Thanks for the crit! Eski and I went through it and discussed it, and here is what we came up with:
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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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.