And succeeded! 
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[Listening intensifies]
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I love this. For me it’s not that outlining doesn’t help at all, but I tend to think of new things and go in new directions as I go, so the final product looks very little like the outline. But for that exact reason, most of what I write is an aimless mess. I will try this.
I will say, as much as I like making silly graphics, my intention this game was to focus on writing instead, which I haven’t done so much in the past but which seemed fitting for the setting and because I just wanted to practice writing anyway.
Trying to write in the style of the times turned out to be really difficult (not really a surprise), and to do any writing I’m happy with takes me a lot longer than it would to make images, so I ended up with not a whole lot, and most of it was first drafts. I struggle (as I suppose most do) to get the complex stories I come up with in my mind onto paper. Complete thoughts and poetic language are up there, but just don’t come out. So I wanted to practice that here, but didn’t have enough time to commit.
I think there are some strategies I could follow for next time to do it better, and the outline-afterwards trick is definitely one of them.
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I want to extend @MalevolentPixy 's comment.
The better something is, the greater the scope there is for “criticism.” My aha moment was when I saw an interview with Rode Carew where he discussed his batting coach. I was aghast! What could anyone teach Rod Carew about batting? He was batting over .400 at the time!! Yet, every day, some dude would criticize Rod – and Rod was grateful for it.
So let’s keep the comments coming for our own Rod Carew @messana – negative and positive!
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I’m curious to see what outsiders (I mean people who weren’t playing the game, but following along and reading each round) thought of the game as it progressed… assuming that non-players would do such a thing, of course. 
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There’s one last point I want to bring up, and I’m going to be (comparatively) brief, because it’s a simple point.
The Social Network
In SPH’s introduction, it’s clear that he thinks that establishing good relationships with the other inductees is going to be extremely important. In the upper class (not that I have any experience), success is almost entirely based on networking. The common saying is, “It’s not what you know, it’s who you know.”
This point was made a few times: in parties that we attended where we could make connections, in dinners where we strove to make a good impression on our hosts; in the Rank stat in general, which seemed to correspond to “how much you’re impressing people.”
But really, in a group of aristocrats, status and connections within the group should have meant more. Now, it’s possible that I just wasn’t seeing things, and the fact that SPH was snooty and rigid in his prejudices got him excluded from the back-room deals.
And, if that were the case, I would have loved for some of that to come through in public, so that I’d be able to role-play it. SPH being brought into the halls of power, being given every opportunity, and then failing because he was unable to make meaningful connections — that would have been a great character arc, where he learns to swallow his pride and humble himself to make actual friends. However, it didn’t look like those connections were being made at all.
There’s a couple ways this could have been done: either through in-group popularity scores which affect outcomes, or, more transparently to the player, through synergies. That is, people’s incompatible specialties working together. If there are three choices in turn 3, then, in turn 5, have an option that requires three participants, one who made each choice. For example, there’s a whipweed shortage on Britannia Prime; a group with a whipweed farm owner, an importer/exporter, and a newspaper printer, who work together to advertise, produce, and deliver the in-demand supplies to BP.
From what I understand of the upper class (which is mostly based on reading fiction, so take that for what it’s worth), the foremost path to success is/was in making connections with your social equals, and then leveraging those connections to mutual benefit. While we did have a few moments where making connections to our social betters paid off (which, I’m sure, would be equally if not more important in real life), I would have liked to see those kind of connections between the different PCs take a position of more prominence.
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Well, I think we would have seen more of that if we, the players, had simply invested more time in Player Character to Player Character communication, both in PMs and in the Club, as well as in specific round threads. But that became too time-consuming, in part because so many of us have IRL time commitments (in addition to differing time zones and availabilities) that got in the way of such communication.
But this game had the depth to support it. But to properly play Redoubtable Downtown Space Abbey, we’d need to do it as part-time jobs for a year at least.
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Playing Badass has hammered home something I “knew,” but I now I realize I don’t even begin to grasp:
Character development is hard.
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Some observations:
It was. Grand Kudos for mutating the game to where the primary turn-to-turn mechanics didn’t require attempting to kill someone or something. (let alone attempting to find a mechanic for something).
Disagree. The Leviathan Club was purely True Citizen-driven, and active all game. (and Le Tavern has been a beloved trope since the TARD-iss).
The Alley was purely Citizen Pretender driven, and active most of the game.
The singular point is to have fun. And be memorable. The Three Tenets of Badass are to have fun, be memorable, make people laugh, and promote socialism.
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The Four tenets of of badass are:
- Have Fun
- Be Memorable
- Make people laugh
- Promote Socialism
- Nice Red Uniforms
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Granted.
But when I said “not much socialization was accomplished,” I was mainly referring to this kind of socialization, the kind that affects the larger story.
There was a lot more monologuing going on in Leviathan’s than there was dialogue, and most of the dialogue was trivialities. Leviathan’s was only very rarely used to progress the story, and, of the 120 possible conversational pairings possible with 16 players, I doubt if even a quarter happened.
Sure, Leviathan’s never went completely dead, and I certainly didn’t expect it to be a constantly-running game of The Extraordinary Adventures of Baron Munchausen, but I would have liked to see different players interacting more often, to learn more about each of them.
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ah – the 80-20 rule.
In Engineering, we learn that “20% of the X accounts for 80 % of the Y” explains… almost everything. (there’s a mathematical reason for this).
20% of the stones in a pile of gravel account or 80% of the mass. In your first grade classroom, 20% of the kids consumed 80% of your teacher’s attention. In economics, it’s called the “Pareto principle wealth distribution” and it’s infuriated left-wing economists ever since… Pareto.
