STATE OF THE GAME: November closeout.

[agogemod]

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 DECEMBER

This is probably the thing most people are concerned with, so let's get to the good bits first.

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.

APPABILITY OF HISTORICAL CHARACTERS

Is 'appability' a word? Whatever, it is now.

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 SURE HAPPENED

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.

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 IS SCHEDULED TO HAPPEN

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.

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.

WHAT ABOUT MY REWARDS?

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 ;)

Comments

[bloodings]

First of all: this game is great. I have 0 actual complaints; I'm so glad I apped even if I picked a shameful character to inflict on you all. I'm sorry about Mordred.

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.

[trample]

I second the franchise cap raise. I figure since there's a lot of series with a bunch of different branches of a universe (think Fate, DCEU/MCU; they're all worlds with their own premise but there are plenty of separate stories that have no interconnection with each other beyond the very basics) that coalesce into one big franchise, it'd be nice to ease up on that for the sake of those who want semi-cross canon CR (is that even a thing). The group's got quite a variety of casts already, some from which I've never even seen, and I think it's doing a good job of having cross canon CR naturally. The points which Cassie makes too are also rather valid. That's just my own thoughts on the matter, though.

[agogemod]

So, if you read my response to Cassie below, you'll know my thoughts on this. The specific reason for why we decided to do a franchise cap instead of an individual continuity cap was because it's an easy loophole to cause the very problems we're trying to head off in cast capping in the first place. It's not that we don't want people coming in here and having fun. It's that we don't want one cast to suddenly dominate all aspects of the game.

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.

[agogemod]

I'm not super worried about player availability, actually! If this is in reference to December, when I say 'plot heavy', I mean December events that involve a ton of ooc communication and planning generally fail in my experience. The plot in Dec will have two big logs that people can respond to, and at least two NPC network posts to yell at, and a choose your own ending. It just won't involve a ton of weird HRHR shit and organization and strategy unless a player wants to do that themselves. So don't worry, December will have plot, it's just not going to be the stupid experimental bullshit of which I'm so fond.

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.

[bloodings]

Totally understandable! I admit I don't have anywhere near as much experience with this stuff -- I've only been in a few games, and only one of them had a total player/character cap like Agoge does. I didn't take the warping of the game based on the needs of a canon into account at all, and that's definitely a problem when the game is designed to be influenced: having it always sway one direction would potentially suck for everyone else (and even the players from that canon; god knows we don't want some assholes to get their way all the time).

Ty mods!

[byhand]

It's admittedly a pretty unique situation, since not a lot of people have been in games with 30-50 cast caps. It's just something me and the other mods ran into a few times, and it sucked for the game that I'd signed onto to suddenly become almost entirely about the needs of one or two casts, simply by virtue of them being good players who tagged out a lot.

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.