EVENT WRAP-UP AND DISCUSSION

[abraxasmods]

A NOTE OF CLARIFICATION: This "wrap-up" post went up today because the event ICly ended yesterday and we're interested in feedback to we can start writing July's event in more detail. This does not mean that you have to stop playing in the event, or that we will stop responding to questions or replies to the various plot headers! Those are still open, and we've pushed the July event to the 8th to give everyone more time with this one!

This post contains some important details about the game going forward, so please read!

1. The Taken List has been updated! If you see any errors please let us know in a comment to the Taken post.

2. The Visit with the Representative vote is closed, but did not get as much engagement as we'd hoped. While the intention for this part of the event was to get some politically-minded characters out there and we thought it could be fun to have voting done based on (potentially mistaken) first impressions, in hindsight we understand that it was too early in the game's life cycle for an IC vote that does not otherwise have incentives to participate. We will consider this in the future when designing events.

We are interested in hearing from the five players affected about how we should resolve this part of the event. The options will be detailed below.

3. The event in general had some aspects that players engaged with very well but overall we got the impression that it was a bit of a struggle. Along with the representative vote, we especially heard some concerns about the group system, and agree that making players self-sort into groups was not really necessary and over-complicated this part of the event in a way that we did not intend. We'll be re-thinking group mechanics in future events (unless characters are going to different locations) and will be taking general event desires and feedback below.

On a more positive note, the honored guest/prisoner split is almost exactly 50/50, as was the split of people attending the festival vs. going on the crystal hunt. We're happy to see this as we really wanted to provide two different paths that would both get a decent amount of interest. We've seen that our players are also actively engaging with the regular setting outside of the event even though there hasn't been much more to do yet than what was on the TDM. We're glad that this setting continues to be exciting for you all. On that note, we've pushed back July's event a little so everyone can have time to play in the castle and the dungeons in between.

4. Regarding the state of the prisoners: There will be opportunities between now and the August event to have your prisoner character legally freed in order to join Thorne. However, characters that stay imprisoned until the August 13th event (which will start the shift towards more individual plot focus instead of game-wide events and also introduce the network) will get to be part of the prison break plot which can lead towards joining the other factions. If your welcomed character is feeling disillusioned with Thorne and/or has befriended a prisoner they wish to flee with, they can do that as well.

On that note, we have put up a header below for players of imprisoned characters to declare whether they are interested in having their character freed (by a welcomed character advocating for them or by good behavior in the last event or the July event) or whether they'd rather stay imprisoned until the August event. If you're undecided you don't need to post, we just have a few players interested in prisoner advocacy that would be interested in touching base with players who want their characters freed (and it gives us mods a good idea of approximately how many characters we can expect to stay in jail).

Edited to add: Whether your character remains imprisoned or is released is entirely up to each player. If you want your character to remain in prison even though they have people willing to advocate for them, we do have IC reasons ready to go to explain why Ambrose would still refuse their release! The best behaved prisoner withe all the friends in the world can still remain in prison.

Finally, we are still monitoring the event post for questions and plot updates, so this post doesn't mean that any of those venues are closed!

Comments

VISIT WITH THE REPRESENTATIVE

[abraxasmods]

We are interested in hearing from the five players who volunteered their character here!

Our options are:

1. RNG three people and play out an NPC thread as planned. We don't usually like to RNG plot roles and will be reworking the way we handle these sorts of things in the future so we hopefully don't have to, but for now we are willing to RNG it.

OR

2. Let all five of you in and, instead of having full NPC threads, PM you with a few questions to answer so we can tell you what impressions your character made on Lyle (and answer a few questions of yours as well). All five of them will get ICly recognized for doing this.

[iobject]

Personally, I think option #2 would work better, but I'm open to hearing arguments for option #1.

[arhivista]

I didn't mind if it went to RNG but reading option 2 I think having questions to answer on both sides would actually work quite nicely

[moremilkplz]

Number 2 is fine

[song_of_ice]

2 is fine with me.

PRISONERS

[abraxasmods]

Please post beneath the appropriate header if you are definitely interested in having your character freed, or definitely interested in staying imprisoned until August. You don't have to post if you are undecided.

WANT TO BE FREED

[abraxasmods]

Coraline Finch

[not_caroline]

pls let her have her magic back

WANT TO STAY IMPRISONED

[abraxasmods]

FEEDBACK

[abraxasmods]

What did you like about this event or about the setting so far? What did you struggle to engage with? What would you like to see in future events, and what would you prefer we leave behind?

Game feedback as a whole is welcome too but the Mod Contact post is also always open. Thank you for your patience with us and with your fellow players as we all work to find our footing here! We're trying a lot of different things and they may not all be successful but we hope to refine the game experience going forward.

Re: FEEDBACK

[lone_horse]

I thought the event was great for the most part. It think the only thing I might say is maybe a little longer for the events? That's just me, though.

FEEDBACK

[ezra_of_lothal]

Agreed that a week felt a little short, and not just because I was busy! That may partly be because it was an opening event - everyone's hesitant about the 'correct' way to do things, and inertia is a Thing.

