Synodiporia OOC community

I. September-October Jaunt Vote

It’s that time again. The choices for the next jaunt are as follows:

Emodriver Frame Phileon: Earth stands accused of a terrible crime, beset by the forces of the Aurigan Empire! The only advantage the Earth Defense Forces have is the Expression Virus, which allows them to channel emotions - and their new mecha weapons drawing on it, the Emodriver Frames! But who benefits from this terrible war? Set in the far future of Doki Doki no Gakuen’s world, but requires no previous Doki knowledge. (Jaunt proposal by Bliss.)

Gransalis Abbey: For well over a hundred seasons, a population of small woodland rodents have been living in the quasi-religious community of Gransalis Abbey, founded by the brave visionary (and puzzle fiend) known only as the Warrior Rat. Now, however, a roving band of carnivores seeks refuge in the Abbey and are willing to go to war against its present inhabitants to ensure their place there. Meanwhile, a meddlesome ghost does its best to ward off disaster. (Jaunt proposal by bii.)

Slivers & Shards: A generation ago the Umbrian Protectorate splintered. For generations the Protectorate Overmind psionically directed irrigation on the dying world, enforced the peace with rightthink, defended against the subterranean Nation-Eaters, psionic kaiju that had devoured civilizations centuries ago, when the world ended.

Without the Protectorate, Wild Talents have banded together and created new polistates, miniature nations prizing freedom, fighting for resources, and discovering new powers and old customs that may create the seeds of a new world in the dying soil of this one. But the Nation-Eaters have evolved as well… shrunk, like their prey has… and now packs of sleek crystalline psychic predators are devouring the remains of the world, one city-state at a time.

This jaunt contains a heavy emphasis on psychic skills, and strong elements of survival horror. (Jaunt proposal by Matt.)



Voting will close August 26th, with a walkabout vote to follow pending interest.

II. The Final Skill Rollout: Input Needed!

As we sat down to discuss things that might be good for our last new skill rollout - and we do have a few notes saved from previous player suggestions - it occurred to us that we’re missing a vital piece: Your input.

What kinds of things would you like to see in our last selection of new skills? What possibilities have your characters chewed over that we might be able to make a reality? While we cannot and do not promise that all suggestions will make it into the final rollout, no possibility is too outlandish to suggest, at this point, so hit us with every wild idea you’ve got and we’ll see what we can do with them.

III. Synodiporia’s Final Fourth Wall

When we announced the approach of Syn’s endgame, we mentioned that we did want to throw one last fourth-wall event before we close apps for good. That will take place following the September-October jaunt!

IV. New/Old Business

Old concerns we’ve forgotten about? Something new you’d like to address? Let us know in the comments!

I. May-June Jaunt Vote

We have three old proposals returning to the voting block for the next jaunt! They are as follows:
( Read more... )
II. Helper Mods Needed!
( Read more... )
III. Information Page Updates
( Read more... )
IV. New Albion Skills
( Read more... )
V. Upcoming Arcana Plot
( Read more... )
VI. Plot Running Best Practices
( Read more... )
VII. New/Old Business
( Read more... )

I. Jaunt Vote Results/Walkabout Vote

The January-February jaunt will be Vanity Fair, by a nose. To offset that, here are three walkabout proposals to choose from.
( Read more... )
II. Remote Portals and Portal Archive
( Read more... )
III. Magic-Nerfing Jaunts
( Read more... )

I. AC Policy Clarification
( Read more... )
II. This Past Jaunt
( Read more... )
III. Mod NPCs
( Read more... )
IV. Who’s Playing Whom
( Read more... )
V. Metaplot Accessibility
( Read more... )
VI. All Hail Our New Helper Mods
( Read more... )
VII. Code Pokery
( Read more... )
VIII. Fortune Favor Skills
( Read more... )
Many of these subjects are still evolving and being worked on - we welcome your continuing feedback and questions on this post or in our email.

I. Next Jaunt Vote

For the September-October jaunt, we’re offering three not-Matt-run options that will hopefully be a little more straightforward after the craziness of Martian metaplot.
( Read more... )
II. Upcoming Fourth Wall Event!!!
( Read more... )
III. ACSavior And You, Part 2
( Read more... )
IV. Skill Suggestions
( Read more... )
V. New/Old Business
( Read more... )

I. Next TWO Jaunt Votes

We’re doing something slightly unusual with this jaunt vote, though older players may recognise the move from this time a couple years back: tossing you two lots of jaunt votes at once. Not only is it time to choose the Travelers’ destination following Majesty’s, but our July-August plans are going to need some tinkering time, and with Matt’s full-time job, it seemed prudent to put the choices in front of you all as soon as possible. (Yes, we know this isn’t usually an ideal way to set up a jaunt vote, but circumstances dictate the need for it on this occasion.)
( Read more... )
II. Upcoming App Windows
( Read more... )
III. Profile Navigation: The Bannering
( Read more... )
IV. New Skills
( Read more... )
V. Psychic Upload Archives
( Read more... )
VI. Plotting Problems Redux
( Read more... )
VII. Old or New Business
( Read more... )

I. Next Jaunt Vote

The time has come, the walrus said, to pick our March-April jaunt. We have three fresh player-submitted jaunts for your consideration:

The Triad Creation Tourney: Her Majesty’s Royal Academy of the Arts, the foremost magical arts academy of Great Britain, is hosting the triannual Triad Creation Tourney, in which they and two other magical schools--the United States’ Lone Star Academy and Japan’s Teikoku Majutsu-shi no Gakuen--compete to create the ultimate magical artistic creation. This year, however, things are far from going as planned. With rumors of cheating rampant and a would-be evil overlord having snuck into the school, the Travelers will have their work cut out for them getting this Triad Creation Tourney to its end!

