As it stands I want to make this server a proper community where hopefully everyone is involved in what is going on Story and RP wise where folks are included unless they choose to not participate. If issues arise with other members I’d rather it not devolve into malicious actions or cause issue with the rest of the community. But this is just my ideal wishful thinking.
If there is ever an issue please advise me of the situation. Once I figure out how best to archive server log files they will be monitored and reviewed.
I would prefer to not have to baby sit everyone and make sure folks are behaving but I will if it proves to be an issue. Thus far we’ll keep to individual invite utilizing a password y for the server to see how things work out. I’d like a list of those invited as well to hopefully insure that only those we personally invited log in. Once things get going we’ll see about allowing others for now I’d rather be overly cautious.
On a different note; I’d like to set up a list of the stories we’ll be having on the server, as well as attempting to find an over arcing story line. It doesn’t have to be a full on epic campaign or such but a general goal for characters to work toward if they are unable to come up with their own stories.
I’d enjoy keeping this as much of a sand box a possible However; if we need to set up a roller coaster to help some folks then we should see to that. I’ll be picking a few folk’s brains for ideas as well as browsing through campaign or story arc ideas for the settings we’d like to use. Thus far Planescape, Forgotten Realms and Scarred lands,Spelljammer are the ones I know of for certain. Feel free to continue the list as I am certain I've forgotten things already.
Feel free to voice your opinions on this or suggest other options or ideas.
I would like to add that I see Ad Astra as being a sandbox in that we have an easily expandable "setting" where we aren't agonizing over "official" lore. But it should also be "story-driven" in that our characters have goals, desires, projects, etc. that will eventually come to fruition or explode in an appropriately entertaining manner. DM involvement in key here, as is "time progression" as much as there is such in the planes. It would be sad if it turned into another stagnant world.
As far as stories go: - Dace and Sasha want to find their world again (Almaaphere--don't look for it in books, we made it up), and get rid of their respective demons. - Kala's quest, which I think is first sending us to the plane of air and then maybe to some other setting? - Ziggy used to want to return / find home (didn't he?)
I would like to stress that the strong suit of dnd has always been in the implementation and execution of campaigns. Stories make the world go round, as they say. The sandbox setting actually should grant the freedom to explore these story elements in the form of stand-alone arcs that each have definitive beginnings and endings. The notion of a persistent world is nice in the sense of the set it up and walk away approach, however, we have all seen where that can lend itself to large periods where there isn't much going on at all.
The maximum entertainment value can be achieved by taking a step away from the persistent world kinda setting and instead gearing moreso towards those special themes. I'd like to point out that there are advantages to using a planescape setting as your sandbox core. We have all the planes and settings imaginable. They all roll up into one big unit. The question we should ask is. How do we start?
Well, the best place to start is actually in places like where Mimi suggested. With those smaller character driven elements but expanded to become the central foci for each standalone campaign as it were. Once this gets off the ground we might find it conducive to run two or more campaigns simultaneously. In essence the continuity is not so much emphasized on the 'persistent' world as it could be focused upon specific events that impact characters of that world.
This lends itself to another potential benefit. The flow of time and of course, respective changes that may come over time. One thing I have noticed on most servers both for NWN1 and of course NWN 2 is that you do not generally experience a notable period of time flow in the settings. I do believe the most time I have ever witnessed a setting cover, was on Elements of Aesyr where they had covered at least a couple decades or so of game time. Now... where could the flow of time lead? Well, places change over time. It might give us reason to 'renovate' areas to reflect the changing times.
All in all these are just the preliminary thoughts that have come to my mind as I take my first stab at the thought process.
I am in full agreement with you all here, except that I prefer to keep it 1 day RL/1 ingame day. However, I am not against jumping in time by months or even years when so required to progress the story between campaigns and so forth.
Storyline: Hildmor, who has been watching Dace and Sasha from the shadows for a good while is ready to offer them more extensive help...For a price.
Being able to manipulate the visuals to reflect time passage as well as results of actions and choices will add more depth to the stories in some regard; although, I'd rather we not have to re map areas so soon. so Such events Should probably be left for later in the story arcs unless absolutely necessary.
