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STATE OF THE GAME: November closeout.
Sup, guys. Here's another State Of The Game post. We're thinking of making these semi-regular events (at least once every month, season to taste) to keep everyone abreast of what's going on. We've got all kinds of stuff to cover, so let's jump right in.
APPS IN DECEMBERThis is probably the thing most people are concerned with, so let's get to the good bits first.APPABILITY OF HISTORICAL CHARACTERS
So, originally, we weren't going to do apps in Dec, because we're not making anyone do AC for Dec (holidays and all), so it seemed silly. But we forgot to edit the dates to reflect this, and then a bunch of people expressed interest in apping in December, going above and beyond to interact with the TDM despite us not putting up a new one or advertising anywhere. At Agoge, we want to always encourage players when they express an interest in something, and we already flubbed the dates and confused people anyway, so we figured we'd open apps in December after all.
Reserves, as you may have noticed, are open. They'll be open until December 3rd to reflect the late opening. Apps, like always, will be going from the 1st to the 7th.
But! Wait! There's more!
On January 1st, we'll be opening apps, and they will be staying open indefinitely. We're going to experiment with having apps open all the time, and see how this goes. This means we'll be getting rid of reserves during this period (it'll be first-come-first-serve).
How long will they stay indefinitely open?
-Until the flow of apps becomes so much that we as mods feel we can't respond to them in a timely fashion without making set app periods, or
-Until we hit cap.
AKA we as mods reserve the right to, after Jan 1st, close apps at any time and return to the first-week-of-the-month schedule. But, hey, until then, go for it, my dudes.
As a final note on this gameplan, since we'll have perma-open apps come January, we'll be dispensing with intro logs for characters, IC and OOC. New characters will post on the OOC comm to introduce themselves, and they can post individual intro logs, or tag around, or however they, personally, choose to bring themselves into the game.Is 'appability' a word? Whatever, it is now.NOVEMBER SURE HAPPENED
Anyway, we realized some wording in the FAQ was unclear, so we're updating that. Essentially, historical characters are fine if they're from something that's fictional media. You can app historical characters from period pieces, not history books and epic poems. Hamilton from the musical? Fine. Hamilton from the history books? Not fine.
We hope that clears things up a little!November, as you may have noticed, was a little... experimental. As I said in the last SOTG post, Agoge is experimental in general, and we're always trying to find new ways to make the game better. Thank you, again and always, for sticking by and occasionally being our guinea pigs.DECEMBER IS SCHEDULED TO HAPPEN
So if the plot felt a little slow and choppy during Nov, we apologize; we were trying to see how best to structure a month around smaller events, rather than big battles. Not all of this was successful.
I personally (Pel talking here):
- felt like HRHR missions only finally 'clicked' with the structure of the National Convention mission, where players came up with plans and the mods provided difficulties and rolls, rather than predestined skill levels and rolls that don't leave much to player imagination. If you guys agree with me, we'll probably continue more HRHR missions in this vein in the future.
- felt like the pacing in general was kind of wonky. Pretty obviously, there was a goal for November (make sure shit goes to historical plan). My original idea was that the details of this (kill the king, make sure Wollstonecraft doesn't die, etc) would slowly be revealed. However, I don't think I paced it correctly within the structure of the month, and believe now it would have been better to just have those goals be upfront and let players accomplish them with their own drive and design. I feel this is the case in no small part because as soon as you guys did figure them out, you all came up with wonderful, amazing plots to accomplish the goals in creative and interesting ways. In the future, when we do missions like this (more espionage and less smashy-smashy) we'll have the details and goals discussed upfront at the beginning of the plot and let you guys go to town.
Please! Discuss with me! If you agree, or disagree. Feedback is always appreciated, especially as we try to craft the game to give you a better experience.December, as you might have heard, has some holidays in it. All the mods of this game have experienced games that try to go heavy for plots in December. All of us have had horrible experiences with that. Thus, there will be plot in December, but it'll be pretty chill, and very make-what-you-want-of-it. If you want it to be dark? It'll be dark. If you want it to be light and fluffy? Ditto. It depends on what you'll put into it.WHAT ABOUT MY REWARDS?
And, since AC in December will only be checkin, no proofs required, you don't have to interact with it at all if you don't want to.
However, if you do decide to do AC for December, XP is doubled as a holiday bonus. Shh, it's a secret.XP, aka AC point rewards, have been a feature of the game since the get go. We will be rolling out a post to cash in your rewards on December 1st. Stick with us. We have plans. We hope you'll like them.WHAT ABOUT THE SERGEANT?You'll meet him soon ;)
Questions? Comments? Concerns?
