foundationmods (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
foundationmods) wrote2019-01-05 04:07 pm
foundationmods) wrote2019-01-05 04:07 pm
HMD
How was the round? How did we mods do this time around? If you have any comments for the mods, feel free to leave them here! We want to continue to improve and do better in future rounds, so your input is important!
If you would like to contact us privately, you can do that as well by messaging either Eski (Eski#2807) or Maple (Mandy#0822) on Discord. If you want to talk to both of us, we can set up a group DM.
If you would like to contact us privately, you can do that as well by messaging either Eski (Eski#2807) or Maple (Mandy#0822) on Discord. If you want to talk to both of us, we can set up a group DM.
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One issue from R1 that carried over is the way item rewards are handled. Between the shop being neglected in R1 and the personalized items in R2 going to the bottom of the mod task pile and thus no longer being handed out for the last few weeks... I'm just really thinking you guys should stick to an easy way of handing out items like rolling them from a pre-established pile. The items being less exciting is definitely preferable to not getting AC rewards at all, in my opinion.
That said, I also felt like issues that weren't existent in R1 manifested here. I'm going to leave the problems with the mafia system out here, you guys already know those. Trying new things that don't work right is normal. You really are the mod team that tries the most new stuff, which is really commendable.
Importantly though, I really feel like the interactivity element has gone down a lot from how it was in the previous round. I know this is something that is important to you two as well, so I am assuming it wasn't intentional, but... this time I felt a little like I was stuck watching a PSL between Ichigo and Gabe, who did the relevant things. The mafia game which we were playing wasn't the plot, the story of those two was. And in the end, all we had to do was watch their memories and.... nothing? The plot sorted itself out and what was left for the living to do was, in your words, 'fixing a familial fight'. I feel like fixing someone else's relationship issues is not really the most thematically appropriate end for a game in which characters experienced traumatic death. There wasn't a lot of feeling of accomplishment because in the end, we didn't really do anything in the finale. The PCs were support cast to Ichigo's and Gabe's dramatic father-son story. Meanwhile the NPC who actually caused the death game was revealed only OOCly while characters themselves didn't get a chance at closure there either.
This ties in with the stakes in this game having felt very low anyway. In week 3 we had it announced that the dead could return. This made IC sense for Ichigo to announce, but from a perspective of the characters in this round it drastically reduced the amount of IC investment in what was happening.
I do still love how much this game lets the dead characters interact and I was pretty happy with how this went in R2 initially - though they were there, there was a tension element of 'once we leave, we'll leave you behind, huh?'. That then immediately fell flat in Week 3.
This then mingled with the fact that none of the murderers were actually at fault due to the possession element, so I was just kinda left feeling confused on what the actual drama-driving aspect was supposed to be.
Culmination of my issue with stakes and interactivity was the "choice" presented at the beginning of the final week. I'm going to have to be honest here, it really demotivated me from participating much in the final week. Though presented as a choice, it really wasn't one at all.
OOCly, the decision was "either play endgame or end the game early without character arc conclusion and also screwing over the players of all the dead characters". It was clear nobody would pick the second option here. The choice having to be unanimous also prevented characters for whom it might have been reasonable to abandon ship. (Not sure if you guys went back on that later?)
So as a result: a choice existed ICly but the outcome was forced by OOC circumstances.
No character would actually be leaving, even though the option presented itself to them. It wasn't OOCly possible. This basically forced our hand into playing the dramatic "we are taking a stand and banding together for the sake of all of us" development. This kind of scene can be incredibly rewarding when it forms organically but when you literally have to play it or drop, the emotional pay-off is cheapened down immensely.
I'm sure this wasn't how you meant for this to come across, but I didn't really find another way of dealing with the situation than bending my IC actions to fit the OOC need. This luckily worked out for me due to my CR with Yoshi, but frankly, had that not existed, I'd have had to play oocly simply to remain in the game. It was awkward.
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This was a lot, so to end this, I have to say again I LOVE YOU GUYS A LOT. SCP has given me immense joy in my life and even if I might not be able to make R3, you guys will not be rid of me ever. I am attached to this world like a barnacle.
Thank you for all you've done!
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AC rewards: Honestly, this is very true. We tried a couple different ways of doing AC rewards, but we kept falling behind on them because of how much work went into them. (plus we had the memories to write this time around too, which meant even *less* time for doing AC rewards.) We don't want to skip out on AC rewards entirely, because we feel like it's important to reward staying active. We're going to try the DRRP/Trustfell/other murdergame method of 'random item draw' next time around and see if that works together. Since it's just a list of items we roll from, the copy/paste for that will be a lot less writing-intensive, and that might help with us staying on top of it.
The story: This was definitely another failing on our part. The main goal of the round was always going to be 'heal the Hotel by removing Gabe, remove Gabe by getting him to own up to his mistakes.' Which, admittedly, did happen quite a bit! Both in the weeks right before endgame and in the final trial itself. But the problem there goes back to the "you get out of the game what you put into it" rule: the characters who pursued Gabe and talked to him were the ones who convinced him to change his ways, and a lot of that happened in private conversations. 'Friend the NPC' is always going to be a valid way to defeat challenges like this, but in the future we will definitely make sure that happens moreso in public channels. That way it's a bit clearer what needs to be done to influence the ending, so you're not left sitting on the sidelines watching instead of helping.
Lambda: Lambda's purpose this round was to serve as part of the bigger message of "The Foundation is seriously flawed. They send people into dangerous situations without all of the needed information, and people die for that. A lot." Admittedly it does make the resolution of this particular round feel a little less great, but we think it will pay off better in the long run, when the multi-round question of "What do we do about the Foundation?" is eventually solved. Rest assured, you will get your chance to have a go at her later! Just not this round. (And admittedly, we could have worked her into the story a bit more cohesively, to make that point more obvious. It's something we'll work on doing for future rounds.)
Tension: our goal with the 'things' was to have a theme for the mafia members to follow, as well as giving the players who got picked for mafia a reason to murder if they weren't the murdering type. That definitely did not work out at all for the reasons you listed, which is why we're going "mmmmyeah, not doing that again." We're going to stick to just 'murder with a motive of some sort' in the future, and I think that will help a lot with the tension issues you brought up.
The choice: If we were to do this kind of thing again, I think we would make the choice of 'stay or go' an individual one, with the caveat being "if you choose to leave, your character is effectively leaving the game and will not be present for endgame" rather than (at least on an OOC level) requiring a unanimous decision. You're right in that it didn't let people stay IC.
We're glad you had fun with it despite the problems though! We had some pretty big ambitions for this round that kind of fell flat, and we're going through the process of "this didn't work, throw that out" and "this will work if we mess with it a bit I think". Thanks for giving us your opinions on it too, it definitely helps us see what we need to focus on more for upcoming rounds.
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Where does that leave characters who wouldn’t do that ICly? Does that mean that all the antagonizing they may end up doing will just lead to a bad end or they just contribute nothing to endgame?
You said as well, now, that if you did a choice again you'd allow for individual characters to leave but... oocly, this would still equal a drop. So basically, it feels like the game disproportionally punishes players of characters who aren't of the FRIENDSHIP ABOVE ALL kind. I get that a contrary character is obviously not going to be the most helpful overall, but I find the mere idea of "if your character has no IC investment in staying, go ahead and drop" pretty extreme. I don't feel like a choice like that should be given because unless requested for it because it really does put antagonist players on the spot intensely. It's a bit weird to me that characters who would bring IC tension to a group are being pushed to the side so much in a murdergame, which is like... the opposite of a happy environment overall.
And here's where it may get to a difference in opinion, but I do find it a little odd that 'friendship the NPC and make him nice' is the singular goal of a game structured around murder. Though there definitely is a bias towards this kind of ending in the murdergame community (which is totally valid!), I'm continuously iffy on 'our mostly teen characters have to be nice to and forgive the people who caused horrible trauma to them' being presented as the one possible Golden Endgame. The very structure of the game hinging on 'making Reyes own up to his mistakes' was pretty uncomfortable in that way on top of the whole 'feeling like props to the NPCs' CR' thing.
I guess this comment is leading up the a question more than anything, but can I expect future rounds to be geared similarly as well? Because this would severely affect my character choice /plays too many cynics
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Thanks for bringing this up, Luna, because that was something I felt was off about endgame but couldn't quite put my finger on until you mentioned it. I just want to add a little of my own thoughts on it.
It was definitely uncomfortable to have the 'make Reyes apologize' treated as the 'correct' answer, and it does seem to imply that any characters who would've wanted him to be punished more harshly/feel Reyes' apologies were meaningless (because it ultimately doesn't solve things in the long run/doesn't mean he'll actually change/etc.) were 'wrong' in a sense.
Thematically, it feels like the game's saying that 'well it's okay if you make mistakes that end up hurting or killing people as long as you apologize and feel bad about it'. Maybe that's being a little too harsh and I'm sure that's not the message you guys meant to send, but that sort of value felt enforced by how this was considered to be the ideal resolution.
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...I don't know, this one feels kind of hollow in comparison to them. Maybe because in this one Reyes isn't even the guy who masterminded the game itself, or maybe it's because it is rather vexing the best possible ending route kind of shuts down people who would be less inclined to forgive him.
I can only wonder if people like Medic or Ripley had survived then the odds of a bad end would have been higher simply because they would have wanted Reyes to be punished. It'd have been rather discouraging for the game to end badly because they didn't want to show mercy to Reyes.
It doesn't help it was once said 'what matters is who survives', because in light of this particular requirement it sounds like 'what matters is that people who'd forgive Reyes survives'.
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On the other side of the coin, the other half of the main endgame 'conflict', so to speak, being Ichigo also I think contributed a little to the issues with endgame. As a deadland NPC from what I understand and have experienced it's natural for him to be more and more involved with graveyard as time went on, so it was relatively more difficult for the living to establish and maintain CR with him when it came down to it.
Overall, it felt like the emotional impact of endgame was meant to hinge on either being ICly emotionally invested in either Ichigo or Gabe. I didn't think too much of it at the time as personality mismatches/other things happen and there were also rats and Guests and other NPCs to interact with, but it left me scrambling a little when the finale was really completely focused on two characters my own had passing CR or negative CR with at best. The way I reconciled this was 'maybe the dead are the ones who have the right to dish out the real punishment', but admittedly it was more difficult to engage than, say, R1's endgame -- where the living had deeper CR with Red and also more of a complicated opinion on Archer thanks to Shirou.
