___-___INTRODUCTION___-___
Hi everyone! The idea for this thread sprouted from some off-topic banter regarding a screenshot in the CSC (my screenshot, incidentally), and everyone was discussing how they think the king was murdered using evidence from the screenshot, seeing as I didn't make it too terribly clear. I will, in fact, credit joshua4missions for the original idea for the thread. I brainstormed on it a bit more and here I am. I made this thread because I think that the CSC really helps with the forum's active designing skills, in other words, all of your abilities to continually grow and become more experienced and generally better designers on a semi-daily process. I'd like to expand on this idea a bit. The idea behind this thread is to create a more "laid back" designing experience. The CSC is pretty formal in its process, and it demands a lot from a designer to win (usually), and it takes a week to go through one round. With the Murder Mystery Thread, I hope that people can just log onto AoKH, pop open this thread, and participate, learning about designing usually without even opening the editor. Of course, the thread's theme provides that we can have some fun in this process, so that also helps with the laid-backness. I want it to be a blend between TC off-topic forum games and scenario designing. That's what I was shooting for in this process, and I hope it doesn't greatly degrade from the other aspects of the "game."

___-___HOW IT WORKS___-___
A lot of ideas came out of CSC, and seeing as I started the first one, I can't help but steal some of its ideas. Basically, we'll start with a screenshot of a murder scene. It may not have any text except that for effect, i.e. "the smell of rot hangs in the air," or other sort of description or clue. This will make sense later. After posting it, the first three people who post after it will be known as the witnesses. These witnesses will start their post with the bolded word "Witness." This is so we can allow people to commentate on the process without participating, but still leaving us able to denote those who want to participate. The witness will give their side of the story as to what's happening. They can effectively do whatever they want; they may get into character and place themselves in the scene and say what they saw, or they can just post from a forumer's perspective and give an interpretation of the murder. What really matters is what they say, not really how they say it, but the ladder may affect the former in some situations. Next, the following five posters will be the jury, and will once again start their posts with the bolded word "Jury" to denote themselves as participants. The job of the jury is, in 2-5 sentences per poster, to decide upon which of the witnesses story they think is true. Now, in reality, the jury can vote upon each screenshot in any manner they want. They can cast a vote because it was funny, entertaining, or legitimately accurate - the vote is really all that matters. I know it sounds like homework to give the sentence guideline, but it prevents people from going "lol i liked it" and having that count, because that's just not fair to anyone, and the jury are encouraged to have a bit of fun with their reasoning. Lastly, the winner creates their own murder scene and screencaps it, posts it, and we rinse and repeat.

As you can tell, this bears quite a bit of resemblance in its structure to CSC, but I changed a few things to make it more laid back and smoother. The 3:5 ratio of witnesses to jury prevents any ties from occurring*, and the non-time-based structure gives the game a flow of its own. As well, the fact that the voters aren't directly voting upon the screenshot but on the interpretations of it, on top of the fact that there's only one screenshot at a time, gives the thread more of a "game" feel, rather than a "competition" feel. That way, the screenshots are made for fun, creativity, and/or personal taste of the designer, whereas some in the CSC are created for public appeal.

Synopsis of the process:

Screenshot is taken and submitted - no text or narration allowed except to add more detail or description

Witnesses submit their testimonies - three per screenshot

Jury votes upon which witness' story they find most appealing - five per screenshot

Winning witness submits another screenshot

___-___RULES AND REGULATIONS___-___

All screenshot-editing restriction rules in the CSC stand here - no picture editing except to remove toolbars or to add text, no mapshots (obviously), no modpacks that add new graphics, no advanced data editing to create new/hybrid SLPs, and screenshots must be taken from your own scenarios and only for this game.

Murder scenes need not be full-screen screenshots. They can be cropped down to smaller portions of the game screen, but please don't make them tiny.

*In the event that the first four jury members split the four votes between two witness' stories, the fifth jury member must break the tie, and may not vote on the third witness' story.

If for whatever reason that many participants disagree with a screenshot's validity or quality, or if the winner is taking too long to submit a new scene, the participants may vote to override the screencapper with 5 (please help with this number) votes. If this happens, the first person to post a new scene will be accepted. This is to keep us from being burdened with grace periods and such. (Again, please help with this rule - I don't know how fair it is).

Please suggest any more rules you think are worth adding.

Lastly, I won't be tracking game progresses or previous winners as the CSC does in this thread. This reason being is that I hope for this to move too quick for me to want to keep up, and hopefully the amount of rounds will be too great to be worth keeping in the topic post, for bandwidth's sakes. I will, however, create a highlight board at my own descretion. That way the truly unique/funny/interesting rounds get the recognition they deserve.

I hope you guys like my idea! So, to start us off, here's the first scene. It's not the best, but I'd like to get the ball rolling more than anything.

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~ thundy wundy ~

Splash Splash XXVII
Continuous Screenshot Competition
StormWind Studios
Isolation Years [4.1]

[This message has been edited by Thunder77 (edited 09-03-2010 @ 06:39 PM).]