Since this is a really long and self indulgent post, I want to put the point at the beginning.
I think we should each help each other's projects more often. Too many of us go it alone and fail to realize our own visions. Going solo can work but it doesn't always. And so with that in mind I'd like to encourage those with the itch to create stuff to offer their help to existing projects. Not my projects. Because none of mine are currently active, but to the projects out there that appeal to you at some level. Thats the gist of this. And please respond to this thread if you have any thoughts on this to discuss. I'm not interested in arguing, but I think some discussion would be great.
Self indulgent ramble begins:
After dealing with a career change this year (which I feel lucky in so far), I've begun reassessing my commitment to NWN. A little background on me in NWN: I came to the NWN PW scene late (2006) and on a Mac at the time (who primarily played with deving in Unity) so it was not until really late that I actually stepped into the toolset (2010) and even later until I did anything of substance. But I've worked on 3 PWs since then in a major capacity (as in did everything). One was my own, Arnheim, which I never truly released as a PW even though it is built as one (we played it as a closed campaign in which I also sometimes ran parallel adventures on off nights because I am crazy and had too many payers to play all at once), and the other two were related to the Vives PW (the original and a reboot that we call Llyra). While my rewrite of the original Vives is still running somewhere, the other two projects - Arnheim and Llyra - are sitting around quietly offline after having only a moderate amount of play.
Why am I not still supporting those other two projects? This is an important question, and what this post is really about. So please bear with me. I feel like telling a story here. My problem with PW development is that I get bored after I make something cool, and often want to go make something even better. I know I am not the only one with this flaw. I see it in the community all the time. I also have a feeling that in this community burn out is another issue that leads to abandonment of really cool stuff. Ye Olde Fog for example appeared to be building some really nice areas in his PW project, and had made lots of them. But you can only go so long doing such great work by yourself and he eventually tried to hand the module over to some people (I was one of them but politely refused). While burnout is not really a problem for me because I don't actually care if anyone but me ever plays my stuff, it is for others. I've seen it. I've talked to some really brilliant builders that walked away after burn out. I recall talking with Vaei years after they stepped away (one of the community's unsung heroes who I admired greatly when I started out and who after their PW days were done left us with those cool animations.) After chewing the cud for a few emails, I invited Vaei back. Because Vaei is brilliant. Vaei was a visionary kind of builder that could do a little bit of everything and thus saw the big picture and thought outside the box. But I was quietly refused. After getting burned out on the politics of it all and churning away solo on other stuff, Vaei was done. That was really sad to me but at the time I was not overly concerned because there were so many other people to potentially build and DM with.
With a smaller community however I think this becomes more problematic. I am not going to throw out the hyperbole that NWN is dying. That is just nonsense. BUT it has lost its critical mass of builders and DMs. Back in 2006 when I started playing PWs seriously I was amazed with the amount of DM talent that glomped on to each server. I saw that fade at Vives during the period 2007-2010 after the brilliance of my early experiences there. Those early experiences however blew me away. I was addicted to playing due to the level of DM involvement I could get everytime I entered the game - even when just soloing my character. I didn't see a server with Vives level of verve and vim until the short lived but brilliant Border Kingdoms started up with a like minded team in 2012r. I know a bit about them because I tried to recruit their team for my Arnheim project while they tried to recruit me as a scripter and builder. Azador and I toured each other's projects. I turned them down because I thought my project was better. From a scripting standpoint it was (an unfair comparison I admit since they didn't have a scripter), but the lesson I learned is that a team of energetic DMs trumps clever scripting. Border Kingdoms blew up to be the last great server I have seen in NWN. I'm sure there are many better crafted servers, and some do have the amount of players that Border Kingdoms sustained that first summer and into fall. But they lack the vision, energy, and excitement that BK had. I don't mean any offense. This is just my opinion. But I think it worth considering because they had too many players, at times more than the server could accommodate. This is a problem that most admins wished they had back in 2012 let alone now. BK attracted players that hadn't played NWN in years. The popularity was too much for the team, and given the server's ambitions and early ability to deliver on it, I think expectations were too high. They should have had more DMs to keep up, but when NWN lacks the critical mass of builders and DMs scarcity becomes a problem, and in this case their ambitions were greater than the team could maintain.
