Hey guys,
     Just an old shadowrun lover here. I'm hoping to get involved in the building of this new game and I had a suggestion. It would be nice if some special attention was payed to the system whereby players get transported about the map. If there was a decent driving time (flying time for air vehicles) associated with getting from point A to point B I think it would add a meaningful element to the roleplaying activities.

      Players won't just unrealistically bop around, they have to take their time to travel from place to place. A night would consist of fewer stops, and more meaningful choices would have to be considered. Do I go out to the bar? Do I go and visit my contact? Also for flying and drone usage, this would provide some depth to the field of battle/play.

      And lets not forget the awesomeness of vehicle battles. Car chases, Dog fights, being tailed, ramming into walls. Will this new grid system support our beloved car fights? I think a full system of highways is out of the scope of what we are going to benefit from. However, consider having a couple main pathways in between locations which could be travelled or not. Side streets would be available to the runners looking for less attention, and their vehicles would not be spotted by other players in passing.

      Just some ideas to throw out there, but I was really inspired by the initial stuff posted about the grid system. I feel like our plots will really benefit from having such a big expanse of land and street to take place in. I can just see it now, our team lifting off from an undisclosed landing field.. whipping up over the barrens, passing low over empty streets in the middle of the night. Our approach takes us out over the water, seattle's downtown comes into view. What a rush!

      Let me know what you think, anyone. Opinions are welcome.

    - Chron

Well, the system can support anything theoreticly. I mean, I well know that you can run a game rather well with one active staffer, 4 regular player's, and one or two blank rooms. Thats how PRP's are run, to some extent.

As for travel time, I'm middling. While I can see how it add's some depth to the game, and some concept of distence between locations, it makes it difficult if I just want to RP with person x, and that person's sitting in a coffee shop elsewhere. Or if I just want to troll about to find the right place for the scene I have in mind, etc. It makes that rather difficult. I'd disagree with travel time in the convention sense.

As most of us only have a few hours to play a night, I doubt many people would want to spend an hour driving from one part of Redmond to the other.

Also, seeing as how Vehicle Combat Requires GM support, there is no need for a buttload of rooms which will just waste away 98% of the time as not many players/GMs will use them.

Anything you want to RP can be done in one room.

-Hades

I agree with Hades, really. When a player has limited time to play, forcing them through code to idle is unproductive and un-fun.

But it also brings up an issue people tend to mention pretty regularly. Trust. We trust that players will make rational decisions about travel time. Yes, in order to facilitate play, sometimes people have to bop around in a rather odd fashion. But I'd like to think that players in the middle of some IC activity in which time has a real component can be trusted to make reasonable choices about travel time.

The new MUX has no freeways or streets. It does have, however, sections of 'outside' in front of every IC destination. If people need to do a freeway/street chase, we're hoping to have PrP rooms available for the purpose.

The current grid has the bus stop in the UG and the taxi out of Redmond, both of which take time and give you never changing emits.  While it's fun the first time or two, it gets boring a while later when you really want to get over there and you have to wait and see the same thing again.  We do give people the trust to say that finishing a scene over in P-yup doesn't mean that you can pop over to a fight in Redmond a minute later.   

I rather like having a smaller amount of rooms. With place code, views, or just poses, you can create an entire different atmosphere.  Especially for those roads that will constantly be changing due to traffic, construction, weather conditions, and accidents.  Plus, with the general area rooms that don't show who is in them (are we still doing that, Noor?) and the outside areas of buildings, we don't need side streets so people can go off the beaten path.  Just coming up with a place off the beaten path all of your own is nifty to me.

Not to head off topic, but I made a point about this in Waffle's other thread about time code, or IC time. I think its quite feasable if a character wraps up a scene in, say Downtown, to zip over to Redmond to get into a fight scene, as long as they RP that it took them a little bit to get there. Because of the abstract nature of time on a MUSH, and the fact that scenes with folks wait for no one, I think its reasonable to suggest that I can say, "That scene's over. I can say it ICly took place like, 20-40 minutes ago, even if it took place IRL like, 4 seconds ago, and go over to this scene here."

This isn't saying that if I call for fire support or assisstance on a radio that that same person who was ICly in one place can zip over to the other place immediatly, because my scene has now established that he was over there and not some other place, and it will take him time in my scene to get here. But that should be independent from any other scene unless the phone call inturrupted one.

Right... you get what I mean.

Yeah, that's kind of what I meant, if it wasn't made clear. 

If two people in Redmond get in a fight and a third pops over from P-yup after finishing up a scene thirty seconds earlier is fine.  Switch the times all you want.  But if that third person got a call for help from one of the other two, then they shouldn't get to do that.  Or if the third was told OOC to get over there to help out with a fight. 

I'm all for switching times during scenes and such, but getting backup there OOC when they've been on the opposite side of town or coming into a side of town they normally don't doesn't make sense to me.