Sierra

Let's B!tch. I feel it's a healthy release for our roleplay annoyances 2.0

I tend to just ignore those replies. I tend to have somewhat steep requests for people expressing their interest (often summed up with the phrase "sell it to me") and that course of action is so far below my level of expectation that its not even worth the effort to acknowledge or explain why it's disqualifying.

The Parallel Campaign - An Expansive Spacefaring RPG

I am perpetually in a state of semi-interest in this. Whether or not its enough to make a character is TBD, likely hinging on the fate of my existing sci-fi RP thats rather on the rocks.

ᴘᴀʀᴀᴅɪsᴏ // cyber-dystopian sandbox

@Grimhildr Clearly you didn't learn the first time I told you to please never mention me again. Perhaps you will listen this time, as I have no desire to see trolls of any kind in my notifications ever.

Interest recinded.

ᴘᴀʀᴀᴅɪsᴏ // cyber-dystopian sandbox

Tentatively intrigued. We'll see who sticks around first.

Galactic Conquest

Mail order apocalypse: check

Delivered per consultation with @DragonofTheWest, who now has to pull some godmod/metagame crap to survive this (which I'm okay with since his implied death is an unintended side effect).

Galactic Conquest

=THEY ARE RAGE=

PLANET “AURORA”
UNCHARTED SPACE

The frenzy of Covenant activity above Aurora was visible on sensors anywhere in the system. Fires on the surface could be seen from space. The rocky backwater dustball nobody could possibly ever want was the center of a vicious siege. An innocuous burst of white noise had brought the belligerents here, toiling endlessly for some gods-forsaken vault beneath the arid soil. The chaos of battle makes a perfect cover.

A single subtle subspace disturbance rippled high above the battleground. Not even the keen eye of Natka on the Destiny Ascendant caught it at first. When she finally did call it out, the reaction amidst the bridge crew was nothing short of panic. This was not yet another player; it was far more worrisome.

”They are rage, brutal, without mercy. But you ... you will be worse. Rip and tear, until it is done.”

-Prophecy of the Concordia Knights

A single ship slipped from the roiling tear in spacetime into the calm between subspace and the fury of war far below upon the surface. Not even a quarter kilometer, the small craft did not even battle the gravity, falling gracefully towards the surface. The spaceship itself was a marvel and an abomination of flesh and metal somehow braving the harsh void. The mechanical engine nozzle to the rear glowed as it began to travel the vacuum under its own power. Its tendrils lazily waved, stretching behind it from the flanks. Four enormous eyes, the larger being at least ten meters, peered out like telescopes, searching for signs of life.

Aboard Destiny the entire chain of command scrambled to make a plan of action. In the frenzy they had rudely ignored the Asari fleet with which they previously were conversing. Muriel insisted this took precedence; she was not without justification. The alien creature-ship closed distance to the planet. Soon it would be entering the Covenant’s battlespace. As it approached the very fabric of space around it began to sparkle. A thousand pinpoint lights flashing dim to bright to dim again, growing in intensity with each flash. In a single blinding cacophony of luminescence fifty ships flashed into existence as if the light itself had coalesced into being.

Each form that joined the first was new and ugly in its own way. A group of smaller crafts with long slender limbs resembling crab legs darted swiftly through the formation. Their crab legs reached well over three hundred meters in length. They nimbly formed a circle behind their companion creatures, legs extending wide to form a giant ring shape. A yellow lightning crackled between the far ends of the legs completing the circular form. Space began to bend and boil and tear within the ring. A burst of the lightning erupted from nothingness within the center, and a terrifyingly massive structure forced its way through, tearing the fabric of space asunder to assert its will on anything in its path. The pillar had arrived.

Behind it another swarm of vessels followed through the portal. Most were small, under two hundred meters long. Only a few crafts spanned over half a kilometer. Yet the pillar, the enormous structure the swarm formed to escort, stretched over six times that length. Two and a half kilometers of jagged metal and bits of flesh, folded and constructed and packed away to be transported across the blackness. Its ultimate destination lay below: the very ground the Covenant fought so hard to hold. The escort fleet around it now was quite numerous. Though small in size and power, a little beyond a hundred vessels encircled it as it dove ever faster towards the crust, racing past the Covenant forces in orbit and destroying everything in its path.

The smaller ships branched off to strafe cruisers which came too close to the descent path. Swarms of light vessels, perhaps frigate or corvette class should they have a classification, extended away from the escort formation to give close passes. Yellow lightning shot out from fleshy tendrils attacking the Covenant ships. Shields shimmered and glowed under the blows and overloaded under the surge that the swarm put out. The arcs burned into the hull leaving glowing red gashes. The small ships escorting the pillar darted into incoming fire, blocking the shots aimed for the pillar itself and protecting it as it struck the atmosphere.

