Hey everyone this is a ROADMAP post which means you can vote for ideas that you want to see sooner, this will help shape the future of the site!
We already have a discussion about this on the forum so I’ll link to it here:
I think it will be an amazing feature and very useful, it’s not that difficult to actually build but working out how things should be displayed and making final decisions on things would be the biggest issue…
I’ll update this later but please VOTE if you want this feature!
I know we’ve been waffling back and forth about this for a while, but I think this in combo with the playlists means we could keep the absolutely truly essential prereqs on this ‘official’ list and then if people wanted to do the deep dive in a playlist they could
I think it would be important to have the ability to hide prerequisites, like ratings/reviews, so that spoiler scan be minimalised.
I think the only issue with this - despite being a brilliant idea for a feature - is that sometimes there’s debate about whether something is actually a prerequisite or not.
Yeah that’s the biggest issue.
The Times Scales has it but it just says “there are prerequisites for this story” and doesn’t say what they are.
I guess that is because it’s the easiest way to do it? However I find it really frustratingly unhelpful…
Yes, this has been discussed for a while. It’s definitely something I’d like to see implemented, but as has been pointed out, the big challenge is determining exactly which prerequisites go with which stories.
I’d probably do something like, people can submit which stories they feel are prerequisites and also vote on already submitted entries.
So eventually when enough people have voted you get a feel for how much a story really should be considered a prerequisite.
But it’s a lot of work and will need people who know the stories to go around and decide!
I feel like the biggest problem with this is how differently structured different stories and series have, so it might also have to add categories to sets too. There’s things like gallifrey that form a coherent narrative and should be listened to in order, there’s the main range where some stories are stand alone and some have prerequisites and some form arcs and not even the TV stories are easy to sort like that. Something that is kind of the opposite of the prerequisite feature but might be helpful too would be the ability to mark stories that are good jumping on points, so stories that require no prior knowledge and let you follow on from there and because that feels kind of different, maybe marking stories that are really standalone, so not part of an arc or anything, as that
This sounds nice, but I think playlists would be better.
@shauny Can these two be incorporated?
I mean, like having Prerequisites as a special kind of Playlist. We can make stories have different versions of Prerequisites, e.g. loose/strict so people can choose which to follow.
If the Prerequisites are essentially playlists, then people can copy and tweak them as they would like to experience the arc
We can make new options to mark a story Standalone or N/A(for people to filter and submit suggestions) in Story Arc
Yeah like other people have said, this sounds good, but I think the playlists would help with it a lot (plus people can ask on teh forum if they’re that worried)
Has there been any consideration to adding this as a feature? It’s something I really appreciate on the other site and would love to see on here. I’m thinking stories like Primord would have a little thing where you could see you need Inferno to make sense of it etc.
If you go to the roadmap section of the website, you can see that it is currently under discussion. You can also cast a vote on the topic (the little vote button) to encourage the people with the power to move the development of the feature further up the list.
@danninagh is interested in this as a potential feature.
Thanks for that. Voted!
Here’s my thinking on this.
People will get a chance to add stories to the prerequisites for a story. There’s no need to add multiple stories in the same sequence though, for example:
Let’s say you’re editing Hell Bent. You choose Heaven Sent as a prerequisite.
Heaven Sent already has Face the Raven as a prerequisite for that story, so no need to choose that as well.
So once added, the Hell Bent story now has a graph of stories in a kind of flow chart, and says “before completing this you should complete:”
Face the Raven → Heaven Sent → Hell Bent
Then I’d let people vote a simple yes/no on the prerequisite, if they think it applies. If something gets heavily downvoted it will be hidden.
The difficult part is what is a prerequisite for Face the Raven? It’s kind of “all of Clara’s stories” for context of how she is becoming like the Doctor. But if we do that, then pretty much every story will just say “you need to do them all in order”.
We did discuss there being different levels of prerequisite: Required, Suggested, Enhancements.
Let’s take another example.
Empire of Death (tv):
Required: The Legend of Ruby Sunday
Suggested: Pyramids of Mars? Or is that an enhancement?
The Legend of Ruby Sunday:
Required: The Church on Ruby Road?
Suggested: Pretty much all of Season One?
Enhancements: can’t think of any?
I think suggested/enhancements might be too similar, maybe we just have required and suggested?
As well as voting up and down, should we have a way to vote which category something goes in?
This is a difficult one!
Survival:
Required: Everything from An Unearthly Child onwards
Suggested: The unaired pilot
Enhanced: all of K9
Required: Watch the damm show 
/j
I think Enhancements might be too vague of a category, could make it “References” but that sounds like it’ll get bloated fast, or just leave it at 2 categories, I think both Required and Suggested get the point across.
Maybe make it where to be either required or suggested, the two stories both have to be in a set together?
Might require a few sets to be made, but presumably they have something in common a set should cover, and might discourage people from marking prerequisites that aren’t really needed.