MP Game - Yarnspinners

[Sedna]

R'lyeh, Turn 52

Thuella the air queen lives, but for how long? My ghost riders struck, slaughtering two mages and slew of archers, but the cowardly Thuella flew away. At this point, her few remaining troops are more of a liability than an aid.

Mithy did fine against the birds. They have this annoying enchantment which strengthens their local defenses, but not strong enough to stop an abomination! Mwhahahah...

Every city of Man is now under siege. We'll break into a few of them soon. I'm especially interested in pillaging their homeland in Skjomen's Steps. My lovely Limne will be directing that battle. After that, I'm going to quit fooling around with Xlikloth. I've carefully arranged things so that his army is stacked with those loyal to me, and at a single word they will slaughter him, all for the greater glory of me.

At last we have been able to summon Bathusma, queen of the deep. Most of her magic gear is ready to go, but I'm still waiting for the one item I outsourced. There is a very reasonable individual within the empire of Arcoscephale who was willing to forge a dread blood thorn for me for a fair price. That should arrive shortly, and then Bathusma will bathe in the blood of those who oppose me.

[Zen]

OOC:

I have to say this has really turned into a fantastic type of game. A little long in the running, but now that I've seen it to near completion I really like the idea. I enjoyed quite a few of the different aspects of the game.

Particularly: Puffyn's posts as well as his "Dramatis Personae" really illustrate his position in the world.

I wanted to say that for the next Yarnspinners, I'd like to join and have the entire set of Players post on (perhaps an entire website for the game) a Dramatis Personae or Index.

Have any of you that have been playing this game thought about the next game and ways to make the game more enjoyable (as mostly an AAR) for the viewers in terms of website logistics?

[Sedna]

Hi Zen,

Thanks for reading. I've thought quite a bit how to make this game better, because it's been a great deal of fun, but big improvements are possible. Obviously the biggest problems has been people dropping out. I myself am a replacement - and I think only Alneyan and Puffyn are original players. The flip side of this coin is a lack of yarns.

One solution would be to decrease the number of yarns while increasing the pace of the game. I feel that the slow pace (~2 turns/week) lost us a lot of the original players. But it's extremely difficult to post interesting, informative, or funny yarns even twice a week. I think an optimal solution might be to have just one yarn per season (thus every three turns). We could then play 48 hour turns and yet need to write only approx. one yarn a week.

This might make for long yarns in the late game if people want to report on everything that happens, but it would help with the slow pace of yarns at the beginning of the game. Let's face it, after a little bit of character development and mood, the first many turns are going to be: "Yep, we killed more independents". I get bored just thinking about writing those yarns.

I think this type of game really requires it to be PBEM. If you need to review past turns to write your yarns (which you will, at some point), it's much easier if you have an e-mail archive of them. And it's pretty easy to just rename your old Yarnspinners folder to Turn51, and slowly dump the really old ones into another folder to keep your in-game menus reasonably short. So a PBEM host as wonderful as Alneyan is also a must.

As for motivation: the point scheme clearly Zap originally proposed clearly failed. The only benefit I've received from writing yarns is that people seem to have been reluctant to attack me, for fear that they will no longer be able to read my deathless prose. Or perhaps that's just because I attack everyone before they get a chance to attack me.

I believe that the motivation to write yarns should be tied directly into the game. I'm not familiar with the possibilities of modding, so perhaps this is impractical or there is an easier way: what if PBEM host was not directly playing? He/she could maintain a neutral empire of one province with a large astral income (and no dominion). Each yarn submitted would be rewarded with one astral pearl. Again, the incentive would be greatest at the beginning of the game. Once everyone is emotionally invested in the game, I think they will keep writing. The details of this suggestion could probably use more thought.

Finally, it would be great to be able to see more pictures and maps and graphs as the game progresses. I know AARs with maps are the only ones I really bother to read. Puffyn plans to post maps for this game after it's done, but it would really help keep an audience to have them as we go along. That audience, in turn, provides more motivation to keep writing. Again, the host could play this role: a simple screen shot of the map each season (or year) with just the race banners displayed. Secrecy is all very well and good, but it can't be maintained if it interferes with the game, and good yarns are going to reveal some useful information anyway- playing with full knowledge of the map evens the playing field and allows everyone to write more honest yarns.

Oh, and baby brains. Lots of baby brains.

[Alneyan]

I concur with all the points Sedna offered (especially the one about Alneyan being such a great host; feel free to send me your prayers, gifts and firstborns).

- A quicker turnaround and fewer yarns would help keep the interest of the game high: we all, to various degrees, failed to keep up with that kind of pace, while quite a few players dropped from the game: Puffyn and myself are indeed the last ones, so Puffyn will be the only player having made it from turn 1 to turn 60 (hopefully).

