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[exodius1]

I'll be honest; that idea doesn't appeal to me on its own for same reason picking an embark at random doesn't appeal to me.

What if I tell you there is a story I have buried in there for the observant to discover... It is not very good story mind, but there is something to get the RP flowing...^^

Sorry, Sorry, I'll stop now...

[ChristianWeiseth]

Interesting thread, I think this longing for succession game is really a longing for a fully functioning shared "Dwarf Fortress" experience in a multiplayer format.

As a relative new player I have only read Boatmurdered, one that was focused on a simultaneous comic of the fortress though i don't remember the name and right now I had to stop reading Gemclod because of I got the spoiler part and I want to experience the spoilers myself instead of reading about them.

This is just a personal taste, but the more narrative the better, also limiting the focus on about a dozen dwarves to make the reader feel connected to the dwarves. Gemclod was very good read in these aspects, especially with all the diaries, songs, pictures it surpassed Boatmurdered as a story though Boatmurdered is a more a comedy. I have been trying to get a group of friends together to do a succession game, but they are not into the whole writing story. As a warhammer 8th edition player what I liked most about the battles was writing the narrative of the battles as a novel instead of just the normal "turn 1: 4 spearmen dead" etc. But it takes a lot of time, something we don't generally have.

It is too bad games like Stonehearth always seem to fail just a short distance in front of the DF style epicness mark. We live in 2017 now and everyone have 4G/fiber or high speed copper, and in 2020 everyone will most likely be gaming on 5G with several gbits speed anywhere. Multiplayer is the future, and I think also for Toady and Threetoe if they want to increase their donation then maybe they should start thinking about outsourcing DF multiplayer functions or doing it themselves. Just COOP is more than enough, but you would need to be able have both host and connected players be able to issue commands.

With DF what would be theoretically awesome would be to have it possible for someone to play adventure mode simultaneous in a player that is playing fort mode. Though I think for DF this means a lot of FPS death related unnecessary variables need to be removed from the game.

What is sad is that all the other games that try to mimic dwarf fortress always flop. I see a dozen new simulation games that try to go for a DF style on steam but they always fail because their scope is limited and there is essentially no depth. And I'm so dissapointed in Stonehearth because the only reason I donated a lot of money to that development was because they said Multiplayer would be a huge part of the game both COOP and PVP. I play Rimworld and Prison Architect from time to time, but no other game comes close to DF which is why it sucks that we are stuck essentially the only mp experience being "play by mail" which I think will be the eventual death of Dwarf Fortress when we old geezers either die out or become too accustomed to the singleplayer experience of  !FUN!.

[exodius1]

Snip!

I think you are partially right but the "play-by-mail" is the thing that really endeared me to this succession forts. Kinda reminds me when you used to pass around the keyboard and mouse before you had internet, the whole "swap on death" mentality^^

[Bearskie]

Is it my turn?

Narrative is good. It's like peanut butter. Goes well with anything. Good narrative elevates average forts to good forts, and good ones to legendary ones. Narrative is great!

Unfortunately, narrative is hard work. There's a limited number of players on the forum, and a limited number of hours to go around. When you see different players hanging out in certain threads, it isn't because they like sticking to their cliques, it's because there's just not enough time to get involved in multiple forts, let alone build a decent narrative in each one.

As OP you're just going to have to accept that not all your players are up to the task of giving detailed expositions during their turn. Different strokes and all. You deal with the hand you get - sometimes you get literary Shakespeare, sometimes you get Urist burn-the-fortress-down. Trying to force a literary stance tends to backfire and drive potential players away. Of course, it might also do the complete opposite and elevate the story significantly (Clobbermountains).

TLDR: Succession forts are hard, man.

[Telgin]

Multiplayer is the future, and I think also for Toady and Threetoe if they want to increase their donation then maybe they should start thinking about outsourcing DF multiplayer functions or doing it themselves. Just COOP is more than enough, but you would need to be able have both host and connected players be able to issue commands.

With DF what would be theoretically awesome would be to have it possible for someone to play adventure mode simultaneous in a player that is playing fort mode. Though I think for DF this means a lot of FPS death related unnecessary variables need to be removed from the game.

