The Return Journey (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
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returnjourneyooc2022-03-05 05:37 pm
returnjourney) wrote in returnjourneyooc2022-03-05 05:37 pm
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STATE OF THE GAME
STATE OF THE GAME
Hello, passengers!
We've passed our two-month anniversary, and so we'd like to take this opportunity to check in with our players, to see what's working for you guys and what could use improvement. You can consider this post a place to freely share your thoughts, both with us and the game at large. If you'd like to engage with the mods one-on-one, please see our Mod Contact page!
Feel free to converse amongst yourselves, whether it's about expectations, concerns, or anything else.
Character Activities
We also wanted to introduce a new page we set up, to make it easier for your character to contribute to the ship and also notice those contributions! Please check out that page here.
You guys can use this page to post and track any background behavior or activities your character and others are up to, whether now or at any time in the future. Basically, things that aren't big enough to merit a player plot, but are still important to how your character engages with the setting! Think of it as something adjacent to a handwaved CR meme; you can see examples on the page itself.
We'd also like to give you guys the opportunity to plot amongst yourself, insofar as the group activities go. There were a few of these mentioned on the warden meeting posts, so if you have an idea for a group activity and would like to present it to the game at large, please post it under this header! Then, if it gets enough traction (or has received support elsewhere, like plurk), submit it to the proper header on the Activities page. Other players can show their support by adding a +1 or -1 in the subject of their replies. Let's say there should be participation from 4 or 5 characters for it to count!
That said, if a group activity doesn't get enough support (or your character wouldn't bother trying to get support and would do the activity solo), please submit it as an individual activity! You can always bump it up to a group activity in the future, if more passengers participate later.
Please note that this page is not meant as a substitution for threading out cool things or player plots. Rather, we'd like to give everyone a neat, easy way to see what's going on around the ship at any given time, so wardens and inmates can stay on the same page with their activities and share plot hooks.
Since this page will be a mainstay, if you have any questions, please ask them on our FAQ!
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@ mods
PLEASE FEEL FREE TO PUT DOWN HARD BOUNDARIES AND HARD "NOs," WITH ME, VOLK IS TRYING TO MAKE THE NAVARCH'S LIFE HARD AS A STATED GOAL BUT FIRE IS NOT TRYING TO MAKE MODS' LIVES HARD I PROMISE. I WILL ALWAYS WORK WITH YOU TO TAKE THE LOAD OFF IF YOU NEED IT, JUST SAY THE WORD. i like to play characters that do this, the only time this relationship gets toxic is when people lie about what they are or are not ok with me doing [eyes slide over to my old game]
i also wish we had more original character slots :(
i could stand 2 events a month, also, but see immediately below for my pace vs everyone else's lol
@ playerbase
please tell me if my pace and/or volk's intensity/character themes and general confrontational nature is making things bad for anybody. he's supposed to feel like he's enjoying being a bully, it's not me i swear. the game i was in previous to this (for 13 years) is one of the fastest games there is even though DWRP as a whole is way slower than back before we all had kids/jobs/etc. there i was actually a medium-slow player and here im afraid i might be overwhelming :(
im also clashing a little with my ooc conception of the setting and some other people's, i think - i tend to think the peregrine & the barge & settings like it aaaaare, lawful neutral at best, & that generally the challenge of a warden is to try to do good despite
a) a system that is actually kind of frustrating and restrictive &
b) inmates that are inmates, being at turns both violent and conniving & manipulative AND genuinely terrified, sympathetic, or being damaged by said system
WOULD LOVE TO HEAR PEOPLE'S THOUGHTS ON THE MATTER
this is leading i think to some meta-level thread-steering that i don't enjoy doing or doing TO people. i'm not getting bleed - there's no emotional component bouncing from me to volk or vice versa - but i find myself, hmmm , rather than just communicating ooc with other muns when i think volk is right or wrong, (ratio 1:3) ive just been trying to narrate harder to try to get them to come to the conclusion on their own and then getting frustrated when they don't pick up the signs or agree with me
anyway this has made some stuff hard and im going to be better about not doing that.
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An inmate can have any read on the setting they want, and whether it's valid or something obviously way off base they have to overcome, they don't icly have any choice about it. Which DEFINITELY can have its own hurdles, but there's at least a very solid reason to keep them there. Whereas if a warden is repeatedly hammered with "everything here is bad and you are part of a corrupt/shitty/etc system", or things that make them doubt whether their windfall is some kind of trick, there's no cushion for keeping them here — and especially since wardens are likely to care about that kind of thing, it becomes this ooc wall of "my character either has to avoid or completely shut down the concerns of someone trapped and frightened/angry, or I have to grasp for whatever straws can maybe keep them from voluntarily leaving"
Or like, fixating on the system, which can be fun and viable, but not long term unless the goal of the arc is to see it be a failing effort or change the game radically
I don't know that I think there's any Right Or Wrong way to play it, I don't have A Solution, but this is a quick two cent explanation of why at least I specifically also kind of struggle to engage with this
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i guess my WANT is to go as hard as i can and trust people to tell me when i need to walk back
but
a lot of times with a character it's not a single thread, it's a buildup of many things you dont realize is leading to a struggle with a drop until it's already happening :/ which means i need to balance better and check in more with what the other mun is feeling. good call
i think volk might be leaning more on warden-inmate collective organization rather than "LEAVE RIGHT NOW YOURE SHITTY" and maybe i can use that to my advantage ? ? ? we will see ??
