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+--- Thread: rooms! (/showthread.php?tid=885)
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rooms! - Damon - 12-17-2014
So most of my ideas for rejuvenation were pretty off-the-cuff-whatever, but ... can we discuss reducing the number of rooms a bit? mainly cuz there are a bunch that i really cannot tell the difference between. here's the list as is:
OOC
- Dice!
Downtown
- 16th street mall
- Sept of CC
- Sabbat temple
Santa Fe
Federal
- Anarch hangout
East Colfax
- Cammie hangout
Washington Park
University of Denver
East Denver
South Suburbs
- Sept of FQ
Foothills
- Chantry
Resort Areas
Northern Colorado
So here are my proposals:
1) Combine the system rooms. I know it's somewhat less cool to just have one "Werewolf Room" and one "Vampire Room" and one "Mage Room", but seriously: have you ever seen simultaneous scenes in FQ and CC? Anarch, sabbat, AND cammie hangouts? Let's just say the system-specific rooms are first-come-first-serve, and if you absolutely have to set a scene in the other-system-only-location, put it in Night/Day subrooms.
2) Can we pick either 16th street mall or SF Arts District? They pretty much both serve the "fun activity-filled pedestrian nice shops area" niche.
3) Can we have either Federal or East Colfax? They both seem to serve the "bad part of town" niche.
4) Can we drop Washington Park? I know it's cool, but for the "city park" thing, University of Denver's entire campus is apparently an arboretum!
5) Why, oh why, do we have five different "suburbs"-type rooms? Can we just have a "suburbs of denver" room to cover East, South, North, Resorts, and Foothills? We could also add a "wilderness" Rockies room.
6) Can we just roll dice in OOC instead of a dice room?
That would leave us with this list:
OOC
Downtown
16th St OR Santa Fe
Federal OR East Colfax
University of Denver
The 'Burbs
The Rockies
Werewolf Septs
Mage Chantry
Vampire Lairs
I'd love to hear people's thoughts (even if they disagree). But please, for the love of bejeezus: we have 20 rooms right now! D:
RE: rooms! - Jacqui - 12-17-2014
I would fight for Washington Park, if only because I know its been a location in Mage where the admin/different ST's have had some SLs happen etc and it’s become a point of focus for some aspects of the system. I don't really disagree with the prospect of condensing the others per say, though.
Making one unified downtown area (or one or two) rather than several, etc.
Would putting all the dicing in the OOC be a nuisance for others, though? I don't know how often the dicing den gets used but I suppose people could always PM their rolls if they didn't want to interrupt conversation.
RE: rooms! - FadedNoel - 12-17-2014
I'm going to have to disagree. You can't drop the park -- that's where The Message lives. You can't combine Federal with East Colfax, because then Pan's Church would be on the same street as a vampire's strip club, and that would be just weird. The 16th Street Mall is special to my character, and it's a place where she regularly goes back to in order to flip off the Starbucks.
I guess my point is, all those rooms have stories behind them already. Taking them and mushing them together removes a lot of the flavor from the game -- makes it more generic. And I don't know why you'd do that? What's bad about having multiple rooms?
RE: rooms! - Damon - 12-17-2014
Well, three things:
1) There are so many rooms that our small cadre of players ends up eternally spread super-thin, 2-3 to a room. There's no impetus for random-interaction scenes; everyone is constantly doing their own preplanned thing.
2) A lot of the rooms DON'T have special flavor, as far as I can tell. Or -- that flavor isn't special enough that it can't be combined with another room. I'm more or less okay with not combining Federal with East Colfax -- I can tell at a glance that different scenes with different vibes might go on at one vs the other. And if there are others that multiple people want to fight for, then go for it by all means; defend your favorite room's specialness.
But plenty of rooms are expendable. Five different suburbs? They're totally interchangeable, and I don't see any reason to keep them all. And that's with one of my characters living, working, and basically existing up in Northern Colorado. Make all five suburbs one big "suburbs of Denver" room, though, and I'd be fine with it. If I really absolutely felt the need to have a room just for Calden's house and ranch, I'd make a temporary room.
Which segues into:
3) We do not need to keep an entire permanent room just because it's special to one player or one character, or just because it represents something unique and cool. Permanent rooms should be rooms that set a major tone AND see a lot of use. For everything else, there are temporary rooms. And if one particular temporary room keeps coming up and keeps being used by multiple people and characters, then maybe we should consider making it a permanent room.
At the end of the day I just think it's wasteful to scroll through 20 rooms and see 3 people playing -- particularly when a number of those rooms are functionally indistinguishable from each other. It seems unnecessary, cumbersome, and repetitive.