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First off, the story. If I’m being entirely honest, I don’t know what narrative you were aiming for because of how much information was just being given out by the NPCs and how fast paced everything was, leaving me incredibly confused at times as to what the players were supposed to do from there. The first few weeks were incredibly fast paced with regards to the story and I frequently felt as though a lot of important information was just being given out to the players without allowing them to draw their own conclusions or investigate for themselves. I am aware that active player involvement pushed this story along even faster, but as mods, it is your responsibility to try and maintain your narrative and not allow the story to go too far off the rails because of player intervention. Additionally, the plot seemed to revolve solely around the conflict regarding Ichigo (the Apprentice) and Reyes (the Outsider). It largely felt as though the player characters were outsiders to this interpersonal conflict, and, unless the characters specifically chose to seek CR with Ichigo or Reyes, they had no stakes and otherwise would have no reason to get involved with or care about the characters. Considering all the themes and elements at play, the conflict resolved in an underwhelming way and ultimately, I felt as though there was little effort required on the part of the players in order to reach the “Golden end”. Of course, I may being overly nitpicky with this, as I was too busy to actually participate very much in the graveyard during endgame, but as I read over the comments again I couldn’t help but feel somewhat unsatisfied with the way things concluded.
Next, the lack of focus on the promised premise. This is somewhat related to the problems regarding the story. You initially advertised your game to be based off The Thing (1982), and at first, I was very excited at being able to play a horror movie protagonist in this setting. However, from what I could see, there was virtually nothing playing off any concept regarding The Thing besides the inclusion of the Doppleganger, which barely had any spotlight or fanfare. Maybe this was just me and holds no bearing regarding other players, but there was no sense of paranoia or danger, and there was little reason for the characters to be afraid of one another, so the whole basis and theme seemed somewhat out of place. (And, despite how much the Foundation was stated to be the “bad guy” in the situation, we never got anything besides memories to demonstrate this. I know one of the rules of storytelling is to show, and not tell, and it disappoints me that such a solid premise and narrative was lost along the way.) There was more focus on the Bleach characters than The Thing, which left me feeling rather confused.
Speaking about Bleach characters, I was surprised and a little confused at how much plot significance Syazel held over the other characters to the point where he almost felt like an NPC. As far as I was aware, he held no role in the game, so I am unsure why you decided to pursue this narrative thread besides the fact that he was also a Bleach character. I want to make it clear that I have no ill will towards Fishbone, but I was a little alarmed at how you allowed them to write the player’s memories. I know that you guys said that you were tired and wanted a break, but as mods, you have an obligation to your players and running the game effectively. If I’m being honest, I don’t know why you guys didn’t just make Fishbone a third mod. Additionally, the last memory written by Fishbone had downright sexual undertones which rubbed me the wrong way, given that Syazel is an adult and many, if not most of the characters in the game are underage. As one of the first memories of the player characters arriving at the resort, there was no real way to opt out of this and I felt deeply uncomfortable about it.
One of the mechanics I felt did not work in your favor was the IC = OOC timing. Don’t get me wrong—I very much liked the fact that trials ICly and OOCly took place over the course of six hours—after all, the characters can’t be expected to stall forever, and it helped in creating a sense of urgency and pressure missing throughout the rest of the game. But all other aspects in which IC time reflected OOC time left me feeling somewhat confused as to why this was included. For example, during the second to last investigation, the investigation took place at 12 PM EST as opposed to 6 PM EST. I understand that you wanted to reflect the abruptness of the explosion and how the player characters were awoken, but I felt that it was an unnecessary change that I didn't really think worked in the intended way. Additionally, during the second-to-last trial where eight people were supposed to be killed, your initial plan was to take 20 minutes OOC to vote for each person. As it takes several minutes for people to reply to each other, there was no real way for any significant discussion to take place or for people to make choices in reaction to what was occurring. After several people expressed the fact that this was too little time, you changed it so that OOC time would not equal IC time, and I greatly appreciated this adjustment and willingness to cooperate with your players. I understand that you wanted to create more of a tabletop RPG sort of experience, but I do not feel as though that this mechanic works with the format of DWRP.
Finally, I’d like to say that towards the last few weeks, I grew confused regarding my role as The Knight, as it seemed like what I was told was not the same as what was implemented. I understand running a game with so many roles can sometimes get confusing, and as far as I am aware, this is your first time running a mafia-type game. However, I will copy and paste what you wrote for my role on this post:
“- The Knight is a Town aligned role that can protect one player from being killed on Thursday night. The Knight will either be with them that night if the protection isn't activated, or elsewhere if someone makes an attempt on their charge's life.
- The Knight has a 50/50 chance of surviving an attack, provided the would be murderer is human. If it's a mafia member, the Knight will die in their charge's place.”
If I am correct in my information, Ripley decided to protect Akira that night, and Akira was initially going to be targeted by Makoto. This is also reflected in the fact that you stated that Ripley’s protection had gone through that week. Makoto at the time was possessed by the Barghest and was thus a mafia member. If this was the case, then, using the information regarding my role, Ripley would have died in Akira’s place. Later on, however, in a PC between Makoto and Ripley, Makoto had stated that she had been blocked from attacking Akira and thus decided to attack someone else. Beside it not seem to reflect the information I had been given regarding my role, I assumed some other role must have blocked her from attacking, but I was later lead to believe that Ripley had actually protected Akira that night. I am confused whether I was given the wrong information regarding my role or whether you misremembered the rules regarding The Knight role.
Many of the mod decisions had me feeling lost, and with them all together I felt dissatisfied with the round as a whole. I hope I've been able to put across my concerns well; if you have any need for further clarification, I will be happy to elaborate. I applaud you both for for running such a high-activity murdergame (especially during the holiday season) and I hope that you find this feedback to be helpful. I wish you success in your future murdergame endeavors.
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Which is a shame, because it puts a damper in what I think was the high point of the round: the memories.
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Hey there! I'm glad you had fun with your first murdergame experience! Murdergames are a lot of fun, and definitely one of my favorite types of games on DWRP. I hope you continue to play in them, either with us or with one of the other groups running murdergames here.
Eski and I have read through your crit, and we wanted to go over a few things with you. This isn't really because we disagree with anything (in all honestly, we agree with most of it), but moreso to say "we're getting what you're saying right, right?" and "this is what we're going to do with your crit to make future rounds better." This is our second time around, but we're still learning things, and we just want to keep improving.
Pacing: Honestly, this is 100% legit. The game went extremely fast, even by murdergame standards. While it's normal for the first week or two to be fast, we were going "wait, this isn't right" by week 3, because that's when it typically starts to slow down. We do have some plans in place to fix that in future rounds, and hopefully that will help.
One of the plans we have is to slow down on giving out plot information. It's pretty standard in murdergames to befriend NPCs and then get information from them, but we gave out too much too fast and because of that only a few people got to jump on the 'get information from the NPCs' bandwagon. For round 3, we're going to have a much more structured way of giving out plot points, as well as a better timeline for getting that information. We were mostly trying to avoid the "this NPC has no further information for you" problem that a lot of games run into, and it backfired badly.
We're also going to be dropping our character cap down to 25 (and possibly 20, if 25 is still to big), and hopefully that will help as well. Fewer characters means each character will get more chances to participate, which is what we really want here.
Themes: This was us not being clear in the beginning, and I apologize for that. Much like how round 1 was based off of Higurashi, round 2 was based off of 'the thing' in that we took the elements we wanted from it and ran with that. The monsters didn't quite fall into the horror aspect as much, and I think that has to do with the fact that it was players playing their characters rather than just 'mindless monster eating people'. We don't think there's any way to really fix that problem, though, so all we can really say for that is "yeah, The Thing did not work at all for a setting for a murdergame." And we do apologize for the finished product not being like what we envisioned.
Also, in relation to the themes: Because The Foundation is a multi-round game, some stuff won't make sense right away. Some important background information happened in round 1 (a LOT of why the Foundation is shitty happened there), and some of the 'huh, why did that happen?' stuff will become clearer in future rounds. Eski and I were coming at this from the point of view of having been here for round 1, so all of that was fresh in our mind and the story tones made sense to us. But someone coming in starting with round 2 would not understand that, and that's a pretty huge failing on our part! To help prevent that from happening, I'm going to be spending the next month working on a 'the plot so far' page that gives in-depth explanations of what happened in rounds 1 and 2. That way someone can jump right in without having to read all of those rounds, they can just read the plot page and know what's going on. I'm sorry you got caught in that, but we're going to fix it going forward.
Szayel: This is actually very common in murdergames! The mods will run most of the game, but someone will play a game-important character within the game itself to help run things. In DRRP, Airlocked, and Trustfell, other players often ran the 'main NPC'. (So, for example, someone else besides a mod would have been playing Ichigo or Gabe.) We didn't do it so much last round because Eski and I handled the NPCs pretty well, but well before this round started we were working on the round plot and tapped Fish to help us run stuff. So it was less that 'he's a Bleach character so he gets special things' and more 'shit we need a third person to help with this specific part of the plot, let's grab a friend to help us.' Labeling him as a PC was definitely a blunder on our part though. In the future when we have to do that, we'll make it clearer from the start that a character like that is an NPC. The sexual undertones on the last memory were definitely out of line, though, and that's on us for not catching that. Even if we were tired, we should have read it more thoroughly, and we apologize for that.
IC vs OOC timing: You're right here. We tried something new with the fifth trial, and it did not work so well. In the future if we need something that's meant to drive tension because of time limits like that, we're going to make 'IC time' and 'OOC time' more clearly split. That way players have more time to thread things, while the time limit is still kept ICly.
Knight role: We actually hadn't heard about this. Can you link us the PC in question so we can follow up on that?
Overall, we want to thank you for playing with us. We're sorry it had some bumps in it that made things less enjoyable, but we hope that you come back for future rounds! Or at least you stay in DWRP and find a group here to play with. You've been a delight to RP with, and we would like to play with you again.
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I understand what you're putting down, and I'm glad you're very receptive to feedback. Thank you for helping make things more clear to me.
Here is the thread in question, but if you haven't heard about this, then it must be a miscommunication between players. I severely apologize if this is the case!
https://justfists.dreamwidth.org/8179.html?thread=135155#cmt135155
I wish you the best for Round 3! Thank you very much, again, and thank you for being great mods.
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In this case, that knowledge wasn't supposed to ever be known ICly. When the mafia were doing the planning for the deaths (after the victims had already been picked, and the mafia hadn't chosen Akira), we alerted them that they had to work around the fact that Akira had been chosen for protect that week, so he couldn't be included in any of the planning (as like, a fake-witness to Owain running away from a murder scene, or that kind of thing). It should not have been IC knowledge, and we apologize that it came up ICly. We'll make it clearer next time what is OOC-only knowledge and what is known ICly in these situations.
