I had no idea what I was doing and I had fun. Thanks for guiding the chaos, @messana!
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I’m going to use that last post to lead into the next part of my critique, which is:
Choices
I’m not going to get into the whole idea how choice plays into themes, and tying ends back to beginnings by having a character make a different choice at the end than they would have at the beginning to demonstrate character development. That’s more of an individual writing thing, and there’s not much you can do with it as a GM, except play along with players who are trying to give their characters narrative arcs and development.
Instead, I’m going to point out two problems with the choices that were on offer.
Narrative weight
The idea of narrative weight is twofold: First, that there is a problem that needs solving, that only your characters can solve; and second, the actions that they take influence the direction of the story.
I’ve already discussed how it was difficult to determine how our actions influenced the developing story, and how that makes our choices feel less compelling (e.g. how did the delay of plague-relief supplies affect Weatherby as a colony? How many died? Will that have knock-on effects to the economy? Did the fact that field workers died in the plague have anything to do with the severity of the whipweed blight? etc. etc.).
Now I’m going to address the other half of the issue, which is, “Why did our characters have so much power?” The Doylist answer to that is, “because you’re the PCs,” but that’s not a satisfying answer from a Watsonian perspective.
To explain what I mean by that… “Doylist” refers to what the author would say, if asked why something had to happen. “Watsonian” refers to how the narrator would respond, if asked the same question. So, the Doylist reason why Watson is the protagonist is because the story Doyle is writing is only interesting if Holmes has someone intelligent to take the place of the reader and explain his conclusions to. The Watsonian reason for why he’s the protagonist is that Watson needed a place to stay and Holmes needed a roommate, and Watson just ended up getting dragged along on all of these adventures because Holmes found him useful. His prominence in the story comes from the fact that he’s the roommate of someone who is unique in his ability to solve unusual crimes.
Coming back to Weatherby, the opening narrative makes it clear that we are not the only TCs in the colony; we are simply “finally of age and of means.” And yet, five of us had the narrative weight to swing the entire mayoral election, and three of us could have swung the fate of Weatherby from Britannia Prime to New Prussia.
In a world where half of the population (of thousands if not millions) are True Citizens, and we are simply a dozen-ish of the youngest and least powerful of the TCs, what makes us the heroes?! What gives us the narrative weight to overrule everyone else?
We don’t really have a Watsonian reason, so far as I can tell, why our votes or money counted more than, say, the Governor’s did, or the socialites of Ms. Applethwaite’s salon, or the politicians who attend Ms. Fangley’s gatherings, or…
I can conjecture a couple of reasons why that would be the case (we entered society at a time when all the factions are in precarious balance with each other; or, the plague has devastated the upper ranks of Weatherbean society, giving us large shoes to fill; or, some crisis, far vaster than the ones we’ve been left to deal with, are occupying the establishment, etc. etc.), but none of these are made clear in the text. We’re just neophyte socialites who are absurdly powerful, because that’s what the game requires us to be.
Do you shoot or pet the dog?
The other issue with our choices is that they often aren’t really compelling choices, from a character perspective. From a player perspective (“Do you choose to make lots of money, at the (average) risk of having to use that money to leave Weatherby?”), the choices make sense, but how those are presented from a character perspective (“Do you choose to withhold half of the plague supplies from the suffering populace and sell it for profit, at the (average) risk of having use those profits to escape if the colony suffers a severe population collapse as a result of your actions?”) makes the choice an absurd one.
I get that some people play their PCs as murderhobos. That is, they don’t put any thought into their characters beyond, “Kill that guy, loot his corpse, buy better gear, level up, increase your skills, rinse off the blood, repeat.” Certainly, SPH puts a lower value on sentient life than I do, or he wouldn’t be a duelist. Still, when you offer your players a choice that would make even chaotic evil PCs take a step back and evaluate exactly how low they’re willing to stoop…
If the choice had just been between “medicine for all” and “medicine for all, but PCs first,” then that might have been a compelling choice, especially if there had been tangible benefits to offset the tangible risks of the latter. But the third choice really brought to the fore that any choice other than “medicine for all” was killing people, and it was reflexive horror at that idea, more than anything, that drove SPH’s choice to try to save everyone.