Also, this - the overall warden atmosphere is V E R Y different once you jump in which is a culture shock for me. so far i dont think any wardens actually think the system is shitty, except former inmates william and loki. they think the system is good and that inmate complaining is just mouth noises coming from guilty criminals
that is an odd adjustment, and frustrating as someone who was kind of planning to play a grey-inmate only to find out that there are no grey inmates lol
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MORE THOUGHTS LATER HOPEFULLY
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speaking for myself as a player here: you are blurring ic/ooc and it's actually making it actively unpleasant to play a warden bc now i have to worry that i'm going to get judged about my ooc values for shit my dumbass devil hunter does. this is deeply off-putting.
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seriously thank you, communication is hard
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fwiw, i am totally fine with volk's behavior icly and his first thread with aki was genuinely interesting and fun. the issue for me comes in with the ic/ooc blur. i see pel already mentioned it, so i won't rehash, but i saw your plotting meme comment as well; in it, you seemed deeply unhappy with not being able to get what volk needs to develop in a positive way and, well, not only am i here to have fun, but you are, too. so i genuinely hope this helps you figure that out.
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more often then not, volk is the first there, and when anyone replies, he's immediately answering or thread jumping in a way that oocly puts a lot of burden on players to keep track of and icly makes volk's voice forcibly louder than any other inmate in the game. this might directly relate to the time or attention you have placed in the game itself, but a lot of players don't have the same amount of time to tag into new posts or threads as you do, and by always jumping in first, i feel you're also actively discouraging other players from participating. in a lot of ways volk is constantly drowning other people out in network threads, and that's not very fair to players who don't have the same amount of time as you, especially since this game has a small playerbase. i think it would help if you dialed that back, because insomuch as most of us are okay with threadjacking, the way you use it for your character isn't what threadjacking is typically intended for, and that puts a lot of stress on other people too (ic/ooc both), whether you realize it or not.
to bring this back to what pel said, seeing both "getting frustrated when they don't pick up the signs or agree with me" and "the only time this relationship gets toxic is when people lie about what they are or are not ok with me doing" in what you posted is extremely unsettling. people should be allowed to disagree with you without conflict (ic/ooc both), but with the way things have blurred, you don't seem to be okay with that idea at all, and these phrases clearly reflect that. people thinking/feeling different from you, having different ways of handling conflict, and not feeling comfortable talking to you about the things that bother them as frankly as you want them to doesn't make them toxic at all either, especially if they feel smoothing things over without being vocally contrary better protects them as a person.
they don't owe you the truth if they don't feel comfortable enough sharing it with you. most people in dwrp are just here to have fun writing their characters and not get into the nitty gritty of how anyone else plays their character. with whatever other things they might have going on in their lives, they might not even have the bandwidth for that, so i sincerely hope you can take a step back and understand where people might be coming from rather than silently begrudge them for doing what might be best for them as a person.
separate from all that, i know it's your character's thing to troll people and leave giant walls of text, but oocly that can really tire people out. i imagine it's probably fun to write out all the things he's rambling or venting about, but it's become very exhausting to follow as a player. i didn't make it through all his questions because after a point it just felt like there wasn't anything particularly important that my character needed to know. while bucky doesn't reply to everyone, he reads everything posted publicly, and i have to do that reading for him. icly, yes, it's his job to and he has the time to do that, but with my full time job and the week i've had, it's really not fun for me to read through it personally. and this is coming from me as a player with a character that doesn't intend to reply to volk. if i had a character that would reply to him, i would have to, and that feels like so much work for very little substance, tbh. i don't find that fair to put on other players constantly, even if that's the ic thing he would do. something to consider, maybe.
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my speed/activity isn't something i can super dial back i guess because i like to keep my inbox at zero and my characters active, but i can definitely threadjack less!
I think it's just a bad character/game match honestly, I'm going to probably switch him out
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I do want to add that I think your tagging pace might be contributing to your overall stress about all this in addition to putting some pressure on other players that I don't think you're going for. It might be worth it to slow down some more, do some more day-to-day things, etc. Not full SOL or anything, but I think sometimes Volk comes off as if he's trying to speedrun the metaplot and it's requiring an awful lot of thought and effort from everybody involved to manage that.
