[Paused for Now] Sinder Cultural Enrichment Center

Realm & Areas
#1

During some OOC discussions tonight, a little bit of informal brainstorming was had. Among the ideas that come up were the possibility of some kind of movie night, improv theater, a comedy club, and some other things like that.

As I was thinking over the practicalities of things like that, the idea crystallized into a whole cultural center- rooms for people to screen films, cook food, book clubs, all that. The ides being that you could reserve a room, set up an event, and have it there.

I was imagining the possibility of doing lessons (real stuff you could teach practically here, like writing, programming, math, basics of cooking, etc…), book clubs, discussion groups, even virtual events like the tours some art galleries have online.

I’d be keen to start off a couple things, given how much fun the idea seems to me, but what would be the general interest in this? I’m seeing there being a few dedicated rooms with main topics, and a schedule system- I’d be accepting the responsibility of managing the reservations system at first, but eventually I think a bot could handle it.

Any thoughts on what else might be needed, what sorts of things might be good to aim for, any fatal flaws I’m overlooking in my enthusiasm?

#2

Lessons can present a bit of a challenge, because they can be genuine attempts to teach something that the player RPing as the teacher knows about iRL… or they can be purely RP based, with no need for anyone to know the subject. And both of these are fine and fun and good, but it can cause confusion if people don’t know which one they’re getting! So, that’s something you’ll want to think about how to communicate, if you decide to go forward with this.

#3

That’s an excellent point! I mostly imagined it as being sort of meta: In-Character discussions and practice of OOC material (ie. book club, or ‘writing’ but specifically to improve roleplaying skills).

I think perhaps a mix, denoted with specific tags- IC, OOC, and Meta. Does that seem sane?

#4

I can speak to the book club idea, at least - I was part of a book club that met on another roleplaying system, and it worked rather well for a while, but there were a few things we learned:

  • The readings worked best when they were short and freely available online. Actual books took too much coordination for people to actually get a hold of, and too much out-of-game time to read, and the discussions weren’t worth it.
  • Communicating what the group was doing was really important. We had a lot of people drop in who just wanted to roleplay around the scene of people talking about the story, and that worked when they weren’t disrupting the conversation, but wasn’t so good when they felt like all this “book talk” was distracting from them getting character-drama and they tried to disrupt the group ICly. Having clear OOC expectations that the “book club” was not just a pretext to meet and start other scenes was really important in not letting that take over.
  • Maintaining good OOC connections about how people were feeling about the time-commitment and what they were getting from the book club was also important - that’s how we figured out the right lengths of things to read, and what sorts of things, and when people were feeling burnt out because of work or school or other commitments. Sometimes we skipped having a book and just hung out, if we knew a lot of people would be busy.
1 Like
#5

This is really excellent feedback, exactly the sort of notes I’d hoped to get, thank you!

#6

Is this topic still awaiting feedback, resolved for now or needing staff review in someway? Asking so I know how to mark the topic for organizational purposes @FoxLancaster-Okami

#7

This project is currently very on the back burner pursuant mostly to my work with the bots, I will notify the builders when I get to the point it’s active again and would need attention!

1 Like