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[Nunzillor]

New one doesn't work on androids.

It's working on my end on an Android device (both the calculator and text entry).  Which part of it isn't working?

[spazyak]

I can't do negatives.

[Ozarck]

I greatly prefer tragedies most of the time.  Or, at least, stories where he motivating emotions are negative.  Comedies which aren't motivated by tragedy invariably strike me as satyr plays, to use the greek terms.

I am not opposed to deep character struggles. I just think the potential for positive development is necessary to good story telling. Fate, inevitable doom, and everything everywhere being corrupt is a recipe for despair and uninvolvement. I doubt PW wants a lot of players whose characters spend the bulk of hte time drinking heavily, smoking, and contemplating suicide, though that might reduce the workload a bit. I think people can grow through sorrow, fear, doubt, even rage.

But... what about Mainspring?
Or that one exploration game that we played in Limbo.

I'm with Oz, I prefer a bit of Grimbright to the old standard Grimdark.

agreed. If I wanted grim derp of grim derpiness, I would play a warhammer 40k rpg.

Is it grimdark if victory is possible?

No. well, maybe. If the hope is markedly slim, at least according to that chart.

Hey, that MMWW picture looks pretty neat.

the more I think about it, the more interest I have in the third game idea - the one with small homonculi. I like the idea of exchanging bits and becoming something else. I would still prefer something robotic, where you are one of many new robots, programmed with a genetic algorithm for growth and self modification, out to discover your personal identity, to return to the nest in success or failure to add your knowledge and experience to the sum total of the Mother Machine.

[Toaster]

Now, with fifty players it would take seven missions to cycle through most people, so the vast majority of players would just leave, because few people are gonna wait over a year just to get in a single mission. 

Keep in mind that one mission at a time means a far more aggressive update schedule.  As comparison, M1 took ten days from boots on the ground until leaving.

not saying piecewise wont make them into good games, they just cant compete with ER...

They certainly can't if nobody gives them any chance in first place.

I concur with Ao.  What if PW said the next game was "You guys are a bunch of convicts who run missions into various alien hellholes run by a snarky AI who gives you dangerous tech and laughs when you blow yourself up with it."  You can't describe a game the scope of ER with a blurb.

Let's be honest--people aren't here because of PW's great DMing and wonderful world--though those help--but because they can play with fifty other people in the same game.

Speak for yourself.





What if the "on ship" thread was run by a co-mod?  Two-ish updates a week over the "faf-abouters" should be enough to keep them in the loop.  They could even be kept largely mechanical to hold down the text bloat.  "The five of you working on the wall got it 70% done.  You used up 30% of your wood and 10% of your bonescrap.  It should take three people to finish in the same time period, assuming no hostile influence."

[Kedly]

Syv, I plan on sticking around regardless of whay happens partly because of PW's GMing skills. The community is a big part of ER's appeal, but so is PW's story telling/ ability to manage all of us.

[syvarris]

...I'm including his ability to manage all of us in the community statement.  If the GM couldn't manage fifty people, being in a game with fifty people would have no benefit.

And, Toaster, while PW is a very good GM, that doesn't really come through often nowadays, at least not in ER.  Most actions don't get much of a reply, and when they do, it's rarely a detailed description.  Plus, turns take a long time, so those short undetailed replies take longer to get, too.

[piecewise]

Sorry about the lack of posts. Dental work+all my classes giving me exams at once mean I have 5 minutes to mess around on ooc a few times a day, but no where near enough to do any significant work.

I know that Ozrazk offered to act as like a co-GM for everyone who's not on mission.Do you think that would work? No idea if he's still willing to do that just offering the idea of maybe appointing some apprentice GM's to help.

A Co-Gm to handle non-major mission stuff would certainly help.

Right now though I'm still not sure what to do. You guys are so split between the options that I'm having a hard time deciding.


Regardless though, we're gonna have to do something about massive numbers of people on mission at once unless you're ok with missions being like they are now.

[Devastator]

I concur with Ao.  What if PW said the next game was "You guys are a bunch of convicts who run missions into various alien hellholes run by a snarky AI who gives you dangerous tech and laughs when you blow yourself up with it."

That would be awesome!  Where do I sign up?

[Harry Baldman]

You could have a system where you give each co-GM a camp to run, so you can have one or more of them. The original one gets the starting town, another gets a camp further inside, yet another gets some other dump made on the way. Would go a ways in establishing a distinct feel for each camp.

Or you could narrow it down to an establishment within a town/camp. A watering hole or something like that where people gather when they're itching for trouble or something like that. Not the full town, just a sampling of it.

[syvarris]

I would also be willing to assist with co-GMing, as long as I'm not the only one.  And as long as I can still play a character (presumably with turns ran by the other GM.)

