Taking advantage of Mass Innovation: The Tardis

[pedxing]

My idea for an improvement to KOL is to create an object that lets characters develop new areas for KOL without impacting game balance. This could be done in many ways. Here is my conception of it.

I'm thinking of a new item called "Tardis" or maybe "Police Box". The idea is that you can only get this item once you have extensive experience in the game. When you get it, you can place it in your campground. Clicking on it from this point takes you inside it.

The regular menus disappear when you are in the Tardis. Instead, initially you can only "Remove Tardis from your campsite" and "Exit the Tardis". Trying to hit any URL directly that is outside the Tardis would give you "You can't seem to find your way there".

When you use a sonic screwdriver inside the Tardis, it becomes tuned to it and you are given a new set of menus that allows you to create new locations (at least the first of which creates a new menu option in the tardis, encounters, items, monsters, and whatever else makes sense in this context. All new content creation would be done through the web, including uploading of new images.

With or without the sonic screwdriver, you can wander from location to location, battling things, getting items, and gaining increases in your stats. When you go to leave via the "Exit the Tardis" menu option, though, you are told that the Tardis has travelled back in time and everything is exactly as it was when you entered. You lose all items and stats gained while inside.

This allows you to playtest your newly created area. Once you are satisfied that everything works the way you want it to, you can remove the Tardis from your campground and, with your clan management's permission, stick it into a "Police box full of Police boxes" or something similar in your clan's area.

At this point all of your clannies can playtest your new area. They can provide notes via a Filing Cabinet that shows up in the starting area of the Tardis that you can review, or you can give sonic screwdrivers that you have tuned to your Tardis to some of your clannies to allow them to edit the content directly.

Once there is agreement that the new area is well balanced and would provide benefit to KOL and above all is funny, it can be proposed to the KOL developers as a new area for adoption. They can then decide whether to edit it to fit their vision of KOL and promote the area out of the Tardis into the "real" world of KOL.

One other idea I had was to allow other clans to playtest by using a portable hole. One end could be tied to a Tardis and then the hole given to a member of another clan to place in a clan's "Police box full of Police boxes" (and now holes too). Clicking on a hole would take members of the second clan to the Tardis of the first clan.

Of course, all of this would be a huge amount of work. I don't know how the KOL developers create new content, but I doubt it is through the web, so that means a whole lot of new forms would need to be developed. But the effect it could have on expanding KOL even beyond its prestigious volume of content count be immense.

WDYT?

[OldKnight]

This idea has been used in one of my companys games called tbadventure, we only allowed certain people to access the menu like you said. Ours was more of a program though, it was a blank piece of map with pictures and landscapes you could drag into the desired position you like. After you did all of this you could elevate the landscape using a another program. After the person finished the map they clicked "save" and it was sent to us through our administrative module. We then decided if it was usable and if so where would be the best place. But yeah I feel this could really work in Kol, but it would be a hassle for Jick and his developers to design something of this level.