As for the starting point being the character stories I agree with that. and from those stories we should hopefully be able to develop additional side stories. How ever I would like to avoid focusing entirely on just one character or set of characters through out. though I understand that will happen to some extent. the interesting part is going to be how or why the characters come together in the port. since there are several who do not know of or are involved with Dace and Sasha's Jammer crew.
As I stated before, I might extend the port to more Cartel members when the time is right and everyone's in agreement. We might want to expand in future. Fresh blood is fresh blood after all.
While remaining focused on a given group would of course be rather dull, it does give us a starting point at least. Ideally things will change or get shaken up along the way as new people come in and all.
Regarding updating areas and stuff as the plot needs, this is kind of a given, and unless we have changes like "a big huge meteor randomly hit and changed the entire landscape" , the changes should be simple enough to make.
Before begining the campaigns, we should all (those of us in the initial party) sit down and establish each characters power levels/ non mechanical abilities/ influence spheres/ groups/ etc.
Flow of time is something we ought to leave up to the DM's running the specific campaigns, IE, let it vary, with an otherwise assumed period of 1 day= 1 RL day.
Light; yeah, stepping away from the normal PW approach is the idea here. One part about PW's that I really want to keep out of Ad Astra (as I have mentioned in our Steam chats); multi-faction/ guild based gameplay. That is, allowing multiple clans in the game world that players can join, which are then encouraged- directly or indirectly- to work against each other. This sort of situation makes it extremely difficult to move a story line along, causes fragmentation in the community, and inevitably leads to people stepping on each others toes. IF in the event we do allow allow multiple player factions (again, really want to avoid this), then I strongly advise bringing back a rule we had in Beldin where a DM was not allowed to DM things for a faction if their PC was in it.
Far as storylines go, what I have in memory:
1) Dace and Sasha's quest to return home and defeat the fiends inside them 2) Ziguard's wish to go home, with some hints of needing to face down the thing that destroyed the surface. 3) Kala's wish to hunt down Abnigation and avenge her world, followed by her wish to ascend to godhood. 4) The search for Neelis 5) HIldamors plans for the fiends. 6) The search for the Ultimate Cake.
....what? You were all thinking of point six too, admit it...
Well, we can't really have a lot of elements of a PW in a reasonable amount of time. We probably don't want to get wrapped up in them either (building for a PW and a DM'ed campaign are very different things).
For instance, the whole leveling architecture is probably going to be slim to nonexistent (which means keeping many secondaries of high level will be hard). Campaigns also naturally favor every player having only one or two main characters.
We'll probably want to handle crafting of significant items by the DM making them, porting them in, and requiring people to search for various components and gold (unless somebody has a better idea beyond making an extensive crafting system and figuring out item level balance).
Our first / 'founding' story is everyone getting on a spelljammer and going off to solve their personal quests. So there's the natural restriction of people needing to have reasons and/or the desire to join a spelljammer crew. Ideally later we'll have multiple stories that will allow there to be a little more fragmentation, but our beginning is more "focused" than most PW's.
As time goes on, everyone's character is not going to be equal in IC station and/or influence. Its a natural result of having long-running stories, but it rubs some people the wrong way, so some PW's try to steer clear of it.
On the bright side, story focus lets us have the time to do nice things like change the world and NPCs when its appropriate to do so.
I think going with campaign/story driven server to be a lot better than just another PW... since as we all saw, those get a bit boring; and I'd rather we all log on once per week to have actual fun in an event than wander the server without purpose all week.
And I agree with Emi, let's try not to fragment the player base up, because that just adds a level of pointless bickering and situations where something we'd like to partake in getting a big "No No" because our respective PCs are of an opposing group or something similar.
As for starting off with character stories, go for it. I just need to poke Reptiller to let me finish up the campaign he once started for my blackguard and co. ;-P
People try to think in too big a scale. KISS. "Keep it simple, stupid", goes a long way here. Tight knit story arcs, small things happening, some which WILL have wide impact, some which don't.
