Mock round questionnaire

[foundationmods]

Hey there! With the mock round over, we wanted to get your opinions on what worked and what didn't work. We're going to be tooling with the game mechanics we tested out in preparation for round 3, so your input here is valuable! Just fill out the questions below and let us know your thoughts.

If you did not participate in the mock round but followed along and want to give your opinions, then you are welcome to do so!

Questionnaire

1: What are your thoughts on the truth system? Was it easy to understand and use? Or do you think any part of it needs to be changed to make it work better? (we do plan on using the mock round for examples of how the trials will go, so people apping in to round 3 will have examples to base their trials on.)

2: Given the nature of how the trials work (magical explanations vs mundane ones), do you think the mock round worked better with all powers off, or with powers on? Which way do you think would be better to go with for round 3? (this would only affect round 3, and not subsequent rounds.)

3: Do you like the new start time for investigations? (noon EST on Friday instead of 6pm) Or should we go back to the old time?

4: Any other comments or critique about the mock round (and what to do for round 3) should go here.

Comments

[accitio]

1: What are your thoughts on the truth system? Was it easy to understand and use? Or do you think any part of it needs to be changed to make it work better? I don't think it's beginner-friendly at all. It's an interesting system and I see a lot of creative potential but at the end of the day, it's mostly used to confirm the means which... almost wraps up trials in a lot of red tape? Not to mention I feel like six hours is not enough time to discuss a timeline with everyone, what points to someone, and present it all to the NPC for scrutinizing. Both during Trial 1 and Trial 2 people went down to the wire and had pretty simple rundowns of events when they presented theories. That's probably going to keep happening unless cases are really, really simple which means you'll probably have to accept whatever theory people throw out since everyone's more or less going to present in the last ten minutes. They will very rarely, if ever, present anything earlier. Even extending by an hour might help give more of a buffer, 'cause it isn't that I saw anyone wasting time. It was more that they had to rush at the end.

I also feel that six hours makes it more pressuring to stick around for the full time instead of being able to go off and take a break if you need one. In a way, I feel like the six-hour time frame is almost repeating one of your mistakes from Round 2 with the thirty-minute lightning rounds. It doesn't give players a lot of time to digest, so they very easily can become overwhelmed or feel anxious. That wasn't as much the case this time because both cases were pretty simple, but I'm assuming the cases in the actual round will be harder.

I also want to say... one of the things I've noticed in all the murdergames is people have the most difficulty pointing fingers. I’ve heard a number of players, numerous veterans even, express gratitude when other people name a culprit because they had an idea but either ICly their character wouldn’t present or OOC they were too nervous to push a theory since they didn’t want to be wrong. I don’t feel you guys are accounting for the pressure players will OOC feel because of trials or their reluctance to present not one but three bullets that might end up being rejected.

2: Given the nature of how the trials work (magical explanations vs mundane ones), do you think the mock round worked better with all powers off, or with powers on? Which way do you think would be better to go with for round 3? ... Powers off. I think if you aren't going to have IC profiles of any kind and you want people to IC solve satisfactorily, it's going to be extremely difficult to do that with powers/magic. For example, I know at one point during the second trial people thought Silver may have flown over the blood trail. That's only one possible explanation for why there might not be a trail (wall-crawling ala spider-man, intangibility/walking through walls, telekinesis/levitation, teleportation, wind magic, blood magic, and more) and trying to solve a timeline that may contain one of these when characters don't know each other's abilities seems like a headache.

And, as great as Takashi was and as much fun as I had working with Jess, I'm not sure Takashi was an accurate gauge of how powers/magic would work in the game because he only had summoning and no additional powers. In the round, it seems like it would be better to stick with no powers due to the problems you might face in handling characters with more varied kits. I know some people are saying they didn't see a difference but I think that's because, for the most part, it really wasn't a difference because Takashi just didn't have any powers beyond summoning...

Powers can add creativity to cases, it's true, but the cons for people who want to solve outweigh the pros.

3: Do you like the new start time for investigations? (noon EST on Friday instead of 6pm) Or should we go back to the old time? I don't have a preference, this is probably something you should ask everyone planning on participating in Round 3, actually. I changed my mind. Noon, please.

4: Any other comments or critique about the mock round (and what to do for round 3) should go here. I'm just going to do these in bullet points so I can be concise, I apologize in advance if these come out really curt/blunt. I don't mean any harm by it, I had fun in the round and with the system but there are definitely things that could use some tweaking.