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I was looking forward to this game, I really was. I had a lot of fun in Petoskey and I greatly enjoyed the story there, so I figured SCP2 would be a blast too. It's my unfortunate opinion that it...it wasn't as enjoyable as I thought it'd be. It doesn't mean it was a bad game! It simply is that personally it wasn't really how I thought it'd be like, so my own expectations tripped me up. That's my fault, heh. But although I feel this partly because of my rather high expectations for the game, it's also because of some rather notorious problems I feel this game had. I was thinking about just keeping this to myself because this is kind of negative, but since I'm looking forward to the other two rounds...I don't know, I felt I just had to post this, even though I may be wrong?
So please take these opinions with a grain of salt! Let's see...
The game was rather overwhelming during the first half, pretty much. You could say the pacing of level of overwhelming events in the game reminded me of the graveyard event in Cartesio -- that's not a favorable comparison at all -- just that instead of happening in the span of three hours this was in the span of a couple weeks. It's not an exaggeration to say I'm feeling burned out for the first time in three years and half, and that's even when I bowed out from the game like halfway in.
It was because us players went quite hard at everything, with a lot of enthusiasm and stuff, yup, but at the same time I feel the balance between the players moving forward the plot and the moderators keeping a handle on the plot was skewed too hard towards the players' side. I still think you lost control of the plot.
The biggest example is the revelation about how the resort is alive. You yourself said it, it was a plot point that was supposed to be presented later in the game, yet due to players' actions it happened earlier than expected. I can't avoid feeling this kind of thing happened very often, also for reasons I'll talk about later in this post.
So much happened in a rather short span of time, and at breakneck speeds. It's shameful to admit, but...I had to stop following the story by the end of week 2 because of how much was happening -- and I know I'm not the only one who had to stop thinking about the story to focus on other stuff, which is a shame. The narrative of this round was nice and interesting once you have the time to read back and finally process everything that was going on. If this happened with a round that had a straightforward plot as this one, I can only imagine how troublesome a round with a more convoluted narrative such a next round could be, if it ends being like this one on this regard.
I can't avoid feeling the breakneck speed was something that was meant to be encouraged, because of things like having twenty minutes to vote in the last trial for a person to die, right at the start. The deceased having the ability to stick around in the living side with as many liberties as they had also contributed to the extraordinary amount of activity there was, that's for sure. It was like nobody died at all, hah!
So yeah, on week 2 I had to stop following the story and I decided to focus on the rest of the game -- the mafia game. That takes me to the other point I'd like to address, because it's the biggest reason why I wasn't able to enjoy this round:
This game was very anticlimactic. I think that's the reason why I feel kind of letdown by the game: because it felt like a mafia game just like any other I have seen and played in before. Mafia starts killing, mafia stops doing the killing, mafia joins with the town, end of the game. It's a formula that has been done so many times during these last three years. The game's concept had a lot of potential, but I think the potential went unfulfilled despite the effort. If I had to pinpoint a reason for that, I'd say it'd be because of this:
By the end of Week 3 -- less than halfway into the game -- we knew the identities of two mafia and the mafia's disposition towards town was friendly. Pretty much the entirety of the mafia game mechanics was obsolete by the end of Week 3. From there on, there was no antagonistic force the characters could really work against. The Outsider was the closest thing to an antagonistic force, and even then he wasn't really...someone to work against. He simply was someone who at the time seemed to be extremely stubborn and refused to come out of where he was even if it was very clearly killing the resort. Narratively it was a huge step down in terms of stakes -- and it only was fixed when it was revealed he was trapped, not that he was voluntarily staying there.
I don't think it's a good thing the mechanics the game was promoted on -- a mafia game based on the Thing, with roles and everything -- were made redundant before the game was halfway done. I also don't think it's a good thing the good end flags except those happening at endgame had been achieved by around halfway into the game. I guess it's possible the reason why I felt aimless was because I signed up for a murdergame and by the end of Week 3 it felt more like it was a jamjar.
Even the final trial was extremely anticlimactic. I mean...it's safe to assume the chance Reyes would be punished with death was pretty low. That means the only thing that happened during the final trial was deciding the punishment for Reyes. There was nothing to discuss other than that. Seven weeks of game led to the final trial. It's a pretty weak end not only for the game itself, but also for the narrative established during these seven weeks.
In terms of a game in general it was an enjoyable game! I had fun when I was playing in it and doing what I could. That's the least one can ask from a game, yup! And this round fulfilled it. As a murdergame it was okay. And as a mafia game...um...it...didn't work at all and I feel it was shoddily executed on that regard.
I'm very sorry if this comes across as excessively negative. It wasn't a bad game, it really did have good points I enjoyed a lot! But yeah, I felt all this needed to be said.
I already have high hopes for the next round, I admit. I already know some measures are being taken to avoid the problems this round had, so...yeah, I'm looking forward to the next round.
Thank you very much for your efforts, modteam.
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Pacing: As mentioned above, the pacing definitely went out of control. We have some measures we're going to try to slow everything down a bit in future rounds, so hopefully that will help. We're definitely going to be watching more carefully to make sure it doesn't go as fast as it did this round, neither Eski nor I can keep up with a round like this again.
Mafia: We hear your crit here, and we agree with you. The mafia part of the game just completely fell apart. Part of that is our fault (Pan asked us if Cinque could out her role, and we ran with that idea in week 3. We should have told her 'no, it's too early, wait until week 5 or 6.'), and part of it is the fact that mafia is not suited to weekly structure games like this. Mafia works way better when each 'voting day' happens every day or other day, and the game lasts two weeks total. This is a big part of why we're not going to do mafia-style anymore. We do wish we had something better to offer than "we're sorry, we'll fix it for next time", because you're right. The whole 'The Thing' part of the game did not work at all, largely because we made the Things into PCs instead of NPCing them. But we are sorry that our plans did not work well here.
The final trial: This also ran into the problem of "mafia was known, so it was made moot." The number of mafia left, as well as Gabe's disposition to them, was supposed to play a HUGE part in the final trial. Like, when we planned it, a good chunk of it was planned under the assumption that he would still be hostile to the mafia. That's a big part of why the final trial felt lackluster, and we're sorry for that. We should have beefed up the other aspects (and maybe included a section of you guys convincing the Hotel to let him go) to accommodate what we lost.
And thanks again for giving us crit. You always give us really insightful thoughts, and we appreciate it.
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I'm sorry that it hurt your enjoyment of the game.
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First of all, I really appreciated what you were trying to go for with this game. I was really excited for it, and I like that you guys are trying to break the norms of murdergames and change things up a little. However, I kind of left this round feeling disappointed.
I won't touch on the mafia dynamics, as it seems you guys are already well aware of it, but first and foremost: the pacing didn't work very well at all. Reveals happened all too soon, most notably with the revival of the dead which removed pretty much all stakes and tension for the characters and death became kind of...meaningless. Except for the situations of double dying which, for the two main NPCS, that was apparently a bad end criteria but it seemed really unclear where the opportunity for that was really going to happen. Things happened too much too fast, I think the distribution of information ICly went too quickly (and it felt like characters were just told things, rather than figuring them out for themselves which didn't feel very engaging), and attributing it to "the players going too hard" suggested you guys lost the reins of the story a little bit more than anything else.
Again, timing wise, having certain situations having an IC=OOC balance didn't really work out because...not everyone's really available that whole time, or people have to get up and do things, or take time to consider and write their responses. I understand having restrictions but the 20 minute machine gun voting is just something I would not suggest repeating again (and definitely definitely please give your players a greater heads up than "be at the trial"!), and to a lesser extent, the time limits on the Tiger event.
I think the resortghosts account was a neat concept in theory, but in the end it just was...kind of a mess. People saw tags they didn't want to see, it was just kind of a hassle to log in - log out, and lose track of tags and not know who you're threading with. I understand wanting the mystery, but I'm uncomfortable concept of not having an idea of who it is I'm interacting with, personally.
I'll echo above sentiments about the role of the NPC's conflict in the plot because really, it's been said about as best as it can be. It felt really unsatisfactory that a lot of stuff seemed to be just happening around us as a cast, and a lot of the things to do with the mafia monsters and their motivations were really unsatisfactory. It seemed you guys were going for a "who are the real monsters?" kind of plot thread for a while but that never really seemed to go anywhere. The final trial, as a result, also felt anticlimactic and not particularly exciting. I really think elements of paranoia could've been a lot stronger - especially because this is based off of The Thing. There just seemed to be ever-dwindling reason for character tension.
I think the chat could've benefited from stronger moderation in terms of sensitive topics, and in a similar vein I was really uncomfortable with that final memory with Szayel. I think really, at this point, I will just be echoing what people have already said. I really respect what you guys are trying to do here, and I did enjoy my time in this game to a point (and I think, if you want to keep anything, please keep all these fun worldbuilding memories and details because those were just so much fun), but I think you guys might have been trying to balance too many things at once in this round.
Thank you for this experience, for your efforts and for reading. I hope this has been helpful to you & best of luck with Round three!
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You're right, a lot of what you mentioned are things that we are seeing did not work at all, and won't be using again. But we do appreciate the confirmation that we're right in our thoughts there. We will also be giving much more mod oversight to when we have players run things for us (it's common in murdergames for players to run important plot stuff, but we should have had more oversight over what was going on), so problems like what happened this time won't happen again.
We will definitely be clearer on time restraints in the future, though. The IC=OOC time is likely to come up in round 4, as it's based around game shows, and that's part of why we wanted to test it now. But when it does come up then, we're going to be a lot clearer on the expectations for those events/trials, and let everyone know much farther in advance what is going on. We apologize for not giving enough notice on some of the events this time around. Our plan for future rounds is to let everyone know on Sunday what days in the upcoming week will have mod-run threads (player-run we will still leave up to the discretion of the players involved), so that everyone has timely notice of what is going on.
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I’m glad to hear that you guys have already been doing reflecting on this during the round and that you’re already working to improve on some of what didn’t quite work out. You guys have been very approachable as mods and I appreciate that (part of why I personally am comfortable enough to share my concerns here). Thank you for listening & for the game!
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Ooooh boy. alright, im just saying ahead of time this will probably be very disjointed because im gonna be bouncing back and forth from point to point while writing this for the next couple hours. If i don't explain smth well or yall just want further clarification, just let me know
Also, there is no doubt that I've forgotten quite a bit of what I wanted to say here, just because there truly is a LOT. I may come back and leave a second comment on this post in the future if I remember anything hugely important, or at least comment on others' posts here if they bring up a point I agree with and forgot to elaborate on.