There is a way to host a DF server that lets multiple clients connect and issue commands to it, although for the life of me I can't remember the name of the software that allows it.  It doesn't really fundamentally change the gameplay, but I guess it could be a fun experiment to allow people to continuously run a fort, day in and day out by switching control.

And you're pretty much right about FPS death related variables getting in the way of multiple people playing the game in a true multiplayer server fashion.  I wouldn't really call said variables unnecessary since they're part of the depth, but you'd almost have to make the game multithreaded to be able to simulate multiple concurrent forts on a single server, and that's already a hard enough problem that Toady has basically kicked that can down the road indefinitely.

Unfortunately, running fort mode and adventure mode concurrently, even if they were in different map tiles that didn't directly interact, would introduce a lot of other problems.  The two modes run at different time scales, for example, and you'd have to find ways to address that.  Doable, probably, but it would likely mean rewriting huge parts of adventure mode.  More than simply farming off stuff to an outside developer could really help with, even if Toady were willing.


Anyway, on topic, I'll agree with the notion that narrative is very important to me when reading community forts and succession games.  That, in turn, is a big reason that I haven't paid many succession games much attention and have no intention of joining one.

As Bearskie said, the quality is a mixed bag at best, and that bothers me.  I greatly enjoy writing detailed narratives for these forts, and it would pain me to turn it over to someone else who barely writes anything for their turn and doesn't include any screenshots.  Or take it in a bizarre direction, like the part of Boatmurdered where the narrator suddenly became a basement dwelling nerd pretending to be a Dungeons and Dragons wizard.  If it's a more mundane community fort that I can control, I can at least ensure that the main updates are of consistent style and effort.

I guess if you join a succession game you go into it expecting that and probably wouldn't put as much effort into it, but for that reason alone I'd want to just start an ordinary community fort over a succession game.

Relatedly, I've found that it's also impossible to guess what community forts will be popular.  I can say with strong conviction and a fair bit of evidence that effort counts for something, but it is entirely possible to try too hard when setting one up.

[Bearskie]

Relating back to the original post - have succession forts lost their appeal? I believe this question may be easily answered by looking at the all-time top views in the CG&S forum. Below is a compilation of Bay12 forts above 50k views, segregated according to version and viewcount.



The implications are fairly obvious. Succession forts have clearly underperformed in the latest version. However, I beg to differ on why this is the case. I don't believe it is due to an oversaturation of knowledge or literary-challenged players. Even in previous versions players knew what to expect; still they manage to create good stories. Not all forts are lore mountains like Spearbreakers either, many have their fair share of lulls and less-than-stellar storywriting.

I blame the lack of emergent gameplay in DF2014 for the downturn. You cannot tell good stories if there is nothing to write about. Yes, DF2014 has a much deeper scope of events, but a titan with over 1000 kills and having destroyed an entire civilization is still a titan, and it doesn't matter when an axe lord lops off its head in one action. Previous versions had consistent large sieges; even if they weren't challenging, it broke the tedium and made for good RP. These days you'd be lucky to get anything larger than 30. We can try to bandaid these problems with mods and challenge rules, but this drives the newcomers away.

What remains to be seen is whether this is an inevitable state of affairs. Will the new stories of the upcoming DF2017 reach the bars set by its predecessors? I believe they will. DF's audience is bigger than ever, and the benefit of being able to take active action against our enemies should not be underestimated. Even if the difficulty is found lacking, it gives players an avenue to do something instead of sitting idly by and waiting for the RNG to throw us a curveball. Mark my words, one year from now site excursions will be the backbone of every new fort that comes out, and the next legend of DF2017 will be played in complete vanilla, with zero restrictions or gimmicks, like all the era-defining forts that preceded it.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

except Spearbreakers, because that thing was a mutant

Another interesting trend to note is the drop in community games over the years. In v0.28 SFs like Halltraded or Sparkgear weren't even close to the popularity of CGs like Nist Akath and Blockedlance. Come v0.31, the Battlefailed saga and Deathgate had risen to prominence, but there was still a healthy serving of CGs like Glitterglen or Towersoared. By v0.34 however they seemed to be dying out, with Roomcarnage being the sole exception. Today, the only CG above 50k views running a DF2014 version is Archcrystal, maybe Silentthunders if you count it.

