After some discussion, we came across the idea of planning the OT! Book ahead of time at least somewhat. This is a lot different than what we've been doing currently, as we've been basically just having people write whatever with 0 communication to see what sort of mess comes out of it.

If we were to implement some sort of planning element I'm not sure how exactly, please share ideas

Reasons for planning:
- Quality of the writing generally increases, the experience of reading the book in it's entirety will be better
- It'll be easier for people to keep track of what is going on
- We can properly plan how we're going to end this book if we ever want to
- This can possibly increase discussion of the book in general
- People can write more coordinated stories

Reasons against planning:
(This is all stuff we'd need to think about when deg a new system for planning, eg how to minimize spoilers?)
- It's a fundamental shift away from what we've been doing, it'll definitely be a big change
- The book would somewhat lose the charm of being extremely messy and chaotic
- The experience of reading new chapters might be worse if you kinda know about what's gonna happen
- It'll mean a bigger time investment, not only to read chapters but to keep up with planning
- EMBRACE CHAOS

In general i'd be against planning, but I feel like too many people have diverged pretty far from the initial plot of the book, the crumbling of the world and the student of Tomfoolery highschool.

I think it's cool that there are several plotlines at once, but these plotlines should all be connected to Tomfoolery highschool in some way. I also think that when writing about a certain plotline, there should be more reference to other different plotlines in order to connect them together and show that these are events that really happen in the same world.

Maybe something that could also be useful is a sort of chart that details avenue for growth inside a plotline? I think a lot of people are afraid of ruining the original author's vision and so don't touch the plotline they are making at all, which ends up making everything feels very disconected. Maybe the author can write a little document to state what sort of stories could pursue the current plotline and also what sort of stories would break the future event that that author has planned.

my main reason to want planning is that mainly a lot of the stories that you guys are trying to write and in some ways made worse by the existance of the other plotlines, so I think just talking a little bit so someone doesn't really make a drastic cahnge to a character you created or whatever is needed

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cephaphysic wrote: 1o5144

imo, i think there's too much focus on trying to force a single, overarching plot. a collaborative project like this works best when people are free, and honestly? while communication and planning are issues, the main reason we're at the point we're at now is because new writers are *required* to introduce a new character. in hindsight, it could've worked if more planning was done and you were more strict about what people's characters could be and how writers could contribute, but that's not what happened, and i disagree with changing it to be more strict

anyways, i'm taking the chance to say that i think an overhaul needs to be done on how the story is organized as a whole. separate and group plotlines together, yk? rewrite them so any plotline can be picked up without needing to read other ones. it retains the freedom i assume you wanted people to have, and actually makes planning easier since writers aren't forced to take irrelevant chapters into consideration. for general information about the world, you can just put that into its own section, like the encylopedia chapters or the glossary

i've seen the discussion in the editor chat. i know you guys have already talked about just leaving the older chapters alone and applying improvements to future chapters instead, but it bugs me a lot to see things that can be fixed, not be fixed. hell, sign me up for editor and i'll reorganize and reconstruct everything myself

I mainly suggested not touching the older characters because I dont know how each author would feel to have their work retconned, and I don't think the planning needs to be for a single focused storyline, you can still have 24 plots, but you can maybe organize the chapter order better and that sort of stuff

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cephaphysic wrote: 1o5144

Patatitta wrote: 5t25

cephaphysic wrote: 1o5144

imo, i think there's too much focus on trying to force a single, overarching plot. a collaborative project like this works best when people are free, and honestly? while communication and planning are issues, the main reason we're at the point we're at now is because new writers are *required* to introduce a new character. in hindsight, it could've worked if more planning was done and you were more strict about what people's characters could be and how writers could contribute, but that's not what happened, and i disagree with changing it to be more strict

anyways, i'm taking the chance to say that i think an overhaul needs to be done on how the story is organized as a whole. separate and group plotlines together, yk? rewrite them so any plotline can be picked up without needing to read other ones. it retains the freedom i assume you wanted people to have, and actually makes planning easier since writers aren't forced to take irrelevant chapters into consideration. for general information about the world, you can just put that into its own section, like the encylopedia chapters or the glossary

i've seen the discussion in the editor chat. i know you guys have already talked about just leaving the older chapters alone and applying improvements to future chapters instead, but it bugs me a lot to see things that can be fixed, not be fixed. hell, sign me up for editor and i'll reorganize and reconstruct everything myself

