Secrets, Clues, and Plots
Posted by Tehom on 11/16/18
So today I pushed live the preliminary release of something NV and I have been working on for a bit now: a rework of how lore is stored and searched in the game. This includes some smaller changes, such as Visions and Secrets now being represented by Clues, which means they can now be shared and accessed in other places, such as the @clues command, and some much larger changes that won't be immediately visible to players, like how OOC notes about lore are stored and searched. What's more significant for players is formalizing player-run-plots, and storylines as a whole, with the new 'plots' command. The tldr is that PRPs can now be organized, storing events and actions that occur as 'beats' which advance the storyline of the plot, and participation formally recorded by joining plots. Secrets can now be set as explicit hooks for one or more plots that can be run by GMs or by players for easier integration of new players, and those on plots can opt-in to write short stories that can give ideas for how a character could find out their involvement to approach them for a scene. Additionally, there's a mechanism for more easily pitching plots to GM for approval, which will automatically create it, as well as for asking GMs to enforce effects/consequences that might have resulted from plots. I'll be writing a guide in more detail about plots, probably under 'help player run plots guide'. Some things will almost certainly be broken, so let me know if anything bugs out: the process of converting how a lot of things were stored in the database was very complex, so a lot could have gone wrong, even ignoring all the command changes and new commands. There's also roughly 500 clues that are now listed as placeholders due to the conversion that need to be properly written up, and all other existing clues need to be stored/categorized, as well as a similar number of revelations, so there'll probably be doing some bookkeeping for a little bit.