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love the direction! i share pretty much every bit of sentiment that the green haired guy below me has- the HRHR structure was great, and judging from the discord server, everyone hunting down different bits and pieces of information to go after angles for the mission was amazing and highly engaging. and educational! edutainment, even.
the only feedback i have for the app cycle changes (which i think are great!) is to keep doing the OOC mingle log, maybe just as a CR meme once a month so that there's a centralized place for people to hop onto the platform and plot a little for the upcoming setting for this time traveling train (TTT, for short). i think a challenge for me as a new player coming onboard was figuring out "oh... oh crap i'm here. now what do i do?" and it took a little while (maybe a week at most?) before everything started to click and the logs/network posts came rolling in.
everyone here is super inviting and warm, and creative as can be- and you guys as a mod team are seriously A+, but i understand the challenge of coming into a plot-centric game and feeling like you have no idea where to begin. and maybe it was just the setting/pacing as you mentioned, but i think it was hard to come up with ideas for an open-to-all type log that isn't a network log because we don't want to do anything that would upset the flow (forgive me yoshitsugu) of the plot events or the setting. MAYBE IT'S JUST ME THOUGH, i don't know. i'm sure it'll iron itself out either way.
anyway,
thank you for housing this amazing dating sim!let us braid sarg's hair. looking forward to december!!no subject
The CR meme idea is a good one, and one I hadn't thought of. It's definitely something we'll institute in the future. I put it on the calendar (the exact date may change.... shh its a process).
I think it's generally an epidemic in RP not wanting to upset some weird unspoken rules or whatever and not step on toes. Part of our jobs as mods is to midigate that as much as possible and make the environment welcoming. The CR meme is a good way of helping that process along, and please let us know if you have any more ideas! Those are always welcome.
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But anyways! Thank you guys for such a fun game, seriously! It's been a while since I've felt so immediately at home with both the players and the mods, and it's been a huge blessing to me. I think that the changes to the app system sound solid, and I think it would benefit the game and how it functions a lot. I do think that the suggestions Jay made regarding this (OOC mingle/CR meme/etc.) are very good also, just so people can feel that same warm welcome I did!
I think all of the experimental HRHR stuff has been awesome. It just proves that you can still have a fair amount of excitement going on even without a lot of plotty event logs, and I think the variety is really great. I seem to have just as much fun being a bystander to how people deal with HRHR stuff as when I'm a participant, so that's rad.
If I had one piece of more constructive criticism (tempered a lot, because this was the first of its type), it would be that perhaps longer-form HRHR missions like Royal Pain are perhaps done in multiple rounds that were formatted like the National Convention mission. Or, rather, just sort of putting a deadline on rounds of actions/reactions. The only reason I say this is purely in regards to my own proclivity for procrastination, and just the slightest more framework put in place would make it feel guided but not railroaded. But, again, it was the first of its type, so this is just the only thing I noticed (as I kept noticing the notifs sitting in my inbox and gathering dust oops). But I've been having a blast, so thank you for all the hard work!
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The Royal Pain mission was a huge experiment on my part, trying out a similar style of mission I'd seen in other games; the intention was basically to replicate a dungeon-master-and-player scenario where you ask and they answer, etc. However, it doesn't quiiiite work for RP? It didn't when I did it in other games, and my 'improvements' didn't really fix the problem. If I do another mission structured like that (and it's a big if), I'll definitely institute more structure in the form of due dates or submissions or something. I don't want it to be too harsh, but there's always a danger of giving someone too much creative latitude, because then they don't know where to start or what to do.
tl;dr that's a good idea, and thank you for being part of the Process.
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Our secret is that we sat in a chatroom scratching our heads about what actions to take next! Which our characters would have coordinated a lot anyway, so it was sort of the OOC side that would be reflected in the IC side. But there were times when we were just baffled about where to go with this element or that element. Sometimes we weren't clear on what our objective was apart from trying to find Regency Stuff.
I think it played out fine on the IC side though, and it was pretty fun to have characters in this unusual situation that most others weren't. It also drove some character development. (Somebody please show Marie Antoinette some GoT episodes so all can become clear for her?)
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For future HRHR missions, if you're worried about player availability, even a quick informal poll on the discord channel might be fruitful. I think most of us are in there now, and it would provide a rough idea if nothing else. Otherwise just trust your gut, it's worked out fine so far.
