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integrating2016-07-13 06:13 pm
onemind) wrote in integrating2016-07-13 06:13 pm
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STATE OF THE GAME - JULY EDITION
YE OLDE STATE OF THE GAME
Hi friends! We've been tentatively planning a State of the Game for a while now, but given the concerns over the current mission log we thought it might be best to tackle this now. We want to hear what's going right for you with the game, what doesn't work as well, and any suggestions you might have both in the long and short term!
Further, if you want to jump in and skip past the rest of this to provide some general feedback, feel free to. The section below is some directed spitballing in reference to mission logs and general game mechanics that has been on our minds; while we'd love direct feedback in relation to this, don't feel obligated to work through it if you don't have the time or inclination!
As always, thank you for your enthusiasm! We look forward to your feedback.
THE LONG OPTIONAL PART
If you have Abby on plurk, you've probably seen some brainstorming and discussion happening there between us (Abby and Donna) and some helpful players. In general we feel the current mission log, while brimming with potential, hasn't quite managed to hook the response desired from players. In an attempt to build momentum and give Concordia a slightly more directed feel, we made the executive decision to largely handwave the IC planning stage of the infiltration and bout it out missions, prefering to leave organization to OOC brainstorming and coordination. In retrospect (and in casually talking to a few players), we feel that was probably a mistake on our part. While we wanted to emphasize that the mission was very open to interpretation and approach, we feel that especially with the Infiltration Objective we probably gave everyone too much freedom and that may have resulted in a lack of organization and made the objectives difficult to approach. Basically: OOC planning is boring for everyone involved and rather than expecting everyone to get their ducks in a row OOCly so we could jump straight to the action, it may have been better to give everyone time to work through these thoughts on an IC level instead.
Right now our thoughts for tackling the current mission are this: We'd like to do a slightly backdated IC 'network' thread instead of simply handwaving at the top of the log description as it currently is described in the mission log itself. Our current thought is a sort of 'check in' through the mental link from Carata and Nirad early in the day of the mission, giving characters a chance to discuss what they've learned, what they've done, and how they think they'd like to approach the missions from that point in character. This would gives characters time ICly to work through the plan and figure out who they're teaming up with, what they're doing and how to approach problems in a more dynamic, organic environment than asking players (and mods) to do it OOCly. We hope this will make the Infiltration end of things a little more directed and easier to play. For the Bout It Out end, we plan to top level Kun-Kun for the final round of the fight. Originally we intended to let the log play out longer and then eventually thread jack an existing top level for this, but think that simply top-leveling with Kun-Kun or his reps might be the more effective approach at this point.
All this said and done we definitely don't want to skip past the objectives because they have a lot of potential and we have a ton of faith in you, the players, for being creative and doing awesome things with them. If it comes down to needing to handwave and move on, that's understandable and workable, but we'd prefer trying to recalibrate and give it a little more time first. Given how many of our tiny playerbase have been on official or unofficial hiatus, this seems like the least invasive way to do things for now. We'll be doing as much patch work as we can to make this run, but we'd love feedback for how we can run objectives like this more smoothly in the future. Is there too much freedom? Would it be better to have events like this more strictly 'on the rails'? Would you prefer IC planning to OOC planning or would you just prefer OOC planning be more directed (ie ' this, this and this MUST happen' instead of 'you can do anything! there might be complications though!')?
In general, we feel like we've done a not great job at emphasizing the fact that players are more than welcome to make up and mess around with the world as they desire, including creating NPC randos of their own. We feel this failure on our part has manifested really strongly in this log especially. We've given you a huge world to play in and a lot of flexibility, but have done a poor job of making sure players feel comfortable with that level of freedom. Right now we feel like the mechanics we've set up instead are encouraging players to wait for mod-driven NPC involvement/direction as opposed to driving events themselves which is definitely not our intention. For one, it makes things boring for you! We want your characters to have the most agency in this world; two, we have rather limited schedules and don't want to limit your play on our availability.