This same idea ties back to New Prussia, and, to a lesser extent, the Mayoral race. Sure, the choices had obvious consequences. I’ve already delved into New Prussia in “Antagonists.” In the mayoral race, we are built up to have a vested interest in the status quo. So, when we are called to elect someone, we default to the status quo, and things carry on the same way. In one of the alternate version of this campaign I’ve described above, where it’s made clear that we are to marry C-Ps and thus have been developing relationships with them, and finding out what their lives are really like, the choice between choosing the status quo for our own benefit, or change for the benefit of our prospective partners becomes much more compelling. Or give us some sign that the Mayor is a dubious character from the beginning, and it becomes a choice between the devil you know, and a completely unknown quantity.
The rails
In a completely open-world RPG, choices are limitless, and thus the GM is basically there to give the characters a backdrop in which to tell a story. In a more structured, railroad campaign, you’re sacrificing the player’s ability to choose in order for the Game Master to send the characters on a ride through the story the GM has already created. Most GMs choose a path somewhere between: the characters can choose how events will proceed, but certain story beats are going to happen regardless.
The structure of the Badass games seems to lie closer on the spectrum to the “railroad” style. The GM is limiting the actions of the PCs, channeling them down certain possible paths. And that’s great; it’s a totally legitimate choice, and it saves the GM a lot of work. And, even on a glued-to-the-rails campaign, a really good GM can indulge in sheer con-artistry and change the flavour text on the fly to indicate that the PCs’ choices were responsible for their arrival at the next station on the track, misdirecting them away from the fact that that was never not going to happen. But, when you limit your players’ choices, you have to really make the effort to make them feel that the consequences of those choices are both substantial and reasonable. Even (especially) if that’s not actually the case, and the “consequences” are exactly what were going to happen anyway, with a different flavour text.
And, for the most part, this was done well; it’s just that certain choices had proportion way out of effect to what they should have, given the relatively low status of our characters, and other choices appeared to have been presented for no other reason than that the characters were supposed to decline them, both of which can make the campaign feel like it’s on a railroad, even if that’s not the case.
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In case it’s not already incredibly obvious, I have a habit of overthinking things, and all of my criticism should be taken with that in mind. Most people playing these games are not going to be staring at the seams and poking them to see where all of the tiny holes are, but it’s just habitual at this point.
So, if anything even feels the slightest bit off, I’m going to keep turning it over in my head until I figure out exactly why it bugged me.
I’d like to reiterate that again, despite the several pages of criticism I’ve written so far, I enjoyed the game a lot, and the above (and let’s face it, there’ll probably be more below) is just a consequence of me putting way too much thought into all of this.
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Well, I gotta say, your Space Griffin was not only the most well-thought-out character in the game, it was incredibly consistent as well. It was fun for old Ssskidwish to think of him as a pompous old blowhard; in fact I found it impossible to resist reading all St Patrick-Hartbrooke’s words in the voice of Sam the Eagle.
But SPH could be counted on to be utterly principled in every action and reaction. I appreciate your digging deep and laying out his underlying motivations just now. I wasn’t sure that he wouldn’t be true-blue Loyalist to the bitter end, but it makes absolutely perfect sense that he would deem it vitally important to be perceived as such.
I only wish I had had the time to invest in creating a character with that much depth and integrity. All I had time to do was resurrect two well-used characters from before, since I figured they might be fun skinks-out-of-water in a Regency context, but it wasn’t really a fair contribution to what was in fact an uncommonly deep and demanding and rewarding game. It deserved better than my cloaca jokes.
@penguinchris is right, I really should do a brand-new character for the next game. But it’s just so hard for me to resist the Lizarding.
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Seconded.
