returnjourneyooc | STATE OF THE GAME

Entry tags:

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!

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

no yeah absolutely and im kind of, aware of this? I definitely am not clever enough to play wardens i think, the only time i can manage it is when they're good at compartmentalizing or extremely rigid-lawful

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

Oh you replied before I could edit in, lmao, big flashing neon banner, I don't know nothin about playing inmates and these two cents are 1000% shit as it relates to my individual experience (just as a general disclaimer unrelated to your reply)

MORE THOUGHTS LATER HOPEFULLY

hey dude i'm just popping in to say that by and large, most of the characters, wardens and inmates alike, are coming from settings where the baseline for prison is so much fucking worse than this. we have several period characters or characters who grew up in period environments and also literally NONE of them have seen how it works in practice, besides william and loki. there have been multiple wardens discussing their suspicions on this front, whether they trust the system, etc (i myself have participated in like 3 or 4 conversations about this), but of course the wardens aren't going to talk to the inmates about it. especially not volk, who you give an inch and he takes a mile.

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.

dude thank you for speaking up to me about this, seriously. i am going to take this to heart and think about what to do. i might need to just swap volk out, he's fun but maybe he's bringing out the wrong stuff in my playstyle and if that's hurting other people that's way more important to me to stop than anything else that i could have as a factor for consideration

seriously thank you, communication is hard

absolutely, i prefer to be straightforward with people whenever possible.

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.

yeah i think it has, i need to make a major playstyle change or switch him out, as well as communicate better. ptttbbbth. oh well. we fuck up and we learn from it and do better next round <3

for sure! thanks for being open to talking about this

echoing off of this with my agreement. volk is constantly playing up being a victim, and it's exhausting both oocly and icly for people too keep up with. icly my character would never talk to yours, would even just lock him in a closet and let him know what a real prison is like, but your ic/ooc blurring has also made me very actively worry about being judged oocly for things that make sense for my character to do. but even if my character isn't doing any of that, i've watched your character harangue wardens nonstop about one thing or another in an extremely aggressive way without any regard for giving other inmate players a chance to say something first too.

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.

no actually do lock him in a closet! dude, airlock him. seriously, i was planning he'd be murdered more. he's designed to be someone you actively want to make shut up.

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

Not to speak for Carolyn, but William and Loki are definitely seeing this as an improvement upon the previous system, so they aren't really in a dramatically different boat (lol) than any of the other wardens. They wouldn't be here if they were. Loki's skeptical and has gone to seek reassurance, and I'd like to leave it at that for the time being rather than stress testing the setting's premise, if that makes sense?

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

lol my tag speed is forever going to feel too slow ....... i like fast characters

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

I can picture Volk fitting in if he was toned down slightly re: setting poking, personally, but if you don't think that's something his personality can manage, I totally get it. Whatever works for you, my dude.

nah, I think people are pointing out larger tonal issues and im cool with that

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

STATE OF THE GAME

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject