Tighten Command's ability to exclude crew from Odysseys

[Fluffy]

4 minutes ago, N8-Toe said:

[...]

You're missing the key point: They're needed to be there, which is why they're being sent there - someone has to go down the depth and build thing is there because there's something that needs to be built, the sailor is there because the ship needs sailing. A bartender isn't there because in the middle of the somali pirate infested sea there's no compelling need to serve a Manhattan, there's no neurosurgeon, there's no pharmacist, there's no a lot of things that aren't needed to be there, there's only what is needed to be there

There is no problem sending eg. engineers if you need a long-term base built on Hivebot Prime or whatever, even if there's a (reasonable) risk, they are needed to do something, so they have a reason to be there, protected by Security - that is the equivalent of what you're indicating in your example

 

You can abolutely build a big plot like the one you're describing, you start with "we needs a party thrown, send down people to setup a party house and prepare a party", at which point the Horizon would send engineers to build it, security to kill xenofauna, mining to clear up the soon-to-be frat house, cooks to cook the party things, bartender to bartender, operations would haul the things needed to and from the horizon etc. etc. - After that, you can pop up with Mechafrost escorted by 3 John Sol, ground the shuttle and take everyone hostage or what have you. You can pick this story apart. Don't. It's just an example

On the other hand, investigating facility X for possible crimes against humanity doesn't need a bartender, or a cook, or operations or the likes, and it's possibly unsafe, so you would send security, possibly an FR, and science if the crime has something to do with scientific research or similar. You'd not send the cook, or the bartender, or an engineer (unless they have to break something open), or operations, in such a story

[N8-Toe]

So awhile back when we were still on the Aurora there was a movement against rounds that went like this for non sec/command. You would be minding your own business as a doctor, engineer, whatever.. and it'd go to code blue. If anything was said it was "Something is happening", than perhaps later code red, announcement saying get out of the halls.. you'd hear shooting in the distance maybe. if your med someone would show up cuffed, in and out before you could really talk. than code green. You'd have to pull teeth basically to get sec to tell you what was going on, let alone get you in on the action. 

Thankfully, we moved away from this as a sever and have a culture more focused on "Yes and" RP when it comes to involvement. Sending the bare minimum needed crew for a mission and no more is OOC'ly crap. When things happen on the ship, when there's a hostage situation on the ship, its there, its down the hall, its happening and on radio, even if your the bartender your affected by its proximity. People can stage, they can prep, command may be there organizing, its a place to be, and a place to RP or be involved in RP. Odessey if we're moving to the idea of its proper, and if anything logical to use the minimal teams needed, this is gone. Its happening off ship, away from here. My round as the engineer who didn't get picked to go play with sec is I spend 2 hours just... hanging out? while other people are involved in a cool story I can't play with. 

Back to the ship example, IRL ships have cooks. its some guys job to make pancakes for people in pirate and contested waters. its some guys job on the Horizon to build forward bases in a possibly dangerous environment, even without a gun. Thats reasonable. I think if we need more "IC logic" to have people going. Lean into it being an exploration ship, maybe everyone who wants to go on a mission has completed a 1 - 2 week safety and basic survival course or something idk. To stave off accusations of this making the ship militarized or giving people an excuse to be a John sol badass, Cruise ship hotel staff usually have five days at least of training on personal survival, first aid, fire suppression, and similar skills. it wouldn't be much to say the company trains people the basics of "Don't wander off into the woods alone" "Don't pet strange alien creatures" "Don't get in the space shuttle marked "Free Phoron". 

I keep repeating the phrase "Optimizing ourselves out of fun", and that's because that is what this is. It's defeating the chance for fun stories. I've said my piece, so im going to stop with this post. I appreciate you replying and discussing this with me. Just don't want to clog up with us going in a circle. 

 

 

[Fluffy]

2 hours ago, N8-Toe said:

So awhile back when we were still on the Aurora there was a movement against rounds that went like this for non sec/command. You would be minding your own business as a doctor, engineer, whatever.. and it'd go to code blue. If anything was said it was "Something is happening", than perhaps later code red, announcement saying get out of the halls.. you'd hear shooting in the distance maybe. if your med someone would show up cuffed, in and out before you could really talk. than code green. You'd have to pull teeth basically to get sec to tell you what was going on, let alone get you in on the action. 

Thankfully, we moved away from this as a sever and have a culture more focused on "Yes and" RP when it comes to involvement. Sending the bare minimum needed crew for a mission and no more is OOC'ly crap.

You mean the "militarizing"? Yea, all of that was making sense in a paramilitary structure, where everyone know how to hold a gun and use it, and could be made to become part of the fighting force if needed. It doesn't in a civilian ship where your cook knows how to cook and maybe pull the fire alarm when the space carp tries to make him its meal

2 hours ago, N8-Toe said:

Odessey if we're moving to the idea of its proper, and if anything logical to use the minimal teams needed, this is gone. Its happening off ship, away from here. My round as the engineer who didn't get picked to go play with sec is I spend 2 hours just... hanging out? while other people are involved in a cool story I can't play with. 

Now you understand why outcrying the "militarization" etcetera was a stupid thing that was done. We however have the motto "play stupid games, win stupid prizes", people played the game, and are now discovering the prize they won

2 hours ago, N8-Toe said:

Back to the ship example, IRL ships have cooks. its some guys job to make pancakes for people in pirate and contested waters. its some guys job on the Horizon to build forward bases in a possibly dangerous environment, even without a gun.