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For one thing, as I’ve said elsewhere, I like having the zanier characters out there. My RPG characters all tend towards the “straight man” vibe, so having zanier people to bounce off of can really make things more fun. It’s just a shame that we weren’t able to interact more often.
As for creating deeper characters… It’s not really a matter of how long it takes for me to come up with one. I try to let the setting inspire an idea for a character, and then just make mental notes of ideas as they occur to me. I think the process for coming up with SPH was:
- What bits of myself that I rarely use myself can be incorporated? Well, I used to be religious, and that was very important at the time, so make him devout (but hypocritically so, in line with being a Regency-era aristocrat)
- If you could append any species to the word “Space,” what would be the coolest. Griffin? Awesome.
- Name - What sounds can a bird make? Not many, so if they need language, it will need to be based on timing and intonation; tie religion into the name as well.
- Make him quirky somehow - with that language, an obsession with time and timing would fit.
- Add an approximation of Regency-era manners and morals, w/ focus on social standing (“Rank”)
That is, very nearly, the entirety of the SPH character concept, and most of it flowed from the desire to make a religious character, with the idea of timing coming from my thoughts about how a bird might communicate, and the rest from some quick reading on the Regency era. That’s not to say that I didn’t have further ideas, but they were just random, “Hey, wouldn’t it be cool if…” thoughts that I tried to squeeze in and make consistent.
Any “depth” or “integrity” or “consistency” came from keeping the concept as close to myself other than that, and from some writing experience in the past to give it some polish. (Oh, and I’ve played a “holy classist warrior” before in a different RPG, which probably helped too).
As the character is inspired by the setting, I generally don’t migrate characters between games; they’re like a mask that just doesn’t fit right, when out of their natural environment. I find it easier to build someone new that fits properly than fiddling with the old one to make it fit.
Thank you for the compliments! (And for the idea of SPH as Sam the Eagle, that’s hilarious, although not what I was going for, fairly accurate.)
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I will critique and epilogue this evening, now that I remembered to plug the laptop in.
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Thanks @messana for running this! It was a blast. The game mechanics were a bit more on the complex side for me, but I had fun and I think as others noted, enjoying the stories that came out is really the best part of this than “winning”. Our group is pretty collaborative, so it might be interesting to have a long running NPC antagonist to rally and plan against in a future iteration.
I’ll have to admit that I didn’t fully read the player guidelines before I rolled the Duchess, but I just thought it’d be pretty funny if LSP was running around this setting. Y’all didn’t really call it out, but I did tone her down to try and get any sort of character interactions with others.
I probably could have upped the silliness later. I was expecting @Tom_Ratchetcrank to eventually spurn her, so I could conveniently 
all the things.
I personally was also a bit time constrained during certain portions (traveling for work) but was glad I participated. I’ll try and roll an OC next time.
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Okay, well, if you’ve read my epilogue, you probably have a better idea of my character origin. I might have a slightly different take on the game than some other people, because @messana and I had a lot of back-and-forth from when I originally pitched the idea of someone who wasn’t an actual citizen and was faking it. There were some moves where I wanted my GM to know what was coming and let me know if I was veering too far off course: abandoning the ball, having a dinner for staff and tenants instead of courting someone.
About the only thing I knew from the start was that at some point Liv’s cover would be blown. I didn’t know when, how, or the consequences.
And I’d like to thank @messana for that freedom, because I had no idea at the outset how many other characters would end up being outsiders, and I wanted an in-game reason for it when (inevitably) I screwed up.
I think, like others have said, the biggest challenge was time. Outside of that, I would say the other challenge is that when the random occurrences hit, there was no recourse. People who ended up with “bad industry verticals”, say, had little idea how to mitigate it. It just happened, and that was that.
The other part, is that so many plot threads got left hanging and we had to wrap up just when things were getting interesting. Palace intrigue. A war on. A possible citizen’s revolt. A murderer running around who never got caught! That, to me, was the most disappointing. There’s a whole other game’s worth of material right there.
