'd like to see them in action :)
Edit: Also, please, no Night of the Mongolian Safari. No offense, but... well. There are quite a few reasons why I hate it with half of the fibers of my being. (The other half are dedicated to being angry at the Green Sun, if you're curious.)
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Post by smashingBrawler on May 5, 2016 17:06:46 GMT -5
While I agree on the point of Others/Angels for the most part, I think horrorTerror has done some really neat stuff by playing one. Though I do agree that some of the new stuff is a bit weirder, probably because of the lack of ability to ask questions of the guys who've been around for a while/since the beginning (whether or not 'x' is okay).
As for the genre things, I'm kinda iffy on that one. I think the variety of genres is a simple result of the fact that different characters will have different results. Sometimes a session is really dark and everything is going to hell in a hand basket with no way out, other times it's gonna be more like super fun time with friends. It always depends on the players and situation, I would argue.
New forum is great and probably needed. For in-universe lore, I'd be willing to throw up an offer of sanitysController being part of the solution or problem - I've been partially setting her up to be some kind of intense gamebreaker to help give reason to either the site's meltdown or the new site's set up. (I plan to relinquish control of her at some point after my current plans and have her become global use character)
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lucidChthonia
Full Member
?I am a brain, Watson. The rest of me is a mere appendix.? ― Sherlock Holmes%\1\%
Posts: 105
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Post by lucidChthonia on May 5, 2016 19:01:47 GMT -5
Hello. lucidChthonia/OJ/eternityBraid here. I was informed of this thread through my book/blog. Yes, I do say book. This is because RV Classic, after diverging from the forum, had its own canon. We agreed that we needed to document it before we had a chance in hell of getting new players in. So I wrote the documentation. It is about 400 pages, excluding supplements. Have fun. I have absolutely no idea what's been happening on these boards. As far as I can tell, nobody from RV Classic even tried to keep up, either, although someone did throw the occasional thread in for peanut-gallery-ing. I do not currently have any plans to roleplay on any future forums that are created as a result of this, although I will likely at least make an account. I do have enough contact with GGTG that I could ask him to point the link at the latest forums. I don't want to push my luck, though; he feels rather ashamed of the entire affair, so it might be impolite to ask him to do more than that. (I was going to say presumptive, but gentlemanMannerism.)
It is probably best to create fewer subforums. Too many will spread people too thin and make the membership look less active than it actually is, which will reduce the amount of new people who will stick around. You can create subforums and move threads later if it starts getting too crowded. So I recommend a structure like this: OOC - people are expected to be speaking OOCly. -- Announcements - self-explanatory. -- Character profiles - standardize keywords in the titles so you can scan for characters by native, species, and so on. -- Planning and socializing - includes session coordination, OOC threads for specific sessions/scenarios, MSPA fan adventures/Quests (although digest threads for those can go in Other), and threads for non-RV-related stuff. IC - people are expected to be speaking ICly, and anyone can post in anyone else's thread, unless specifically stated otherwise in the OP. -- IC "ontopic" forum, for threads which have specific topics to examine or specific problems to solve. -- IC "offtopic" forum, for introductions, 'which aspect is the best' slapfights, vent threads, and other socializing. Logs - in this category, threads are assumed to be invite-only. You should not post in someone else's logs thread, unless specifically stated otherwise in the OP. -- Sessions - one thread for each Sburb session. Feel free to have Pesterchum slapfights here. -- Other - this is where you would put other kinds of threads. For example, if you wanted to post a FAQ and don't want other people's posts in between yours, put it here (and then link to it from IC on-topic for comments). Or if you want a logs thread specifically for everything involving your character individually. Finally, this is also the place for IC threads for tabletop-game Sburbs.
Finally: I have made a Discord chat for Replay Value AU, and it is at discordapp.com/invite/0zANxp9Ool4kLmYx. Feel free to come in and catch up on the four or five years you may have missed. Or tell me about what you've been doing.
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Post by transfixedThumomancy on May 5, 2016 19:37:50 GMT -5
The problem with playing Others/Angels is that they're supposed to have values and mindsets fundamentally different from those of humanity. That's pretty darned hard to roleplay, when the person doing the roleplaying is themself human. I'd rather see them as general-use characters - open for plots, but having no actual forum account to their name.
And re: tone: I'm not talking about 'oh wow everything has to be super tragic and angsty and grimdark all the time grrrr'. I'm just talking about -
Well.
There's actually a technical definition of 'grimdark', now - not in the context of Other corruption, but in the context of describing a world - and its antonym 'noblebright'. There are also derivatives - 'grimbright' and 'nobledark'.
The word 'grimbright' describes a world where you can have great adventures, and see wondrous things - but inevitably, there is a status quo, and it is very, very resistant to change.
And, in my opinion, that's what RVAU was trying to be.
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Post by Ohmanit'sback on May 6, 2016 2:19:02 GMT -5
I agree with lucid in terms of structure of the forums, because Replay Value isn't exactly a massive AU with a lot of followers or anything we could likely get away with only having a few broadly defined boards for all of the action. It'll prevent things from looking too sparse. Tonally I don't think there should be a site-wide effort to enforce anything? Like I'm sure we all even have some diverging canons for stuff like game abstractions, let alone overall tone of work.
