Submission Thoughts: Building a Boat Vs. Building a Raft Island

[Ted]

The Strolen community is well versed in what makes a good boat. Your usual luxury boat usually has a HoH thrown at it, and the real yachts out there are the Golden subs kicking around. A boat can pretty much stay afloat on its own, and it can really move through the waves.

Strolen knows a good boat when they see it.

Rafts, rafts are little different. A single raft isn't usually very stable or seaworthy. They tend to capsize easily. But, you can throw a bunch of rafts together into a larger creation, and the whole thing gets pretty scary. Soon enough, you have a moving deserted island complete with stranded travelers and coconut trees.

Strolen doesn't have a lot of Rafts. Despite the strength of Freetext and linking submissions together, rafts just don't seem all that common. The continuity between the submissions to the Citadel just isn't there.

So I'm going to test the waters. Many of the submissions that come out will rely heavily on previous submissions to be understood- all part of the plan. The raft island only gets more stable the more that gets read and added to it.

Thoughts?

[MysticMoon]

Rafts, fishing boats, yachts, cargo carriers, battleships; I like them all. Separately or strung together, just as long as they are sea worthy.

Cutting past the metaphor, there are many different approaches to the amount of material per sub and how that material is organized within and across subs. What is important to me is that each individual sub be internally coherent/consistent, even if it relies on information revealed elsewhere.

There are good examples of this. Check out the Hewdamia and ColdForged freetext for starters.

For myself, I am working on my own (as-yet-unnamed) floating island and I hope that I don't sink it along the way.

Just my $.02

[Strolen]

It sounds a little like you are going to build a world of stubs. I will admit I blindly built the stub ability as I still wasn't entirely sure what they would be used for but greater minds than mine wished them. I always had the thought of having the ability of stubs to be "sucked" into a main submission somehow or incorporated together in some unique way. But I could still never figure out the overall use of them even then.

I tend to agree with MysticMoon, each sub should be able to stand on its own. Mention other subs and link them together in order to form a more cohesive overall set of interlocking ideas but the main idea of the current sub wouldn't be totally lost if you didn't know what was in the other linked, just enhanced.

All that said, go for it. Maybe we can figure out a new way of doing things and I am always interested in a new style!

[Dozus]

Does a coracle count as a raft, or a boat?

[MysticMoon]

It sounds a little like you are going to build a world of stubs. I will admit I blindly built the stub ability as I still wasn't entirely sure what they would be used for but greater minds than mine wished them. I always had the thought of having the ability of stubs to be "sucked" into a main submission somehow or incorporated together in some unique way. But I could still never figure out the overall use of them even then.

I haven't quite grokked the concept of stubs. I just don't know where that boundary is between a stub and a full-fledged submission.

I'm not sure if this fits in this thread or if it should be a feature request (I'm just thinking out loud here), but the idea of having stubs pulled into a sub got me thinking about something I've seen others mention. Some subs are very long. They can't be split up into multiple subs because they only cover a single topic, but it would be so much easier to read them if they didn't appear on a single page. What about creating a number of stubs and then tying them together with a sub that acts as a table of contents? The stubs themselves would end in links to the next one in the sequence.

To make this idea more concrete, consider MJS's The Keep Beneath the Dusky Star (a most excellent piece that took me a couple of days to get through.) The sub itself contains only the links to the idea scrolls which provide the actual content. The difference between this example and my suggestion would be to create the scrolls as stubs instead, make the links point to the stubs, and then have each stub link to the next part/chapter.

That could, indeed, be an island made from tying rafts together.

Thoughts?

[Strolen]

How about a feature like the <!--nextpage--> in wordpress where you can divide the sub up into multiple pages with a small pagination below it?

I hesitate to have random floating stubs around the citadel that only make sense when combined. Continue brainstorming. This is going somewhere.

[MysticMoon]

In retrospect, stubs probably would be overkill. I was just throwing ideas around.

Being able to insert pagebreaks sounds intriguing. With a new top-level category of Fiction, such a feature could be useful for posting longer stories.

I am curious to know what others think.

[Ted]

I feel that sometimes the burden is too great to show and tell with all the subs that are submitted. As a DM, I want room to customize, bastardize and take what I need for my sessions. I try to leave some room for that in my own creations.

So, sometimes I have an idea. One that can lead to a multitude of different plots. These can be wildly contradictory, and it seems wrong to include anything past a simple hook with an idea that is at the core, a location, item or person. Which is where linking can become powerful.

[Strolen]

I feel this is going somewhere positive. I sense a paradigm shift in the force. I don't know what it is yet, but big it is. Coming soon it will be. mmmm