Elsewhere University: A college and nearby town coexist alongside the Fair Folk, who come in all shapes, sizes, walks, and scuttles of life. Human, fae, and Other are caught up in a potentially disastrous Changeling exchange that will lead to a rescue mission in the Elsewhere. Based on charminglyantiquated's Elsewhere University world.

The Missing Photographer: A photographer working with a conservation group has gone missing the day after taking a photograph of what appears to be an actual fairy. While the fairies try to figure out what to do with their new guest to best protect their home, a group of rescuers has been called in by the conservationists to do a search for the missing person. But that isn't the only problem - the expedition to document and protect a patch of virgin rainforest from corporate desecration is under attack by a company mole who's putting plans of sabotage into high gear.



Voting will close the evening of Wednesday, February 14th, to allow time for a walkabout vote if necessary.

II. Jaunt Schedule/February AC

After a slight strategic delay on posting the week 3 mingle, we’re going to do our best to keep the end of the jaunt on its original schedule, since there will be very little Liminal time in February as it is. At most, remaining mingles will be delayed no more than 24 hours, and we don’t expect that to extend beyond this coming mingle. Walkabout folks, don’t forget to check out the player-driven content you guys have - the next ‘official’ mingle will be heavily dependent on what happens over the next couple weeks there!

Since February is a short calendar month anyway, and especially since Liminal time will be so scarce, we’re going to allow an extra 48 hours for players to accumulate and submit February AC, making the final deadline for the AC period March 2nd. If you do use comments from the very beginning of March for February, please don’t also submit the same comments for your March AC; if you don’t need comments from those days for February, you’re more than welcome to use them in March.

III. Profile Navigation

It’s occurred to us that, while visually interesting, our current profile navigation isn’t terribly mobile-view-friendly, or all that helpful if the background image fails to load properly. We know there are simpler code blocks available out there in DW-land - but what do you guys think? Should we change Syn’s profile pages to be a little more streamlined?

IV. Old Business

None of the earlier SOTG matters that were still under consideration have been finalized yet - it’s been a hectic winter for most of us. But we haven’t forgotten them, either! Ongoing discussions for old SOTG issues should fall under this header.

V. New Business

If you have new questions or concerns, bring them up here!

Sorry for the delay in getting this out to y’all - Matt’s vacation threw a couple of wrenches into our schedule. Without further ado:

I. December Liminal Event/Next Jaunt Voting/App Window
( Read more... )
II. Jaunt Plotting
( Read more... )
III. Un-Taking Skills
( Read more... )
IV. Information Indexing
( Read more... )
V. ????? (PROFIT)

Is there old business that we missed, or new business that you think needs addressing? If so, please let us know here!

I. Jaunt Vote Results

Our October/November jaunt will be Night Falls on Yensid. There was very little interest expressed on the poll in a walkabout specifically for this jaunt, so we’re presently thinking about not holding one; please let us know ASAP if you think you will need an alternate.

II. Mingle Length

Now that we’ve had most of a jaunt’s worth of 10-day mingles for players to interact with, we’d like to check in with y’all on how you think that pacing works out. Is it too slow to get anything done, too much of an infodump when the mingle finally ticks over, just right? Is there another issue with this pacing that we haven’t thought of?

Jaunt pacing is an eternal struggle to get right, so we’re open to feedback on how best to wrangle mingle length. The one thing we really can’t do is go any longer on mingles than 10 days, as that pushes past the point where movement is necessary to keep people engaged.

III. Skills

The last SOTG generated a vigorous discussion on the nature, size, and comprehensibility of our various skill lists. We’re still feeling out a lot of the possibilities here. At the very least, when we do make new skills in the future we can endeavor to give them clearer and more widespread prerequisite skills - thanks to Fran, Blue, and Thomas making a stats sheet for the Acquired Skills spreadsheet, we have a much better idea of which current skills are the most popular and what makes for logical additions.

Regarding the sheer number of Favor skills, it is worth noting that any given character is only eligible for a small handful - there may be over forty skills on the list, but the vast majority of those are limited by Arcana marks. It’s been suggested that we add a comment index to the Favor skills page, listing what skills a given Mark makes a character eligible for; would you find this a helpful addition?