I mainly suggested not touching the older characters because I dont know how each author would feel to have their work retconned, and I don't think the planning needs to be for a single focused storyline, you can still have 24 plots, but you can maybe organize the chapter order better and that sort of stuff

fair enough. i didn't mean rewriting in a retconning sense, but now that i think about it there's much better ways to resolve that issue. i still think splitting the story up would be better with how things are organized. for as long as each writer is required to have their own character, the amount of plotlines is only going to increase, to the point that a "one after the other" book format becomes impractical, no matter how well you try to organize it

if this wasn't meant to be a direct response to me, then i'm sorry. i legitimately can't tell

it was a direct resposne to you, and yeah, I do think splitting is the best, or just giving a easy way to read all the important chapters in a certain story

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What do you guys think about making a discord for this, I think it'll make discussion and communication a lot easier (maybe the discussion becomes less deep if it's not in the form of responding to long, well thought out paragraphs?) but move the project away from being mostly centred on the forum thread

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DM FOR MUTUAL wrote: 6z15h

What do you guys think about making a discord for this, I think it'll make discussion and communication a lot easier (maybe the discussion becomes less deep if it's not in the form of responding to long, well thought out paragraphs?) but move the project away from being mostly centred on the forum thread

We already have the forums why we would need a discord?

After leaving this thread on read for 2 weeks I'm back with a suggestion of how we could implement planning.

Basically my idea is instead of using the extra supplementary docs such as the lore wiki and the character compendium just as a way to record what happens in the book, to instead start using them as tools to pre-establish certain things.

Like for example the character compendium wouldn't be just be for chronicling all the characters in the story, but as a place with proper character profiles which would determine how they would be written, like maybe what'd you'd do if you were actually writing something and planned out all your characters beforehand.

An example of a way this could be used is if we wrote for Fara in her "abilities" section something like "Primarily uses fire-based magic, and isn't averse to using large AOE type magic because she enjoys destruction and is a pyromaniac, but generally doesn't go overboard with her destructive tendencies" (I made this up based off of Corne's chapter where Fara used fire magic and created a forest fire)

From there, writers would know that Fara has a tendency to use fire based magic, so for example in fight scenes she could be written to use fire magic instead of making up random spells

We could a similar change with the lore wiki as well

I think this way we could write the story in a more thoughtful way that feels less like we're pulling things out of our ass



As for planning out things like the actual story, I'm a bit more on the fence, but I think having more than zero discussion about the plot would be good. Maybe we could do something how samX500 suggested but idk how it would be implemented

Corne2Plum3 wrote: 3y1z1p

DM FOR MUTUAL wrote: 6z15h

What do you guys think about making a discord for this, I think it'll make discussion and communication a lot easier (maybe the discussion becomes less deep if it's not in the form of responding to long, well thought out paragraphs?) but move the project away from being mostly centred on the forum thread

We already have the forums why we would need a discord?

Imagine not having the editor discord chat and osu dms and having to exclusively edit through posting on the forums

I think having a discord would make communication, especially if we move more towards people working things out in advance and collaborating and discussing the quality of the book in general, a lot easier and also allow for a lot more communication and discussion in general

But I also don't like the idea of moving the main place of the book away from the forums which might happen if we make a discord.

cephaphysic wrote: 1o5144

either that, or you could make a separate thread for story discussion (being on-site makes it more accessible).

Idk about this, it feels a bit redundant when we could instead have more discussion on the main thread

this feels fair