The point is always the same: They are needed. A cook in a random scenario that doesn't involve cooking, especially if possibly unsafe, isn't

2 hours ago, N8-Toe said:

To stave off accusations of this making the ship militarized or giving people an excuse to be a John sol badass, Cruise ship hotel staff usually have five days at least of training on personal survival, first aid, fire suppression, and similar skills. it wouldn't be much to say the company trains people the basics of "Don't wander off into the woods alone" "Don't pet strange alien creatures" "Don't get in the space shuttle marked "Free Phoron". 

None of this outweights that it would be throwing yourself in danger without any need nor reason to, which is against self-preservation and OOC-in-IC motivated

[Triogenix]

Right, look. The topic of the Horizon's militarization and anything surrounding that topic, is one that is at current, closed for discussion. The maintainers have a position they've made clear, and me and kermit as loremasters agree with their position on the topic quite clearly, so there's no use going around in circle arguing about it. It may be revisited at a future date, in which case people can say whatever they want if we open a public discussion thread, but this thread isn't a place to air grievances about it. If you don't like the decision, we have a staff complaint forum for a reason.

 

As for my actual thoughts on the suggestion;

I think that there is a lot of crossover between the behind the scenes stuff the lore team does for planning events and arcs, and not only running an odyssey but coming up with a general idea for one. That said, as someone with alot of experience in the former, I feel comfortable saying people commonly underestimate how easy it is to involve every department in what is happening in a round, in my case event rounds. It's actually pretty difficult in most situations, especially when there's a specific story you want to tell ahead of time; and this is for event rounds that are heavily planned out ahead of time, have whole documents written up for them, and an admin who is there specifically to help ensure the event goes smoothly. It's even more difficult for a solo storyteller to do in a single round.

I had a whole section written out about how the unathi events were planned because I was involved in that first as a deputy, then as unathi writer, then as loremaster, but it boiled down to a simple principle. When a story requires a specific thing for the Horizon crew to do/complete/ensure happens whatever synonym you want to use, either for the story to progress or simply because that's the type of round the storyteller is running, it is almost impossible to involve every single department. The unathi events were only able to pull this off because a majority of the storyline they were about was one I came up with and wrote Izaku specifically for back in May of 2022, and was eventually planning to do as an article arc, not an event one. The Horizon didn't need to do anything for it to occur, it could happen around them rather then through them. This is a baseline, the extensive custom mapping(thank you rusting, shaky, and all other mappers who helped out) and extensive planning that was done for it allowed it to shine. For storytellers however, they're trying to currently* do something on the fly with little other structure provided besides a map. The easiest thing to tell a story therefore is to give the Horizon's crew a task, something they have to do; but tasks, unless they are insanely large or there's multiple of them tailored for every department, cannot possibly encompass the entire crew and all departments. It is unreasonable to think that it would.

I think bear's suggestion is the only reasonable one with this in mind, in terms of what we can currently do;

On 19/12/2024 at 17:29, Bear said:

The start of an Odessey round should indeed be open to anyone who wants to go. However. A lot of this is dependent on the story teller and the theme that is being set for the round. If we are going to blank check away teams then we need to check the Story teller's escalation at round start to ensure those who have no real business going aren't barred by things like logic, or check the storyteller's ability to have existential threats in general and reduce their impact. The latter is worse, in my opinion as dramatic risks and so on can make for good rounds. So the former is likely the best route to have people start off "slow" so anyone who wants to get involved can get down there before things pop off.

I think going forward however, there's a couple things.

Firstly the creation of odyssey's that are part of a larger story. The Lore Team will start looking into ways to have larger ongoing stories taking place that odyssey's can be built around, somewhat similar to what we did in KOTW where the Aurora had the whole battle for biesel happening around it and nearly all the antag gimmicks reflected that wider story. There's a few obvious issues with this immediately, but I'm not getting into them here.

Secondly, given that it's going to be basically impossible to involve all the Horizon's Departments and crew in every odyssey, create a ton of different odyssey's that cater to different departments. It's not a perfect solution, but it'll balance it out a bit more. Re-use assets where-ever possible, like with Stev's nuclear missle silo/bunker thing, have the potential for the odyssey to be the horizon crew just repairing it, or restocking it before a new crew comes and takes it over, or helping out the people crewing it. Tons of different possibilities.

Third, potentially make our future event arcs significantly longer with fewer 'planned' big events but have dev work during development go towards making tons of different potential canon and non-canon odysseys during that arc. I will discuss this with matt and arrow, but need to preface this by also saying this probably won't be in effect for the next arc, and the one after that even if we decide to do it, for reasons I can't disclose here.

Lastly, and this one may be a bit controversial. Allow Odyssey's to come to the Horizon. Having them only be away sites will always be limiting, and I don't see a reason for them not to sometimes still be ship-centric. One of the best things about the Horizon is that we change regions often, and the best way to have consistent odyssey's would be to have some which don't require region specific maps or similar, but can happen anywhere the ship is and only need like, a shuttle mapped in. If the maintainers already said no to that and I just missed it, ignore me, and apologies.

 

*to the best of my knowledge

Edited 5 hours ago by Triogenix

[FlamingLily]

16 hours ago, Mr.Popper said:

there is usually no one to roleplay with in Odyssey when you're segregated from most of the crew.

This is something that I think is very important to address, when you're left behind on an Odyssey, it's not just "i don't get to interact with the gimmick" it's "I literally can't do anything this round because even if I weren't interacting with the gimmick the vast majority of my RP opportunities have all gone down to the gimmick and there are like 3 people aboard right now"

I have nothing more really to add to this except yes please do more horizon-centric odysseys.