HMD

[foundationmods]

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.

Comments

[foundationmods]

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.

[dolleyed]

I'm going to have to come back to this because something Fishy said resonated with me and my experience with the game in regards to 'you get out what you put in'. Quoting straight from Fishy's comment:

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

[relentlesslyonwards]

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

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.

[geckodad]

While I can definitely see the merit of an ending that's meant to be unifying and heartwarming, it's true this may not be the best way to do it. In many other games the final trial is about convincing the antagonist to change their mind about everything they have done, but...

...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'.

[tacticalespionageaction]

Whilst I agree with basically everyone else has said here, I’m just gonna latch on to Nick’s last point here. Now, correct me if I’m wrong, but this sentiment was only ever expressed OOCly, I think? I’d understand if it was said ICly, it can cause tension over who is worth keeping on and such and such. But expressing it OOCly felt like...some of us didn’t matter, and yeah, it began to feel like the characters with a certain disposition (aka, would not friendship and forgive Gabe) were those. I’ll be clear, I’m not criticising anyone who’s characters wanted to forgive him at all, but it became increasingly frustrating the more it seemed this was the route we were meant to and had to take, and it made me feel like I had to have my character killed off for the sake of the plot.

[latebluemer]

Oh, that was actually an IC line from 34's letter in... I forget which week it was! But it definitely caused some IC tension that I saw here and there, though it was vague enough that it didn't become a huge thing (at least not that I saw).

[tacticalespionageaction]

Oh right! Ty for clearing it up - I only remember it being brought up in chat. My apologies for getting it wrong, then.

[latebluemer]

Dropping in as a quick add-on to this myself, it did start feeling more awkward by endgame if you played a character who didn't like Gabe or wasn't inclined to get to know him better, and even if his fuckups weren't intentional they were so colossal that I'm sure this happened with a significant chunk of the characters!

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.

[swordhandled]

I definitely would also like to add-on a +1 here! While I am very satisfied with Owain's endgame that came as a result of the final trial, I do also recognize that a large part of it is because of his unique position of being Gabe's mole. Having known Gabe since the beginning of the game, he had the chance to speak and get to know him for a lot longer than the rest of the game, and thus had a vastly different opinion of him than the rest of the PCs.