The raging fires of reentry seared at the armored spike that headed the giant construction. The metal burned red and small pockets of exposed tissue smoldered in the inferno. The small creatures that had escorted the megastructure had scattered and descended into the atmosphere with a circling grace that the many thousands of tons did not. The radiant heat alone from the burning plasma shell encasing the pillar often killed most beings present at the point of impact. The heat preceded touchdown by less than a second as the leading spike pierced rock. Hundreds of meters of the pillar structure had crushed or disintegrated on impact, but the solid rod that ran through its core pierced the crust intact. The weight coming down at once crushed the ground beneath, fracturing the land and leaving a sunken bowl spanning five kilometers. The vault had been directly beneath, now smashed to nothing under the arrival. The harvest began at once.

The pillar began to unfold, its large metal barbs stretching out into arms which held platforms for other craft, spikes armed with lightning, and ramps to release the hordes within. The top arms did not level, instead extending out rods which spread and began to create the familiar circle of lightning from which the last fleet had come. The escorts had begun to near the surface as the sky rippled within the lightning and the portal formed. Direct reinforcement would arrive soon. Nothing would stand in the way of the harvest.

...

@Mattchstick I think you're sort of on the right track but what you're getting at is very niche. For a more "standard" tolkien-esque fantasy setting you could do it like this:

You have towns that act as hubs. When in said towns, characters continue to live as normal without their players. Players can come back and pick the character back up whenever they want. When off on a quest with a group however they must diverge from the group, concluding their commitment to said group before they can drop out. This is obviously a very rough notion but I think it makes the point clear. Note that due to the scale and complexity of interstellar sci-fi, that genre gets much much harder in this realm because of difficulties managing playable space.

...

The problems that @catchamber's current proposal will run into are as follows:

The duplication of universes on the fly is going to turn people off, particularly people like me who have universes with incomprehensible amounts of lore behind them. The sci-fi world of Stardust has more lore written for it than it does stories within it by an order of magnitude, and the unwritten lore is another order greater than the written. In no world could someone ever duplicate that. And if they did, it creates massive & abhorrent continuity errors. I would never subject Stardust to that. The people that have these quantities of lore are going to be excellent worldbuilders that you absolutely want because they'll flesh out this infinite space. Yet the duplication concept is potentially alienating.

You have an infinite amount of space, made worse by employment of multiverse. I've run enough sci-fi groups to know that everything goes to shit when multiverse theory comes into play. The fundamental rules of continuity are thrown out the window and that never ends well. It gets confusing very fast, leads to all kinds of potential powerplaying, godmodding, etc. Its quite literally and open door for godmodding because as you've described it, if the "local/thread GM" has said no, someone can simply duplicate that universe and go around them to get what they want.

The last major issue I'll harp on is that you have no way to bring players together, and your proposed system will actually encourage more fragmentation. At that point your persistent universe is really just a microcosm for the site as a whole, with the exception of overriding one of the accepted rules of RP etiquette. Unless you force players together, they will diverge. I speak from experience on that. I think @The Harbinger of Ferocity summed it up quite nicely. You need to drag players into involvement with a central plotline, or else they'll just go off and do their own thing with 1-2 others which IMO defeats the point.

How I would recommend proceeding is to treat it like you would any other large group roleplay on the site. Except, due to intent to run for perpetuity, you have very clear rules relating to ad-hoc player participation. It needs to be clear when and how players can jump in and drop out and precautions need to be put in place to avoid players becoming integral to progressing the plot, then dropping out/going inactive, and processes/penalties established for when it does inevitably happen. I believe based on my own firsthand experiences that doing anything else will be a recipe for failure.

A Mix-Bag of Group Concepts

@Cryfest Well with the interest in Will Made Real I may look at actually fleshing the concept out further.

Root of all Evil may or may not actually be taken. I have someone asking about it in more detail in PMs so a casual "sounds cool" doesn't actually get anything anymore. :P

I'm also tacking on another one to the first post, dieselpunk western hybrid, optional magic elements. Also a more worked out one where I'd be prepared to run a group.

A Mix-Bag of Group Concepts

@Blue2 Good. I was skeptical that those wold take since they're so far out of line from the genre norms.

@Kassarock I'll level right back. I'd be lying of I said Reckoning of Souls was not influenced by that. It definitely was. Not really a reboot, but some of the concepts I liked I wanted to try and reincarnate.