< Insert you own example here. >
So of course most of the possible dialogue pairings didn’t happen, and the majority of the rest (80%, say) were “trivial.” To expect anything different would be unnatural.
To get the kind of “dialoguing” you suggest requires multiple interactions per day, However, the Badass door games are specifically set up to be a weekly game that can as “lighttweight” as each player chooses.
Those more intense interactions, to occur at all, have to be driven hard by a motivated player, and thus mostly happen out of the main public areas. That is were I fit in.
My characters are always flat, plagiarized, never develop, and thus are stagnantly boring. However, my characters are clear and I use that clarity to drive interaction with every single player, primarily through PMs.
Pushing this thought further, be careful what you ask for when asking for more dialogue - I have been chided for resorting to platforms other than the game-related PMs to drive such dialogues. It works, but can be viewed as “unfair.”
I love the vision you present, but I don’t think it’s realistic for a game where most of the players only drop by a few times a week, often for just a few minutes. Now, if we had a regular “game night” where we all skyped in…
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I venture to say that we all would have liked to see that, but it would have made the already stiff time commitment even more prohibitively stiff, at least for a player like me. There would have to be back-and-forth conversations both in PMs and regular threads, both in-character and out most likely, to negotiate how two or more characters can interact or cooperate or clash, and that stuff could happily occupy us for tens of hours a week for over a year without exhausting the most banal possibilities. Truly cooperative multi-character maneuvers that pit factions against each other (all translated into even a rough approximation of period dialogue) would be hugely fun… and hugely out of reach for amateur gamers with only a handful of free hours per week. Especially those of us who burn a few of those hours in MSPaint shoopery.
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Yeah, I must admit that my expectations for this sort of thing are being set by in-person pen-and-paper groups, and there’s a reason those generally don’t grow much beyond five people.
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We’ve got a few players that want to contribute their votes and thoughts, but are running late. Awards will be delayed by a day or two to allow those that have asked for extra time to deliver. Thanks, as always, for your patience.
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Codmander's log: I found the social dynamics of politesse and subterfuge of Weatherby to be wonderfully maddening. Among the upper classes, rarely were interactions straightforward and without insinuations of squid pro quo.
Here’s some excerpts from my memoir, Foul Weather Be, Breaking Me
An Invitation
A Reply
Another Invitation, Unanswered
Plans Made
A Shoulder, Most Cold
Hearts Broken
It was at that time when I noticed that Ensign Crusher seemed to be developing a habit of overindulging in the local vices.
/log
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Huh. I think ol’ Ssskiddy didn’t see that one in time.
Since that account was dedicated to another browser, I couldn’t access it on my phone, so days would go by between Ssskidwish logins. I apologize on behalf of the rude old skink.
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Let me add my thanks to @messana, who put together another magnificent game! And thanks also for your patience with all the questions (next time I’ll try to avoid being the last line in the database… 
)
My (few) frustrations with the game were in the same areas others have mentioned: discomfort with the setting, character development, and real-life time constraints.
Not being familiar with the Jane Austen/Downton Abbey style was intimidating for me, so much so that I considered passing on this round of gaming. In prepation, I reread Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, and a little steampunk, which helped a little. Once we got down to it, it got easier to write in something vaguely resembling that style. (It did encourage me to write formally and use way too many words, which is a weakness of mine anyway.)
My biggest problem was developing my character… but I’ve only got myself to blame for that one. I chose to jump in at the last minute and tossed together a quick concept, figuring I could make the rest of it up as I went along. It worked well enough for my first game, right?
Evvy was pretty easy to write for. She knew what she wanted, and had fun doing it. Eudaemonia, in the other hand, was a royal pain in the ass for much of the game. I knew she would probably follow a coming-of-age arc, progressing from a young, timid, overly-proper slip of a girl to a mature, determined woman. But I didn’t really know how that would happen, and other than proving herself a successful member of Society, I didn’t know what she really wanted. Round after round, I struggled to “hear her voice,” when by her nature she was quiet and didn’t “speak up.” 
The dam finally broke about the time she received word via PM that her intended, @liversnaps_grayson, was part of the wards’ drugrunning gang. Then she had suggestion after suggestion to avoid public humiliation… 
It got easier to write for her after that. Despite the frustration, I became very fond of Eudaemonia, and her “loss” hit me harder than I thought it might. (Though I had a funny feeling the dice would go against her in the final round, which prompted her grand charge at the end.)
I think I only had partial success in developing her character. It probably would have been better if I’d pushed her into interacting more with other gentlesentients and participating more in society. But, as other players have said, it took me longer than expected to cobble up what I did submit, and other obligations didn’t leave me as much time as I’d have liked to play. (The Intermission came in very handy for me, as my dad’s health took a bad turn at that time and I skipped that round completely. He’s better now, thank goodness!) I’m guessing the process will get a little easier the more I role-play. And I will definitely give the outlining technique a try in the next game-- thanks for the tip!
Big thanks to @penguinchris for the “Eudaemonia’s charge” shoop, and huge thanks to @MrMonkey for remembering Eudaemonia so sweetly in Jean-Rhys’ epilogue. You nearly made me cry! 
And I apologize for my epilogue. It’s set up as a “what-if,” so if you would rather think she’s dead, that’s fine. But it gives just a little hope for Eudaemonia (and Damerl too, with @pogo’s blessing,) should the Reader choose to accept it.
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Poor Rocco suffered the same fate. I didn’t want to reset the password and log in on another machine just for convo.
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Holy hell! I just read it now and… DAMN!
Now I really want to play Eudaemonia’s Heroes and help everyone bust out of Star Roost Theta Three!!!
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