[Radio Controlled]

I think making Oro in ER would be perfect. We just say that we are a universe that somehow lost contact with the rest of humanity and over time a sister city has slowly mutated into the city of the dammed and shut the doors to heaven(contact with the rest of humanity). So now the rest of humanity, having adapted to this universes surprisingly pliable laws of reality, must delve into the depths of the city and kill the heart(corrupted AI) and find the key to heaven(a packed up EUE).

I'd rather like an ER-inspired Oroboropolis. We could call it... Robobropolis!

I would also like an ER-connected Oroboropolis. Quite a bit even.

There's a lot of ways that could go, and since we'll be branching out to a lot of different universes then using Oro wouldn't even hinder anyone else who wants to do something else with the ER universe (or if pw ever wants to return to it later), just say it happens in some other universe.

Hell, a cool thing (going on a tangent here, feel free to skip) could be to say that it was the Heabi and the sharkmist components of one of the auto-colonies that went out of control and started trying to destroy each other after the central AI got corrupted for some reason. So now you'd have 2 (or more theoretically) parts of the city that are wildly different: one a pulsing jungle growth teeming with life, the other cold and sterile, with silent metal alleyways hiding all sort of threats. These two parts of the city constantly war with each other for control of the heart of the city, while what remains of the local humans scrape together a living at the edge, where the hostilities are less intense.

So now they gotta start taking back the city and try to take out both the crazed entities (or at least prevent one from winning and taking the core for itself), perhaps in a system where the city is divided into blocks/districts, with each district its own 'boss'/control node that can be taken out to help liberate that part of the city and allow humans to set up safezones (breaking up the larger campaign into smaller subgoals could help prevent the feeling that you're just endlessly dungeon crawling, and introduces a sort of strategy element for those not on mission to brood on).

I wouldn't be against doing something ORO like with ER as the backdrop, but we're still a bit caught here because the opinions of the players are still at what is basically a 50/50 split between new ER and Entirely new game.

Seeing as how Oro seems to be the most popular of the 'something else' options, wouldn't Oro ER version be a good union between the two and satisfy the most people?

I was explaining to Kedly why having the inactive city peeps be "zoomed out" wouldn't work.  In MMWW, everyone is zoomed out, and Kedly was suggesting that Oro would likely not have anybody with less.  But, Oro would also have the active mission people, who would be "zoomed in", rather than zoomed out, and therefore Kedly's idea for Oro would be more work intensive than MMWW.

That's assuming a 'zoomed out' turn in MMWW would be equally taxing as a zoomed out turn in Oro, which isn't a given. Especially since in Oro the zoomed out parts would be an afterthought, while in MMWW they would be the whole game, so to speak.

...I'm not politicking here, but I greatly disagree with this.  Most missions feel like they won't affect the universe at large, regardless of how they go.  Sure, there's things like Nik's little fling dooming the universe, but that's the exception and really felt like it was out of the blue and unrelated to people's actions anyway.  Tinker virtually never feels like it actually accomplishes anything, though I suppose you might have a different experience with that due to the awesome goop thrower.

Then maybe you had a different experience from me, but I often did have that feeling. See eg. the two Heabi ground missions, and how they widely differed in results. True, sometimes the difference might be between 'win but lots of dead people on your team' vs 'win, flawless victory' but that's quite good already for me. Sure, one could argue just how much or how little the course of the game was changed by getting our hands on the snowglobe AI data, but it still felt like it made a difference, and again, that's good enough for me.

I'll concede that my view of tinker might be colored by the goop invention, which if nothing else was used to hilarious effect during the Heabi spaceship mission.

I would also be willing to assist with co-GMing, as long as I'm not the only one.  And as long as I can still play a character (presumably with turns ran by the other GM.)

I wouldn't co-gm, but know that the wiki and related services would still be available. I might have to reorganize the wiki a bit to accommodate, but in either case, you should still be able to outsource quite some of the minutiae to us (assuming our grand wiki gnomes keep lending a hand, which I won't doubt they would).

[Ozarck]

Sorry about the lack of posts. Dental work+all my classes giving me exams at once mean I have 5 minutes to mess around on ooc a few times a day, but no where near enough to do any significant work.

I know that Ozrazk offered to act as like a co-GM for everyone who's not on mission.Do you think that would work? No idea if he's still willing to do that just offering the idea of maybe appointing some apprentice GM's to help.

A Co-Gm to handle non-major mission stuff would certainly help.

Right now though I'm still not sure what to do. You guys are so split between the options that I'm having a hard time deciding.


Regardless though, we're gonna have to do something about massive numbers of people on mission at once unless you're ok with missions being like they are now.