Another tiny thing - if there's an event that separate locations, maybe put in a top level for each location for people to put prompts under? I spent a while scrolling around trying to work which prompts I *could* respond to.

[girl_at_the_window]

I think this was a really good first event (at least on the Frostwurm end - can't speak to the festival!) in terms of giving us some new environments and a chance to get to know the setting a bit.

I do think that you're right about the difficulty of the group system - self-sorting might work a bit better further down the line, but I feel like as a first event, it was kind of stressful and maybe encouraged insularism more than branching out, in which sense randomised groups might have been better. I know that in my case, the group was very much dictated by who happened to already be talking to whom, and I'm not sure that's ideal, since a lot of the time group plots like this are most valuable as a way to get new and unexpected CR. But it sounds like you've got that in hand, and I don't think it was a disaster or anything.

The other thing I struggled with a bit has been the split between the guests and the imprisoned, as it means those of us playing prisoner characters are a lot more limited in what CR we can start than those playing guests (since guests can go into the dungeons, but not vice versa). Again, this seems like something that's likely to be less of a problem going forwards, and it's not massive for me, but it seemed worth mentioning.

It's hard to know what feedback to give for the event itself, because honestly, my main feeling is that this was a great event - it just maybe wasn't the best one to start on? I'm finding that most of my feedback boils down to "this was a slightly tricky place to start CR", and that's... probably not something that can be helpfully applied to later events, once more CR is already in motion.

The only thing I would suggest for future events is that in cases like this one, where there's two or more simultaneous events without crossover, it might be easier to navigate if you were to put up separate IC posts for the different settings? I found that when I was looking to tag out, I was struggling a bit with how many awesome starters I skim-read, got excited about, and then remembered I couldn't tag into because they were at the festival. Again, very minor, but maybe it would be easier to navigate if there had been one post for the festival and another for the mountains? (But I know that then leads into all sorts of issues about posting order and potentially extra effort, so do take that with a grain of salt)

Re: FEEDBACK

[coerthantorment]

I thought the event was good and am developing from great CR as a result - I believe I was one of the people mentioning that self sorting groups at the very start of the event was challenging, but I ended up working it out in the end. There was a point in which it was feeling pretty stressful, though, mostly because it felt like I'd completely missed the boat for not finding a group that first night.

Otherwise I'm mostly just sort of startled to be seeing an event wrap up a week after the event was posted, which is possibly seconding Kiryu's player. I gather from what you said that the escape plan stuff can still be done, but I had a moment of panic when I saw the Discord announcement lol.

[the_archive]

Purely technical quibble, but links between related OOC and IC event posts?

re. Feedback

[photophobic]

I think the only suggestions I have that might be helpful are more organisational than anything. I enjoyed the tone and scope of the first game event and thought it did a great job of providing opportunities for a variety of interactions, particularly the wurm adventures half which was well designed to avoid reliance on npcs and encouraged fresh CR!

OOC vs IC

I found that having parts of the IC log post presented from an OOC perspective and the inclusion of OOC signups for things was a little confusing when it came to knowing where the IC action was supposed to go. My own personal preference would be for IC log posts to be presented entirely from an in-world perspective with any behind the scenes organisation/planning/rolling for results and outcomes on the linked OOC information post.

Something that might help with questions would be if players summarised the topic of their question in the subject line of their comment— this way once the post gets enough action that comments collapse we can all see at a glance which questions have already been answered.

Setting the scene

I felt the post was pretty clear when it came to mechanics and the kinds of thread we could write, but I think having the two halves of the event separated into two location-specific posts with a little more description of what each setting was like could have made it easier for people to dig in with confidence. The mod team feels very open to answering questions and I like the care taken not to overload us with more required reading than necessary! But I feel like we might need a little more of the worldbuild fed to us in setting-the-scene description at this early stage, to avoid anyone worrying about doing it wrong.

Something that might help for future world-build would be providing tags for settings/locations, so that players can easily skip back through previous scenes set in those places for details.

Sign-ups and outcomes

It feels like there might be a bit of a timing tangle for signups to receive a mod outcome, particularly with a short event. Characters wanting to write a top-level including the outcome of their magic spell might have benefitted from space between the OOC and IC parts of the event so the mods had time to handle the rolls and give out those results on day one? I'm not sure. On the other side of things, it was difficult to get a thread progressed to the point where we could trigger an outcome from the mods in the wurm tunnels in the timeframe provided. I think most people just created their own drama which works just fine for me, and I get the feeling the intention was more to provide personalised consequences than triggers to provide ideas for threads (in contrast to the rolls for spells). If so, it might be helpful to have a little more time between the launch of an event and its conclusion so there's space for players to play with those consequences.

I wrote a lot which might give the impression I'm less happy than I actually am, but on the whole I think the balance is extremely good! I'm enjoying my threads, am more than satisfied with the experience so far, and absolutely appreciate the amount of work I can see is going into the game's design. I'm excited to see what comes next!

