Thread:Talk:Little Talks of Paradox/Prompts versus world-building/reply (2)

Let's review, in hope that it sheds light on what happened:


 * I post a short description of the story, to intrigue players.
 * Dan makes the first character, so I ask only Dan a few questions.
 * A couple more players join, and start filling in their character backgrounds based on assumptions about the world.
 * Not wanting to shut down imagination, I start filling in the gaps in the hopes that players will understand their situation: Yinthaesha is used to demonstrate that humans haven't been in this land long, and that they are basically alone.
 * More discussion happens, but it surrounds a part of the world (Paetani) that doesn't matter at the moment, so no problem.
 * More discussions happen that question the fiction of the world that is disregarding what little the players know.
 * I am awfully busy, and don't have time to carefully craft my answers to questions without spoiling my story.
 * Neither am I willing to ignore threads, since that is lame and not the kind of person I am.
 * So I try to rein in the conversation to what is happening with the characters.

And that is how we got here.

Folks are gonna feel how they feel, but before we commit to be defensive, let acknowledge that this is a new system in a new format for most (all?) of us.

I think I am at fault for assuming that folks would ask questions about their immediate surroundings. The setting is very non-standard. As I've said, the area of Velia is very small, and there are relatively very few people. That leaves a lot of questions, and we could explore them all in discussion as we build articles around all the specifics, but that is not what I am proposing with this game. Unless your character has an interest, you should not understand the political alliances between cities, or even have a very good idea of the history of some place. You only need enough to get through the scene.

Keep in mind, scenes are going to take weeks or perhaps months to finish. We haven't even gotten all the players at the inn, yet. We still have more players joining, but they haven't had time to sign up or read the materials. That is the nature of this particular campaign.

Now, as for the specifics of collaboratively creating the space, I want folks to feel free to move around within the parameters of the game, but we haven't established them yet. Possibly because we are on day 3. ^_^

I've thought about how to bet encourage you to create off-the-cuff places and people, and I've decided I don't want to encourage that. I think all of you have precious minds with great stories, and I want to hear all of them. But for this section of the wiki I want to relax and check in every couple of days and tell a story about characters struggling together (remember, I am your biggest fan!). I would like to lift up on that suggestion as time goes by and we all have a better understanding of the geography of this area.

Also, understand something particular about the format: Gautham quoted a book, borrowing a city and bringing it into this world. That was all that needed to be said, that blurb. You, Adam, created one on your own and filled in the details, which put more pressure on me to ensure that it was real. I was trying to make that connection by expanding on it, but because we are new to this, you took that to obviously mean you should create a whole lot more. But I can't keep up with it. I need to be the one that creates things, and ask you for the details, so that I can keep the story on track. Then, when I read the thread about why there is a federation I saw that instead of you folks playing out your characters, I was going to have to defend every choice I made about this fictional world. That is obviously not fun (for me), so we are gonna just agree to not do that for now.


 * Another example might be if you asked me how Gelthas found his animal companion, and I decided it was a gift from a particular mystic. Would the right thing to do is then ask on a thread on this page if me creating a page giving a brief description or memory of what he knew of that NPC be OK?

That is an example of when you should suggest things. It is my hope that I am good enough at spinning a tale and setting boundaries that I can rein in a person's imagination if it gets out of the scope that I can handle. However, articles should only be created of notable subjects. A particular mystic isn't notable, it is a sentence or section on your character's article. You can always say, "hey, I have a cool story to share about this mystic", and then we can decide how to incorporate that into the fiction, but keep in mind that we don't care about that mystic, we care about the folks in the party. This is their story.

Okay, I've gone on for a while here. I hope everyone takes it to heart that I am trying to find a process that works for us, given our constraints. If some folks want to go nuts with worldbuilding, I say be bold and do it (in this wiki, too)! I will contribute when I can. But for this game, we are gonna switch our focus to something. ^_^