'We should also probably pick a genre/set of genres and stick to it; iirc, RV Classic dissolved partly over arguments about tone and partly over sheer amount of separate storylines.' - Perhaps we should have a rule about trying to make extreme changes that would vastly alter the standing canon of Replayverse? Like maybe have a part of the board where members can OOCly weigh in on really drastic new bugs and features people want to introduce before they start making IC posts about them. The way I see it, there is no inherently impossible to overcome issue with having no 'central authority' like the Replayverse so far has lacked. Crazy different things can happen from session to session, as GGTG established in the FAQ proper. I think the ability for people to throw wild ideas out there and stuff makes the setting what it is. There should just be a soft amount of control on things that change the game for almost everyone, like a new class or defining some big chunk of an existing Aspect's abilities or something.
I'll be interested to see how this all evolves, and I'm hoping for the best! I loved this AU when I used to participate in it, it's a big part of my high school life.
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Post by Interested on May 7, 2016 15:21:22 GMT -5
I agree with transfixedThumomancy on the others/angels issue; I feel like they lose their impact if they're actual people who talk and do stuff, as opposed to vague, looming forces. lucidCthonia's suggested structure also seems really good; technicolourCapitalist's isn't bad, but I do get concerned that things would get stretched to thin, and the Prospit/Derse separation seems rather pointless (and potentially confusing, since replayers can switch moons between sessions). More boards can always be added as needed if things seem too crowded.
Anyways, do we have any sort of timeframe for when this new forum will be up? I've got some character ideas I can't wait to use.
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Post by smashingBrawler on May 7, 2016 21:43:51 GMT -5
I find myself in agreement with Interested for the most part, though I do feel as though perhaps we could give horrorTerror some kind of pass - he's done a ton of stuff on here, and kept it closer to alive than many others, I'd argue - I'd almost argue this thread is here because of horrorTerror's involvement (without him, absentAbsolute wouldn't have really been replied to, nor would I have). I generally wouldn't want anybody playing as an Other/Angel, but maybe HT could be a unique case? (To be clear I do fully understand why people don't want people playing as others, I'm just making the case for an exception. Plus, like, it could actually be a neat point of conflict - some people trusting HT because he's been pretty helpful, others being suspicious, because, y'know, he's an other, [or maybe we could have him turn out to be one's (the one we think of as HT currently) speaker?])
Perhaps I should let HT speak for HT.
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Post by horrorTerror on May 7, 2016 23:15:02 GMT -5
Honestly, HT was intended to be a half-joke character, who blossomed into a slightly different and more helpful character than originally intended. I can basically drop him if we want, or keep him, either works.
HT as a character is essentially a random unimportant Other who basically showed up because whoever Nefer is playing as was posting in old threads, and wanted to vaguely join in to see if it'd make more people show up and interesting things happen. The main reason beyond that why I made 'Fred' (obviously a taken name) was to be a nonplayer perspective who can have information that players normally won't, but usually just irrelevant things (like mechanics outside of their corner of Paradox Space that would most likely never be encountered), and stay too far away and too weak to actually do anything with the server protections still being a thing for the sake of not changing the setting as it would actually be played provided people DID show up. Basically a focus on the 'hey let's explore the setting' side of the RP in a way that could be safely ignored, and for the 'slice of life existential horror' side reveal that the full eldritch madness right outside the edge of the regular trapfest is still easily invoked in its own territory and just as desiring of your body, mind, and soul as it is inside the walls designed to keep it out. Beyond that he's like other forum-advice-centered members mostly were in that personality was mostly buried behind random tips, but without the sense of shared experience. He ended up being a generic advice guy who lacks personal experience with Sburb but has the time and space to read everyone else's FAQs and jump into not-RP-relevant technobabble in an attempt to justify wildly different situations, and became someone not-generic whose primary motive behind assisting players is a Problem Sleuth reference combined with helping friends and superiors take over the freshly manufactured frogs and therefore be able to exploit them using all the information put up on the replayer networks that the Others are probably monitoring to keep each other from jumping all over them.
I'm fine either way and I'll set up a new character if it gets set as a rule when we change forums.
If we're keeping him I could see him as somebody involved in setting up cheap/effectively-free security/decay-prevention/nondamaging-interference-only Deal on new server ("lol this is normal for me. Sad that artisticHourglass and the backup stuff the Circle said exists when they announced this server's off limits aren't anchoring anymore, anyone know what happened to her and the rest? If you guys want a new linear server protected I know a Middling God who's a fan of the replayer chains make a few hundred doomed timelines with an emphasis on Others corruption so we can put thousands of yous in a bubble for a few weeks and *see what happens*. Preliminary formal terms and conditions below feel free to accept them by calling anyterror in the deals network listed once you've got the server prepped for launch and Time players timelinegrabbing.") or just go 'oh everybody's leaving let's follow' and promptly remain giving the 'this this and this are likely to be consistent so try that first and tell us how it goes if you don't die' speeches in the new place.
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Post by NoAccountb/cLazy on May 8, 2016 19:12:52 GMT -5
I'd be fine with HT remaining a thing on the other forum, weird exceptions that violate the rules are one of the things Replayverse is made of after all.
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