[brittlest]

Echoing the above! I think generally speaking the event was well structured, and I appreciate the amount of flexibility on the table in terms of having options to validate characters ending up at either the party or on the worm adventure.

Agreeing with the sentiment that a lot of the mechanical options you had available—the black market, the consequences in the caverns, the magic demonstration, etc—are VERY cool options and I'm glad that they exist, but that the implementation of them in a fairly short event makes it hard to implement those features as a player (and I imagine it was difficult to sort through as mods, what with having a bunch of other game setup stuff to wrangle behind the scenes). I'm +1ing the suggestion to have some time between the ooc announcement and the IC log so folks have time to gets their ducks in a row before the IC logs go up.

I also think having clearly marked deadlines for things (such as when the voting for representatives closed) established from the get-go would be nice, but I appreciate that this is the first outing in a brand new game and that there are bound to be things that fall through the cracks. Particularly when the event has as many moving parts as this one did.

In general, I know I took a little longer to get my feet under me than usual because the setting is so new/I kind of wanted to see what other people would do and having interest in before I started over committing myself anywhere. I wouldn't be surprised if others felt the same, but I suspect that will be less of a factor in play going forward as we all get our bearings.

But really: Fun first event! Thank you so much for organizing everything.

[gynvael]

I was on the wurm side of things and overall enjoyed the event, and just the setup of the game itself. It's been fun working within the structure of the prisoner/guests dynamic, which allows for a lot of interactions and CR that normally might not happen, and being able to build on this deliciously terrible situation as flavor text or to create certain IC situations has been great.

I'll toss in support for having more time between OOC sign-ups/plotting and the event itself so that any questions and other decisions that need to be worked out first can be, in case anyone needs those answers before they can write their top levels, etc. But I understand due to the game opening and then the event upcoming that the timing for everything about this initial kickoff must've been difficult to juggle.

I should add that you've been really quick at getting replies out to us, especially given how many you're getting between rolling for spells/items/general questions, so I super appreciate that. It makes things much easier to keep moving in a game where the particulars about the world/NPCs are important. I also really liked the links you added with answers for questions that may be relevant to the game as a whole. Your event write ups made it easy to see what was going on when, even though there were multiple things happening at once, and I found getting a glimpse at future events/plans that are upcoming in the OOC post was really helpful.

I don't mind splitting into groups, but I did find in this particular event that they didn't have too much impact in the end. This is a good thing since it meant you gave us plenty of avenues to interact outside of our assignments, but it does also mean I'm not sure the groups were entirely necessary in the first place. On the other hand I'm always interested in mechanics that push different characters together outside of who they might normally mesh with or choose to ICly spend time with, so it's probably just a case of working a few kinks out as you said.

But yeah, in general, I've been having a blast here. The responsiveness has been encouraging, the roll mechanic for the spells was really fun to watch even though my character wasn't technically a part of that, and I'm looking forward to what July and beyond has in store.

Re: FEEDBACK

[mytearsaremine]

Agreed on length, longer would've been easier to get more involved. Also, I feel like limiting most of the tunnel-group event to small groups was kinda limiting? Like I understand that for scening and CR-building purposes, but maybe if small groups are a thing going forward, having them meet up again during the event would be helpful.

QUESTIONS

[abraxasmods]

Any questions relating to this post can go here.

Re: QUESTIONS

[not_caroline]

Would released prisoners be able to advocate for the release of other prisoners?

[hardcase]

Flagg has at least two people who would reasonably advocate for his release but I'd rather keep him in prison, will this still be possible or will anyone who has advocates be released?

Re: QUESTIONS

[gynvael]

1) What is the status of the released prisoners? Are they effectively as free as any guest, or will there still be an aura of scrutiny around them?

2) Will the advocate take on any responsibility that might blow back (if the freed prisoner misbehaves or causes trouble, will that reflect poorly on the advocate and/or get them both in trouble?)

3) What exactly will they ICly be told (either through the advocate or directly) about the terms of their release (i.e. powers, limitations, advocate responsibility, if they're on probation, etc.?)

Thank you!!

[iobject]

As a defense attorney, Phoenix will have been trying to compile case law to support his argument for releasing prisoners while also schmoozing and trying to earn an audience with Ambrose so he can understand better why folks are in the prisons in the first place and convince him to let them out. How much success would he more or less be seeing on these fronts?

[inthemeadow]

Sorry if this should have been asked in the previous post - I'm basically looking to get Mal imprisoned because that's very IC for him. As a supervisor attempting to flee the tunnels with a prisoner (Alina) and getting caught by guards, would that result in imprisonment for Mal? We haven't got that far in the escape thread as we're still threading out cast reunions, but I just wanted an idea as to what might happen if we're moving on to wrapping up.

Alternatively, Kirigan is being let out of prison for good behavior/with an endorsement. It's looking likely Mal or Alina are going to be violent towards him in the tunnels (i.e. hit him with a shovel) which would give Kirigan a reason to snitch on them about trying to escape/attacking him. Could this lead to imprisonment or some kind of punishment?

Thanks!