While Arnheim was really satisfying, I regret not joining them. They could have benefitted from all the stuff I have developed. Most of it was a perfect fit because we both had the same ideas about what makes for fun in NWN. I still remember fondly when Azador (the team lead) wandered around through the forest of Falkswoud in Arnheim with me and had a holy **** moment with my crude 1st gen terrain scripts, and then just said... "OK. I'm sold." We started negotiating about who would join who's project at that point, all doing this in Arnheim with blue jays, and foxes wandering about in the background. My point with Azador was that they needed what I already had, all the systems that enabled me to keep the world running as a solitary DM without lifting a finger beyond RPing NPCs and the expected story telling stuff. The players had the tools to interact with the world, teach other skills, languages, convert religions and do all that book keeping nonsense instead of bother DMs about it. He disagreed that that was important. And so neither of us budged. He wanted me to join his team. I wanted him to join with me. And neither of us compromised. In retrospect I think I was wrong. He had the resources to do something great, and so I should have helped them become even better and perhaps last long enough to get more DMs.
And thats what this is all about.
I think we should all help each other more. I've shared code with other people, and even packaged some projects for the vault when people requested the code. But thats not really what I mean.
I think we should each be more open to joining each other's projects and giving of our energy. And while I can do a PW solo I'm not really that excited any more about the idea (unless I got around to doing X2 Castle Amber as a short lived persistent module. I still think about this one and want to do it and no one else wants to so....) But anyway I know how seductive doing a PW solo can be and while I don't mean to rain on anyone else's parade, I would encourage you each to think twice about going it alone. Its certainly possible. Many have done it. But think about it first. I told my stupid little story above for this reason. Sometimes when you are too fixated on your own little thing, you miss out on being part of a much greater thing. If we each can let go of our egos, let go of needing full creative control, and dedicate ourselves to something else, maybe we'll create even better projects together than we each could have alone.
With this in mind I'm looking at Niv's work on a Silver Marches server. Its not one of the big projects out there so I'm not necessarily recruiting you to it. But for the time being I feel like creating some dungeon content for them because it looks like a cool project, and I like them. One thing I like about the project is that any player can actually build and submit content through their website. Niv put together a brilliant web interface. Really impressive work. Its a good fit for me because my commitment can be casual and I just don't have the time I used to have.
I might even be willing to help you out if you'd be willing to work with me. You'd have to be open to a light commitment. Maybe just DMing and a little building. Or maybe polishing a script or implementing a script system. Whatever. But the offer is out there.
And lastly I'll add a thought for people who managed to sit through this long winded and self-indulgent post:
would a formal match making service for builders, scripters and DMs work for this community? Its an interesting thought. I am thinking of getting over my aversion to Drupal and extending its calendar module on the Vault to work well for match making between players and DMs running events. But I wonder if we also could use another system for DMs, builders, scripters, and artists to offer their services freelance to other teams on a short term basis. I realize that many servers out there would need to loosen their concerns over all of us being complete crap at what we do, and that we'd probably need to be open to adapt to the server's style and quality level to make this work, but... wouldn't it be great if we all played more often with one another? We probably don't need a match making website for this. It seems that forum posts to the equivalent of "services offerred" and "services needed" would be enough. But whatever the technical aspects are, what does everyone else think of trying to do this more often? Or formalizing a place for it?
Retour en haut
Sometimes, it does get repaid though. Sometimes, those I've helped have dropped their own projects, but taken what they've learned with them to another project or active PW and contributed there instead. A couple of folks I've helped over the years have even revived or taken over PWs on the verge of extinction and normally couldn't have done so without much of that initial "help" in the past. So limiting assistance to only those projects that are "live" and populated seems a little shortsighted to me. 
That seemed like an offer to teach through experience or use their base in a PW (and even host it). Sinfar has an enormous amount of players and if they hosted a server for someone, that server would be likely to get a ton of exposure.
