Why I believe small towns should be given a chance

[Lojo613 1420]

Recently @camocat9 made a post regarding unwalled towns and settlements. The title seems a little misleading, because the issue at hand most certainly is not walls, its the lack of small/rural towns dotted across the map. Having played in Anthos (Fringe) – Vailor, and leaving at map change, there used to be a much wider variety of small towns dotted across the map. While then it seemed to be tied to goon culture, whereby any lord with at least 6 guys to show up to war claim would get a piece of land to build on, it did lead to a variety of locations across the map which felt very real. Sure, there might not be a lot of players there, but these locations often suffered from two issues, as outlined in Camocat’s post; Those being 1) Out of the way location, making travel to that settlement difficult for 0 rp OR (and I will get to why it is an or in a moment) 2) The local lords had not deigned any rp worthy organizations exist within the area besides a pvp goonsquad, and nominally built up the area to either have a cool castle or simply a place to put further goons.

 

During Atheira and in the Fringe, I rped under devland99, who was the lord of a small place called Owynswood in Adria, just over a hill past the capital. The rp there was fun, but I distrinctly remembered no-one ever stayed because there weren’t any other organizations besides the goon keep. To keep a small town healthy, you need leaders who are invested in the rp health of the town, which I think activity checks do encourage in some way. In another way, a lot of the flavor and lore of the world is lost by focusing so much on centralization. I miss those small towns, and there are some, like Johnstown, with leaders who care. 

 

I believe the statement “Uncentralized rp is a cancer on the community and always leads to someone logging in and deciding there is no-one to rp with” is factually wrong. How many times do I log into Helena and all I see are afkers. Yay? Its neat that I see someone, but it kinda removes a lot of the joy I used to get when I met someone on the roads. So many situations have been lost with the advent of supercentralized roleplay hubs. When I’d log into Owynswood, and see nobody, what would I do? I would leave Owynswood,  find someone to rp with travelling the roads, and then maybe head back to owynswood to rp. It actually made smith rp enjoyable, because it felt very personal. The convenience of having a bustling city with all players in one location is lost. People like to create things in minecraft, its the point of playing the game. When you put everyone into the same bubble of City Rp on a fantasy roleplay server, you alienate portions of the playerbase and make the world feel less dynamic, and like we have less of an impact on it. My problem with massivecraft, and why I loved LOTC so much, was because I impacted the world. The world actually, factually changed due to my presence in it. Cities, highly centralized regions, it takes away some of that.

 

I don’t want a return to the old free build system or nexus settlement totem system, and the current build system in my opinion works fine, but I do wish that the small towns if they are going to require activity checks, are at least put someplace central, or given to people who deeply care about creating a rural community. If you are looking for realism, the most realism is cities often aren’t right next to each other. They compete for resources, and travelling a highway you are certainly going to see small towns all over it getting trade to and from a city.

 

As for the bandit thing regarding walls on small towns, lots of small towns in the middle ages did indeed have walls around them, but if a centralized government cannot protect its settlements, maybe it is time for that settlement to think about feudalism, or vassalship to a more effective state.

 

To conclude, I disagree, personally as a player within the niche, that “uncentralized rp is a cancer”. I believe that just because places are sometimes empty doesn’t mean they are horrible. We have never had our community exist in a bubble. Back in the day, we had skype, now we have discord and it is easier than ever to coordinate oocly with your local community. I believe a guide to playing in and supporting small towns is probably in order from the halflings, and some chances ought to be given by NLs and Admins to smaller settlements rather than holding up the activity check pistol to people’s heads. Some regions die out, it is fair to say that, and perhaps empty regions should be abandoned, but so long as an area has people using and enjoying it, I see little problem in letting them exist. So what if people turn a centralized small town into a hub and Helena has less afking people? Good, so long as others are having fun, who cares if there is less lag in Helena. The city will always be a busy place simply due to it being the city, where people always go to find certain goods or rp they can’t get in their smalltown, or because they like city rp and live there. 

 

3 keys to small town success:

Allow them to build along heavily traveled roads (maybe have a road activity check to give people the hot tips), 

Find competent leaders who are good at communicating and organizing interesting rp

Maybe change the dynamics of travel or the need to travel to facilitate more map crossings and therefore random road encounters

[argonian 12836]

i complained about everywhere being empty for years, but now i think we’ve gone too far in the other direction. the world’s weird and boring when it’s just a bunch of city states 

 

atlas >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> arcas btw 

[camocat9 1021]

All of these points are great! And, I do agree, my title may have been a slight bit misleading when compared to the contents of the post.
 

You’ve covered all the major arguments against smaller towns and villages extremely well, and showed how they can work out if nation leaders would just give them a chance. We don’t need the entire map to be villages-- as I stated in my post, centralized roleplay hubs are fine for those who enjoy large city roleplay. We just need a few locations in easily accessible parts of the map that players would actually come across, and for there to be local leaders that care about roleplay in their small community and attempt to organize things such as events.

 

If you ask me, Johnstown would be a very popular spot for small town/village roleplay if it were not shoved off into the back corner of a nation tile, but instead nearby a main road.