Before I start on anything else, I just wanna say, overall I did have fun in this game and I don't hold any real ill will to yall as mods. yall tried, and some things worked, and some didnt, and what matters is that yall learn from what didnt work going forward
So, there's some things I've talked about before to yall, but for the sake of accountability I'm gonna bring them up again, if only so that other people who might have had similar concerns can see that they're not alone.
-The decision to make every dead person use the resortghosts account led to a lot of confusion, it was difficult to keep track of messages in the inbox, some people who didnt want their PCs looked at by strangers and acquaintances real-time felt uncomfortable with people stalking others PCs, and people like myself who didnt want to see teenager characters making out or being groped or in other implied sexual situations involving ghost characters, had no choice but to see these messages when they arrived in the inbox.
-Going into this game, people knew that there would be things like body horror and a certain amount of memory manipulation. We did not know that an unavoidable, canonical event would be a player character drugging all of our characters with tentacles in an oddly sexualized manner and mind-wiping us. i know the worst of that["post-orgasmic"] was edited out later on, but it was still wildly uncomfortable, especially considering that same player making jokes about her character being creepily sexual and even referring to him as a rapist in deadland chat.
-The overall plot importance of Szayel despite him being a player character, the fact that Szayel's player knew multiple key plot details, Szayel's player being allowed to write memories, etc, really made him feel more like a mod character in everything but name. Involving players in the plot is fine! Closely involving one specific player with the plot was kind of overdoing it, though, and it got to a point where i would occasionally forget he wasnt a mod character
-Despite the chat rules saying that discussions of triggering topics weren't allowed, I rarely- if ever- saw the mods step in and stop discussions of:
a.the suicide of a character close to Atsushi, being joked about in chat
b.Jokes about non-consensual drugging, mind control, mind reading, et cetera
c.Jokes about nsfw content involving teenagers
et cetera. In fact, the only times I can remember these discussions being stopped were when players brought it up. Now, I understand that it's not possible to completely moderate a chat 24/7, and I don't expect you to be able to. But there were times when these comments would happen while yall were actively talking in the chat, and nothing was said, and it did not make me feel comfortable bringing up concerns I had at the time.
That's the stuff I've more or less talked about already w/ you two, and which has already been covered and/or dealt with elsewhere as a result. Now let's get to the rest of it.
-This game was said to be based on The Thing, a movie centered around paranoia, feeling unable to trust one another, body horror and things not being what they seem. I pretty much... never got that vibe from this game? And part of that was due to player decisions, IE attempting to befriend the monsters, befriend the resort, save Reyes despite him causing all the conflict, believing that the monsters were coerced into hurting people and aren't really bad, etc; which is fair! this cast was mostly made up of protag teens and young adults, after all.
But that's kind of antithetical to the very premise of The Thing, and the fact that in order to reach Golden End the living HAD to get Reyes to apologize, we HAD to make nice with the resort... it doesn't fit? It feels like, OOCly, the push was for the characters to friendship everything, and if that's the case then... why involve The Thing at all?
Though really, I genuinely don't know where The Thing was in all of this. The Dopple role, I guess, but there was no real chance for it to shine, especially since Cinque got revealed in week 3. The fact that we're in a snowy place in the middle of nowhere with monsters? Sure, I guess? But that's just a setting. The fun of The Thing is the fact that it could be anyone, that someone could be puppeted like a meat suit at any moment, even someone you love, and you'll never know until it's too late, so you can't trust anyone, no matter how much you want to. And if you trust too much, you die.
Which... the only time I can really think of that happening was Cynthia's death against Atsushi tiger.
Overall, I know yall were trying to go for a "people are the real monsters, the Foundation are the real monsters" thing, but it doesn't at all go well with The Thing, and led to some real confusion on my part as well as frustration.
-Power nerfing was sometimes handled... Oddly. Like, speaking specifically about Medic- I was initially surprised that Medic was allowed to keep his Medigun, but I accepted it, assuming that the resort had some anomalous properties preventing it from working perfectly. But- and I could be remembering this wrong- I believe in chat it was mentioned that our powers were nerfed by Szayel's drugging? Which shouldn't have had any effect on Medic's gun. If it was always intended for the characters to have lost their powers through drugging, I would have honestly been ok with not being given the Medigun at all, and instead having Medic rely on healing syringes and his own knowledge of combat medicine.
More importantly, though, while the Medigun could only manage a weak form of healing, and most other characters with healing properties were nerfed in similar ways, another character- Katherine(And this is not at all me insulting her or her player, mind you) was allowed to keep her blood which can instantly heal anyone who drinks it.
That... seems unbalanced. And I'm not sure if that was just an oversight, or if the whole "you have to drink her blood and also if you die within 24 hours you also become a vampire" was seen as enough of a drawback to make it work, but it left me very confused.
-The sheer amount of significance on The Apprentice and Outsider left me feeling like this was more of a story about them, with us just sort of... influencing what happened. This feels reinforced by the fact that we could have bad-ended if either of them permadied, despite the fact that... Really, what did Reyes do in the end, once he'd gotten out of the brain? Would him dying have prevented the dead from getting new bodies, and have somehow doomed the resort? If so, I missed that entirely.
-There are ways to play w/ ghost characters being around and interact-able. There are ways to play w/ characters being resurrected at endgame. Mixing the two is a delicate balance, and revealing in week 3 that all the ghosts could come back to life was not the way to do it. If you're gonna have characters come back to life, it works so much better if the living can't interact with them, and thus have that to strive towards. If you're gonna have ghosts, either permadeath or ICly withholding the fact that the dead can come back to life until endgame is probably the best way to go. That way, the living have a REASON to want to live and not see their friends die. Because they either know they won't come back, or they're left with that uncertainty.
-Speaking of all the stakes being gone early on, the mafia felt completely useless around week 3. The comment on the end post: "The game of Mafia is finally over." feels kind of like a joke, because the game had basically been over from the moment 2/3rds of the mafia was revealed and we knew that all the dead could be resurrected. (And I don't blame either Makoto or Cinque's players for that, by the way, just in case they're worried about that. Yall did your best.)
Some more minor nitpicks:
-IC:OOC time can work sometimes. I feel like the Atsushi tiger event was one time where it definitely did not work. From what I could tell, there was a lot of the living twiddling their thumbs trying to wait for the next part of the event to happen
-"you'll really want to be here for this trial which takes place just a few days after Christmas, on the half-break week" = "the instant the trial starts, you need to vote to kill someone" came as a big [and inconvenient] surprise to most people and while I'm glad that yall were willing to extend the voting time upon hearing complaints, you probably should have been up-front from the start about the fact that ppl would be voting at the very beginning of the trial. I know, it gets rid of the surprise factor, but most ppl didnt realize that "this trial will be big and important" meant they couldn't even be an hour late to it without someone dying. especially since, again- Holidays!
-Also, so much of this game's plot seemed based on misunderstandings. Ichigo got shot because of a misunderstanding when he started talking to himself. Atsushi turned into a tiger because he forgot what day it was. Reyes refused to believe he was the problem and blamed the resort and others for his own mistakes. These sort of things feel like conveniences, and... kind of underwhelming.
Overall, there was some fun to be had in this game. I loved what CR i was able to build (and, just as a note for anyone reading this- this isnt a criticism of ANYONE but myself btw-: I am genuinely apologetic for the fact that I didn't tag out as often as I wanted. When I joined this game, I didn't realize just how many characters would be teenagers, and I'm personally not too comfortable having this weird bastard in his late 40s who talks about gore and medical experimentation, trying to socialize with people under 20. It feels uncomfortable to me, and it led to me intentionally playing down some of his weirder traits as a result whenever I did tag out to other characters. I hope that he was still enjoyable despite this!),
and honestly? I think the highlight of this game was in the little details. I loved reading about the resort and its grandkid haunted houses in the epilogue. I loved Cookie Gojira and the oilcat and the raccoon and the moose and the rats. I genuinely wish this game had given those little things more focus, because those were truly my favorite parts of the game- these little bits of worldbuilding, that could have even been utilized even further, driving home your point that, yes, the people are the real monsters here, and the "monsters" all have lives and feelings and motivations separate from ours. (Which, again, doesnt jive too well with The Thing, but that doesn't make it an irredeemable premise.)
I know this post brings up a lot of negative things, but again, that's not meant as a reflection of dislike on you guys as mods- or on the other players. I genuinely hope that you guys take this criticism to heart and work to make r3 as good as you can make it! I believe in yall.
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Resortghosts: We have decided not to do this kind of a thing in future rounds, as it definitely had more problems than it was worth.
Content warning stuff: As per our previous discussion, we edited the memory and discussed the content with the player in question. If we ask for content written by players in the future, we will be much more diligent about catching things like that. I do apologize for the sexual content within that memory, and the comments made in the chat room. That said, some of the other content you mentioned (the drugging especially) is par for the course as far as SCP goes, and we really consider that to be covered by the general trigger warnings for the whole game. We will be editing the game information to make that point more clear, but our general rule is going to be "If it's something you can reasonably expect to see in a horror movie, then we count it under the general content warning rule."
Szayel: It's actually not too uncommon to involve other players in this manner! Speaking from personal experience here (this is Maple btw), several rounds of Trustfell (a murdergame I played in before modding this game) had players running important NPCs. In the future we will do a better job of making it clear that such characters are being run for the sake of the plot, though. We apologize for the confusion there.
Chat problems: Overall, Eski and I do try our best to moderate the chat. I am not here as much as Eski is, but I trust her to moderate chat when I am not here, just like she trusts me to moderate chat when she is not here. That said, we do miss content sometimes, which is why we appreciate it when people come to us and say "hey, this was said in chat and is not cool!"
As for your specific examples:
a- The only thing I remember seeing involving Atsushi and suicide jokes was when several of us were talking about Atsushi's canon and I went "Hey so, since we're talking about it: Bungou Stray Dogs contains suicide jokes. This is a trigger warning for that fact." We did not mention the suicide jokes, we only gave the warning so that people who were interested in checking out the canon would be aware of the fact that it does contain suicide jokes. If there is an incident besides that, please copy/paste it so I know who to speak to about it.
b- I do apologize for this one, but we spoke to the player involved and as far as I know it did not happen again. If it did happen again after the player was warned, please copy/paste it so I can bring it to them and begin the disciplinary process.
c- There were indeed these jokes sometime in the first week, and as soon as I saw them I immediately shut them down. As far as I know, there weren't jokes made outside of those particular jokes that were NSFW content. I remember kissing jokes and dating jokes, but nothing that really warranted a "hey, don't do that" from us. If I am wrong here, though, please show me where it happened and I will handle the problem. (if it happened in the last 2-3 days I definitely did miss it though, because I have been busy with endgame stuff. But still, please show me, and I will handle it.)
