fhplotterywheel | Brainstorming Post!

Entry tags:

brainstorming

Brainstorming Post!

Apologies, apologies, apologies! We've totally flaked on this for the past couple of months. I won't speak for

willbedone as far as inviting punishment, but you can make indignant noises in my direction for it if you like. *shameface*

Anyway, this is the monthly brainstorming post, and I hope this means you guys have a ton of stuff to throw into the mix today, so have at it, in the appropriate OCD thread! And they are up, so go go go!

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

The problem with that is, for me, Fandom High is a place where I can unwind. Where I have fun. "Something bad happens and we save the day" is fun. "Oh shit a volcano just exploded and covered half the island in ash" is not only not fun but is also traumatizing.

Well, fighty stuff isn't fun for me. I know it is for other people and I'm not trying to say we should never do it again, but I would like more variety.

The catch is, fighty stuff is pretty easy to ignore. And it's relatively temporary. Over and done. A natural disaster? Not so much. The repercussions continue for a while and for people who don't want to play with it? Not fun.

I don't personally see how the aftermath of any island wide plot is different from the aftermath of any other. I mean, the aliens blew up the damn school and the entire summer was spent rebuilding it. People had to deal with that whether they liked it or not with no warning.

The way I see it, people get warning for BDEs and have the chance to take their character off island if they don't want to participate. And when their character comes back, they have to deal with the repercussions of whatever happened. I'm not sure how it would be different if what happens is an attack of killer termites or an earthquake.

Well, for one thing there's a pretty big difference between, "Oh, hey, there were killer termites, but they're gone now," and, say, "Half the island and all of your stuff are gone."

I never said that I was advocating "half the island and all of your stuff is gone".

No, but natural disasters that require more than five minutes to recover and rebuild from generally are not kind to people's stuff. Earthquakes, volcanoes, and giant-ass hurricanes are equally not kind to the accepted geography of an island. Other disaster types may be moreso, to be fair.

A major natural disaster is not something someone can reasonably opt out of. "I'm taking a pass, so my dorm room is still standing even though everything around it fell down, and my windows are unbroken so none of my stuff got destroyed," doesn't really work. Yeah, some people do get lucky, but having clothes or running water or, hell, even just your family photos when your neighbor doesn't is a really weird place to be in.

Natural disasters are not fun and games. To me this is the glitter and crack and, yes, punching things game, not the epic drama game. YMMV.

This right here is how I felt about the plague. I'm not against dark and serious, but "here, you can sign up to change people's dressings while they vomit and get sicker and die" -- you know what? I did that. It was soul-crushing. I don't like it as cheap fodder for wangst. Pass.

Maybe we could have an unnatural disaster (see my comment here) and/or we could do an evacuation plot. By which I mean something where a disaster threatens and everyone has to rush to get themselves and their pets out of Fandom, but ultimately there's no major damage.

For example, we could have an asteroid headed for the island and then have some people go after the asteroid to destroy it before it arrives and everyone else works on evacuating the people, pets and precious items just in case the others don't succeed.

We probably wouldn't want to do that one in summer, since we're already going back and forth from the cabins, but maybe for a fall/winter plot?

ETA: And the asteroid-destroyers would succeed, of course, so ultimately there wouldn't be more than cosmetic damage.

Edited 2009-05-14 01:27 (UTC)

I like this idea, but only so long as everyone promises that Aerosmith won't be involved in the soundtrack. I have enough earworms as it is.

But I Don't Want To Miss A Thing!

*shakes fist at you*

But would Ben Affleck come and save the day? :D

I think we have to admit people have fun different ways. For me -- and I fully admit this is on the weird side -- a fight I know I'm going to win isn't all that interesting. I'll do fighty scenes, and they're fun the first time I get to play them out with a new character or from a new angle or whatever, but for the most part, if I know I'm going to triumph, why bother? (I also fast-forward past filmed fight scenes if the main character's obviously going to win. I'm special.)

