The Fifteen Strangers Mods (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
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notasstrange2019-11-25 12:15 pm
strangerpeople) wrote in notasstrange2019-11-25 12:15 pm
MOCK WEEK 3 HMD AND R6 ANNOUNCEMENT
Guess what? It's time for another HMD!
We are absolutely glad with how this third Mock Week turned out. And you know who is responsible for it? You! That's right, you, the players. Without you, this game would not be what it is, mock weeks included! And that includes all of the feedback you can give to us as to what we've done good, and what we can do better!
We also would like to me an announcement about Round 6's date of beginning. After taking consideration varying factors, such as our own schedules and the existence of other games with definitive dates, we've decided that Round 6's reserves will open on Saturday, January 18th, 2020, and the round itself will open on Sunday, January 26th, 2020. Information pages will be revealed in early January for those interested in joining us for our All-Star Game - a game which Mock Week 3 characters can also participate in alongside characters from the previous five rounds and Mock Week 2!
And with that, have a happy holiday, an excellent New Year, never stop backtagging, and remember:
I̷T̷͢ ҉̀I̛Ś͏̡ ̷͠IN̡E҉V͡I̵͠T̵A͟B͏͟͞Ļ̛͠E͟.
no subject
I've also never modded or know the logistics of it, so my thoughts probably won't help.
The only issue I had was the size of the setting or layout. I'm not sure if the house was just for the mock round and R6 will have more space. But the small size made it awkward in the investigation, mostly with stuff like how Fou-Lu either slept through the murder, or didn't notice the body. Or how the phone got were it was without anyone noticing.
But the small space was fun for awkward character interactions. So I guess a larger house/secret passage ways that slowly get cut off could keep that as there's less characters to watch. The reverse of the normal adding new rooms weekly.
Or just have everyone pass out before the murder, that also works.
no subject
There's just a couple things that you tried that I think did not work out so well. In my opinion, the minigame really hurt the round. Normally when you do a minigame it provides either a good mingle opportunity or maybe a bit of action and drama. Unfortunately, hacking the firewalls was such a solo-oriented activity it was difficult to get a thread out of it. I also think using Mugen for it was... a cute idea that I was on board for, but wound up terrible in execution. We had to wait for you to get home and run a twitch stream, meaning the activity was dead for most of the day. Then the actual coin flips just took a REALLY long time to get through everyone, and in the end it meant we didn't unlock all the clues... really through no fault of our own, in the end it probably wasn't as interactive and fun as you hoped and since there was no relation of the stream to IC events, I'm really not sure what the point was. In the end, I think all the time we spent screwing around on that would have been better spent doing tags. Wednesday is the mid-point, it's definitely not when you want to make people lose their momentum. I noticed a considerable slow-down from that point on.
I also think the case should have been reviewed more by mods who could give advice, because there were a lot of things that didn't make sense. I don't want to go into too much detail out of respect for the players on the case, but overall, there really wasn't anything suggesting the case was a suicide in the evidence so it came out of left field for the characters. Once it was revealed, you really had to grasp at straws to make Lala culpable - I feel like it didn't make sense either IC or OOC, and with such shaky logic I'm not sure how the events that unfolded were ever something we could guess. It worked out in the end since the smoking gun was one we could figure out fairly easily, but.... with murder I think the "how" is more interesting than the "who" and finding the latter without the former is unsatisfying.
Here is my suggestion. If you, as mods, have difficulty with showing us how to establish the timeline, I think you should make it an IC requirement that culprits/the mastermind/whatever have to explain in detail what happened after the votes and before execution. Here's an example of what I mean. This kind of system will clean up the loose ends IC so we can see what we got right and what we didn't. Paying closer attention to what is happening IC on Thursday wouldn't hurt either (I assume this is why the slumber party was brought up by Len, but once it was set up in a centralized location you should have made sure no clues ended up near it so we could suspend disbelief.) Ni brought up the MST3K mantra in chat, but I feel that for a murder mystery game where the objective is to solve a case by putting clues together, this is a matter where that invocation doesn't really work. It's not just a show for our CHARACTERS who are naturally going to be factoring these things into the case. Overall, more attention should be paid to the IC reasons for why things happen in the murder so the mods can be sure it will all check out when we go over it in the trial. All mods should review the case until all obvious questions have an answer.
