We'd Love To See

For planning of new concepts and events that might come up in discussion.

(If this is filed somewhere else already, apologies! The Wiki is a lovely thing but many-layered and sometimes too deep to find things.)

See also Steal This Idea and Players Wanted (similar in spirit but a little different - maybe reorganize eventually?)

(Elements liberally taken from [recent discussion] on PB LJ)

You probably know my style by now: I favor the carrot and generally avoid the stick at all costs. I won't prohibit anything unless the demand is virtually unanimous. What I would probably do is add new utilities, new events, new information, new volunteer opportunities, or any other new resources that might make PBx more hospitable for the people who feel they aren't fitting in.

--Postvixen

New concepts

• Having just noticed the Medicinal Drugs page, I'm wondering if anyone has any interest in a fictional drug I wrote up for LJ Rabbit Hole Day -- [Luce]. Free to good home if anyone wants to steal the concept. As presented, the drug is quite similar to the existing Key Logo -- with a subtle yet massive difference: whereas Key Logo blurs symbolic representations into reality, Luce embeds the user within a present, pre-set narrative. Luce would be more predictable and more voluntary; one doesn't flip through books the same way one glances at street signs! But there are obvious benefits, and this would allow for (e.g.) "playbacks" of logged exchanges that IC would be as vivid as if someone had been there. -- Murotunikel?

Oh, hiya! Surprising no one, the PBX wiki already has a section for Drugs, and the description of Luce would probably fit quite nicely under the Metapharms page. This page is really more for MUCK-wide infrastructure, but don't sweat it -- we're not sticklers for formality and the idea's welcome to stay here until it finds a home elsewhere!

This seemed like the best place to get some feedback before, as it were, adding it to "canon" (which I know is more flexible than I'm giving it credit for, but seeing as how I'm not even on the muck yet ...). Feel free to move it somewhere more appropriate, perhaps under MinorVariation as a Key Logo analogue? -- Murotunikel?

• Create a "plot" command, e.g. "plot Alba is planning her Cat Mitzvah. Alizarin has apparently been trying to manipulate Mel to get him an invitation, but nobody knows why. The truth is that Mel's been treating him in secret, and he's ready to get on the wagon and try singing in public again." (This is a fake plot.) All text from the plot command will be dumped into a file and automatically posted to a public Livejournal, a la [yaparfmoo]. This will put plot announcement capability right at players' fingers. I know other means exist to announce plots, but the idea is to make this an easy habit to develop. It'll be as easy as writing a page!

• I'd thought of giving Puzzlebox its own calendar, perhaps based on that still-unfinished Puzzlebox Oracle I wrote about a few months ago. Maybe a 50-day cycle, with a mild and totally optional theme to each day. Sort of a postfurry alternative to "Tropical Hat Day" and other such corporate morale-boosting bollocks. :) Maybe this could be the solution to the Big Heavy Unfollowable Plot problem -- occasional players could rely on a casual night every n days or something.

• We've discussed organized weekly mini-plots in the past. Ideally, this won't be necessary, if we can nudge the general culture of the MUCK away from Heavy Angsty Deep Drama a little more, and balance it with less intense stuff. But mini-events might be fun for their own sake.

• More formal social networks. A couple of recent returns to Tapestries have really highlighted how much friendlier and more open people tend to be on PBX. But it's still very, very easy for new or quiet players to get lost amid all the spam, especially as the MUCK grows. Maybe it's time to create the "buddy system" that we discussed at the last meeting -- or even just an informal method of giving a boost to people who feel a bit lost, by inviting them OOCly into ongoing plots. (I could use that, myself...)

--Postvixen

• Mini-plots and theme days both sound fun, but perhaps the best trick is to conciously try and spread things out over the muck a bit, even if it means lurking in one of the warps when the utter majority of folks are at the park. I think it's a safe bet that a little patience alone could lead to some very good RP when one or two extras arrive later in the day.

--Parity

• Spreading things over the muck is nice, but we need more space to do it with. I think I'll have to do something more about that than I have been lately.

Elelator Go Up!