- I feel a public map would be better, perhaps by adding a neutral nation with the Eyes of God enchantment as well (making it easier to take a screenshot of the map). Borders should be clearly visible, but perhaps scores should be off with this sort of setup (or made available every five turns or something along those lines).

- A nation giving gifts should not be difficult to implement, and would not have to be handled by a third party. This nation could simply be visible for everybody (it won't affect the game), so everyone would be able to check for astral gems mysteriously disappearing; it would also work well with the Eyes of God option above. In modding terms, this nation would start the game with a 0 pearl Wish spell, and would thus create a few hundred astral pearls (Wish would go back to the other nations afterwards).

- Something else I was thinking of: what about implementing a political aspect to the game, limiting the number of provinces that may be taken in a single war? The purpose would be to help those nations that are much weaker; in Yarnspinners, wars end only with the slaughter of the weaker nation (Mictlan, Atlantis, Ermor, and now Vanheim and Man collapsed, though I must say I underestimated the might of Machaka. I didn't make any such mistake with R'lyeh though). The specifics on how that would work are left as an exercise for the reader.

[puffyn]

As you can probably tell, I've been enjoying this game immensely, and it's great to hear that there are other people interested in another Yarnspinners game. Count me in...

That said, I'm all for reducing the number of yarns. I'm pleased to note that there should be no problem finishing this game -- R'lyeh doesn't scare me, and enslaved Starspawn make such cute pets -- but it's taken a lot of discipline to not miss any of my yarns, especially when I've been travelling. Lately I've been writing my turns in bunches of 2-4 at a time because I'm often too busy during the week to give my story the loving care it deserves. And I agree with Sedna - there are really only so many ways you can say "this turn we recruited another mystic and three hoplites and Limmy died against independents, again".

I like the idea of an independent nation dispensing pearls for yarns. Would we vote on the number of pearls distributed, or have an arbitrator like magnate?

The best parts of this game have been the interactions with other nations, and it's unfortunate that so few regular yarners are left to give reports on both sides of the great battles. (What great heroes lie unsung from the Man/Machaka wars?) I think the large early turnover in this game (aggravated by hosting problems and the delay when we switched to PBEM) would be lessened if we (a) had a smaller map, so first contact came quicker, and (b) had quicker turns.

As for wars leading quickly to extermination... Mictlan was of course AI, so there was no chance to negotiate. If, of course, Vanheim were writing yarns, begging for mercy, there might be a narrative necessity to stop short of killing them. Though I dunno if C'thulu would be stayed from his madness even by a well-placed yearn... Perhaps other incentives should be devised, too.

[Zapmeister]

puffyn said:
And I agree with Sedna - there are really only so many ways you can say "this turn we recruited another mystic and three hoplites and Limmy died against independents, again".

Actually, I originally anticipated that the yarns would not simply be reports on the events of each turn. I hoped that the story-writing aspect would overwhelm the gameplay aspect, and that the gameplay would provide the setting for rather than the content of each yarn.

If Yarnspinners 2 happens, I'd also like to participate as a player.

[Sedna]

R'lyeh doesn't scare me, and enslaved Starspawn make such cute pets

Dem's fightin' words!

[CuriousCat]

As much as it may not look like it, I've really enjoyed this game. In fact, the yarnspinning is the part that I liked best. Unfortunately I haven't been as disciplined as Puffyn or Sedna. I did well for a while but RL got busy, I lost the thread of my story, and I never managed to regain it. I am very interested in participating in another yarnspinning game. I'll do my best NOT to drop the ball again.

Also, I echo the thought that Alneyan has been an awesome host.

[puffyn]

Oh, and Zen, about you post:

Glad you like the Dramatis Personae; I've fallen a bit behind on updating it, but maybe that's because it takes more to become an important enough character later in the story (just like in the Hall of Fame...)

How fancy a website are you thinking? My original idea for my site was to take everyone's yarns and post them on pages by player (so you can read a story all the way through) and by turn (so you can see what was happening each turn). Then I realized I'd have to crawl through the pages of this thread and extract all the story posts, being careful to keep the fancy formatting, and I got lazy and just went with the Dramatis Personae.

Perhaps for Yarnspinners 2: The Vengeance, players could submit their yarns to whoever was maintaining the game webpage, and the webmaster could add them with minimal formatting (UBB is easy to convert; I use HTML mostly anyways) to the appropriate running pages. For example, Arco's report for Turn 42 would be on both turn42.html and arco_yarns.html. Players could also send text/pictures for a Dramatis Personae at, say, arco_personae.html, as desired. (If we go with astral pearl-based rewards, perhaps you would get one every 5-10 turns if you kept your character list up to date.)

The game page in the forums could either have duplicates of the turns or not, however we want to do it, but would also have links to the external page. That way people playing wouldn't have to know how to maintain a website, but people reading it would have a lot easier time picking up in the middle and keep track of what was going on. Plus there might be more pictures (since it's a pain to upload more than one per post to the forums).