RE: rooms! - kai - 12-17-2014
I was thinking about this today. I think it's probably a good idea to back up and focus first on the reasons there may be to change anything about rooms, and reasons not to:
Reasons To Change:
1. We've just had some upheaval; now is a good time to look at rejuvenating/refreshing things.
2. Many of the rooms serve the same general purpose in the overall setting.
3. Many of the rooms are generic, and there isn't a clear 'draw' to set a scene in them or use as a hook.
4. We're a small group of players; 20 rooms is just excessive and just reinforces spreading out into tiny pre-planned scenes.
Reasons Not To Change:
1. We just had some upheaval; let's let things settle down before we run around changing stuff.
2. Some of the rooms have become focal points for individual storylines/characters and should remain separate rooms for use in those storylines/by those characters.
3. The areas themselves are different 'IRL' so they should be different online.
4. There's nothing objectively wrong with having lots of rooms.
Those are just a few off the top of my head; I'm sure everyone has their own viewpoint on it. Personally, I fall more on the side of using this time to refresh the site a bit and refocus, though I admit I also felt a kneejerk surge of Reason Not To Change #1 and some vague bits of Reason Not To Change #3, but I think the latter is just because I live here.
--
Musing over this earlier today (just fiddling around on my lunch break), I thought:
- We should merge 16th Street Mall into Downtown. There's really no reason for them to have been separated to begin with; it's in the center of Downtown.
- Remove East Denver, South Suburbs, Foothills, and Resort Areas. They are all bland, generic, rarely used, and in setting terms don't serve much purpose. I don't think we need a Suburbs room, either -- they're primarily residential areas, which means we've basically just got several rooms for private 1:1 scenes in people's homes.
- Remove Federal. 'IRL' it and East Colfax are different areas, with very different tones, but in game terms we really don't need two 'bad areas of town'. And frankly, different as they are, Federal just isn't as interesting a place. There isn't as much there to serve as a hook for RP, particularly open scenes.
- Move Richthofen Castle away from being a sub-room of East Colfax. This is a nagging thing for me: that's not really where it is IRL. I've never understood its placement as a sub-room there.
That would leave us with 12 IC rooms, which I think is reasonable. I don't have a strong opinion on system-specific rooms; they don't really need to be a sub-room of something else in order to exist, and I know that all the Admins (past and current) put a lot of work into those primary settings. I do disagree about mushing them into nonspecific 'The WtA Room' and 'The VtM Room', for those reasons. I say we leave them alone.
As for a separate Dice room, it's not hurting anything. It keeps random dice rolls from infecting the scene logs in other rooms. I think some people may have an aversion to rolling in the OOC room, but if I'm wrong about that and we can all just use the OOC room for random dice, there's no reason to have a separate Dicing Den.
I'd also disagree about getting rid of Washington Park. I think a 'park' room is one of the more heavily used on WoD sites, and (this may just be me having a kneejerk reaction because I live here) DU isn't actually much like a park. It can't really serve the same purpose in terms of available setting.
--
And to sort of address some of the above: I think we do need to look at this as what works best for telling stories, what makes scenes accessible, what gives us a specific and 'moody' setting to work with. Not to dismiss a location's importance to an individual system, storyline, or character, but not every place where important things have happened in game needs to have its own room, particularly if the storyline is (or will be) in the past, if a character or NPC is no longer around (which inevitably happens) or a system eventually closes. If that's the only (or even just 'main') reason to keep a room as-is, it seems a little off-track to me.
--
So with the above changes, it would look more like this (which is, like Damon's, just one suggestion).
OOC
Downtown
- Cold Crescent
- Union Station
Santa Fe
St. Stephen's
East Colfax
Richthofen Castle
Washington Park
University of Denver
Forgotten Questions
The Chantry
Northern Colorado (and I could take or leave this one, to tell the truth; I just really love Fort Collins IRL and want to keep it LOL)
What do you guys think?
RE: rooms! - Samael - 12-17-2014
I'll put forth my point on this again. I am strongly opposed to reducing the number of rooms because that piles people into larger group scenes, and a lot of the time I cannot handle larger group scenes so I get forced out of scenes when people jump in. I know others have felt the same in some situations. It sometimes gets frustrating (and I'm not blaming anyone for this) that when I get into good scenes, I have to leave because people have decided they want to join in and the general messaging I have been given in the past was "It's not fair to say you can't ask people not to join." You're looking to push people into more group scenes and I get that, but the problem is that for some of us that just doesn't always work and eliminating options in order to make it logistically more necessary is restrictive to us. To my thoughts, the way to get more people into random group interaction scenes is to declare scenes as open with tags which doesn't seem to happen all that often.