Two things regarding apps/app cycle: I definitely agree with Jay to continue with the OOC mingle log, even if it's a CR meme, so plotting is easily available to newbies. Also, maybe one log a month should be optionally open to interested appers to hop into, a la this month's test drive? I think a lot of other games have ghost town TDM memes since people would rather focus on things that count for AC or actually affect the game, and while I don't think that would happen here, it's definitely cool that people can feel involved even before they app. I know I thought it was rad as hell.
Actually, three things, I lied. Depending on how reserve/app numbers go, I think it would be neat to see the franchise cap raised to 5 or 6. I fully understand the concern of having one cast dominate the game, and the focus on crosscanon CR, but everyone (imo) has been fantastic about tagging around out of their casts. I think a big part of this is the restriction to one character per player, which I love; it means people aren't putting a second or third character on the backburner and only tagging with castmates.
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To go back into hypothetical, let's say we changed the franchise cap and made it continuity cap. Suddenly, you can app Marvel film characters and Marvel comics characters and they don't count against each other for the cast cap. Let's say the game reaches cap at 50 characters. This means there could potentially be 8 characters from Marvel in the game. Then DC superheroes apped, and let's be conservative and say there were only 6. That's a total of 12 superhero characters in a game of 50. That is 28% of the game suddenly dedicated to superheroes, where superheroes have an overwhelming focus on the plot, interact with it and inflection and shape it. You apped into this game for the war themes, but with so many superheroes, inevitably superhero themes will bleed into things due to their sheer numbers. And that's not what the game is about.
But remember, we aren't even at 50 characters yet. We have 25 characters in game right now. Characters from similar canons inevitably have similar goals, and they'll invariably change the structure of a game based on sheer presence. Eight characters out of 25 is 32% of the entire cast.
As I said to Cassie, this is actually something the mods experienced in a game, where we watched it warp and change simply due to a very nice cast of outgoing people who tagged back often, but couldn't help but have a huge impact on the storyline in a way that wasn't intended but couldn't be avoided. It wasn't their fault. It was just poorly balancing the ratios of character cap to cast cap. So that's why we have these rules in place.
It is something we'd be willing to reconsider, we never want to make it seem like there's anything that's a flat no with no discussion or arbitration. This is just a rule that will take a bit for us to budge on, because we've seen what happens when it's not implemented, and it's a bad time.
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We really like the TDMs to be 'canon' as well. Going forward, the idea of a monthly TDM sort of deal is a good way to grow the game, and we'll think about how to impliment it. It's definitely something we want to try! So thank you for that.
So, our problem with raising the cast cap isn't the whole tagging out problem. It's more about numbers. For example: the character cap on this game is 50 characters. If we raised the cap to 5, it means a cast could potentially be 10% of the game. Let's go further and hypothetically say this cast was super active and involved, which is great! And they tagged out a ton! Awesome! But it means every time you interact with any plot or any game, you run a 10% chance of running into someone from this canon. Which isn't a bad thing, let's say these characters were super awesome and you loved threading with them! Cool!
But characters from the same / similar canons tend to have similar goals and ideals, and this runs the risk of warping the game to the needs of that particular canon. If the game is suddenly a high percentage of Harry Potter characters, it suddenly becomes about magical academics; if it's suddenly tons of superheroes, crime fighting becomes an influential theme. That's, again, fine, except other players didn't sign up to play a crime fighting or my magical academia game.
Now, remember, in that hypothetical, that was postulating if the game reached full character cap. At the moment we have 25 characters, meaning a cast of just 5 would be 20% of the game. That is, in our opinion, a lot.
All of this sounds like a lot of handflapping over hypotheticals, but it's actually something we as mods have experienced in other small games where the ratios of cast cap to game cap were off. It meant suddenly the game became about something it wasn't originally advertised for, and the cast, even though there were only like 5-7 characters in it, dominated every single plot and influenced the direction of the game to a ridiculous degree. And this wasn't even their fault! They weren't doing anything wrong! They were just playing the game! But because of their dominating presence, they became the center of the game in a way they were never intended to, just by the simple fact that they were like 30% of it.
At Agoge, we always try to listen and carefully consider player feedback, and I want to make it clear we are listening and considering your proposal. This is just a subject it'll take a little more for us to budge on, because we've been on the raw end of it and are very leery about opening the game to potential problems. We'll definitely consider it as the game progresses, but for now, we want to be careful about things like that, especially in early stages.
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Ty mods!
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So we really appreciate you being so understanding about this, since it can seem confusing and weird from the outside. Please always come to us with questions and concerns, because we really do want to know what our playerbase is thinking.