Volk being high-strung isn't necessarily going to go away, obviously, but it could be lightened up, I think. Make it fun. Take your time. The game'll still be here tomorrow. <3
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no honestly at this point im thinking i just didnt pick the right guy TONALLY for what's fun for me and other people. which, you know -
i always think that if youre doing something long term you have to make every mistake at least once and this is one i have yet to make before :V
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I really want to make it clear that the intended purpose of the Navarch and Archimedes are not to be full characters in their own rights (esp in Archie's case) or a kind of "CR" (esp in the Navarch's case.) They both serve different functions in play, which is intended to be:
I want to make it clear that characters can (and should) question themselves, wardens and what fairness/equity/etc are. I think it even makes sense as a deflection for them to temporarily fixate on the ship's system as the real problem rather than acknowledging any flaw in themselves.
However, I do think it's a pretty unrewarding path to take long-term, both because I am not interested in NPCing for frequent and persistent challenges to the core premise of the game to no benefit, and also because it is going to hit a wall, a very very hard wall. It may also be very hard to convince other players to engage on fighting the wall with you. To match your eye slide: we designed some things in this game to be more transparent because the total ambiguity of a nameless, faceless Admiral who has no rhyme or reason for why he picks certain people and has no accountability to any other body felt very hard to handle sometimes. That said, I cannot possibly answer 41 questions, the first two of which are made up of over a dozen sub questions. This is not a functional use of my time, and may or may not glean anything useful to Volk. If you'd like, we can handwave a variety of things, but I simply cannot NPC them all, and Volk will eventually have to accept the situation he's in so that you can get into the meat of the problems that made him an inmate, rather than the problems with the system he's temporarily in. Especially because none of this seems rewarding to Volk; he just seems more and more frustrated, and I worry about frustrating you in turn.
The problem with trying to make the Navarch's life difficult is also that:
a) The Navarch is not going to talk to inmates, the same way any prison warden isn't going to meet at random with prisoners, so it's just creating work for the wardens as a go-between. Some warden players may like this and like investigating the system, but everyone has to understand that I am not going to NPC out dozens of answers to challenges to the system that largely won't get changes, because we are not going to overhaul the game to address all those things. The game will change and evolve over time, yes, but two months in we're not going to gut it like that to make it more realistic to any specific character.
b) This is a setting meant to give characters challenges, new experiences and tastes of other lives. I like to think of it as a redemption isekai. We are not building a meticulously crafted open world beyond the Peregrine's boundaries, nor trying to tell a story about an idealized version of earth prison in space that follows the Geneva Convention and whatnot. Writing about the nitty gritty of the system is a lot of hours, discussions and labour for us to write a ton of stuff about how the system works in huge detail when we could be writing plots where characters get to see new things, blow things up, go on adventures, live other lives, etc.
c) As I said to you in conversation the other day, some of Volk's questions are technically answerable, and I could write out a full answer using alien jargon or excuses to answer "why don't we have a psychiatrist", but the real answer is just "because then we have to have NPC psychiatrists on board so mods can do more NPCing, people can handwave psychiatry, or someone has to play a competent psychiatrist and also be interested in playing it with you specifically." I am doubtful as to how satisfying this is for most players OOC and it is also not going to create much (if any) value IC. I understand that it may be frustrating to curve a character around legitimately good questions, but we are writing stories set in a cool spaceship, not writing a 1:1 observation on the reality of the situation.
Ultimately, I don't want to treat the setting like an escape room where the objective is to figure out how to get out, whether it's by unlocking clues talking to the NPCs or brute force. I want the setting to be a vehicle for telling stories about characters, and that means interactions between PCs who have ongoing CR and conflict and resolutions and all those things.
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One thought: I think there might be something to be said about a balance between the scifi and the fantasy of the game. None of it is hard scifi, obviously, but compared to the barge, the Peregrine is a lot more structured and LOOKS very scifi, so I think we have some players leaning into that Realness a bit more than ever happened on the barge...which was very nebulous and therefore easier to go "whatever I'll just do this who cares" with. I think ultimately for playing in a dollhouse collaboratively, it's generally better to have the setting be mostly agreed upon, but the more rigid you are about how the dollhouse functions, the harder it is to move anything around inside.
Maybe it's just a magic dollhouse and maybe PCs get exasperated by it being silly sometimes and then they move on and we keep playing barbies.
Events will likely help propel this along as time goes on, I think, but a slight attitude shift towards "it's magical realism and the reality is focused in the CR not the setting" might help chill things out a bit. Idk how we do that beyond y'know, talking it out like this, but that's my two cents.
