Holy crap Kittania looks GORGEOUS.

I love everything about it. The art type fits so well with Kitt, and the little details give me so many ideas about how the outpost looks as a whole. 11/10.


But with progress on this project comes some concerns and thoughts and such. In Banter we began discussing how Chat Spaces will work on each map. I assume the idea is to give each square their own Story and have them all have Global Banter, and while this idea seemed fine to me, some thought it to be rather inconvenient.

I can't speak for everyone's concerns, but some situations I imagines were that it will be very likely quite a few squares will go unused, leaving them dead. Which is fine and all, but in places like NewHome it will look like the game is rather uninhabited to beginners.
I can also foresee this method encouraging much more localized and personal/planned out Stories, and discouraging those random meet-ups and such, which many really enjoy.

So, I'm making this to ask CMJ what the plan is, exactly? Is it to be done how I said, each square having its own Chat Space, or is there some other plan? Or maybe we're just playing it by ear and seeing what works?

Life would be incomplete without random meetups, I believe.

Give each square its own Story channel? God, I hope not! Imagine the annoyance of RPing a trip across the Map with others, but all the time, forever.

Each square has its own story channel, with the exception of the nine squares in the centre of town which use a common channel. Depending on how things go, I might also extend that same common chat channel to the squares leading from the outpost gate to the centre of town.

I think the idea of different RP spots in outposts is pretty rad. I never story in Outposts because I am a friendless misanthrope who hates random interlopers interrupting his pre-planned story with others so this looks right up my alley.

I guess I'm just the type where if I agree to write with someone in Banter and they suggest an outpost I'm like "ehhhh... outposts" and would rather go anywhere else. The idea of being able to hide in a corner somewhere and have SOME privacy (even though I realize it's still very much a public space) but while still being able to use the flavor of the outpost itself is appealing.

man that sounds like I'm gonna go post a bunch of smut or whatever in outposts but I promise that's not what I mean. I guess I'll just enjoy the freedom that comes with not having to be lumped with literally everyone else in the outpost where things can quickly get very chaotic.

My real issue here is that, while occasionally outpost story can be chaotic enough that I have to bow out because I can't keep up with it all, most of the time it's not anywhere near that bad. Several outposts already have multiple story spaces that folks wander off into, and I've noticed that causing minor problems with continuity, coherence, and just finding story in the first place.

I'm already super-rare in outposts just because the topics that come up sometimes make folks uncomfortable and I really don't want to make people uncomfortable around me, so I stick to Places where that kind of R-rated conversation is understood. That part won't change if we wind up with a dozen separate story spaces per outpost, but it will lead to further isolation, division, and difficulty in finding story at all. I could see a need for that sprawl if we had a thousand active story-writers, but we don't. I'd be surprised if we had more than two hundred people who story more than occasionally.