Setting up the RPG - Everyone please give input

[Hollywood Heidi]

Okay ya'll, I was thinking about the RPG throughout the day and thought about past issues and how they could best be resolved so that the RPG goes more smoothly and organized this time around.

Here's some of my ideas:

1. Each week in our time is a day of island time.

2. If we go with #1, then we can even further organize by saying that Sunday is very early morning, Wednesday is the middle of the day, and Saturday is very late night.

3. I can put a header on the RPG that has the date and the forecast of the different areas, etc. By keeping track of the date, we can do fun little things like remember birthdays, anniversaries, or other such events of our past. By putting the forecast, it can make it seem more real and it'll make it easier for everyone to remember that it happens to be raining, so perhaps you should forget your idea of getting in a round of golf until it lets up.


Alrighty, as far as areas, it'd be nice if we have some type of a map along with how long it'd take to travel to certain areas. During our old RPG, people were hopping around from one side of the island to the other in what seemed like minutes, a problem that comes up when everyone has different amounts of availability when it comes to being able to kick back and have fun. So if we have a map and divide it into areas, that'd be great. It doesn't need to have special names or anything. Heck, I'd be happy with simply A1, B1, C3, or whatever. Maybe if we make it more like a grid, it'd be easy to figure how long it'll take without having to constantly look at the map.

Anybody have access to a map of what the island looks like and anybody good with photoshop or whatever to grid it? If someone comes across a map, I can try the griding, but to be honest, I'm not all that great at it.

How long does it take to get from one side of the island to the other? We know that the Tailies were on the opposite side, but it took them a little longer since they were carrying Sawyer. So, factoring that in, does anybody know?

It would also be neat if we had someone in charge of the other important living things, such as polar bears, the island monster security system thing, boars, and other such random things (like chickens). Here's an example of what I mean. Let's say that the person in charge of the monster wants the monster to appear over where the front of the plane is when some people go there to find the transceiver. The person would do something along these lines:

- (In the thread for the area of the front of the plane)

***MONSTER***

A loud and strange growling sound is heard outside of the plane, followed by the plane giving a slight lurch

- (In other threads that are near the front of the plane area)

***MONSTER***

A faint sound like growling is heard to the east. (or west, north, south, depending on the area you're posting it in)


I'm thinking that by doing this, it will make it more realistic and give it a feeling of suspense as well as involve the whole group rather than everyone being able to randomly have things disappear. Of course everyone is more than welcome to PM the person in charge of the monster, polar bears, boars, etc. and request that one or some appear in a certain area for plot purposes.

If you're interested in being the controller of these creatures, please let me know and we can discuss it further. ;D

Anybody else have any ideas on how to make this run more smoothly or to add to the fun?

[Ethan Rom]

That all sounds great, Heidi. I'm good with that idea.

I have no idea how to grid, but here are some maps I already posted in the LOST Maps thread.

[Hollywood Heidi]

Oh wow, those are amazing! I'll have to take a longer look at it when I get home to determine the amounts of travel time from each location to the other. I could probably just name the areas as they're shown on the map.

I'm so Exalting you and giving you a Karma point for that!

[Ethan Rom]

Hooray! Karma-ed by Heidi.

[Brittany]

I think these ideas are great. I can't wait to start the new RPG. ;D

[Bella]

Sounds like it's going to be good, i've found that on other RPG's they've fallen down on the idea of letting people create there own threads where they've created them and they have about twenty the same with only two people interacting on each. There was also the idea that you post more then a certain amount of sentences to keep it going and so that it makes it more interesting for everyone, the flaw with that is it means people have to reach this target and sometimes it can be aloud of rambling on about nothing in particular.

[Hollywood Heidi]

Brit! Man how I've missed you! So glad to see you around again. ;D

I think I'll have this set up the same was as the Firefly one. For those of you who don't know how that's set up, it's the same as the old LOST RPG where we have threads of different locations. It'd be too confusing to have boards and threads within the boards. Too many places to look for the new posts and it'd be hard to keep up that way. I can always easily create new area threads.

So my question is what would be good names for the threads? Let's try to name the areas like they have on the island map that I'd made a grid of so that it makes it easier on all the players. It would be a good idea to break up the beach area a bit more, as Hamilton suggested. We had over 100 pages of posts for that.

So, anybody interested in helping out with the whole other random living things?

[Ethan Rom]

Well, perhaps East, West and Centre parts of the beach, but for seperate characters' 'homes' we could maybe have a seperate thread? I think I said something about this. Like if a character wants to speak to Ana, she'll go to 'Ana's Tent' or possibly 'Sawyer's Tent'

As for the other places, uh....I'll be back with suggestions.

[Cyrus]

OK….uh….