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As for realism, that's really interesting insight! I totally get what you mean about sci-fi lending a more realistic feel compared to the barge, where magic meant you could have a lux 5-room mansion inside your cabin and whatnot. My mind was thinking more along the lines of living with some level of austerity, while more realistic, creates more reasons for characters to interact with each other; when you have a mansion for a cabin you don't need to eat in the dining hall because you have a full kitchen, when you have almost no material needs you never need to strive or make challenging choices (ie theft, bargaining, etc) about acquiring something. On the flip side, I felt it was more other-worldly to give the ship a very specific aesthetic and cleaning bot presence and AUTOMAT food thing rather than having a little co-op of characters who are immediately forced to cooperate with each other in order to accomplish largely handwaved tasks like making meals or maintaining the ship. Basically my thought was to trim realism where it discouraged conflict and emphasize realism where it encouraged interaction because that suited the Peregrine's vision of a team of funky heroes + villains doing some cosmic justice in the universe, whereas the Barge is more of a ragtag family that loves (or loves to hate) their ship.
And yes, absolutely events are gonna push this forward nicely! I really want to set a real tone with ports and simulations B) And talking along the way is good, we're gonna have a ton of fun.
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- totally get this abt the navarch and archie, am trying to think exactly how to thread the needle IC. its possible that i might start posting my archie toplevels as a general summary of volk's concern rather than him poking in fascination at the fucked up owl for ages and ages.
- similarly, his 41 questions are all nitpick nonsense and im comfortable with just saying "he got an answer and it begrudgingly satisfied him" with no further interaction with the list or detailing
- i totally am here for this ethos of the game and although volk feels like he's trying to kick it to pieces, it's how he's reacting to being extremely offended that he's here lol. if he was a warden he'd be more or less just as ferocious defending his interests from the other side
- mr volkhov is a person who uses his insanely high standards and ability to browbeat people in conversation as a weapon, and to me its just kind of an interesting kind of terrible and shitty person to be, but it sounds like it IS having a splash effect ooc. i need to brainstorm about how to more or less put a cushion between his ic knife-throwing practice and actual ooc people. in completely practical terms it is something i WANT to do but don't know how to rig up yet.
- how do i do this. hm. i'll get back to you on what i can make work. maybe i will start putting [heres why hes wrong] flags in my narration, or like ... hm
- i like that he's just a mean ball of spikes that could be in a utopia and still think he's living in hell because his brain is broken. i dont want to soften him....... i intend strongly to either cushion between IC and OOC or switch him out (which sounds like a PA threat but playing him is less important to me emotionally than not breaking the game that my friends made, i will not feel bad if that is how i end up doing this)
-howww do i do thisssssssss hm. problem problem problem solve... im going to think and circle back, thank you for your thoughtful response tho
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I'm honestly a little concerned by this line:
getting frustrated when they don't pick up the signs or agree with me
Setting aside discussions of ic/ooc bleed, this sounds like exactly what you mentioned above:
the only time this relationship gets toxic is when people lie about what they are or are not ok with me doing
You want Volk to hit certain character beats in how people react to him. Instead of communicating that, you seem frustrated when it doesn't happen organically. However, people just want to play their characters IC-- that's what you're doing, that's what everyone's doing. People can't know you're trying to do a certain thing if you don't say it.
I hope this helps!
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your first point is exactly right, this doesn't come naturally to me and is something i need to work on ;-; in the future i plan to be better and to find a way to be less afraid of an ic fight becoming an extremely real ooc fight
second point oh boy yeah im being a hypocrite, huh. good call. i need to cut this tendency off before it gets worse and be open about my feelings and just deal with whatever happens tbh. ninety percent of the time people are cool!!!! ;;
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Another thought, feel free to disregard, but while I have you here-- When I was backreading through the comms I came across some of Volk's questionnaire. While I understand the thought process behind them and how it's IC for Volk, I kind of wonder the long term how fun it is to play for everyone else.
When I've modded games, I didn't want to give all the plot info to people when they just asked directly. I wanted to foster plots and let things unfold out of player initiative. Volk's current method of trying to reach the Navarch isn't very fun for other players; it doesn't give them anything to do, and it doesn't give you anything interesting to bounce off as a player.
I think some kind of player plot where Volk tries to contact the Navarch, that allows other players, both Wardens and Inmates, to respond as more than passive observers / messengers, would be a good way to give Volk something more meaty to chew on, so to speak.
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In terms of perspective on the setting itself, I think Lucifer is aware that it's unfair (I imagine most, if not all of the wardens are), but again, he doesn't care enough to concern himself with addressing it because he thinks it can, in fact, work despite the unfairness. He's always worked within unfair systems and made them work in spite of that. And again, OOCly, we're all aware the system isn't gonna change so at some point we need to move on and try something else! It's always a balance, I know, especially when playing a character with proclivities like Volk's.
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i think i might swap him out, he's a bad combo and i'm frustrated and other people are frustrated and there are ways to play with my friends that don't involve this hazard lol
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