Themes: We do acknowledge the clash in themes at the end. As I mentioned above, one of the components of endgame was going to be trying to convince Gabe that it's safe enough for him to leave his holdout within the Hotel. This got circumvented by two of the mafia permadying (which did happen through means we put in the game, but we didn't expect both methods to happen) and the third one being an absolute sap and nonthreatening to the game. It's definitely on us that we didn't alter our endgame plans to take that into account, though. We apologize for that. (You are right though, we were trying for a "The Foundation is the real monsters" thing, because they are. That's more of a multi-round plot that will pay off later, though.)
Powers: Powers are actually nerfed upon entry to the game! The device that summons souls to the world adjusts power differences to try and make things fairer. It's also why some people get powers when they didn't have powers to begin with. We did have some trouble with power adjustments this round (we didn't realize to what extent Katherine's blood heals people, using the example you gave, and we had to adjust that mid-round to make things fairer), and we definitely could have done a better job at that. We want to make it an even playing field for everyone without completely nerfing powers, as we feel 'no powers' would not really fit in an SCP-based game. So, we apologize for the problems here.
Deadland: honestly, the 'communicate with the living' thing was something Eski and I wanted to test out, since we did always dislike how the dead are pretty much 'gone from the game' in a lot of murdergames. Ultimately you're right in that it didn't work out this round, though. We probably won't be allowing communication between 'living' and 'dead' in such a manner again, it just didn't work out as well as we thought it would.
Mafia part: This is honestly our fault, because we gave the OK to out the roles early. We should have said 'no' to that, and we will be keeping a better lid on reveals like that in the future.
IC/OOC time: As I mentioned above, we will probably be using variable time like this in round 4, but we will be much more upfront about when it's happening and just how it will be changing things. (Our current plan is to do announcements like that the Sunday before.) That way people can plan and be there.
Misunderstandings: Eski and I were trying to get a specific theme across with this round: people are, ultimately, human. They make mistakes. They aren't always right. They don't think clearly under stress. They're prideful and try to cover up their mistakes, which ultimately make things worse. This is why we used misunderstandings as a framework for the plot this round: to build an atmosphere of mistakes and second-guessing your gut. We thought that, since this was a mafia game, it would be the perfect time to try that. Have the NPCs make mistakes, which in turn causes the PCs to make mistakes as well. And then the battle isn't just against monsters, but against your own faults. It seems that it didn't come across quite as well as we intended, though. We might take another shot at it in a future round, to see if we can get it right, though that won't be a mafia round (since we're not going to do mafia-style anymore).
But thank you for the crit! You've given us a lot to work with for improving future rounds, and we appreciate it.
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jokes about a character who committed suicide, without any content warnings-
https://i.gyazo.com/996e49030ff1e63e0e3ee16fbec777d3.png
https://i.gyazo.com/3098c76ff3b765a0b777fe9cd1eb619c.png
https://i.gyazo.com/364eabb65a722ad6164286debe46f873.png
theres not a whole lot of specific examples i can think of off the top of my head involving nsfw jokes and teens[i dont take specific note of every message that rubs me the wrong way, after all], but here are a couple of things i managed to remember after reading through this message:
https://i.gyazo.com/ce338d09c45aa767f3cc0c92e4146e4c.png
https://i.gyazo.com/eee2a0686b338b0c6efe0622f11f953a.png
[Rean is 18, but Ryoga is 16, and the comments about how investigators "secondhand touched Rean's junk" feels inappropriate even though Rean is 18, since most of the cast is either teens or MUCH older than him]
https://i.gyazo.com/546d94553664ccbf48dcc06f7d21436e.png
https://i.gyazo.com/a83f8a0cc409f6ce509e8d883444fb6f.png
[I know these are clearly jokes, but they still don't sit right when they're about a 16 y/o.]
Thank you again for reading through this and the other critiques available on this post
also, for any players reading over this, please dont feel bad if you're in these screenshots. i dont have any real grudges here
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For the second and third one, we just don't see how these are inappropriate? Not inappropriate enough to warrant a "hey, that's NSFW, please don't" warning at least.
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as for the latter, its also possible im reading too much into things in those regards. while the comments did leave me and a couple others a little uncomfortable, they weren't nearly to the point of things like the szayel memory.
thank you anyway
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However, and I know I expressed this before, I do think it's a little worrying that you want Round 3 to be even more ambitious. There were times when it seemed like you were rushing to put stuff together on little sleep, such as when you were writing memories last minute. I recall at least once that Eski was doing a map an hour or so after the weekly post was supposed to go up. I don't know if it was because you guys were busy or what, but please take care of yourselves... Personal flourishes are great, as is the item system (which, I think ended up being something you guys overextended on and ended up dropping. I think this is completely fair, it isn't easy to do items much less come up with something unique and fun every time, but I think doing as Luna suggested and having a generic list ahead of time or simply doing away with it entirely will help you guys) but if it ends up being more stress in the long run or causing you precious sleep then I'm not certain it's worth it.
I echo Kohaku, Ripley, Iwai, and Snake's players sentiments on the plot importance of Ichigo and Gabe's relationship. I'm... not entirely certain why that was the focus of the second half of the game, if I'm being entirely honest. It felt like the entire first half was dedicated to worldbuilding—which is where a lot of the overwhelming plot details came from, I think. The thing is a lot of these details, in hindsight, felt very superfluous to the overall plot of the game. Take away everything about the resort besides the "SCP, living entity" and the entirety of the endgame plot remains intact. I'm not entirely positive that's a good thing. There could be some merit in the concept of "rebuild the relationship between these two" if it were presented in a different way, I think. An example off the top of my head would be: maybe have Ichigo choose town roles and Gabe choose mafia. Gabe could be trying to take over the SCP and Ichigo could be trying to stop him, so the mafia's goal is to eliminate Ichigo's side (knowing full well the characters can be brought back + are dispensible anyway) and cause chaos in the SCP. Then you could figure out how to hide information, manage mechanics, justify IC decisions, etc..
I'm also really not sure what the stakes were supposed to be for the final trial. I'm certain there were some. My best guess is if the characters chose to execute Gabe, Ichigo would lose control and kill everyone or half of everyone. I'm not entirely sure that's a good way of doing things though. It felt like the entire final trial was on rails and there was no point to arguing with Gabe to apologize to everyone. In fact, it... it honestly just felt like making him apologize was purely catered to making Ichigo feel better...? What did the characters actually gain by arguing with him to apologize versus choosing to execute him or simply saying "nah let the Foundation handle him, whatever"? And that's putting aside that it is a very weak punishment for everything he did. It's the equivalent of giving him a slap on the wrist. And putting even that aside, the fact that the apology was a prerequisite of good end assumes that only those who had a "good" moral leaning were "right." Even then, I would argue that absolving him isn't morally "good," but by making it the correct choice for Golden End it felt like that's what you were saying.
Um, actually. I don't know how to say this and I don't know how it was in Round 1 but... I do, uh, feel like this round you guys had an issue in general of putting a lot of importance on your characters and NPCs. I can understand why, honestly. We all enjoy playing our characters and for NPCs especially it can be easy to lean on them for story progression. But outside of Ichigo and Gabe, I think there maybe was an issue with Atsushi as well. The fact that he had contact with Lambda, spoke of her first, and that he said she had multiple conversations with him made me a little uncertain. I understand your reasons for giving Atsushi the Cleaner role, but if he was going to have that much interaction with an important background NPC, I wonder if it would've been better to give it to a player. I think you guys mentioned she approached a few different people so maybe it's just that those characters didn't speak up, but it was something that made my brow raise. The fact that Atsushi's player plot was used during break week and advertised in the mod channel kind of made me uncomfortable too. I guess if I'd been watching Atsushi I would have been able to predict that the Friday/Saturday plot of that week was going to be about him and, honestly, if it was stated outright it was about him then it's my fault for missing it. But while it was advertised as a non-essential plot, I didn't expect it at all to be a player plot. I expected something like a Holiday dance for Saturday. Something silly but fun that people could miss if they wanted and could backtag if need be. Those expectations are on me, of course, but... I really do wish it had been advertised as a player plot instead of being put in the announcement channel. I think you guys would have gotten more interest from Atsushi's CR if it was. Atsushi's CR could have taken up the limited spots in the tiger fight too. I ended up volunteering and, honestly? Had no idea what to do with the Atsushi stuff because my character had no CR with him. There was no emotional impact for him at all beyond Cynthia's death, which is okay for him? I think it definitely would have been more satisfying for Atsushi's CR to land the spot vs. someone he didn't know, though.
On a mechanic level for everything re: tiger fight: more transparency for rolls/the formula would be great. I understood the concept of "you get what I get, it's bad," but there were a few times both in the kill log and in the Saturday fight where the rolls seemed completely arbitrary. You would roll for one thing but not for another. That could be on me, I could be dim and simply missed what it was for or perhaps you forgot to put a roll down, so take that with a grain of salt. On another mechanic note—I think putting the amount of turns the tiger was distracted would have helped out immensely. If the tiger looked sufficiently distracted, I'm fairly certain Vanitas and Gerome would have run off sooner. That, in turn, would have made the thread go by faster.
Only other thing I have to say about that is it may have been wiser to start with Atsushi transformed rather than spend almost two hours building up to it as it would've been faster.
Beyond all that, I think maybe you guys need to hold back a little more in the chat. You let a lot of stuff slip. Sometimes it's small stuff, sometimes it isn't. Mostly I think it's because you're excited to talk about everything and the effort you put in, and the effort you did put in is honestly wonderful. It's great to be proud of your work and the details you put in and want people to notice them! But sometimes it was stuff that could have been a greater twist if it were revealed later or implemented in a different way. Mainly, I'm thinking of Lambda. If you guys waited to talk about her in chat until endgame, I bet it would've been a huge shock. As is, I think a lot of people assumed she was the one who started the game as soon as she was mentioned.
Moving away from NPCs and plot, I want to bring up the mass vote trial. Again, I agree with everyone else here. There needed to be a warning about the time limit and I think by this point you understand that, however... Frankly, I also think you needed a content warning. The mass volunteers could easily have made players uncomfortable. While I understand you can't control your players, it should have been an easy guess that a lot of characters would volunteer. The concept of volunteers came up during the first trial and even during the third. This was a very self-sacrificing town so I'm a little unclear on why so many volunteers weren't anticipated. There were better ways to handle crowd control (use Cleaner to kill more often, use Mole to whittle down numbers, add a TP killer role that had to kill), and I think stopping at the minimum survivor pool count would've been better than continuing. Without the ghosts around to talk to the survivors, the final week was very quiet.