You are in a tube of brightly colored plastic, the lower entrance of which lets people walk in at or near ground level. The upper entrance seems to be quite some distance in the sky, as various ports in the walls/floor/ceiling allow you to see. Occasionally a group of giggling shinies will gather at a window and wave to rubber birds and chromed orbiters fluttering past.

A smile from someone nearby, a gift of artistic leaflets or flowers blowing past in the gravitational wind. Happy people walking at all angles on the inside and sometimes the outside.

Welcome to the Charmtubes, someone says. Please, feel free to love us! You can go down to the central field, or up to the Park to play.

--(Siege) Echo

• It's quite natural that people gravitate to the most populous places on the WA. If you graphed it, I'm sure it'd even look like one of those representations of a gravity well...

Purely as an experiment, you could always put a lock on some of the public rooms that detects when they're over-capacity. It wouldn't keep/kick anyone out, just display a brief message from the world-system that politely suggests people spread out a little more.

--Amanita

As mentioned in OR's entry, possibly set MPI in very popular rooms to quietly add/remove them from whereare as the crowd level changes. --Echo

• Proposal of Dream Sequence concept. --Coal.

• Another idea: a public "free-form room" - meant for RP without set locations, for those times when your current plot isn't taking place in any place that's been built (yet). Ideal as well for sentient city blocks, flying characters and other misfits of normal muck-building. :> Linked off the Nexus or available through a global. Simple MPI mechanism to set the room's WA to reflect the current plot. There is now a trial version of this set up - from the Nexus, type "yah" (You Are Here). Page-mail me or post here with any suggestions! -A

I've been putting You Are Here to use, and it's been used a few times as far as I know. This would actually be really fun to have in more locations/Warps/etc. It's wonderful for someplace private-ish, but people can still wander in on. -- Trilogee

• Round-robin poses are the norm in muck RP, of course, each pose representing one or two major actions, or a 'moment' in the story. It'd be interesting to play with free-form text using 'spoof' (not unheard of, actually), allowing players to paint in more of the surrounding background. Or experiment with the time frame. Why not have every pose span days, for example? Or write it in little haiku-like episodes or snapshots - a phrase, a landscape, a passing facial expression?

• The other day, I got an image in my head of a vast (well, it would have to be) inter-Warp ocean. -- Grey

• A good map would be nice, something that can be updated as things go forward. Maybe we can even do it on the wiki. Also more places linked to the wa command. - sabina

• Not sure this would be ideal, but we have a lot of characters with various types of extraordinary senses and ability to generally examine other people/things more thoroughly than is normally possible for most unaltered humans/furries/whatevers. As it is, those sensory abilities have to be explicitly verbalized in poses and such. This often results in people being lazy about voicing them out. If we expanded the look/smell/lick/feel command component to include a 'scan' (or another better suited word) command and setting, it might be useful. Already, though, I can see problems with this. While a lot of characters do have exotic senses, they aren't identical in nature. I do want to see discussion about this idea, though... - Grace
  • Presumably, players already know which sorts of exotic senses their characters have. A 'scan' command could be a catchall that would cover things that can't be viably rolled into any of the other four interaction commands or a @desc, like radar imaging, (counter)entropy, gravitics, or whatever else. For the sake of simplicity the players could just determine what information their character can detect, though I admit it's a rather hackish solution.
    • I usually just ask straight-up OOCly if I have a need to know something I haven't picked up already from the metasphere. "Is there anything interesting about your electrical signature?" -- Echo
      • Same here. When Twin does a rudely-deep-level scan with (her) Exotic Black Hole Senses, I pose something to the effect, and ask for any hidden details in a whisper. Similarly, there was a scene where Sosael/Atazael was able to get knowlege neither she nor the player had by OOC asking for scary things she might know because of her connection with the Strangevirus... negotiate precise details of what you can {exotic sense verb} in whispers, and act on it.-- Twin

