09-28-2016, 04:58 PM
This falls right on the great divide among MMO gamers -- "power gamers" vs. "role players".
I understand the tendency to want just the stats. But that leads to a somewhat dry experience. It makes me want to flourish it up myself, with some player-created narrative. Maybe that's a good thing.
In general, it's probably not worth spending a great deal of Moderator creative effort on drafting long narratives that will either be read/skipped over once or be generated repeatedly across multiple turns, undermining their impact. I rather liked the way they do it with Alamaze -- you get the statistics for any given battle, along with a paragraph or so of narrative results describing how the battle went. I'm not sure if the narrative is generated randomly in one piece, or if it actually represents intermediate states arising as a battle is processed. But it's a fine way to feed both types of players.
I think it also depends on the game. For an economic supply-chain-driven game like Cluster Wars, such a narrative would seem out of place (and they don't do it.) For fantasy tribes, some sort of Conan-style narrative seems entirely appropriate.
I understand the tendency to want just the stats. But that leads to a somewhat dry experience. It makes me want to flourish it up myself, with some player-created narrative. Maybe that's a good thing.
In general, it's probably not worth spending a great deal of Moderator creative effort on drafting long narratives that will either be read/skipped over once or be generated repeatedly across multiple turns, undermining their impact. I rather liked the way they do it with Alamaze -- you get the statistics for any given battle, along with a paragraph or so of narrative results describing how the battle went. I'm not sure if the narrative is generated randomly in one piece, or if it actually represents intermediate states arising as a battle is processed. But it's a fine way to feed both types of players.
I think it also depends on the game. For an economic supply-chain-driven game like Cluster Wars, such a narrative would seem out of place (and they don't do it.) For fantasy tribes, some sort of Conan-style narrative seems entirely appropriate.