Wrap party

First, about Ed leaving. It might sound weird to say this, but I disagree over why Ed quit. I knew Ed didn’t like the game, otherwise he’d have found a way to keep posting, obviously. If it was truly just Hello Airport, well, you guys haven’t been there in a while, and yet, no return of Ed. So that can’t be it entirely. I think, rather, Ed’s inability to frequently post, and thus actively drive the direction of the game, is the leading cause. (For the record, let me state that Ed early on was fantastic- the Blackwall Thiefs, sneaking into the Potion Guild- he played a strong hand, so clearly the ability to exert change was an important part.)

There’s a difference between hating things in-game and hating them out-of-game. Ed never was a frequent poster, and by the time Hello came around, we’d decided to stop waiting for slower posters before moving things along. Before, there were a couple times when waiting for him to post delayed things, big things, for days (e.g., first death of Vrill, Mysterious X). So Hello I think was a ‘final straw’, but not the root cause. My hypothesis is that he’d log on, there’d be a lot to read to figure out what was going on, and by the next time he posted, the game would be in a different place with different things going on. So, he had little control over what was going on. It’s just that he wasn’t invested enough in the blog to care and carry it through. You all hated it, yet most of you didn’t quit. I hated it also, but because you guys seemed sick of it from the beginning, just wanting out-of-game to get back to Grito, to do what though I’m not sure. (Besides, you were supposed to hate it, it’s Hell/Purgatory. But hate it in-game, not out-of-game. More on this below.) That’s my theory.

For a similar reason, that’s my guess as to why Paul keeps posting despite being disgruntled: he’s more invested, and feels like he still has some in-/out-of-game control over events. I’m sure Chris quit for the same reason: felt like he was just reading someone’s dumb gaming blog, rather than having strongly invested in its success or failure.

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Next point: wait a minute Paul. How do you know that all that stuff you posted, about secret enemies, and friends turning traitor, how do you know that isn’t occurring here? Maybe you’ve gotta integrate over a longer period of time. And trust that, after DMing through many campaigns, my major plot points aren’t all ad/post hoc (and those that are, are that way for the sake of comedy). I shouldn’t have to annotate my game, explaining the hows and whys of things that seem particularly bad or stupid.

If Abbey kills you or brings you back, if Vrill is immortal, if you’re geased one day and not the next- up to you to figure out why, if you want. The main thing a game is about, in-game, is solving mysteries. Any game. Any story, or work of art. (Not implying that this blog is a work of art.) (And the main thing out of game is clearly the social element, enough said.)

Bottom line is that Vrill, Abbey, Mysterious X, and the Death Knight were designed to be the way they turned out to be: parodies of horrible RPG clichés, namely, the uber-powerful DM’s pet NPCs. Same with the railroading at the end. I mean, come on guys, do you think I’d really throw the Grand Master of Flowers at you if this were a serious table-top game? Or have Zelba goddess of death geas you to kill a little girl arch-mage? (At least at your low levels…) And god, Vrill? Maybe initially he was sort of a ‘real’ NPC, but come on, the guy’s a big joke start to bloody finish.

But this is why all the NPC criticism here isn’t really nagging me: you’re complaining that the cheesy over-the-top NPCs are, in fact, cheesy and over-the-top? Well let’s agree to agree. But the complaint about power, about me storylining the Abbey fight for example, is serious and accurate, but we’ve already discussed that enough, yes?

Okay, I’ll assume you got the joke, and hated it anyway. Fair enough. Not all of you like the whole gods-and-archmages epic thing also, but not everyone likes to dick around Grito. Trying to cater to all- very different- tastes here.

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Back to Hello Airport, seen now as the ‘turning point’ in DiD. The point of Hello Airport was lost in the hating of it. It was originally designed to let you guys try things you couldn’t ordinarily do. It was one big text-adventure-style puzzle. In Hello, there was no death- if you died, you simply ‘restarted’ back in the beginning. The strength of blog gaming, as I saw it, was that it could be an interactive text adventure, like Zork, but even better- a cooperative Zork. (The original idea was to have you guys have to sneak through the big robot citadel, as homage to my favorite text adventure, Spider and Fly, in which you ‘die’ over and over again trying to figure out what the correct solution is.)

I tried to distill this down into its essentials with The Book of Bad Dreams, which also seems to have left most of you cold, but being optional and short didn’t attract the hate of Hello.

So the ‘puzzles’ in the game have mostly failed. Not entirely, but mostly. Which was a surprise to me, because many of them- such as the BoBD or the combat specific ones (Mysterious X and Vrill)- are things that don’t often happen in table-top. I assumed that blog-gaming was most like text adventuring, and that’s what the appeal was to you guys. Like Dave says below, I thought initially that the strength of the blog format was the facilitation of honest-to-god workable interesting puzzles in the game. The death of Vrill bolsters my faith though. Straight up die rolling average combat is what this blog is worst at, with all the horrible time-lags and retconning, things that should make ‘text adventuring’ nice, not to mention having a written record and lots of brains working on ‘figuring things out’.

