To those who worry that this guild will vanish once Killerv gets bored of planeshift: I actually joined Cybio\'s cult because I liked the idea of a player-run religious institution, especially when \"player-run\" means \"run by me\". Believe me, I have several plans for this cult, and none of them involve the metal militia. To recruit player characters (and I want to make it clear that I\'m recruiting characters, not players), I rely entirely on role-play. This is a good way for me to judge the quality of potential recruits - if you don\'t have the patience to sit through an IC conversation, you probably don\'t have the patience to sit through a sermon. So while I don\'t expect to attract many people, the ones I do attract will be best suited for the cult.

A leader once told me that he wanted to change the name of his guild, but since there was no way to do that other than making a whole new guild and switching to it, the process would have lost him some recruits. Cybio, I really think you should do that at some point, just to get rid of the inactive ballast. A real guild relies on the relationships between its members - it has nothing to do with coded ranks and titles - and if it can\'t survive without the code to back it up, it\'s not even worth calling an organization. Right now, I can say we are a guild of five active members, perhaps six... I\'m looking forward to getting more players, but rather than go on recruiting sprees, I\'ll focus on one character at a time.

Since it\'s become a hot new trend (to which I\'m actively participating), I\'ve decided to start a sort of poll on it.  A quest is considered player-run if players set up the plot, run the \"NPCs\" and generally coordinate it. I\'m planning to start a chain of such quests myself, and the answers to these questions will probably help me along...

1.How would you like to be informed of quests? Should a message appear on the forums? How detailed should it be? Or would you rather find out about everything in-game?

2.What subject do you prefer? Treachery? Mysterious knowledge? Bandit-bashing? Social uproar? Lost treasure?

3.How do you prefer to solve quests? Do you enjoy using your brains, your fists or your persuasive powers?

4.Do you prefer quests specifically assigned to you, or the sort where you might compete with many other people?

5.What kind of risks would you be willing to take, throughout the quest? Should it be perfectly harmless, or would you be willing to lose your character along the way?

6.How complicated do you want quests to be? Should they have tons of \"NPCs\" and features woven into a complex plot, or should they be more simple affairs?

7.For that matter, do you prefer open-ended quests, or prefabricated ones? Do you want the \"NPCs\" to follow a script, or should they act according to the whims of their players?

8.Do you believe quests should have a reward? Which would it be?

OOC: Sorry this has taken so long. In the future, I\'ll try to respond as soon as you post. Also, I\'ve decided for this character to be *completely different* from the krissanasli you\'ve known in-game. I\'m going to play both in CB... Therefore, I think a new name is in order. Eskalsaneski (with the accent on the penultimate syllable) seems nice. Impossible to type, too.

IC: Amidst the calm footsteps of strangers and the hails of  anxious birds, a new dawn was emerging over this abandoned street. What few people still travelled it, apart from Eskal and the man, had mostly reached a building\'s corner and were prepared to passed on - either to more generous lanes or to a tower\'s the narrow courtyard. She glimpsed only a few of them on her way to the fountain, but it was obvious that no one was around her... No one, of course, beside the wonderous beast ahead. How could someone cover himself in white moss, and wear clothes on top of that - as if the moss was simply one more layer of skin - without having gathered it all from a weed trader? Perhaps Solliba was wrong..., she forged within her whirling mind. Confused as well, Eskal could barely clump whatever notions of this place she had been given, and strive to make an accurate perception out of them. Failure would wait, its claws extended, at the end of her attempt... She tried to smile, but nothing came of this, for her pale lips were fused together in the fire of distain. And he thinks I know everything about this world, even though I\'m obviously so unlike him? He doesn\'t even ask about me, how I look, why I came... Perhaps he\'s lived in this wasteland for longer than he ought to.

Undaunted by her inner questions, her lips produced their own, so quietly that she was only half-aware of it at first. \"So you just give your weeds away? I would\'ve thought this hollow world was more...\" Her eyes began slowly shifting to mirror her mind\'s own search. Gathered from her former statements, bitterness cluttered her mouth, and all was to be expelled in one word: \"Primitive.\" She spoke it casually, almost as if breathing poison. Once banished from the confines of her lips, it could no longer interfere with their more generous emotions, from which a tranquil smile took seed. She caught the man between her eyes and asked: \"Then, where can I find someone who gives... What do you call it?\" Her webbed hand sliced its way into a pocket of her belt - the only sheet of clothing she had worn in her own World - and fetched a little piece of hard wax smudged with glyphs. Fashioned as a polyhedron, it had to be turned whatever way the symbols pointed for a message to be wrought. After a few spins, she set it away and pronounced: \"Corpse vine and oblivion leaves?\" She briefly brought her wax-crystal back up and slowly read again. \"Yes, leaves, I think...\", she said upon the end, and left the polyhedron in her pocket, which she carelessly sealed with a nick of her small claws. Attached to a single button rather than the entire pair, the pocket\'s flap was more or less exposed to theft. \"Well, then? I\'d like to hurry this... I don\'t belong here, you see, and neither would I like to.\"

Those might be the \"right people\" for you, but there are many others who will disagree.