It's not like you have to decide today, or even this week.

How about another poll, that instead of "which one of these options is best for you?" asks "Would you like to play A if we went that way? Would you like to play B if we went that way?"

current vote on the wiki is 16 to 18 in favor of a game unrelated to ER over one related to ER but markedly different.

[piecewise]

Sorry about the lack of posts. Dental work+all my classes giving me exams at once mean I have 5 minutes to mess around on ooc a few times a day, but no where near enough to do any significant work.

I know that Ozrazk offered to act as like a co-GM for everyone who's not on mission.Do you think that would work? No idea if he's still willing to do that just offering the idea of maybe appointing some apprentice GM's to help.

A Co-Gm to handle non-major mission stuff would certainly help.

Right now though I'm still not sure what to do. You guys are so split between the options that I'm having a hard time deciding.


Regardless though, we're gonna have to do something about massive numbers of people on mission at once unless you're ok with missions being like they are now.

It's not like you have to decide today, or even this week.

How about another poll, that instead of "which one of these options is best for you?" asks "Would you like to play A if we went that way? Would you like to play B if we went that way?"

current vote on the wiki is 16 to 18 in favor of a game unrelated to ER over one related to ER but markedly different.

I want to get started on the future if I can though, so we don't go on 3 month hiatus as I work on things.



So lets talk a little about what ER Beyond would be like, if it was done. We won't talk about mechanics because those could change. This also assumes things complete roughly how I think they're gonna. If Xan nukes the EUE and we all die via Fatal Forced Face Based Lurker Lovemaking, then all bets are off.


1. Playing as Aliens and non-humans:
This is a distinct possibility. Humans are the main characters in ER because they're the species with the most clout and force in the galaxy at the time, but once we wander elsewhere there could be all kinds of contemporaries to play with. Not to mention all the self enhancement that we can do. Who knows, maybe you'll play as sentient space spiders and reincarnated crystal men. Depends on what people do at the end.

2. Your decisions matter...but you don't.
So how I'm gonna decide the future is look at where we end, and then look at what people are currently doing and what they plan to do in the future. Then roll dice to see if they're successful or not. But the point of the time skip is that you'll all be dead or at least absent, or at least least not player characters in the future. So Lenglon's desire to see what happens to lyra might just not go anywhere. I mean, she's an invisible, shy catgirl who avoids talking. Her influence over the world as a whole will probably be minimal. Meanwhile someone who makes it their life mission to do some specific thing and rolls well will probably have some level of noticeable influence. Xan's life long goal to fuck the world to death with a dick made of screaming baby flesh will probably pay dividends in some form. Just don't expect to get to see your character or continue them or anything

3. No fate but your own.
Steve is gone, so is ARM. Beyond will still have a general meeting ground, a hub, which will probably take the form of a bar, but the players will be mercenaries or men out for their own goals, not for some greater good. Missions and payment will vary, and they'll be no one around to keep the peace. It also means that in general the gear you'll have access to will be a lot lower power. You're soldiers of fortune or mercs or disgraced scientists or jobless doctors or refugees from other worlds or universes.

4. Smaller missions, more death, retirement.
I want to keep the missions small and I want to murder people more. And when people get to powerful, I want to have them start again, perhaps in a sort of NG+ mode of some kind. Smaller missions mean more time to describe them and actually run them well, but there is the downside that if 60 people still want to play, it means that the posts per mission over a set period of time will be less than if we had smaller numbers of active players.

5. Player autonomy and co-GMs.
I would like for players to have some level of autonomy when it comes to simple things, and I'd be ok with having co-gms to help me handle things in the way that Sy is currently handling tinker. Not someone running the game with me so much as someone running a subsection or offshoot part of the game. I know people not on mission will want to do  stuff, but handling 60 interactions all the time will take a lot of time and, as a GM, handling a bunch of minor things like "Yes, you move to that room" or "Yes, you buy that thing" strikes me as rather silly.

6. No tinker, but maybe crafting.
I think one of the things that inevitably leads to power level inflation in ER is tinker. You guys are good builders, too good, and I know the second you get access to something dangerous in the world at large you're gonna start building over powered crap. Well, we're not a military anymore, and you don't have access to an infinite amount of resources, so that ain't gonna happen. But traditional crafting with recipes and items, that seems reasonable. Especially if we visit the same place multiple times, which I feel like we will.

[MidnightJaguar]

Reading this I feel oro set in the ER universe would be even more perfect now.

[Radio Controlled]

ER beyond sounds like it'd be cool as well. Dunno what I'd like more, this or the ER-connected Oroborpolis, both sound great. I do tink a lot of these points (4, 5 and 6 mostly) would be applicable to both though.