Tangentially related: AC was too easy. Activity was more than high enough that players should have been able to get 20 comments in 2 threads. Please consider making the mandatory amount of threads for AC 2 instead of allowing players to split it over 3-4.
This has gotten a lot longer than I intended, l-laughs... If I came across as blunt, I'm very sorry. I don't mean to be harsh and I don't mean to sound too critical, so I hope that isn't the case. There's a lot I think you guys did very well here, even if I think there's a lot that didn't quite work. I very much so enjoyed my time and my CR in the game and would be thrilled to join future rounds!
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Ambitions for round 3: We do have some ambitious ideas, but we're going to balance them out by not doing some of the more work-intensive things we did this round. We're not writing custom memories, for example, which was a HUGE time sink each week. Similarly, we're making an item list to roll off of for AC rewards, so that will take maybe 30 minutes tops instead of the 3-4 hours it did this round. Instead, we're going to use that time on other parts of the game, especially certain things involving Umineko-specific game mechanics. We do hear your worry here, though, and we will keep it to a manageable level.
Ichigo and Gabe: On reflection, your thoughts on rebalancing the game to have Ichigo handle town and Gabe handle the mafia sound interesting! If we were to go back and do this round again, it's something we would try, I think. Unfortunately, our ideas did fall a little flat, and we should have tweaked them a bit more to make them work.
Final trial: I mentioned it above in a couple responses, but one of the components (convincing Gabe it was safe to even leave) ended up getting completely removed by player actions during the game. Which I count as a plus, really, since it shows that you guys are making the story what you want it to be. It did make the final trial a bit lackluster, though, and we should have modified it a bit to make it more interesting.
Atsushi: (this is Maple speaking here btw) Admittedly, the full moon stuff was a bit of a "ooo I want this to happen" thing on my part. I should have made it clearer that it was meant to be a player thing and not really a mod plot, though. That's my bad. I had hoped that putting it on a break week would give the people here something to do while not making it required (like a trial is), but I can see where it didn't come off that way. I apologize for that. (I am confused about the "have him start out transformed" crit though? Because he did start out transformed, the 'changing into a tiger' stuff was a private kill log before the event went up.)
Fifth trial stuff: We addressed this in other comments too, but we do see how people were unprepared for that trial, and we will be making timelines and such much clearer if we use this method again in the future.
AC: The AC we have now is actually our revised AC. We used to have it the way you described, but we got crit on it being difficult to make the threads long enough to meet AC. That is why we decided to go with what we had this time around. And honestly, it worked out pretty well, so we think we'll be keeping it for future rounds too (barring changes to 'bonus AC', as we are still working on that system.)
Once again, thank you for giving us crit! We appreciate it.
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Everything you're saying here makes sense to me, really. And to be fair I know that roles/mafia probably isn't something you guys are going to do again so l-laughs, that was probably an unnecessary example, but I wouldn't mind you guys doing something with a similar concept. Final trial plans changing definitely makes sense 'cause I can see how some things could've been removed cause criteria were already cleared.
For the transformed thing... Maybe it's a terminology problem...?! I don't know BSD terms so if the human side is the "transformed" one, the confusion makes sense. I was thinking the tiger was the "transformation." Basically, I meant starting out as a tiger vs starting out as a human and then turning. The turning took a while, even if I understand the build-up was important narratively. I-I was gonna throw some hypotheticals your way but after thinking about it, it was more off-hand commentary than actual crit so probably not important.
Mostly the suggestion was 'cause the thread ended up going much longer than everybody anticipated (the time estimate was 2-3 hours and I definitely understand why it went longer by probably double the estimate) and by the time we finished, it was pretty late. I probably should have phrased it more like, "If you guys do a thread like this again, starting it at the beginning of the fight/characters running into X might be faster than going through a transformation sequence." Transformations are fun, but they can certainly take a while. YMMV though cause I do understand the appeal of build-up.
I don't think I have anything else to add though. Makes sense to me, and I'm really glad to see you guys considering what everyone's saying and answering us so diligently! o7
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First off, you guys did a great job with the worldbuilding and I appreciated all the little details that went into the setting, like the vents being part of the Resort’s circulatory system and with the PCs being centred in the stomach area. As others have mentioned, the memories were also a very nice personal touch and I commend you guys for writing so many, particularly for the characters that you were canonblind to; I can’t imagine how much work that must have been and how much time it must have taken up, but it really did do a good job of integrating the characters within the setting. I’d go so far as to say that the worldbuilding was probably the strongest element of this game and it’s clear how much love went into it.
Moving onto the plot and I know this is likely beating a dead horse at this point, but I pretty much agree with what everyone else said about the focus being on Reyes and Ichigo’s relationship. The thing is, it also seems to stand in such stark contrast to the rest of the information that was supposed to be the main focus of the round; namely, how the Resort worked and the mafia game. My impression was that (from the amount of information they were given about the Resort early on) the final trial was going to focus heavily on figuring out why the mafia game was run or who 34 was in-game. But by making endgame all about Reyes and Ichigo’s relationship, it feels like any theorizing about why the game was done or who was responsible was ultimately pointless, because in the end, none of that needed to be resolved to get a ‘good ending’.
I get wanting sequel hooks and I get leaving mysteries for the next game to cover. But there didn’t seem to be any reason why some of those points (that ended up being revealed in the epilogue anyways) couldn’t have been made part of the discussion so that the players would have to have something to solve in endgame. I know a lot of it already came up OOCly before and I think most people probably already knew/suspected 34 was involved with the mafia game after she was pointed out in chat during the end of Week 4 (which honestly is a whole other problem in and of itself), but having it established ICly would’ve helped make the final trial seem more substantial. As it was, it just felt like the final trial was all about guilt-tripping Reyes as much as possible, and even then I’m not so sure why that was a requisite for good end. Would the Lady refuse to let them leave unless Reyes apologized or was punished to her satisfaction?
This is connected to the feeling that the circumstances behind the final trial seemed fairly contrived to me. I can sort of understand it from the standpoint of the Resort wanting to get some closure to the incident, but it’s still odd to say “sorry for the inconvenience we caused to all of you, but we’re also not going to let you out until you tell us what you decide to do with him”. If the Resort really was washing their hands of the whole thing, I’m not sure why the living had to stick around to discuss that stuff then and there? Furthermore, I also don’t really understand why the Lady didn’t let the dead back into the new bodies or let them get some of Reyes’ medicine to tide him over. On an OOC level I understand: survivor pool should be taking charge of what happens during the final trial while the dead are mostly on the sidelines. The problem is the seeming lack of IC justification aside from, “no, we aren’t doing it until all of you decide”. The same issue exists for the medication and it seems even more egregious because Reyes is a danger to everyone, including the Resort; again, I didn’t really know what withholding that was supposed to accomplish aside from… I don’t know, punishing him, maybe?
A few more questions on the Reyes and Ichigo thing, if it's okay. You're right that people get what they put in and interacting with the NPCs will give them more plot information; I would never debate that. But if the flag(s) for good end are friendshipping the NPCs, where does that leave characters who wouldn’t do that ICly? Does that mean that all the antagonizing they may end up doing will just lead to a bad end or they just contribute nothing to endgame? Were there alternate flags for good ends that didn’t involve friendshipping Reyes?
Also one last sentence to reiterate, but I agree with pretty much all of the other points about the plot that were mentioned by the other players, even if I didn’t specifically mention them here.
Moving onto the NPCs; obviously this was already touched on for the plot portion, but I do want to make some mentions of trial and events. For trial in particular, I think that generally you did a good job in making Atsushi contribute to the discussions in trial but not give away too much; obviously it can be a tough balance to strike between wanting to give players some slight hints every now and then but also not ruining the mystery. However, there was one point in the third trial where I felt like the outcome ended up being heavily influenced by Atsushi, and that was at the end when attention was drawn to the people in the Persona room.
I’m assuming there was a combination of factors in play: first, you guys probably didn’t want another six-way tie situation to come up again so you thought you’d point players in the right direction and secondly, ICly Atsushi was defending himself from further accusations. But considering how much sway mod characters can have and the tight time limit, that basically ended up completely upending the trial with the majority going to Minato when previously he was not even being considered as a suspect (at least, from what I could see in the discussions). Now don’t get me wrong: #saviorgate was fun to watch unfold because I don’t think you could’ve predicted that level of craziness. But the game should be about player decisions and their conclusions; as it was, it didn’t feel like it was something that completely came about organically because Atsushi’s comments appeared to have heavily influenced that outcome. Again, I get that Atsushi suddenly not defending himself probably would’ve come of as OOC, but I feel like there should have been a way to do it without explicitly pointing fingers at other suspects like that because it was bad timing.
Secondly, about the ‘Atsushi turns into a tiger’ event: I understand that OOCly, part of the reason why that was happening was because there weren’t enough kills and endgame otherwise would’ve been too difficult to run. That’s why the event was open to everyone else and I assume you guys were anticipating a much higher death count initially. I also believe you guys already acknowledged that you should have used the Cleaner role instead and I agree with that because you wouldn’t have been forced into this weird middle-of-the-road approach during the event.
Don’t get me wrong, I think it’s great you guys want to take player actions into account! I think that’s a big part of why planning stuff like Ventventures is really fun. At the same time, you automatically no-selled a lot of options; the tiger was bulletproof and lanceproof, could heal and was amazingly fast and strong. Now, I can see why the tiger was made effectively invincible if the goal was to kill a bunch of characters, since you wouldn’t want it to be easily dispatched. But you guys also ended up providing them with a lot of options to evade that (e.g. distractions with catnip, pointing people towards the pool and anti-gravity rooms as options to contain the tiger). So in the end, it ended up feeling a bit on rails (i.e. if you want to survive you must use one of x options) while also not quite accomplishing the goal of taking out some of the characters.
Obviously what’s done is done and being left with too many characters is far easier to deal with in a traditional murdergame, and these were extenuating circumstances in a way. The most I can say is that you guys seemed to prioritize conflicting OOC issues for this event (player agency vs. needing to cut the numbers down) and that just didn’t really work. I do think player agency is very important and that should have been priority for an event like this, it just may have been too ambitious to wrap that secondary goal in there as well.
Other minor things regarding the event: there was no set end time announced on the post, and it seemed to just be decided in chat that it would end at 6:00 PM EST. It would’ve been good to have had a heads up for that. I also agree with the sentiment that the event seemed more geared towards being a player plot, because it ended up putting a lot of focus on Atsushi.
Some other things that I’m not sure how to categorize:
- Agreeing with everyone that there should’ve been a heads up for the trial with the multiple vote offs. I was under the impression that it would’ve been the same as previous weeks where six hours were given for discussion and the sudden change in format threw me for a loop, even though by that time I had no horse in that race.