So disagree. Why aren\'t they the right people for an RPG? (I\'m not going to ask you why they aren\'t the right people in general, though. That would take a long discussion, which no one on this forum is likely to benefit from.)

Another word for \"rip-off\" is \"classic\" ... it depends on your personal point of view

And, as you might find in another thread, another word for powergaming is \"role-playing\". I\'m serious about that.

There\'s a saying that roughly translates to \"What cannot be said with few words is not worth mentioning at all.\"

Doubleplusgoodthink.

Regarding Zak\'s hideout, he might be a little upset that everyone\'s dropping by, but I don\'t mind. Better that hole than the Gazebo... I can\'t really remember when you dropped in, I\'m afraid. Were you the dwarf who wanted to protect my character\'s virtue, the aimless-looking half-devil or the guy who asked \"wtf\" before running off?

You also said removing \"medieval\" from PlaneShift\'s portfolio might change how people look at it. That\'s not really true, as many people default to thinking \"medieval\" when they see stone houses bound with wooden planks, elves running around and mercenaries getting drunk at the tavern. There\'s so much medieval in this game, you can\'t even walk an inch without stepping on it.

Now, I believe you were actually serious about d)... You argue that a populated, original setting would be impossible to achieve. There are several problems with this argument. First, a lot of people can interpret things. Some can\'t - it\'s a tragedy of nature, but we have to live with it. For example, suppose you were asked to role-play a sentient ship in the middle of space... You wouldn\'t. You would instead role-play something between what that sentient ship should be like, and what a human is like, unless you can understand how the sentient ship actually works. Another example of this is crystal hunting: people don\'t even need to know why crystals spawn in the world, they just learn that they get treats for picking up enough of them. The randomness of spawns and the fact that other players might have already picked up those on the crystal-hunter\'s path can lead to operant conditioning, that wonderful psychological trait that keeps people coming back for more (of the same boring drivel). If you allowed people to play a space-invaders minigame while they bored, all of it using the built-in HUD, they might just agree to become turrets for your sentient ship.

This is also related to the inevitable \"fluff\" of a game, novel or whatever... When people are playing or reading, whether they go on doesn\'t depend too much on whether the plot is weird or familiar. They go on for a lot of reasons, though - some of them emotional, other intellectual. They might not care about the strange customs of a far-off planet, but they might feel disturbed when it came on the threshold of annihilation. As long as you focus on people\'s desires, rather than their expectations, you\'re bound to entertain them.

The third problem, which I can\'t see how you could have missed, is the excitement factor. You say that novelty is something not many people enjoy, at least not when it\'s broad enough to cover the entire game. Yet people played tetris, and it wasn\'t remotely similar to any other game... By your accounts, no one would have played it, except those mindless fanatics who are \"into\" novelty. I\'m confident that many people, once they received a taste of the original, will continue to enjoy it, just as people can become skilled role-players once they\'re introduced to the \"art\".

You also assume that alienating a large number of people is necessarily a bad thing. When you\'re trying to address those people who either can embrace originality or have already done so, you don\'t want the people who \"can\" to be influenced by people who \"can\'t\". Armageddon worked by these rules, and look how many people they have. As it turns out, a lot of players were willing to get into RPing... A lot of others might be willing to embrace an original setting. If that setting isn\'t just original, but also encourages originality, you\'re going to get some pretty spectacular results.

as much as I think you are correct when you say more inspiration/creativity is needed, there\'s no use ranting about it, because it will not happen anyway

Imagine, for a moment, that the same thing was said about education - that people wouldn\'t learn basic maths and litarcy. Not only is this terribly false, it\'s also false that they would have to be forced to do it: according to statistics, a lot more people in America were literate before the first four years of school became mandatory.

One of the reasons you find so few fantastic games is that their designers don\'t think in terms of encouraging fantasy in their players - they just place it in their own creations and hope for the best. Originality is a meme that nobody\'s tried to spread yet, despite the fact that most of the audience practically depends on memetics.

Anyway, you keep talking about \"commercial\" stuff. Since when did they matter? Not since Warcraft 3 was invented... AoS is actually much more popular than that Dune 2 clone with pretty graphics. Not since Rogue and MUD, either... In fact, not even since the legend of Ghilgamesh.

Androgos, the problem is that you want players from all timezones to be able to experience both day and night. You also want nighttime to actually mean something, as opposed to an inconvenient blackout that happens once every ten minutes. Right now, those shifty conspirators meeting in the back alleys can\'t even say a sentence, let alone plot a whole mess of things, without finding that the sun has come up.

I suppose a day that lasts four hours (two nighttime, two daytime) is balanced enough. \"Tonight\" and \"next morning\" would actually mean something, while still being short enough for people all over the world to enjoy.