• I know you guys want to have culprits pick their victims so you don’t run into a situation where ICly friends kill each other and to try minimizing accidental murders, but I think especially because of how the trials work here and how much effort it’s going to take to solve them, you need to be mindful that the most proactive people in trial are going to be taken out first. I know you guys want to build difficult cases and make trials hard (and you've said multiple times we should try to pick smart characters 'cause it'll matter), but if you lose some of those smart characters early because of this system it’s almost like punishing players. Both for being proactive and for choosing someone smart, which feels a little unfair when you've been suggesting we pick smart characters since Round 2 ended. Not to mention it might make other people wary of applying themselves at trial because they might just be targeted next.
  
  This is something I was always going to leave crit on but, l-laughs... It was already pretty much proven true when Lunafreya was picked. I don't mind at all and Jess was wonderful to work with (if anything, I feel bad I didn't do enough to help), but if you're trying to get people to pick smart characters then it might not be a good idea to let them all die off early for being proactive.
• This is more of a concern for the mod side of things, admittedly. I don’t know how you’re planning to do the trials with two witches so maybe you already have it figured out and my concerns are unwarranted. If so, feel free to ignore this. This is mostly me wondering how you guys are going to handle the two witches at trial. If you guys are planning to alternate trials (so Witch 1 takes one trial, Witch 2 takes the next, Witch 1 takes the one after that, and so on) this isn’t much of a concern, but if both witches are going to handle responding to Truth Bullets during the same trial, how are you going to organize who releases what information? If you guys are repeating information or phrasing things in contradictory ways, it’ll be hard for players to figure things out. During the first mock trial I was concentrating on trying to answer Lambdadelta and inadvertently missed that I was repeating a question ‘cause I wasn’t watching flatview as closely. It’s easy to lose track of stuff so if you guys don’t have a system in place for keeping tabs on what you have and haven’t said, it might be a good idea to think of one.
• I don't know how to say this, to be honest, but um... Please be careful of meta clues. The “SO|” in the first case was a clue that told us OOC who the culprit was. IC, however, characters would not have access to this knowledge. Riku might have told them who Sora was but there was no reason for anyone to link Vanitas to the name. If Riku told someone Vanitas looks like Sora, that would be one thing. But no one here met Sora, no one saw a picture of him afaik (which could have been a good use of Riku’s regain, in hindsight). Additionally, there were many other ways to interpret the letters and a Red Truth never confirmed Riku wrote the message so it was far from damning IC. The timeline didn't point to Vanitas at all (at most you might be able to say that the multiple stab wounds/gunshot wounds pointed to someone callous but that's actually a reach to apply to Vanitas when no one knew each other well and one really vague personality trait is not good as a standalone clue). When I went to write the theory down for the first trial, I tried to think of a way to link it back to Vanitas and everything I thought to write felt very... flimsy. Anything I thought of was reasoning that could be applied to other characters and it made me really unsatisfied with the write-up itself. We spent so much time trying to figure out the timeline (when nothing in the timeline hinted at the culprit) that we, frankly, didn’t get much more than an hour tops to spend on trying to figure out who actually did it.
  
  Oh. And I remember you guys mentioned in chat we were missing an important clue from the narration; I’m assuming you guys meant the clue about Lambadelta appearing in darkness. I think the reason it was overlooked was because IC I'm not sure if anyone was aware of that being of Vanitas’ powers, though I imagine Riku would have picked up on it right away had he not been the victim. It was a nice tie to Vanitas but it was another meta clue that not every character would've picked up on.
• A bit related to the above since this is about Trial 1. Also found that a lot of the Red Truth evidence related a lot to the sequence of events but in the scheme of things, it felt like some of them didn’t really matter (e.g. whether the gunshots or the stabbing came first didn’t really actually help much for profiling the culprit ICly). And while it’s understandable that the Red Truths are are dependent on what Blue Truths the characters posit, at a certain point it was decided that enough Red Truths were given out to figure out what happened in the case, even though most of those Truths didn’t lead to the identity of the culprit.
• I don't know where to put this but, uh... Please don’t do two cases at once with this system. That sounds like a nightmare to solve in six hours. A double with one culprit sounds okay but double culprits feels like it would be extremely difficult.

I have more thoughts but I think this is the bulk of what I wanted to say. I know it leans more negative but there were a lot of things I saw that were good! I just know you guys were looking for feedback with mock so I was trying to focus more on that than anything else, but as with Round 2 I found how ambitious you guys got with personal touches really impressive! Like the stories at trial, those were great and a very nice parallel to the executions culprits get! Usually the victims time to shine is the body discovery but those are rarely given the same amount of detail as executions so incorporating a little story for them at the beginning of trial is really nice. You also tried to give everyone at least something in explorations/investigations, even when there wasn't too much to find.

Thank you for your time! And thank you for hosting this game to begin with, it's always nice to see people trying something different when it comes to murdergames!