Overall, though, it was a blast. I loved seeing what everyone else came up with, and the clash of characters. I’m not playing to “win” (though I do have a competitive side that just growled at me), but to create and tell a story. That’s why Liv made moves that didn’t do him any favours, because it’s what the character would do, versus the points.
Three cheers for @messana for doing a ton of heavy lifting so we could have fun.
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i think the side alley gang business was a separate affair from the serial killer running around the city. Serial killer was from the game-side, the gangs from the player side.
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Oh, and seriously, @nimelennar, awesome character concept and execution. You and Heironymoose @Wisconsin_Platt were my favourites.
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First off, I’d like to publicly and enthusiastically say thank you to @messana for running this game.
And to all the players: holy smokes you guys are good! That was way way way WAY etc. more fun than I expected it to be.1
1. I mean, I liked the premise of this game as soon as I saw it, and reading the postmortem of the last one is what made me think this one might be fun to join, but I’d never read anything from any of the other actual games, so I just wasn’t prepared for what came next.
Anyway, here are a few thoughts, in no particular order…
...on character concepts:
Next time I will come up with a PC that’s easier to 'shoop. This sounds silly even as I type it, but it just didn’t occur to me to think about how I’d visually represent my character once the game got started. It quickly became obvious how effective good pics were as soon as I saw other players doing it, though. Putting a face with the words, so to speak, made it easier to remember and keep straight all the characters in my mind. In particular, @ghoti, @fintastic, @gwwar, @Old, @Donald_Petersen, and @manwich, your image games were all outstanding.
From a narrative standpoint, I felt like I would probably have done better to narrow the scope and focus of my character. Jean-Rhys was really a mash-up of lots of different ideas, some inspired by the game setting and others more or less pulled out of the aether while I was reading and preparing, but I never really settled on the one or two things that would have made her who she was. Even so, I had fun playing her, and keeping it loose made it easier to adapt my character to the events of the moment, especially in the early game. OTOH, I sometimes wasn’t entirely sure why she did the things she did, and there was definitely a fair amount of retconning, both on the bbs proper and in my own mind.
...on time commitments:
Let’s just say that I spent way more than 30 minutes a week. 
I figured that with the role playing focus mentioned in the Call for Players it would be one of those things where you get out of it what you put into it, but I still underestimated how much I’d ultimately want to put into it.
The problem is that I’m a painfully slow writer and I am also easily distracted. It was fun to read about the language and the fashions of the era and work it into my texts, and I definitely got some ideas from that sort of research early in the game. But I also went down some rabbit holes, and after a while I just didn’t have the energy to be reading Regency-era slang dictionaries for vocabulary at the same time I was writing a post for story. And I never did get the hang of the overly polite and formal, yet utterly devastating, backhanded compliment.
I suspect some of my difficulties with maintaining a consistent voice were due to my somewhat fuzzy character concept, however.
...on game mechanics:
I really liked that most of the number-crunching was hidden from player view. That doesn’t mean that I wasn’t furiously reverse-engineering the optimal ratio of Lagoderm wager to FSH bonus in the first few turns, but still. 
It definitely lent a certain verisimilitude to the story to not only not know if a particular course of action would lead to success or failure, but to also have no idea if you were correctly assessing the risks and probabilities. Just like real life!
I also enjoyed the ambiguity of not knowing for sure which elements of the story were originally planned by @messana and which sprouted from player narratives. I still don’t know if the whole sentient sandfish thing was a GM plot hook, or a player-character’s deliberate backstory, or something that grew organically from various character interactions. And I think that’s kind of swell.
The only thing that gave me trouble were the PM threads. There were some neat things going on in a couple that I was part of, but as often as not it felt like they should’ve been a means to some sort of end, and I just couldn’t figure out how to promote them from private to public where everyone could enjoy them. As a consequence, I let some interesting stuff languish and wither, which was a shame. My apologies to @David_Falkayn, specifically. Sorry, dude. 
...on softballs:
And finally, I can’t beleive we made it through this entire game with an NPC named Bartlebot and not even once did someone utter the words “I would prefer not to.”
