afibon
Active member
Since people are already submitting big lore docs and CT is apparently accepting them already, I feel like this needs to be brought up before people are complaining about a bloated and useless lore a year from now: you also need to change how you are handling player submissions.
While the concept of player-driven lore is cool and all, any lack of QA and -especially- foresight will mean that you will end up with a bunch of useless lore that no one but the author will really know how to make a roleplay story out of.
Main issue I see is that 99% of articles submitted are hard lore: documents written literally like a wikipedia article that list hard facts about pretty much every detail about a city or whatever. Big problem with this is that there is no place for interpretation, no subtlety, no room to maneuver for any would-be short story or any random event. Going back to the 'foresight' issue, if you accept lore like this without considering how the guys actually making the events could use them in the future, you'll end up with GMs being 'confined' by badly written lore that they are not really comfortable with.
A solution would be to start pushing writers to do more story-based lore; or more specifically, start writing articles with an unreliable narrator, hearsay, rumors, events as told by biased sources, faulty intelligence, etc. This way you give event makers a lot lee-way to interpret existing lore as best fit them for the events they are trying to make.
Example: Event kinda contradicts Mr Big Boy's accepted lore about City 123? You can just chalk that up to the unreliable narrator.
It would make for better reads and a better work flow in the back end of event production.
While the concept of player-driven lore is cool and all, any lack of QA and -especially- foresight will mean that you will end up with a bunch of useless lore that no one but the author will really know how to make a roleplay story out of.
Main issue I see is that 99% of articles submitted are hard lore: documents written literally like a wikipedia article that list hard facts about pretty much every detail about a city or whatever. Big problem with this is that there is no place for interpretation, no subtlety, no room to maneuver for any would-be short story or any random event. Going back to the 'foresight' issue, if you accept lore like this without considering how the guys actually making the events could use them in the future, you'll end up with GMs being 'confined' by badly written lore that they are not really comfortable with.
A solution would be to start pushing writers to do more story-based lore; or more specifically, start writing articles with an unreliable narrator, hearsay, rumors, events as told by biased sources, faulty intelligence, etc. This way you give event makers a lot lee-way to interpret existing lore as best fit them for the events they are trying to make.
Example: Event kinda contradicts Mr Big Boy's accepted lore about City 123? You can just chalk that up to the unreliable narrator.
It would make for better reads and a better work flow in the back end of event production.