- Be a bit more careful with letting information slip in chat; it’s definitely understandable that you guys are excited about things the players discover and the little tidbits you put in, but when you overemphasize some stuff, it can kind of give the twists away.
- Somewhat related to the previous point how the Jorogumo was supposed to be killed by drowning and water being the spiderweb’s weakness; I don’t know if that was the logic players was supposed to use to deduce the correct method of execution, but if it was then explicitly stating it during investigation/in chat basically shut down any opportunity for that role to rotate. It didn’t end up mattering in the end, but just be a bit more conscientious of the information you give out and how it could affect things in the future.
I know a lot of this ended up coming off kind of negative (and probably repetitive!) but I do want to emphasize that I had a lot of fun in this game and ultimately I would still consider my experience positive! I found you guys approachable as mods and it was clear that you guys were very enthusiastic about modding for everyone, which was great! I hope you guys get a good rest and I look forward to seeing what you guys have planned for following rounds. Cheers!
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Re: balance/plot, I do think that there were some significant issues in how fast paced the game was and what that presented both of you in terms of things you could reasonably do between the two of you? There was a lot going on with all the logs, and I know from my perspective, it was really hard to keep track of some of the stuff that was being laid down. There were definitely plot threads that didn't get followed up on, in the crush of everything.
For instance, I thought the time rewinding was going to be significant in some way, but I never really understood why it was necessary in the end, except I suppose as an ability of the resort to save itself? If that was ever made text, I missed it. But more importantly, I think Mandee hit the nail on the head in terms of tying the plot to the game going on, and in general I am not a huge fan of good end conditions that penalize people for playing the game straight or playing it to its fullest.
But more importantly, I felt like there were definitely points where you guys were spread super thin, because of how breakneck the pace was. It felt, constantly, like there were things you were dropping in to make sure there was stuff, and also potentially being TOO receptive to players digging for more, which just ended up creating a space where you were both tied up, and where there was so much stuff to chew over that the big threads you wanted didn't have time to percolate. I am ultimately saying, I think it's great what you guys have done, but that there was definitely space for you guys to pump the break on us, if only for your own sanity.
Re: mafia, I've addressed my biggest criticism with you guys personally so I'm not going to rehash that here, but if, for some reason, you ever do try to do a maf style game again, I think I'd 1) simplify the mechanics greatly, 2) make the game an integral part of the plot. Where good/bad end will require some sort of resolution to the game.
Re: Final Trial, with the style of this game, there wasn't a lot of chances for people to volunteer out if this weekend had ended up being a bad weekend for endgame. I think, 1) I would have stopped at the cap you had for max survivors. 2) I would have offered players an OOC way to opt out of survivor pool, so that it would be less about characters volunteering themselves.
I really wanted to avoid Makoto volunteering herself as soon as I realized that literally everyone who volunteered was going to get chosen, and I was not super comfortable with the lack of any discussion that could be had, since I did want to make survivor pool (but she was in a place where she would have wanted to volunteer to ease the discussion), and also the message I figured she would internalize given the argument I knew she'd make. I think having an OOC pool of volunteers that the resort could glitch out at, once you got the requisite IC volunteers, would have been helpful in this situation, and definitely would have freed up some time to ICly hash out character choices, and where I wouldn't have felt torn between wanting to follow my character's IC desires, and what I was hoping for as a player.
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I want to just caution that in the future if there's a mechanic to bring characters back to life mid-game graveyard access + access to a gy journal should at least be removed from that person's journal immediately, just so it doesn't complicate things/there being less of a chance getting spoiled OOCly. Since from what I could tell there was still deadland access due to comments made in the chat when Makoto came back alive. I don't know how long that persisted / how that was ultimately handled as more time went by, but it just helps all parties since I'm sure a person who was brought back alive doesn't want to see a post/comment on the graveyard filter/journal that might spoil things for them by accident. If it happened to be overlooked I don't think it's anyone's fault or anything, it's just a thing that happens, and something to watch out for.
Quick note that since people addressed AC items, knowing how things can get during a murdergame I suggest setting a reminder maybe somewhere. Since I also noticed Week 5 AC didn't happen and it can be easy to miss when you're knee-deep in things.
And mainly, what I wanted to address is how the Final Investigation + Final Trial happened. I was okay with the investigation since there was a lot I could have my character react to, but it seemed kind of barebones. It might just be because of the murdergame style, though (I'm used to a lot of info-dumping at the end and it probably was like that I assume because of mid-game info-dumping?)
Primarily what made me psyduck was, specifically that nobody icly did find out who decided to make the murdergame a thing icly. I think for the future at least letting it be known icly who the chief culprit of who was behind such a terrible thing in the first place instead of it...not can help a lot. Esp when it seemed to be built up to - I think that was really the thing I was sad about too, pft. And I know this has been brought up multiple times, but I just think it's because it was such a big thing a lot of people expected to have resolved but... wasn't icly.
If some of what I said didn't make sense, let me know. I'm still feeling under the weather, but I wanted to just get things out so I didn't forget. That being said, once again thanks for having me, and I can't wait for round 3!
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I will start off by saying that I won’t go into the mafia mechanic since you guys already are aware of the failings of that and that you aren’t planning on doing a mafia game in the future. However I will agree with what’s already said about the failings of the mafia mechanic of this game, both with it being too complicated and ultimately pointless with how the mafia and the deaths really having nothing to do with the overall story of the round.
One of my biggest issue is honestly how lax you guys seem with chatroom rules. It says up front that discussions of triggers won’t be tolerated. Nick goes into more detail in their critique but I just wanted to chime in to say that the lax nature with not even a real nsfw chat to put it in made me uncomfortable too. It was to the point where I had to have the chat muted for a grand majority of the game. And I know this is partially my fault for not coming to you guys earlier with my discomfort, but I was worried you wouldn’t take it seriously since you guys seemed so lax with the chatroom rules.
I also had quite a few issues plotwise, most of them have already been mentioned but I wanted to echo what they’re saying about how it felt like the players really didn’t affect the plot and it felt more like it was a psl between Gabe and Ichigo where there happened to be 30 other people there. And despite saying that this game is heavy in exploration, I feel like a grand majority of the plot and lore was just given to us, to the point that it was revealed three weeks in that there was a high probability that the dead will come back. Honestly it was so much information that was just given to us freely it felt like that the players didn’t contribute a whole lot to the plot.
I will also agree that when I apped into this game, I was expecting a heavy emphasis on The Thing and that it would emulate the body horror and general vibe pretty closely, since it was advertised on being based on The Thing. However, minus the snowy location and monsters existing (all of them were generally sympathetic), there is nothing connecting the game to The Thing at all. Honestly if you didn’t tell me, I would have never gotten that it was inspired by that movie whatsoever.
I know Everett already covered this, but having single character being given so much importance in Szayel, a roleless character feels a little weird. I wanna preface this by saying that this is not a jab at that player, since for the most part they were just doing what you guys told them to do. However, having one character be a class C researcher for seemingly no reason while everyone else had to be a class D seems really weird, and I can’t help but wonder how much of it was just because they were also a Bleach character. I’m not gonna go around accusing of mod favoritism, but it can feel that way sometimes when a character, seemingly at last minute, was given such high importance to the story. I know you guys wanted him to be a full out NPC, and I understand that, but I feel like being a little more up front with that, especially when Szyael isn’t a mastermind or even a major antagonist, would have helped.
One thing I have noticed that I’m sort of concerned about is the way you guys seem to dig your heels in a little when people bring up concerns. Not the worst I’ve seen, but when I saw people complain a week or so ago that the plot got lost you guys said that the plot wasn’t lost which… literally isn’t true since obviously at least someone got lost in the plot. Maybe not all of them or even a majority of them, but the plot was definitely lost somewhere. Then later one during the final regular trial when someone complained about the strict time limit for votes when people might be busy you guys just pointed out that you told us to be there that day before doing anything constructive to fix it. Now I might be alone on this, but when I read “make sure to be around for trial” I interpreted that as “don’t ignore this trial! There’s a lot of important plot stuff!” not “this stuff is extremely time sensitive and you will miss important stuff if you look away at all”. So at least in my case the fact that you said to be around isn’t exactly a valid excuse.
Communication also seems to be an issue, both between mods and mods to playerbase. I want to preface by saying that it doesn’t seem to be a major issue! This is just something that could be improved on. Most notably the confusion on Break Week AC and regarding Week 5 memories. For the former there just seemed to be a lot of confusion going on there. I feel like both mods should have looked over the AC at least once since it was different from normal AC for mistakes and I feel like Eski, once confronted with it, should have gone to Maple to ask what was going on with that first before saying that we still had to do AC anyway despite saying earlier we didn’t have to.
Regarding the latter, you guys seemed really frustrated when people didn’t fill out their Week 5 memory form, and I think a lot of that would have been fixed if you guys made extra reminders in plurk or an @everyone, as well as pm-ing those who didn’t fill them in a few hours before if they’re having trouble with the memories. This is especially true since, with everyone I saw who didn’t fill it out, it was a case of them completely forgetting to fill it in and they all seemed genuinely upset that they missed out on it. These are the only real issues with mod communications I’ve noticed, but they’re both issues that really stressed out the playerbase, and I have chatted
Speaking of I want to segue into another issue I had regarding the ic:ooc cycle. I honestly still have no idea why so many events had to take place on an irl timer. The one instance that really made sense was the trial (minus the last normal one) since the irl timer made sense so that trials don’t go on forever. However? The Atsushi event? The final normal murder taking place oocly six hours earlier? The way that all votes in the final trial were on a strict timer? I have no idea what’s the point of that beyond like, a “fun little quirk”. You could have them be normal lengths/start and end normally where everything starts around the same time and it ends when it’s solved/everyone dies/etc. And nothing would change. I don’t know how much of this is a nitpick and how much of it is a valid concern, but I’ve been wondering that for awhile and I still have no idea why that’s the case.
Sorry this ended up being a lot longer than I had originally intended, and kind of rambling at some points, but I really want to see this game be the best it could possibly be because I loved the premise! Please understand that I am giving you so much critique because I believe it can be amazing.
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obv i was dead and didnt need to worry about AC, but i know a lot of ppl were confused about why it appeared that break week required full AC, and i definitely felt that little situation couldve been handled better
and as for memories, the couple of people i talked to who forgot to fill out the memory form genuinely forgot, because obviously the holidays are difficult and things fall through the cracks. i absolutely agree that either making reminders as the deadline grew closer, or PMing people who hadn't replied yet, could have easily solved the problem
A response to all of the crit
First off, we're trying our best to address everything mentioned here. It is a LOT of crit though (Maple put it in a word document to check and it's over 15k words from you guys), and we might miss something. If we do, please let us know! We're trying our best here, but we're still human, and we miss things sometimes.