Now on to praise! I could tell a lot of thought was put into running the NPC portion of the mock week. Vyce was a good head-up-his-ass antagonist and Linkara's arrival at the end revealed information about him that made it feel like him showing up at the end was good for something, rather than just taking the victory from the hands of PCs. Another thing that made this work is we were able to fight Vyce in person, at least for a little. I like that Yoosung got a souvenir out of it. The AI revival at the end was also very sensible, and made it feel like there were still consequences for Inaba dying, which I enjoy a lot. Although I am canon blind, it seemed well planned that Vyce's shades were integrated as part of it - this clever use of existing canon structures is the kind of stuff I come to 15 Strangers to see! I'm really looking forward to how what we learned in the mock week will play into R6. Thanks again for your hard work and congratulations for a job well done!
cw: suicide mentions/self-harm mentions
And before I say anything else, I wanna make it clear that all of the time, effort, and thought put into this case really showed and it's very obvious the casemakers tried to create something interesting and nuanced. There were a lot of small things that the culprit did ICly (Just one example, Lala coming in with the sodas to remind everyone of her "power") and details that were honestly great. But there were a lot of things that could have been done a little differently to give us more context to get a clearer read of the case and timeline. These are some things that probably could've been caught by having the mods review the case a little more. I'm not sure how you guys currently divide casework, but one mod can't catch everything by themselves. You need at least two sets of eyes to look over a case to fact and logic check it. 'course, maybe that is how you did things and stuff just got skipped over, which happens! But in general, try to make sure every mod sets eyes on a case before investigation because it's important for everything to make sense.
And... now what I think didn't quite work. The most glaring problem is one Des already broached. The suicide angle. I remember when Lala first brought that up I was really taken aback because it was so out of left field. Not only did the wounds not seem to indicate that's what happened, but iirc it was mentioned/implied the wounds didn't bleed as much as they should have. Maybe this was supposed to be a sign it was self-inflicted, but instead, it made it seem like the wounds might've been made post-mortem. This difference in both placement and appearance gives a completely different read of the case.
On top of that, I am not entirely sure how much sense the wounds really... make... It's perfectly okay to add red herrings to a case. They can be done really, really well! But in this case, it felt very meta because the purpose was to disorient players. In the case of red herrings, usually, they're something a character adds (intentionally and sometimes accidentally) to obscure events. However here, it felt like they were added because the players knew there wasn't a lot of evidence and didn't know what else to add. In fact, I'm pretty sure the Q&A confirmed it was mostly the players adding stuff with only a side mention of why it made sense.
It isn't that meta evidence never happens, but maybe something else could have been used instead...? A last-minute reveal that it was self-inflicted was very... jarring. Not to mention, at least to me, it felt extremely inappropriate and uncomfortable due to how little evidence and warning there was for it.
Adding to that: the knives. I'm not entirely sure what happened with the knives and it seems like everyone forgot to account for them (which happens!) but maybe a heads up when you guys realized players were accounting for them could've helped steer us in the right direction. I know there was some mention of Inaba throwing the knives for the sake of confusing everyone, which I am not entirely sure I understand either. For me, that relates back to my previous point of meta evidence. It doesn't really make sense and I am not entirely certain how anyone was meant to guess that. Particularly when the evidence didn't seem to support it. I also have no idea how the lemon came into play or why Lala wasn't covered in blood when she tripped or why the trail didn't reflect that. I know the lemon was meant to tie to Lala, I just have no idea why it was there in the first place. I'm more or less echoing Des' feedback here but with a slight spin: the "how" is just as important as the "who" and finding the latter without the former is unsatisfying.
Which brings me to the "who". I know Vyce gave his reason for why Lala was the culprit but, honestly it was a very loose reason. To me, it really seemed like Inaba should've been the culprit considering she was the one who forgot her phone and she was the one who took direct action to try to turn it into a case. Lala, at worse, seemed like an accomplice. I understand it's tough to do a "the culprit is already dead" case but maybe some of the events here needed to be adjusted to make Lala more culpable. I doubt this kind of situation will come up again tbh, but I figured it was worth mentioning anyway.
All that said, I deeply appreciate you guys giving us an extra 30 minutes to discuss what happened with Lala, Inaba, and the case because it was desperately needed. Thank you guys so much for letting us have that and letting the characters argue with Vyce! I do think that helped a lot.
Case aside, I admittedly didn't engage too much with the plot or NPCs. I found it a bit hard to follow because some of this stuff ties into other rounds (or seemed to) but I don't think that was a bad thing. It's always fun to see a multi-round game reference past events, characters, and consequences! I wish I had been part of some of the earlier rounds to properly enjoy what you guys were laying out, but all of it looked really fun to me! Every time I looked over at the chat or at the game while multi-tasking, everyone looked like they were having fun! That's an impressive feat, and I think maintaining an atmosphere and energy like that even in a mock week is something to be proud of!