• StrangeWarp past the solid center piece at the Warpexit starts to fall apart. Expanding on the Strange Sea idea in the Strange Ocean but rather than oil it's bits of badly rendered ground and chuncks of virtual space that flex and fold in on themselves. One can walk on it and eventual it becomes an endless red ocean of viral coding. Eventual the ocean shows islands of stability and calm. They become smaller and smaller fading into the Strange itself. Eventualy you find a grand vortex sucking everying in towards the Mess's Core. - Player1
  • For some reason I'm imagining scenes from the game American McGee's Alice. Crumbling castles that fall into floating peices when you walk near, suspended over swirling vortices. Red thick tentacles everywhere, blocking pathways, pushing out of walls, etc. That with the aesthetics of Devil May Cry...demonicly possessed gothic cathedrals, where the walls ripple but are still stone, and statues laugh at you. Maybe we just need more floating things. :-} --Coalesce

• Disco plural NPCs. Inspired by two things: the eerie dead silence in rooms of Mu* which describe themselves as bustling with nonexistent activity; and inspired by a scene in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy old radio play, a group of discotheque robots which exists primarily to make a place seem more crowded and lively. In programming, this would mean a ludicrously large number of puppets, wandering around mostly in a group sticking to an area that's supposed to seem busy, automated to jabber and pose automatically. You literally would have to shout and repeat yourself to hold up a conversation over them in the muck, and/or hide in a corner and whisper. I'm not sure if the disco-bots fall into the category of "annoying, must die" or "realistic area atmosphere." I know some Mu* locations do have objects which randomly speak or pose, but this is a more intense, incessant, detailed version of that. Understatement: the flaw of this plan would be lag. --Sandstorrm
  • Try the command programs noise: we have a random-noises type program on the muck as it is! People just haven't been using it in their building. -- Echo
    • I'd actually like to see that program included as an option to set in the roomedit program. That would make it far more highly visible, as I know a lot of people who use roomedit heavily or primarily for their room-creation and modification needs. And arguably it would be the most used room-program of those listed on the programs command-- Grace
      • It would need its own sub-menu; there are a handful of values to set, not to mention the list of noises. -- E

• Body-mod roulette. Why not gamble with something interesting?
  Though, this may be better implemented as a wholely IC idea. - Volarian
  • I know there are TRAM (Temporary RAndom Morph) programs on various other mucks, maybe one could be ported? -- Kehari?
    • I know I usually recuse myself from these discussions due to sheer technical incompetence, but I'm personally opposed to installing TRAM. Lots and lots of stuff to go wrong in subtle little ways; on the MUCKs where I've seen it installed, a large minority of TRAM toys were broken or very idiosyncratic, and I've only rarely seen it be any really serious spur to RP. My mind can be changed on the subject, though, and as usual I'll try to carry out the whim of the People. :)
      • The better-constructed TRAM programs actually save the player's old data in props somewhere, so it doesn't get lost in case of a muck crash or something. Anyway, it's a two-part thing: the program that changes you, then the program that gets called later which changes you back. If you morph in between, or run the finisher yourself, the second program still gets called when time expires; that's what most people see as a broken behavior. What's really broken is a TRAM version which lets you morph before time has expired - you tend to lose your original desc that way, since it'll save your new desc over the old one. -- E
        • I think I used a TRAM once or twice, ever, and found the sorts of problems mentioned above. I'd be more likely to just pose out a change, to be honest. But it occurs to me that a 'safe' TRAM could be written: the initiation half would save off original desc/species/sex/etc somewhere on the player, *and* save the a backup of the desc it set. The wear-off half would only restore the original desc/etc if the current desc matched what it remembers setting you to in the first place. Not that I'm gonna try coding it. - Twin

• A help-staff command. Yes, I know we've discussed this and previously decided to go for a more informal approach, but I really do think we need a slightly formalized system, if one where people can completely at will add/remove themselves and specify specialities. There're listings on some wiki pages of players who will offer help, but a fair enough number of us have more than one alt, and it would simplify things to have a command one could quickly check for helpers currently online. And I would like to make it specifically clear that I'm willing to give help related to building, I like talking about building as you can see from the Building Guide whose contents are mostly written by me. XOR isn't always available for help on building. -- Grace
  • Ideally, this command would be as simple as doing hs #set for specialities, hs #join for joining, and hs #leave for leaving. Something fast and easy, without the need to obtain wiz-approval. -- Grace