[freeroleplay] Re: Open World Project
- From: Bryce Harrington <bryce@xxxxxxxx>
- To: FRPGC <freeroleplay@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sun, 27 Jul 2003 10:30:30 -0700 (PDT)
On 27 Jul 2003, Ricardo Gladwell wrote:
> > Now, I agree with the one(I don't remember who it was) who said that game
> > world
> > really should be somewhat independent on the game system. So it usually is
> > too:
> > documents that describe the world usually have very few rules. And this is
> > not
> > so big problem. Again somebody can port the world for fringe if he wants so.
>
> My idea would be to develop the world through a Wiki. It would then be
> simplicity to create a wiki sub-system that would allow users to create
> dynamic rules variant pages. So, for example, you create a 'soft'
> description of an NPC for your world in the wiki, without any game
> stats. You would then create a linking page to the NPC stats in, say,
> FRINGE. Someone else could then come along and create a variant stats
> in, say, YAGS.
At WorldForge we developed a game world through Wiki. As a big Wiki
fan, I thought it'd be cool. It worked in the sense that much content
was submitted, but we encountered a few problems. First, it was
difficult to "print the whole thing" (as a PDF preferrably) because you
had to navigate around through a bunch of links to find all the pages to
make up the system. Second, since it was easier to make new pages than
to flesh out and finish existing ones, the whole suffered from
"nodification" - at any point in time the number of woefully incomplete
areas far outnumbered the completed ones, which made the whole kind of
unusable.
Third was more of a personnel issue. A nice thing about Wiki is that it
tends to be fairly ownerless. This has its benefits, but when you're
trying to find out who to talk to about what was written it's a
problem. Also, some people like having stricter control over their
writing and would get irate at other members for changing what they'd
written; this led to a lot of friction. On the other hand, some people
don't like having responsibility for maintaining their area, so would
leave it unfinished expecting others to flesh it out, but people would
resist touching it because they weren't sure if the guy was still
working on it... etc. etc.
Fourth was kind of a tools issue. With a wiki you don't really have a
notion of "release number" that can be referred to. So if someone is
using a copy from a couple months ago, and wants to print extra copies
for new players, well now things have totally changed on the site. He
also does not have an easy way to find the answer, "What has changed in
the world documents since release 1.1?" Since people could change
things very drastically, this turned out to be a bigger problem than we
had anticipated...
Fifth was another tools issue - most wiki's are implemented such that
you have to use the browser edit window for editing, but unfortunately
browser edit windows seem to be the most anemic form of text editor in
existance. People really wanted to be able to edit the content with
their preferred editors, but it was a lot of hassle to try to figure
out solutions. (I figured out a few tricks, like launching emacs from
within lynx, but they were still a hassle.)
Anyway, in the end we pulled the pages out of Wiki and put them in CVS,
changed them to DocBook, and started doing releases. A downside was
that since a lot of potential contributors didn't know DocBook (or CVS),
the cost of entry was too high and the effort kind of petered out after
that. On the other hand, the quality of the few releases that did get
made was much higher, and it was something you could actually print and
use.
Wiki is great for getting started, though, and for doing brainstorming
and roughing in ideas collaboratively. You can do a lot of work very
quickly, especially if you have the "Wiki bug". But I'd encourage
thinking about the above issues and planning to a) make sure your wiki
can do these things, or b) plan on pulling certain things out of Wiki at
some point in the future, into a form better suited for packaging and
releases.
Bryce
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