Co-GM:
In reply to Germany (msg # 131):
The problem with the old style of articles was that no one knew what was relevant and what was not and it was a massive info dump for new players - we lost time and potential players to that style of news.
Flavour and player action needs to be differentiated - now we have important information being supplied by the GM in a list of actions, as posts on here saying what NPCs are doing when its important to the world and info given with budgets & orders.
We have separated the actual meat of 'what is going on' and the news becomes more about putting together something that captures the zeitgeist of that turn.
NPCs can only do so much, and story is coming more and more from the players interactions - for this to work we need to remove all the superfluous nonsense we used to publish that just distracted from actual player interaction.
What is happening is covered by your budget and the other resources, what the world feels like to those in it is what we're trying to capture in the news now.
I hope that makes sense?
While seeing your point, I mostly disagree. One important part of any RPG (and real life, for what is worth) is to discriminate what information is relevant and what is a red hirring, or just color.
The way you say, the Korean Nuclear Crisis would probably have been different:
- where would have the appearance of the space objects (that we all ignored as color, and they ended up to be the only warning) have been published?
- not appearing in nay of the players' actions list, we would not have the many suspicions we had, and that probably added to the Crisis (to the GM joy, I guess)
Worst yet, I’m afraid this is only a symptom of the course the game is taking, one that I don’t like too much
Let me explain myself (and rant a while):
Formerly (for those new players that have not lived it), the turn began with a few news, mostly events and color, that might give clues about what was going on, with time to react. Now, having no news previous to making our turns, we have no clues, and an ycrisis must be reacted when our assets are committed.
Reacting after the crisis begins limits our possibilities to reaction PA (more expensive, despite the lowering of the Price in the new rules) or direct military action.
So, we must either invest strongly in reaction PA, so limiting our action capacity just in case there's some crisis, or be left unable to react (military action aside) in case there is. Buying PAs mid-turn to respond would (aside from needing GM approval)mean being quite indebted for next turn, so increasing the problem until it snowballs, while resorting to military action is quite expensive in SU terms, probably leading to having to shortcut other projects.
This way, I’m afraid we will all end to be just spectators of the world history when we should be the history makers, limited to watch and see what crisis come over us and react to them, unable to any preventive measures (as we have no clues) other than accumulate resources to react, never being able to stop them on a preemptive way.
This is fine for most RPGs, where the players are minor actors unable to have any influence in the general course of timeline, but here we’re supposed to be the powers that decide the timeline, and, IMHO, the game is taking just the opposite course. As the game is now, we don’t have the flexibility for it to be a RPG nor the information to be a strategic game, keeping it as a pure reactive game with little (if any) maneuver margin for the players.
I’m sorry to be so negative in my foreseeing, but, once again, I’ll feel to be failing you all if I just stood silent hoping my fears do not come true and not sharing them with you just in case they have some basis.