I’m very disappointed in all of you. 
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(Thoughts, and possibly an epilogue, will get posted either tonight or tomorrow noonish, as I’ll be AFK for a family get together today. 
)
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PM threads.
It occurs to me that some of the planning, etc. In the PM threads might have been beneficial to have included @messana in them so he knew some of the “not public discussion” going around.
But, also keeping the GM out of your plans is a time honored tradition.
I would also like to know how much (if any) did private player - GM messaging effect the game. To be honest when @MalevolentPixy was framed and lost everything, I was concerned about how badly this Mysterious Adversary could effect me when he finally did strike. But now that seems to have pre ordanied to an extent.
But also I had not interacted with Liv in any meaningful way. As well as a few of the others.
To paraphrase one of the great Baggins,
“I didnt know half of you half as well as I should like, and I like less than half of you half as well as you deserve.”
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For me, one of the best parts of playing these games is picking images and creating horrible 'shoops for my characters.
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Gosh this was fun!
Thank you, thank you, thank you @messana for all your hard work and creativity in constructing and running such a wonderful game.
One of the biggest differences I felt between this game and previous ones was the element of chaos. A lot of the time I didn’t fully understand what was going on in all the sub-plots as they were unfolding. I think much of this was due to the back-channel messaging, and the different factions that formed and dissolved over the course of the game. Some of the PM exchanges I had with other players were so good I found myself sorry for all the players who missed them, knowing I was missing a lot of good stuff too. For example, I wish I’d been able to hear all the details of the drug smuggling gang’s doings, or more about the sandfish sentience sub-plot, or what really happened to Crusher.
I also wasn’t always sure what I should be working on stats-wise. I expect this is partially a function of hiding the mechanics a bit more from players. None of this is at all bad. This chaos and imperfect information are in some ways particularly realistic. Most days in my (rather mundane) real life, I don’t fully understand everything that’s going on around me, or what is the most important project to be working on.
The other particular difference between this and previous games was the mix of worlds. It was a challenge to play both in space and in Jane Austen’s world, but it led to a richer and more interesting world being created. Should Igor have been an Igor-bot? Do I walk or take a hover-hansom? What level of technology should my lab have really had? It all worked out ok, however it got played.
I’d also like to express my admiration for the players. You all are so fun, smart, creative, witty, articulate, and funny. At the beginning of the game, I set myself a few challenges. Some of these were successful, and some I failed at. All helped me play the game better than I would have otherwise. One challenge in particular was to be better at setting the volleyball so another player could spike it. Or at least to bump the ball so someone else could set it. I admire different players for different things, but those I’d like to emulate most are the people who know how to set the ball and do so generously and consistently. I’m going to keep trying to get better at this. I think it’s where the most magical magic happens in these games.
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Given the mechanic used to determine when the truth about Liv came out, it should have happened well before the “mysterious adversary” phase. He got extremely lucky to be able to keep things up as long as he did. Which is another part that didn’t seem like it had enough time to play out. So many of us gained adversaries, but so few had opportunity to really do anything.
This game was so jam-packed with plot, it could have easily gone on another six months. Or at least two.
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adversaries.
Multiple battle phases.
WHO KILLED THE ENSIGN!
Yeah - there was a lot more to work with here. Which is a sign of how well @messana did. In '77, most of us came out of Star Wars craving more, too.
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You and me both.
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You know, I had an English prof in college, and the first time I got a paper back from him, it was covered in red ink. Notations everywhere about what could have been done better. Just looking at it, my heart sank.
On the final page was my grade: A. The lesson I learned there, and what your thoughts remind me of is that even the excellent can be made better.
(This prof also taught me one of the best essay tricks I wish I had learned earlier: if outlining before you write doesn’t work with your writing style, outline after when you start editing. Then you can see where you are out of balance and need to cut or flesh out, accordingly).
I see your comments as being the exact same as that professor’s: this was an A game. You’re just seeing ways it can be even better.
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