THAT SAID, I do kind of agree with you but for another reason. A volcano exploding (or whatever) is a huge, semipermanent-to-permanent change in the game. Thus far, we've avoided having plots in the game that last longer than a summer, and even the long ones were on a simmer most of the time. I don't know if I'd find the game as enjoyable if we did devote six months to being about a volcano and the aftermath; I think there are other settings to play with things like that, and Fandom High is the place for random clouds of glitter.

Thank you, I think you made my point far better than I was managing it.

I don't know if I'd find the game as enjoyable if we did devote six months to being about a volcano and the aftermath

I'm not sure we'd have to. I think it would all depend on how it was planned. I think it could be done on the same level as the aliens blowing up the school a few years ago was.

Because I do agree with you that making the entire game focus on it for months on end would be boring. But I think a balance could be struck.

I think the difference when the school got blown up was that that was very limited geographically, which isn't realistic for a true natural disaster. But we could possibly do something like what Mylia is suggesting, with magic use limiting/channeling the disaster so its impact isn't all that great.

Oh I agree.

I'm not sure how or why anyone got the idea that I was suggesting we destroy half the island because I certainly never said that.

Limiting/mitigating is vastly different than fighting off a bad guy, IMO.

At the same time -- if we did something HUGE and EPIC and then swept it under the rug two weeks later, that cheapens the event, both in-game and its real-world counterparts.

Lots of people talk about how the plague had lasting repercussions. I didn't feel like it did. People got sick, Bart died, research saved the day, everyone was solemn for a week, and then people went right back to acting like it never happened. Which means we're using serious events as cheap drama, and that bugs me.

I'm for repercussions also.

I think the plague did have long-term effects, though. Andrew was still dealing with Bart's death while he and Tony were dating and Tony came into the game almost a year after the plague. But that's the sort of thing that's up to individual players/characters.

I should have said, Andrew was the one exception to that, you're right. His player carried out long-term effects, and did an amazing job with it. The rest of the island promptly forgot all about the plague.

Just to throw out suggestions, if there was a volcano going off, there are plenty of magic users on the island who could possibly work together to create some kind of magic or spell to change the lava flow or turn it into something else so it's not as time-consuming of a plot or that it doesn't permanently change the structure/design/landscape of the island all together?

Also, we could do an earthquake or something like that, instead. The flood BDE was pretty cool because everyone was trying to figure out how to save the island and the buildings/each other before it was revealed that it was angry sea people causing all of the problems.

What if it was more a magic-y sort of disaster to deal with? Like, the Valdemar books have mage storms that come in waves (which some of Karal's friends have already dealt with in game). The mage storms feel like earthquakes and mess with magical abilities (and things created by magic) but don't affect the mundane items. As the storms grow, they start having magic effects in small circles. Like, a rabbit gets caught in a circle and turns into some kind of rabbit-sized magic-mutant beast.

It doesn't have to be mage storms in particular, but suppose we did some kind of magic/sci-fi unnatural disaster plot? Dealing with it could be similar to the way characters would deal with a real natural disaster but it'd be more of a metaphorical thing than a real-life correlation. Would something like that be easier to deal with?

On a totally unrelated note, the rabbit example reminds me of something out of Cimorene's canon...

That does sound somewhat more feasible.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Brainstorming Post!

Re: General Brainstorming

Re: General Brainstorming

Re: General Brainstorming

Re: General Brainstorming

Re: General Brainstorming

Re: General Brainstorming

Re: General Brainstorming

Re: General Brainstorming

Re: General Brainstorming

Re: General Brainstorming

Re: General Brainstorming

Re: General Brainstorming

Re: General Brainstorming

Re: General Brainstorming

Re: General Brainstorming

Re: General Brainstorming

Re: General Brainstorming

Re: General Brainstorming

Re: General Brainstorming

Re: General Brainstorming

Re: General Brainstorming

Re: General Brainstorming

Re: General Brainstorming

Re: General Brainstorming