Journal Modification

[St4rL1ght]

It seems to me that the presentation of White Journals doesn't accommodate the function of RPing the function and holding of journals within the Archives, specifically:

If journals are written and held in the Great Archives for each person within the Compact, it would make more sense to me to have them attached to the sheet for each PC, rather than having them in a Facebook-feed where one can presumably read and respond to fifty entries easily. In reality, this would not be plausible (though certainly possible), since a Scholar would have to pull each and every one of those journals down and put them back for every single person who read them, every single day - and that is an ENORMOUS feat, just moving that many journals, that many times.

Though I've been mulling over this for a while, it recently arises as an issue since I have RPed that my PC did NOT read a whole slew of journals (as they do not have time to spend hours upon hours in the Archives reading every person's entry), but RP from others seems to imply that they have time to do so, or that my PC would have time to do more than have a passing conversation with one of the Scholars about a general theme being written about copiously.

If we, as players, had to take the time to read journals from other players' sheets, however, it would imitate at least in part the effort it would take to read so many journals. The benefit, I believe, would be multiple:

1. More appropriate RP in regards to journal entries.

2. A potential for more 'journal-type' entries that give more details to staff regarding RPed scenes as opposed to a Facebook-feed-type posturing and response. (There could still be the Facebook-feed behind-the-scenes for Staff to easily read what's being written, as I imagine that's why this system was set up in the first place.)

3. Easier access to historical accounts / information written by a specific PC. Particularly if the present search feature remains for all journals when looking for a specific subject / keyword, this would allow a more world-view of information on subjects one was researching, while also functioning like asking a Scholar to hunt down all entries containing the subject 'travel' or written about Bob. If one really wanted to improve the real-world timeline for such a search, a delay could be put in effect for such searches, though I'd expect this is unnecessary, due to the amount of time it takes to simply read a vast number of entries.

If this idea was put in place, I see it as being very much like the way Flashback scenes are available on player sheets, with tabs for White Journals, Black Journals and for writing/submitting journals. Black Journals would obviously only be accessible to the players, as they are now.

And, for ease of reading and organization of the journals on each character sheet, it could be sorted by date with a link to open in a feed-type, with all entries listed, partially-expanded or fully-expanded. I think it would, at that point, make sense to have check-boxes to the side to mark them 'read' or 'unread' - again, like in forum posts or a list of emails.

Thanks! I look forward to feedback.