Airport
Oceanic Airlines Flight 815
The Beach Crash Site
The Beach Camp (with the seperate thread for character homes etc.)
The Caves Camp (same)
The Fuselage
Outside the Hatch
Inside the Hatch
The Black Rock
Front Part of the Plane
Jungle Outskirts of the Beach
The Medical Hatch (The Staff)
The Others’ Encampment
Golf Course
Volcanic Beach

The Jungle will be….difficult to say the least. Should we have it like we did, with Jungle-East and so on?

[Hollywood Heidi]

Well, it was even confusing with Jungle-East, etc. I'm thinking maybe we should stick with more of a grid-like area and keep the areas at 3 miles by 3 miles. Keeps things less confusing so that we don't have two separate groups posting in the same area but are completely not within ear shot of each other. So for example, if we had an area called Jungle F4. But since there are a few important places in F4, we break that area down into separate threads of the caves, the cockpit, and the beachcraft.

So, with our first RPG, we just had separate threads for the different locations. For our new RPG, does everyone want to do it that same way or would you guys all like to have separate sub-boards and threads within those sub-boards of specific areas in that square? I could do something like this

SUB-BOARD: F4 - Southern Jungle Area (description of board: Includes the caves, cockpit, hatch, beachcraft)

SUB-BOARD: F3 - South West Beach, Some Jungle (description of board: Part of the beach where mid-plane survivors have made camp as well as some jungle outskirts)

Is it too confusing to use the grid letters and numbers? Do you guys have suggestions on how to have it done in the easiest way possible for everyone?

[Nameless]

My suggestion is that you make a sub-board for a few of the grids. Like A-1-2-3 and B-1-2-3 get one suboard, where you highligh important parts of thoose sections. Repeat untill all is covered.

[Hollywood Heidi]

Hm, true. I could always keep it at just the letters, and if any of them get too crowded with specific areas, I can always break that sub-board into two sub-boards and move the threads that apply to the new sub-board.

I still need someone to help out with other random living things.

[Ashlee Stone]

This isn't really to do with the grid thing, but could we make it a rule that when you RP you have to write in standard English? For example: typn lyk dis iz nt alowd
I also think the grid idea is really good, but I don't really know what you mean by sub-boards...sorry...

[Ashlee Stone]

For the beach, you could break it up into different area's on the beach, such as in/by the ocean, by the cliffs/rocks/rockpools/ where the beach meets jungle,
Or maybe Left, Middle and Right... neither sound that good, but maybe if people suggest somre more idea's then it might work?

[ana]

All these ideas seem pretty sensible to me. I don't really have anything to add, since I don't really know what was wrong with the old RPG (cos I wasn't in it ). You guys would be the best judge of what works and what doesn't. I'm easy as far as thread names and such goes, I think once we get going, we'll become more familiar with whatever you choose to do, be it grid numbers or compass points.

[Hollywood Heidi]

Okay peoples, I'm going to start setting it up so that you can see how it'll look and give input. I'm going to keep everything locked from posting until we're really ready to begin. First off, I need to find out who never responded back and add the cannon characters back to the Available list. I also need to remove their profiles as well as any original character profiles of those unresponsive people from the Character Profiles thread so things won't get confusing.

[Hollywood Heidi]

Okay players, I created a whole board just for the Character Bios! Thought it'd make things load quicker instead of having to shuffle through tons of bios.

Also, you can add information or new pictures for your character whenever you'd like, or ask questions about people's characters, etc.

Please create a new thread there for your character and copy and paste your profiles there. I'll delete the old CHARACTER BIOS threads as each profile is posted. I'm going to lock up that thread so that nobody else posts their bios there.

[Hollywood Heidi]

Alrighty, here's what I've decided to do as far as the areas are concerned. I'm just gonna start with one thread for the areas. There are three people who have the administrative ability to create new threads. Those are myself, tikkabilla, and hamilton. If ever you need a new location, let us know in this thread. In future, I might create a Request a new Location thread, but for now, this will do.

Once we start getting several locations, I can just start breaking it into separate boards depending on what areas we seem to be favoring.

For right now, I'm going to create the following:

- Syndey Airport - for all of us who are on the flight

- Inside the Hatch - for Desmond (we currently don't have a Desmond character, but I'm going to just assume he spends most of his time there for now)

For those of you who are on the island already, what areas would you like me to create for you? I'm just going to go ahead and create some jungle areas and beach areas where you can start for now. I'll use the areas on the map that Hamilton posted saying there were Other sightings for now.

[Hollywood Heidi]

In case you haven't noticed, the new LOST RPG has officially started! Question for you guys. Should we have the flashbacks be posted in the RPG as we did with the old one or have everyone add any flashbacks they do as a reply to their Character Bios?

[Ethan Rom]

It would be best to have the flashbacks of a character in the same place, just not sure if it should be in character bios......good as place as any, I suppose, though.