(Maple speaking here) 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.
no subject
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.