So then the biggest question we have for you guys is what can we do to help you feel more comfortable taking control? Is it something we can do ICly or is it something better articulated OOCly? Should we provide you with more setting information? Less? Would it be good for mission runs to have a section of 'what you can learn' so you can more effectively interact with the world without needing to turn logs into massive ten character threads? By and large, we're committed to creating interesting framework for you guys to tell stories in but ultimately we want you guys to be driving the direction, action and momentum of them. We feel thus far we haven't been doing a stellar job of that. Anything we can do to help you tell stories more effectively is our priority, so if you've got an idea for this specifically please do share. Currently one option we're spitballing is the possibility of giving a bullet list of hard-fact current-mission relevant 'clues' your characters could get from NPCs, hacking, etc, that could be used in threads if you feel it's relevant to your character, but we're sure there are other ways to approach this too and we'd love to hear your thoughts.
As always, we also wanted to take the time to thank you for your patience and enthusiasm. We love this game and love everyone we've had the opportunity to play with. We feel like Station 72 is a pretty unique experience and despite the learning curve and the challenges of running such a small, tight knit game, we've ultimately found it incredibly rewarding. You guys are awesomely creative, super enthusiastic, and have been very patient with us as we figure out what the hell we're doing. This has been a great, collaborative experience so far and we look forward to coming up with ideas together to make it even better for everyone.
Thanks all!
CONCORDIA MISSION: OVERVIEW • DAY :008 - :013
NAVIGATION • PREMISE • FAQ • RULES • GLOSSARY • SYMBIOTIC SKILLS • ABILITY POINTS
NAVIGATION • PREMISE • FAQ • RULES • GLOSSARY • SYMBIOTIC SKILLS • ABILITY POINTS
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and arguing with nuns.I also agree that having freedom to make up our own mission plan isn't going to stall things. I do think that for specific events like Bout-It-Out and the Infiltration the log might benefit from being broken down into top levels for different parts of the plan, especially ones that involve NPC interaction. Exploration/freedom seems to work better in between pre-planned events, like with the whole mess we made on Avera, very little of that was pre-planned and it ended up having huge effects on the characters that spurred a lot of neat cr/development.
I don't think anything needs to change as far as the way you guys have been setting up the OOC plotting logs, there's enough information there to start moving - personally speaking, sometimes my own lack of initiative is because I'm worried about bogging you guys down with too many requests for extra information or NPC interactions. I don't want to make more work for you!
+1
I'd also like to add that the thing I love most about this game is player initiative instead of handholding (I feel like making our own decisions rather than having someone else dictate how exactly to act adds a sense of character agency and responsibility) and I definitely don't want to lose that. Going forward, maybe on the OOC posts it would help if we give you guys a concise, simplified overview (Phase I: Ted will disable the alarms, while Tim acts as a distraction) and you can give us either a randomized or specified general sense of success or failure or middle of the road pass (Ted can't disable the alarms and needs to find a workaround, Tim has no problem keeping the guards occupied etc) while ultimate mission success or failure is still up for a vote, meaning we all have to figure out on an IC level how we're going to get from point A (working alarms/ preoccupied staff) to point B (successfully stealing the declaration of independence as was voted).
I realize that'd be a bit more work for you guys (and you already do a lot) not to mention a playerbase vote to employ, so just consider this me mentally tossing spaghetti at the wall, because with such a tightly-knit group of players and mods, it just seems like we can relieve a lot of the general "I had too many options and no risk" issues with something like this in place. Even with Bout it Out having just a randomized list from the roster of player-character participants of who succeeds in their final fight vs who fails could have prompted some crazy lineups!
Anyway, novel written, I also want to thank you guys for always listening to us and being so engaging and patient: I know it isn't easy to give us so much creatively to explore and engage with, and so much of that is why I love this game more than I have any right to.
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