A World Without Boundaries
NarniaMUCK is a Role-Playing Muck. Our job as staff is to come up with ways to encourage and foster great role-play and great stories. We do so in variety of ways--imposing limitations on the characters and their world, helping bring the right characters together, writing larger arcs that everyone can take part in, and building an ever-growing playground for us all to play "make believe" in.
Sometimes we try things and they don't work or they work for a while in the current situations, but when the Muck evolves, sometimes they don't work anymore.
Borders is one of those things. It was designed to impose realistic limitations on the characters--so they didn't cross vast distances in the matter of minutes. Unfortunately, as the Muck has evolved, it has also become a hindrance to "getting people together to role-play".
I've removed the border restrictions. You will still see the message "You have crossed a FULL border" at the border crossings, but you will not be prevented from crossing, regardless of how many crossings you've made.
Greater freedoms mean greater responsibility! This means each and every player and YOU are responsible for making sure your stories make sense in regards to time. If you travel a great distance then a great deal of time must pass. Your RP logs, your RP interactions MUST reflect this. If the travel is quicker than normal--role play why. I expect a good story to explain why you arrived more quickly than you should have. The quicker the arrival, the better the story required. This means if you want to cross all of Narnia in minutes--I'll be expecting to read Shakespeare when I read the RP log.
We plan to have some guidelines/rules-of-thumb that can be used to get a sense of how long IC-ly traveling across the world takes. Generally, an outdoor room can be thought to be around 1 to 2 miles across. Until we put out a more detailed guide, use your common sense--and remember that are no fast transportation devices, the distances we think nothing of at all are pretty long in terms of travel time...
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Comments
Well, I think this is a
Well, I think this is a smashing idea.
I was one of the larger proponents of the border system when it first went into place - it was nice knowing exactly how far one could expect to reasonably travel in a day, and to have a system in place in-game to help determine that. I also liked that it encouraged en-route RP - the destination wasn't the entire focus, so if, say Petra was to journey from the Waste to Sted Cair, he'd have more reason to visit the lions, catch a few friendly faces in Beruna, and so forth.
This seems like a nice middle-of-the-road solution to the shortcomings of the border system to me. We still know exactly how far we can reasonably travel, which still gives us reason for en-route RP, but it's less rigid about it. I think our playerbase can handle the removal of borders, now that there's still a system in place to mark a reasonable day's travel.
The message still displaying
The message still displaying was something of a 'happy accident'. I wanted to disable the borders with the minimum number of changes to the code and database. When identified what I thought would work--it worked, but the message remained...I was about to remove it and then I realized the message may be helpful in reminding us that we've gone a long ways, given how easy it is to do 'w' many times and not really think about it. So I kept the message. Also, various statuses will tell you how many border crossings you have left--they'll just never get used. At some point when we're modifying a status they'll probably go away.
I do still want to get us a rule-of-thumb posted somewhere handy, perhaps on the website and in info. But I didn't want the change to wait on the guide, since it'll take some painstaking work to do it right.
Confession
I've run back and forth across borders largely for OOC reasons ... not trying to get anywhere specific (I'm still too clueless of newbie to have a grasp of navigation!) but just trying to find enough rooms with forage-ables to load up until my "arms" are full (haha, what am I, a unitaur!?) since I seem to go from "stuffed" to "very hungry" in just a few hours.
I realize everything was probably intended for challenge, but I guess I'm focused perhaps too much on trying to join in any RP I can access. Thus far, I don't think I've RPed anyplace too far out of reach, just my herdmates and a few members of the Ulfden wolf pack.