Other suggestions included the ability to un-take skills or even entire skill trees that a player’s come to regret having their character keep, and expanding the capabilities of existing skills rather than continually adding to the list. We do like the idea of being able to swap out individual skills, but not lopping off an entire line of skills at once, and would love some input on how to best make such a mechanic work. As to the skill lists themselves, the original intent behind their periodic expansions was to ensure no player ran out of skill options, as well as to reward players’ efforts to dig into the inner workings of Liminal Space and the network (that being the effort that brought us the Liminal Energy tree); sometimes expansions to existing skills will be feasible, but other times, we’ll still want to do a rollout of fresh skills.

Finally, another popular suggestion from the last SOTG was to offer new players a free liminal/psychic/combo/favor skill for hitting standard AC during their first jaunt. This would help ease the learning curve that new characters face in comparison to more established characters and give them a chance to catch up. We rather like this suggestion, and plan to implement it with the next app round. We will grandfather this back to the start of the Pogemon Jaunt--any earlier and the character would have been accepted in time for the triple skill month in celebration of the start of Phase Three. A toplevel will be added to the Activity Check page for reporting these skill gains.

IV. IC and OOC Orientation

One of the suggestions we got for helping orient new characters was to have a regular IC psychic post explaining ‘this is what you’ve just found yourself in, here’s what to do now.’ We think that’s a fantastic suggestion, as was the follow-up of not burdening one player with the constant expectation of posting it and instead having a base template that various characters can embellish upon.

To that end: How should we handle sign-ups for posting this IC explanation, and what information needs to be included in it? Something like this has been suggested before by veteran players in the past, and several characters have been willing to ICly contribute to this list in some sort of rotation system. The problem lies in the fact that at the time this was first mentioned, few people were either unwilling or unable to ICly offer up some more important meta details to newcomers, whether it be from OOC business making it difficult or simply the nature of a particular character leading to secrets being held.

This leads to issues such as not knowing what to expect from certain arcana as a newcomer (which arcana are generally seen as friendly, which are bad news, etc.), certain recurring “other” beings rarely being mentioned as being dangerous or important (the Eldritch horrors, the Illuminants, the Familiar Faces, the Starmovers, etc.) Furthermore this makes it difficult for many new players to adapt to scenarios the established players have handled before (see: the current Jaunt). We can easily throw together a Google doc with the basics and make that available to the poster rotation; the posters themselves can work out a bi-monthly rotation. We would be happy to hear your thoughts on this, and what your characters can contribute, if anything, to the cause.

Another suggestion was for a buddy system, with Synodiporia oldbies signing up to be paired with a newbie, whose character they’d thread with and help get used to both liminal space and the Jaunts. We like this idea in principle; we just need to figure out how we’d work it. It seems clear to us that the buddy system would be difficult to formally institute ICly, but it could be possible to work OOCly. If we do it, we might do what Miso suggested and make it volunteer-based where the oldbie volunteers would be put in a pool to be drawn/matched from for newbies who sign up for a buddy. Time zones, general availability, and multiple ways to contact them would be provided for volunteers on both sides--and possibly if they think they’ll be going on the walkabout or the main Jaunt, should the upcoming Jaunt have one. We’d put a new one up each app cycle, because availabilities do change, and link them at the top of the intro mingle.

Yet another suggestion that we as mods are interested in going with would be to have, as part of the plotting post for Jaunts, a sub-thread specifically for new players (and possibly new characters for old players?) where they can let people know they’re looking for people to plot with, so that those new players don’t get lost in the shuffle. Would players be interested in that?

V. Conversation Space

Finally: should Arcana introductions be the first thing that incoming characters thread? On the downside, it often means characters do not know what questions to ask, and when they are asked what the conversation was about, they have to wait until it’s done to answer, and with the mod team busy, that sometimes takes a month. On the other hand, is there a more sensible, intuitive time? Intro mingles happen after apps have closed and before a Jaunt begins - the least busy time in our modwork cycle, and the most regular, memorable moment so that we can make sure everyone gets their thread. Likewise, certain facets of the game exposition are most easily delivered up-front, before anything else happens. Before deciding on this, we’d like to hear more player feedback. Right now, the alternatives we are proposing are:

1) keep the conversation space timing as it is.

2) a conversation in the moment of time after an intro mingle and before a Jaunt (as early, regular, and low-mod-activity as possible, while not keeping players held up in their initial CR threads & giving them time to formulate questions). This has the added virtue of happening right before players are occupied by the immediate concerns of a Jaunt, so if the conversation takes all Jaunt to thread, it’s still natural that they might be kept busy with no chance to discuss it (especially if they infiltrate) until they get back into Liminal Space.

3) Give every incoming character a token they can spend at the time of their choosing to have the Arcana conversation when they are ready for it. This lets players time the conversation as they like, but the timing may be awkward for the mods, and while it lets the new characters ask their questions strategically, kind of like the World Series did, it’s actually got more player utility than what veteran characters have had - this can be bad, if players find it unfair, or good, as it gives new players a better way to take an active, important role in metaplot, which is one of the problems we’re trying to solve.

Your thoughts, critique, and patience are, as always, appreciated. Right now, we’re just discussing these options, but when we’ve heard your feedback and worked out the new possibilities, we can post a poll and put it to a vote.

VI. New Business

Did we miss something? Is there a new wrinkle in the land of Synodiporia that needs to be brought to our attention? Please let us know!