Yet somehow, nothing gets you guys to log on and post like a round for round fight. So, less story, less puzzles, more combat is what’s in order? Behaviorally speaking that’s what you guys seem to like the most. Yet somehow that doesn’t feel quite right either.

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I like DiD, I like the things that have happened, all the things, fair and unfair, good and bad, stupid and not. What do I hate? Mainly I hate how Blogger doesn’t let me log in all the time and sometimes crashes when I post. While we’re airing grievances, let me go one step further than Dave and say that I hope you guys do take a stronger role in shaping the game and the story, because I haven’t seen as much of that as I would like, hence the strongarm storytelling/storylining. For example, not to pick at scabs, but I don’t recall any pursuit of your dreams or prophecies, which are ‘lightarm’ ways of storylining.

(Er, wait a sec. Why’d you guys want to get prophecies anyway if you hate being storylined? How can a damn prophecy be fulfilled otherwise? And Mark, why’d you play a priest- a character who, by definition, should slave without questions to serve the arbitrary whims of an overpowering force?)

I’m rethinking of what to do next as a campaign, but that’s natural. You’ve expressed what you haven’t liked about this one, and I’ve tried to revisit the blog and see what’s worked and what hasn’t, regardless of your comments one way or another. (Castle Greyhelm, good. BoBD, not so good. Hello, awful. Grito good. Unicorns good. Knights of Armek hmm.)

For example, one idea, back when Hello first took shape, was to have Vrill eventually ‘take over’ the blog and be your bitchy DM (by seizing the red robes); you’d then have to go save the DM’s ass and destroy Vrill’s robes. (There was some foreshadowing to this effect in Vrill’s blog.) My thinking was that that was the kind of weird self-referential thing we could do in the blog game that couldn’t happen anywhere else. But over time it’s become clear you’re 1) pretty sick of Vrill, and more importantly 2) don’t like having either your characters fucked with or having the system fucked with. It’s damn, damn hard to run a game and tell a nice story without dicking over characters. In fact, those games leave me cold- I believe, still do- that in any good story, the main characters have to struggle. And you hate it. You should: in game. But not out of game. My reading here is that you don’t like your chars to suffer and have obstacles placed in front of them not just from a natural in-game perspective, but out of game too. That was one of the ‘problems’ with Abbey: it wasn’t interesting, it was just frustrating to you, to be faced with a foe you couldn’t defeat just by clicking on a few blogrolls and using some magic items that had been dropped in your path.

But the blogroll clicking combats don’t hold much interest for me, one after another. I’ve tried to make things interesting by placing foes in your path that can’t be defeated simply by adding up the hp. Because you guys can deal tons of damage in a single round. But maybe this isn’t a problem from your perspective, because again, the one thing guaranteed to get you guys posting, sometimes after a week or more of individual silence, is a straight up combat. So I’ve been trying to intermingle the vanilla fights with plot points, so that in times of high post activity, we can move the story along too.

Also, that’s why the “G1” adventure was all told in a single post. The plan, up until a few days ago, was to have you guys all take the part of Gregolas. I was going to delete your names from your posts and put a ? instead, and then after a day, change everyone’s post name to Gregolas, and have you all go on a back-to-basics module for some laughs and to unwind after the campaign end. Or, as the short Greg adventure went on, different people could play Stanislaus, Otto, or a couple other random NPCs.

But I opted not to, because the main issue here- the central thing, from Paul to Ed quitting to Vrill and Abbey and DM haters- seems to be that of control. So forcing you all to play Gregolas, even just for a few days, seemed in face of your control complaints to be gratuitous. For the same reason, no Vrill-as-DM, because I think rather than laugh and try to get him kicked off your blog, you guys would just quit en masse.

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So, the next campaign will hopefully be with you guys firmly in the drivers’ seats. You’ve got enough power, experience, and even a frickin’ castle, so do what thou wilt.

I’m not going to scrap the entire game, no new world, no mandatory new characters. You can make new guys if you want. Make two new guys if you want. But I’m not going to make it easy for you just to quit, people, hence your guys came back alive, and there’s probably an in-game reason for it. But Paul, if you want to quit, well, you’ve certainly made it clear why and I don’t fault you for that. (Godspeed gentlemen etc.)

To conclude, vote with your posts. I appreciate the comments both yeas and nays. Enough of you have expressed enough interest that DiD ain’t dead yet. I’m damn excited to finally get a change of direction frankly, and it’s high time we let the new guys- who are now in number equal to the older guys- see what direction they can move things in, unfettered by extant plot. I’d bring in three new people if I could. Go ‘head with yourselfs.