I totally get what you're saying, Damon. It does look like it's really empty most of the time, but there are times when a lot of the rooms are in use all at once and the rooms looking empty doesn't really hurt anything to me. Consolidating the rooms does make them a lot more generic; the way we have it now gives an idea when I look over the scenes of where I might like to go in having a PC involved.
By example, when I see a scene in FQ I think "Okay, it makes more since for Keisha to be there than Javed." A generic Werewolf room gives me no sense of what that scene is and I don't know what I'm hopping into. That's why, to me at least, consolidating the rooms and making them more generic makes it problematic.
RE: rooms! - Damon - 12-17-2014
I like Kai's room list! TBH I'm not really in favor of crunching systems into one room either. The system rooms are actually some of the most flavorful ones we have. I just kinda balk at having 6(!) rooms for systems -- but yeah, if we do away with some of the others I can stomach 12 rooms total.
And last: I'd suggest having a Rockies room. Cuz Colorado. And Denver. And mountains. And also, on a serious note: it might be nice to have a truly, genuinely wilderness-based room amidst all the urban/semiurban rooms.
Edit: just saw Sam's post. And yeah, I get what you're saying -- I personally love huge scenes, but they're not for everyone. That said, I think Kai's list is a nice balance between having way too many rooms and having too-few, too-generic rooms. I also think 12 is probably sufficient for people to not feel too crowded; certainly, it's more than the 6 IC rooms + 3 system rooms I had proposed.
RE: rooms! - HDub - 12-17-2014
I don't actually like the idea of reducing the number of rooms.
While it may look as though people are spread thin, it doesn't actually change the number of scenes that are being played nor does it change the types of scenes that are being played. Whether or not people play in private scenes or public scenes is entirely up to them. Sometimes, having people 2-3 to a room is a personal choice; some people don't like to play in big group scenes. That is their preference.
Reducing the number of rooms available to players makes the setting less precise. If we remove too many rooms, then why are we playing in Denver? Why not play in a made up city? This setting was chosen because it has specific color and texture; I believe we need to tread lightly when removing rooms lest we homogenize the setting.
RE: rooms! - kai - 12-17-2014
Hey Sam -- I hear what you're saying. I just wanted to add that even though large scenes are not your preference, even if we reduced the number of rooms to 12 or 13, no one would be 'crammed' into big scenes. We're a small group to begin with, and almost every room has a Current/Day/Night option, too. We could have 5 IC rooms total and still have 15 spaces for separate scenes. Right now, without even taking into account the 6 system-specific rooms, we have thirty-six separate spaces to RP in. So, apart from reiterating that personal preferences shouldn't be the main focus of this discussion, I wouldn't let the concern of RP suddenly becoming claustrophobic be a deciding force.
To Sam and HDub both, as for the number of rooms overall: I don't think it's about how much 'harm' it's doing (or not) to have a ton of rooms. But when many of them sit empty and unused and add no flavor to the game, the question becomes: what good do they do? What value do they add that is worth defending? So... having lots of rooms doesn't increase activity and maybe decreasing rooms won't change the number or quality of scenes (which I actually sort of disagree with). If that really is the case, then again: why keep them? Other than 'more places to have small scenes' (which I addressed above), what's the value?
If we really want to get precise with the setting, then we need a 5 Points, a Ballpark, a Cheeseman Park, a City Park, the Zoo (sub-room of City Park), Denver Museum of Nature and Science (also a sub-room of City Park, next door to the Zoo), Pearl Street, University Hills, the Highlands, Cherry Hills Village, Cherry Creek, Glendale (it's actually a separate little town), a Shotgun Willies (it's pretty iconic and technically would be a sub-room of Glendale), Lodo would need to be its own sub-room of Downtown, and... so on. I'm not saying this to mock the idea of specificity, especially since I'm arguing against some of the more bland, generic rooms we have. What I'm trying to do is make the point that you can't increase the ambiance of a setting by just saturating it.
Before we get too far off the main topic, I also want to add: no one is going to force anyone into larger or more open scenes. I think open group scenes give me a lot of fodder for smaller scenes later; that is, again, just personal preference. But there seems to be some defensiveness in this thread about the suggestion that open, group scenes are a good thing, so I want to make sure it's clear that reducing the number of rooms is not suddenly going to make this site inhospitable to smaller scenes, private scenes, or 1:1 scenes. So let's set that much aside, okay?
RE: rooms! - Pip - 12-17-2014
There's a lot of rooms and people still play in private room settings.
Making less rooms may just increase private room settings.
Having less rooms won't make more group play.
I agree with HDub.