Redoubtable Downtown Space Abbey - Player Postmortem

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… :wink: :blush:)

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?

CF%20what%20could%20possibly%20go%20wrong

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.” :unamused: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… :smiling_imp: 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! :heart_eyes: :heart_eyes: :heart_eyes:

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!!!

:heart_eyes::rofl::star_struck:

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Yes!

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For everyone citing a multiple-logins issue, FYI if you open a private browsing session in any browser (well, in Safari or Chrome at least, ymmv elsewhere), it’s a blank slate with no logons or other cookies or anything.

The feature is known for basically being “porn mode” but it has many good uses. Come to think of it, I haven’t tried it but I think with how Safari’s private mode works you could even have a different login in each open private window or tab. (Yes, I use Safari)

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Yes, but that means logging in and I’m inherently lazy at that. I’m up to 6 domain and 7 network IDs at work to remember.

And no, I haven’t found a password keeper app I like yet

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I just read it too and I agree… so how do we make this happen?

If you recall, a while back in a thread discussing these games I suggested a The Great Escape themed game, which with this crowd obviously would be more Hogan’s Heroes in tone, and someone made the should-have-been-obvious-to-me suggestion to make it a space prison in the BSD universe. And now here we are.

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Until the first damn Space Lizard rats you out for an extra ration.

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Actually one of the reasons I use Safari is its built-in password manager with automatic secure password generator, which automatically and seamlessly syncs between my iphone and macbook (and I used to be a linux and nexus android die hard…)

I agree that with any other setup it’s still a pain, as it realistically requires being willing to leave browser windows and tabs open (for months at a time with these games…)

On this note, I wanted to say, even though people did make separate accounts for characters, I often found it hard to follow who was who from week to week. That’s always been a problem, but it was especially so this time for some reason. I wonder if a simple convention would be feasible like creating an image for each character - basically an id badge with a picture, name, etc. - which gets posted in every in-character post (avatars help, but having other details readily visible would be useful for memory recall).

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I don’t know if it’ll be appropriate for future games, but if anyone wants a coat-of-arms made for their character, I quite enjoy making them. It’s about as advanced as my illustration skills get. The idea behind coats-of-arms, of course, is to quickly and accurately identify someone on a battlefield; perhaps it would help here.

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I doff my Chapeau, Herr Morrow.

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:scream:

Oh. My. Glob.

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I should have mentioned, you were actually the easiest to identify by far, because of your brightly colored coat of arms avatar (but also because your character and writing style were particularly memorable anyway).

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