As many of you have already gathered, scenarios are now live on the website. I created and sent out a few tests yesterday, and so far everything seems to be working correctly.
I've written up a brief explaining how scenarios work, but here's the short, short version. Plot members may now create brief (one question) choose-your-own-adventure-style narratives, building each one up with any number of possible responses. On top of that, every response can have multiple possible outcomes, and every outcome can have multiple possible consequences, making for some truly dynamic results.
As always, the system is still under development, so if any of you notice problems, please report them to me.
So I can dig the scenarios. They are a nice way to occupy folks, and can be used to push the storyline as well, which is always a good thing. One question I did have was whether in the future there would be more than one level of choosing, ie. you chose this answer, this is what happened as a result, what do you do now type of thing or whether it would be primarily used with one question and answer. The Scenario that we got was cool, and appears to be working great, as my downtime queue will tell you lol.
It's a prospect I had considered. However, speaking as the only one who's built them so far, I can tell you that it takes considerable time and effort even for simple scenarios. The system makes it easier, but most of the work goes into writing the narratives and balancing the outcomes.
Given this, it's possible to have multithreaded scenarios, but it would involve a great deal of work for plot members compared to the amount of enjoyment you guys get out of it. I'm not against the idea, but it'll have to wait until I have some plot members beating down my door begging to do that much work. ;)
Worst case, at the moment, since scenarios appear to be able to be targeted, if I wanted to write a multi thread scenario based on your decisions, I can write a second thread, and only target it at a person if they've navigated properly to it in the first place. I'm working on trying to develop a scenario myself regarding an old friend of the town, and if I do it right, I'm sure its going to have some fun RP implications :)
The problem as Thad says is there's a lot of narrative that goes into the scenarios that you guys don't see allowing for multiple options and multiple consequences for all of those options so that people don't always get the same thing as everyone else.
I for one just love empty treasure chests with poisoned needles in them, lol. I'm sure the chest itself would make for a beautiful tea table :o)