We also wanted to say thanks for everything you all had to say. We can tell it all comes from a place of "We love this game, and we want to see it do better in future rounds." Which honestly is really awesome! We're glad that all of you are as excited about this game as we are, and hopefully we can address your concerns and put any lingering worries to rest.
Before we get into the individual topics we wanted to address, we have a general comment that applies to pretty much all of the crit here: we hear you, and we agree with a lot of it. Even as the round was going, Eski and I were noticing where things weren't as great as they could be, or where stuff started to fall apart at the end. We have come to a mutual decision of not running a mafia-style round again, which we hope will alleviate a lot of the problems. Because, honestly? A lot of the problems in the round were caused (either directly or indirectly) by that mechanic. It's not even worth trying to 'fix and do again' to either of us, because the complete overhaul needed to make mafia-style work in a murdergame is just too much for the two of us to take on. So we wanted to state that from the get-go, that we're definitely not doing that style of game again.
Next, we noticed that a lot of people mentioned how endgame felt weak, and how the final trial felt underwhelming. We talked about it between ourselves for quite some time, because honestly we were confused about this! In terms of structure and style, the ending to this round was not too different from the endgame to round 1. We just plugged in different plot details and ran with it. But after discussing it some, we realized where things went wrong: we were never clear on what needed to happen in endgame to get the 'best ending'. In round 1, we outright stated what needed to be done: get Archer to realize that the ghosts are real and not the SCP trying to escape, and then he would cooperate. In round 2, we actually had a couple key things that needed to happen, but we didn't tell you guys what those key things were. (We can go into detail about what those requirements were if you want, feel free to ask if you're curious! We're trimming them out for now because the response here is already long, and we don't want anyone to get reading fatigue.) And since you didn't know what needed to be done, that might be why it looked like the ending came out of nowhere. That was a mistake on our part, and we're going to fix that by including that information within the game itself in future rounds. We won't necessarily outright state it like we did in round 1, but we will include clues that show what need to be done, both in the final investigation and in searching in earlier weeks. You guys are pretty good about meeting those expectations anyway, but knowing what they are will help a lot with the confusion over endgame, we think.
Also, for the final investigation: We hear you on the memories being not so great 'clues'. We wanted to try it, since deadland seemed to enjoy going through Sol's memory in their final investigation, but we can see now that evidence rather than memories is probably better. Or at least, MOSTLY evidence.
For the AC and AC rewards concerns: that is also us falling short of what we should be doing, and we're sorry for that. Maple handled AC every week, and she got tired of doing it by week 5, just because it was so time-consuming to check the threads and prepare AC items. We're going to have a much more streamlined way of doing AC and rewards for future rounds (basically, rewards will come from a pre-set-up list, and checking AC itself will go a lot faster), so that fatigue shouldn't be a problem going forward. We do apologize for tripping up on that twice though.
The week 5 trial timing: this was, admittedly, something we wanted to try. Basically, while preparing the week 5 trial, we already knew that both victim and killer were going to die (because of tripwire). Our original plan was to have a normal trial and still make you guys all vote someone out after 6 hours of deliberation, with the reason 'why' ICly being "the hotel is glitching out, this is a sign that things are getting Bad, the conditions of the trial still need to be fulfilled even if the killer is dead." But after some deliberation, we said "Well…we need to cut down on numbers for the final trial anyway, what if we have the hotel glitch out and keep repeating back to the 'start of trial' dialogue?" It was, admittedly, something we hadn't seen before in a murdergame, which Is why we wanted to try it! We can see where it didn't quite work out though. A sudden change-up like that (the rapid-fire voting) should have been announced much earlier, possibly the Sunday before, to give people time to prepare for the change. And if we decide to try that kind of thing again (which we might in round 4, since it's based on game shows and game shows often have short timers), we are going to announce that well in advance.
Which leads us into our next point: a lot of you had words to say about how suddenly things changed at times, and we hear you loud and clear. Outside of changes directly instigated by players (which we can't really plan in advance, sometimes you guys are unpredictable like that), any 'special events' or deviations from the usual schedule will be announced well in advance. Our current plan is to do a google calendar with all of those dates and events listed on it. What day motives go out (in rounds where that applies), what nights have special events going on (when those events are run by mods), that sort of thing. We're going to try to have player-driven stuff on there as well, but that we can't guarantee as readily. Our goal is to have everyone know the basics ("There is an event on Tuesday" or "Friday's trial will be different, be sure to be here right at noon.") without spoiling the details of what will happen. We're going to try this out in Round 3 and see how well it goes.
Also, going forward, we're going to have a "the plot so far" document up and running. We are going to retroactively write that out for rounds 1 and 2, so newcomers can be up-to-date on what has happened in the game so far. But for round 3 and onwards, we're going to have an open gdoc that anyone can add stuff to. We (Eski and Maple) will put the important mod and NPC details on there, and everyone else will have the option of filling in details they feel are important too. And after each round, we'll link the document for future reference. We're hoping that this will help with a lot of the story confusion that was mentioned in the crit here, since the information will be more readily available for referencing.
Which brings us to the story. Ultimately, while the execution of the story this round could have been better, we are actually pretty happy with how much story got out this time. This round was meant to be a story of how pride can get innocent/uninvolved people hurt, and how the cure for pride is humility. (Just as how round 1 was a story of how miscommunication can get loooots of people killed, and you need to state things clearly and not be afraid to speak up to fix things.) We should have had a clearer way of getting people involved in that story, since a lot of the problem this round can be summed up as "Okay, but why would my character care about any of this?" This is a stark contrast to round 1 where the only way to survive was to cooperate and get out of the game together. It led to a lot more cooperation from characters who would normally say 'lol no' and run off at the first chance given. By making everyone's survival a lot easier to get (compared to "you die no matter what, you have to fight for your good ending), it seriously lowered the stakes and made certain characters less likely to participate. We see the trouble here, and we're going to be much more careful about including some kind of motivation like that in future rounds. Or, at the very least, stating "This round is going to be about X. If your character is not one who would participate in X, then they might not be a good choice for this round" from the get go.
This response is getting long, so we're going to sum up some of the points we covered in responses to other crit. You can read a more detailed response to these above if you want to hear more! But these points can be pretty easily summed up, we feel.
- The 'resortghosts' problem: We thought it would be a fun mechanic, but it turned out to not be fun. We won't be using it again.
- The pacing issues: This round went too hard and too fast, and we're going to pull back on giving out plot stuff so readily in future rounds. Specific information will come out in specific weeks only. If this alone does not slow stuff down to a more 'normal' speed for murdergames, then we will revisit this after round 3 and see what else can be done.
- Szayel's role in the plot: this was discussed with Fish well in advance of round 2 (we began talks about 2 weeks after the end of round 1, actually), and his inclusion in the overall plot of the game was done purposefully. Fish is not a mod, and will not be made a mod. We may call on others in the future to do something similar if it fits in with the plot of the game, but we will also be more upfront when we do that. (their character will probably be an NPC rather than a PC, for example.)
- Crit about Atsushi: Maple will be addressing this in a moment, since it's a crit specifically for her.
- Chat room stuff: We're going to retool the chat guidelines to make them clearer, but basically: no NSFW or triggering stuff in main chat. If you wouldn't see it in a PG-13 movie, don't include it in the main chat.
- Role in the game: They did not work quite as well as we thought they would, and we're going to be scrapping them.
- Picking murderers: Going forward, the plan is to roll a murderer each week, and the murderer will pick their target. We'll still allow for other kills beyond the rolled one, though.
- Interactivity: we chose a poor way to convey the plot this round, and will be making it much more interactive/player-driven. While we did have two 'good ends' prepared for this round (one was saving Gabe and getting him to leave, the other was eliminating Gabe so that the hotel could heal), it did feel heavily biased towards one specific option. We'll try our best to keep things more open-ended in the future.
- 'The Thing' premise: We did fall short on that. We apologize for the round not being more 'The Thing"-oriented. Ultimately, going forward, we're going to specify that rounds are 'inspired by' specific canons, rather than 'based on' certain canons. It will give us much more freedom to design the rounds based on what fits and makes the game work, and the players (hopefully) won't be left disappointed when a certain canon's themes aren't more predominant in a round.
TL;DR: some things worked, some things didn't. This round did fall flat, but ultimately we (Eski and Maple) learned a lot here, and we're going to use our mistakes this round as learning experiences to not make those same mistakes in the future. And I know, hearing "We're sorry, we'll do better next time" can be a bit unfulfilling, since it doesn't exactly fix the problems of this round. But the round is over, and now that it's over we can't really go back and re-do things. So we're just going to take what we have here and apply it to future rounds, hopefully making them much better in the process.
Once again, we thank all of you for taking your time to give us crit. It really does help us get better at this 'modding a murdergame' thing, and we're always here to talk through things and figure stuff out. Any questions, comments, complaints, etc. will always be welcome from our players. We're here to listen to you and provide you with a fun experience, and any help on making that better is something we want to have.
The Atsushi crit
The tiger event: When we were planning out the round, we knew that the round would happen during Christmas. So, we were talking about ideas to give the players something to do that weekend instead of a trial. I was the one who suggested doing the tiger transformation. It seemed like it could be fun, with the goal being "find ways to distract the tiger until the sun rises." I was the one who came up with all the different ways to distract the tiger without hurting anyone, provided they were used correctly. It doesn't look like it was that big of a hit though, which is ultimately a bummer (because I was super-excited to do it) but understandable. In the future we're going to avoid running rounds around major holidays, so the problem of "shit what do we do this week" shouldn't happen again.
Atsushi's involvement in the third trial: Normally I try to keep my characters out of any trial they are not involved in (see: Kon's uselessness last round), because I already know who did what and I could see how people could say 'metagaming' about it. However, Kon was an idiot and it was easy to say he just wouldn't think of something. Atsushi is a lot smarter than Kon, and it was getting to the point where it was OOC of him to not say something. Especially since the frame-job on Owain was really obvious and he thought people might vote that way anyway 'just in case', since no mafia were known then. So I tried to keep a very careful IC/OOC divide and go with what he would logically think of, while trying to keep it to "here's an alternative" so that nobody would misconstrue "Atsushi saying something" as "this is a hint from the mods". But it sounds like people were made uncomfortable by that, and I apologize for it. Eski and I do plan on playing other characters in our game in the future, and we're going to talk about how to have characters involved in the game while still making it clear that "what our characters know" is entirely separate from "what the mods know".