I actually read this two days after my first post. Looking at its size and scope, I wouldn\'t dare call it a thread... It\'s probably more of a hemp rope.

Oh, and I encourage everyone to read it. The whole nine pages of it. There\'s talk about how role-playing should be encouraged and carried out, a few discussions on what role-playing actually is and links to major RPG-related articles, as well as some interesting trivia on leetspeak and d&d.

\"evil\" person tries to take over world while the \"good\" people thry to overthrough the \"evil\" person

One of the most effective ways to write a realistic novel is to create a few characters with different ideals and goals, plant them into a world and see what happens. This can often lead to an interesting story, especially if interesting characters are taking part in it. A good vs. evil plot tends to be large instead of great - it projects small-scale conflicts onto entire lands. Really complicated wars are rarely a simple matter of good vs. evil (usually, they\'re a matter of evil leaders leading evil armies through the latent evil of civilian bystanders).

Democracy seems to seep into every MMORPG so as to make things \"fair\"

I don\'t quite understand this. Developers usually choose the game\'s direction on their own; most of the government -in fact, most of the world- is an invisible mound of NPCs, whose affairs are practically inaccessible to the players. I\'ve seen a few cases of people being allowed to vote on things (example: A Tale in The Desert), but even then, the developers could veto all decisions (and I\'m talking about in-game decisions).

Where\'s the democracy?

What makes sentient creatures have to be bipedal and/or (in the case of Centaurs) have human features

Actually, that has a lot more to do with making their bodies (and etology) suitable for intelligence. If all you have to do when you\'re hungry is bend your neck and chew on the grass, your species isn\'t going to get too intelligent. If, on the other hand, your body has a lot of ways of *usefully* interacting with the environment, intelligence is a welcome trait, so according to Darwin, it should pop up sooner or later. Humans are intelligent because of several advantageous traits: they can eat a lot of things, which avoid being eaten in a lot of ways (and so require a lot of strategies to \"outsmart\"); they can travel over an environment (the forest canopy) that requires some level of strategy... And so on. I could have a good long talk about this, but the idea is, there are a lot of ways to approach sentience.

You could, for instance, have a lot of species that do *not* have a pack mentality... All it takes is to say \"these guys are individuals\". But for people so embedded and entrenched in that mentality, it borders on the impossible.

[...]these things do not, will not, have not or cannot be changed[...]

That would only be the case if everyone was unimaginative. Things can be changed, and often are, but only to a minimal extent - a good book or gameworld might appear in the middle of the clones.

We could, I suppose, support such creations and encourage others to experience them. I mentioned Darksun, Harwen mentioned Dune... Are there any other settings that strive to be original?

I doubt people are worried about their audience\'s \"purity\", or anything at all, in fact. It\'s simply more convenient to rip off. Few designers ever want to work on their whole game: they may deal with a bit of the coding part and most of the graphics, but for the most part, they\'re content to recycle the same deficient systems. Nevermind the faults of these systems... If it satisfies their sloth and need for familiarity, all problems can be overlooked. Fantasy does slip into games and novels sometimes, usually without the writer\'s clear intention, and whatever fresh ideas get consistently ripped off become a part of the \"fantasy\" genre itself.

It\'s surprising how, through social forces alone, tradition can overcome any desire to think. It\'s also surprising how it persists in the face of overwhelming evidence that \"new\" would equal \"better\". In the corporate world, Molineaux, Spector and the Blizzard crew might design games for the dumb masses simply because it pays, but... It seems social factors are the ones that make it pay. Most people don\'t care about originality, which means they\'re not about to sponsor it by joining a fantastic game or (god forbid) creating one. The solution for this, it seems, is to promote imagination and free thought wherever possible, including one\'s own mind. And by \"free thought\", I don\'t mean those hackneyed ideas about world peace and equality... I mean real free thought, free from engendered beliefs and social influence.

Not ripping off great chunks of Tolkien or the real world can actually be to a designer\'s benefit. As long as no one expects sieges, governments, housing and such to exist in the game world, no one will demand them, because it simply wouldn\'t fit in (and an original game has the bonus of attracting the right kind of people - people who can cope with originality).

Dune has a strange mix of tradition and originality, which is why I never mentioned it. Its universe is no more than a feudal empire drawing its main resource from a savage desert planet - many aspects seem to have been taken straight from our own world. What makes it so original is that, instead of simply binding these aspects together, the author prudently looked at them and decided how they\'d look like in their appropriate setting. Stilsuits, kris knives and such were both imaginative and perfectly logical - white robes and sabers wouldn\'t do for the deserts of Arrakis. By simply studying a random object from the book, its real counterpart and all the differences between them, the pattern of tradition and originality will come to light.

Now...

A. What can one do about it?

If you need someone else to answer this question for you, I\'m afraid you won\'t be able to do anything.