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?
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?
my whole life is thunder.