On the other hand, since 2012 we have seen the rise of illustrated games, so this may just be a new form of CGs replacing it. Thoughts?

[Telgin]

I blame the lack of emergent gameplay in DF2014 for the downturn. You cannot tell good stories if there is nothing to write about. Yes, DF2014 has a much deeper scope of events, but a titan with over 1000 kills and having destroyed an entire civilization is still a titan, and it doesn't matter when an axe lord lops off its head in one action. Previous versions had consistent large sieges; even if they weren't challenging, it broke the tedium and made for good RP. These days you'd be lucky to get anything larger than 30. We can try to bandaid these problems with mods and challenge rules, but this drives the newcomers away.

My own experience is somewhat tainted by the fact that the forts I ran and was part of were all gimmick based forts that were largely maintained by a single, insular community (MLP forts).  As a result, I felt like there has been a lot of burnout among said community, leading to reduced interest in new community forts.  Glitterglen was active during a similar period to my first community fort (Dawnpick) and had similar activity levels.  Based on some very loose analysis of thread dumps, each of my following games, despite more than a year gap from the previous game, had about half the participation of the previous one.  I figured there wasn't any point in trying for a fourth one as a result.

I believe burnout is a big part of it in that community at least, because I was largely recycling players from previous games but didn't have much new stuff to do.  By the time Shadytrails came around (my third game), we'd seen it all before repeatedly and there wasn't much point in playing.

However, I'm also pretty sure that the lack of interesting sieges and other conflict was a big part of it too.  While we'd done everything else already in Shadytrails, there was never a single ambush or siege, which I'm certain bored a lot of players.  Not a whole lot of point in being dwarfed (err, ponied, whatever) as a soldier when you know you won't ever get any action.  We did have a couple of were beasts attack, but it's not quite the same I guess, and I believe everyone quit before those happened anyway.

Anecdotally, the forgotten beasts and titans that attacked in Glitterglen and Dawnpick (both 0.31 games) drove a lot of the interesting story elements in both games.  We didn't have many, if any, forgotten beasts in Duskfields (0.34, my second game), although there were sieges.  I made up for the lack of titans and forgotten beasts by inventing stuff out of game and using DFHack to insert them manually at the end of the game.  In Shadytrails (a 0.41 game) there were neither forgotten beasts nor sieges, and everybody lost interest quickly.  The lack of forgotten beasts was a consequence of RP, I guess, since I didn't dig down far in either game.

I'm pretty confident that the ability to go actively looking for trouble in the next version will reinvigorate the community and games.  It'll certainly eliminate the lack of interesting events, if someone is so inclined.

Another thing that I might as well toss in is to elaborate on my previous remark that you can try too hard.  A big, big problem with Shadytrails, aside from the fact that it was pony related and was never going to attract a wide audience, is that it was kind of the natural conclusion of seeing how far our community could go with the RP heavy forts.  Glitterglen was a happy accident there, and Dawnpick kind of got swept up into it.  Duskfields was an experiment with a stronger storyline and active plans to make the whole game RP related.  Shadytrails took it so far that we were RPing things before the game even started, then dumped pages of text into the first few posts.  What kind of new player is going to bother reading all of that to join a game?  Evidently almost nobody.

On the other hand, since 2012 we have seen the rise of illustrated games, so this may just be a new form of CGs replacing it. Thoughts?

Interestingly, this was how I intended to run my first fort (Dawnpick) before it accidentally spiraled into a full community game.  I'd planned to just post updates with one or two pictures illustrating events that took place.

In my mind it was a way to attract attention with yet more gimmicks, but, really, illustrations are a lot of fun to look at and do make games more interesting.  It has a much higher barrier to entry than just writing, so I doubt it'll ever seriously replace conventional community forts or succession games, but as DF gets more exposure and more players, we're bound to see more of them.  Plus, those that are done well will probably get more attention because, as I said, it's fun to look at pretty pictures.  Nothing wrong with using gimmicks. 

[TheImmortalRyukan]

My thoughts are just that there are too many sequels. It drives new players away. I think we just need to wait til the next version with the ability to send out armies gets implemented. That'll be a source of much RP. With one player sending out an army in his turn, and not telling anyone, and the army arriving the next player's turn confusing them.

And the ability to steal Artifacts, so just wait and see