Collaborative Worldbuilding Threads

[Daigoro]

Originally Posted by vicky_molokh

The main difference is the presence or absence of small players. With single owner, such as a consortium, you probably won't run into "this is a standalone startup that is making their gate, it does not follow the regulations of top dogs and is in fact trying to fight against them", while with no single owner that situation is reasonably available during a campaign.

I think the results of the votes will end up being guidelines. So if we have D, then the setting will basically have one consortium, but when we get to fleshing out the setting, I can't see anyone objecting if you put forward a startup company that wants to make their own wormholes. The difference would be whether those startups were in the history of the setting, and had become successful, or in the present, and are fighting off pressure from the big boys.

[Daigoro]

As we mentioned earlier, one of the issues with the voting threads is the burden on the main coordinator. I have a suggestion, but I'd want Frost to okay it first.

If the thread coordinator is unable to get to the thread for a day or two, the voting could be handled by a roster of deputy coordinators. Each deputy handles one set of questions for one day- posting the questions and options, answering queries, then collating the votes- then hands over to the next deputy on the roster.

This keeps the voting game going while taking the sole responsibility off the OP.

However, I would also quite understand if the OP wanted to keep a tight rein on the questions for the setting. Things might come up or get settled that he had other plans for, or even unimaginably worse things could happen.

[(E)]

One thing that all the previous methods have in common is that they all seek to build the whole world* in one go. There may be benefits to creating a town or the like** first and then expanding from there.

To say it another way why not make a town that is built with play-ability as a central idea and from there backwork and brainstorm the rest of the world.

*planet, galaxy, dimension etc.

**castle, spacestation, city etc.

[tshiggins]

I dunno. I don't tend to work from "more specific" to "more detailed." Instead, I define the type of setting I want, create a framework for it, and then fill in the details.

On the "space opera" thread, we didn't do that, and the problem with "space opera" is that it's so broad. Star Trek is space opera, but so is Star Wars -- and Battlestar Galactica, and The Chronicles of Riddick, and Alien/Prometheus, and even Firefly. That meant everybody worked to create the "space opera setting" each of us wanted, instead of voting to decide the type of space opera (Plato's Republic in spaaace, or a hero's journey, or explorations into what it means to be "human," or a military/covert op campaign, or a bug hunt, or scruffy ne'er-do-wells trying to scrape by, or TOTALLY AWESOME GALACTIC POWER, or whatnot) that we would all work toward.

A shared understanding of the expected outcome helps keep people focused, and that helps keep them motivated, if for no other reason than those who don't care for that end result choose to opt out.

[Daigoro]

Updating the list in Post #2 with some recent efforts:

[Game] Generate a military sci-fi setting
[Game] Collaborative world building for DFRPG
Create a setting -- diesel punk awesomeness!
Shared space setting

[Daigoro]

Is it time to have a hack at a new setting or setting element?

I'm undecided though on what to put up this time. Suggestions?

A couple I've been considering:

Full Settings
Straight-up Cyberpunk
We'd be building corporations, conflicts, smattering of world history, interesting tech, cities, space stations, powered armour squads and gangs. I think it would still need some particular theme laid down to focus our ideas a little. Nothing in the way of psi, magic or what-have-you's, but perhaps the possibility of a new super-science/super-tech.

Stratopunk
Cyberpunk, but above the clouds. The masses live with their feet in the mud, but the elite float above it all in stratoscrapers, dirigible-cities, up-draft towers and tensegrity spheres.

Biopunk Space Opera
Really dig deep into genetic engineering without the shackles of scientific plausibility holding us back... among the stars!

Urban Fantasy- Witches and Dragons
This Vote Up an Urban Fantasy thread got as far as deciding it was about witches and dragons, which is where I started to get intrigued, when it petered out. Can we flesh that out more?

Psionic Fantasy
There's no magic, but psi takes its place. Strains of Julian May's Pliocene Exile.

Fantasy Space Opera
Magic and dragons fantasy, done on a galactic scale.

Monster Hunter Setting
I'm interested to see what we could come up with here. I've tinkered with my own MH setting, but want to see how others would do it.



Single Town/City Projects
Taking a leaf from the book of (E), instead of building a whole setting, just focus on single place and flesh it out.

A Fantasy City
A Cyberpunk City
A Cyberpunk Corporation
A Space Opera Space Station
A DF Dungeon/Wilderness Region

Perhaps revisit one of the earlier projects and do this? I could see it working for the Steampunk or Space Trader settings, perhaps.

As far as themes go, that's what I've got so far. I'm not strongly attached to any one of them and think most any of them could make a good thread.

For the mechanics of the thread, I'd be going for a question game again, but perhaps borrowing one extra idea from the voting threads, and why people like them:

Answer Veto- Usually the game is to build on someone else's answer, no matter how strange it is. This is part of what makes the question game fun, and therefore any answer is valid unless it contradicts something earlier. However, in discussion earlier in this thread, some posters mentioned that they lost interest when something too weird came up in an answer. To deal with this, if you don't like an answer or part of an answer, you can raise it as a veto to be voted on. That element is then retracted or amended by its author, and the questions continue.

Sound good?
And what theme shall we enfleshen?

[(E)]

Cyberpunk would be one setting I would like to explore.
I also have a certain level of curiosity about how the results would differ if we revisited a setting we have already covered.
Monster hunters would be another setting I would like to look at.

I do have an idea for a Romanish fantasy city with "centralized" magic that I would like to see developed. But I may already be too invested in it to be helpful.

With regards to The Vetoing of other people's answers, How about stipulating that a Veto must include an alternate answer?

[Daigoro]

Actually, while I'd be keen to do cyberpunk, thinking about it, we've had a fair number of X-punk settings, so it might be an idea to try something a little different this time.

Let's try out the Monster Hunters idea, see if it's got legs.

For Answer Vetoes- I see your point, to cut down on spurious vetoing, but to start with I think we can trust everyone. Besides, I'm not sure it would always work that way. I'm thinking of the Steampunk setting, where someone tried to introduce magic, but no one else was wanting to include it.

[ericthered]

I think with vetoes it'd be nice to limit folks to one veto per x number of posts. Or even just limit the number of times a question can be vetoed. Votes take a long time to resolve.

[Daigoro]

Originally Posted by ericthered

I think with vetoes it'd be nice to limit folks to one veto per x number of posts. Or even just limit the number of times a question can be vetoed. Votes take a long time to resolve.

Do you mean that a single question might attract multiple answers that people each protest against?
I guess we can deal with that if it comes up.
Limiting the number of vetoes is also a possible consideration, but I don't think it's a good idea to have a whole page of rules on how exactly we'll handle problematic posts- the wall of text in the first post would be a turn-off (it's already a bit unwieldy).
Anyway, I'm happy to see how everything goes as is.