notasstrange

HMD

HMD

Hey everyone! It's time for HMD! We want to thank you for making this an amazing round. Seriously, I had a lot of fun, personally (I being...well, Ni. Hello everyone!) and I truly hope you guys had a great time as well. As always, what makes these rounds so amazing is you, the players, and players both old and new truly made this round a memorable experience.

However, there's always room for improvement, and of course, this round was not perfect on our end, no matter how much work we put in - we know it wasn't and isn't. Nevertheless, we always strive to do our best to do better and be better as time goes by and as each round is completed, we want to know how well of a job we've done to try and meet those expectations. And so, we leave it to you to let us know how we're doing.

Anon will be allowed. Have fun y'all, and we will hopefully see you...come Round 8!

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I absolutely love Kaito and you did a fantastic job!! :D My only regret is that him and Roland didn't get to interact nearly as much in-game until the final trial ;;

A bit late, but I really enjoyed Akane! Her interactions were very sweet when they needed to be (just look at that bodycount!) and even though I'm mostly canonblind with her, she definitely had a lot more to her than meets the eye and I really enjoyed her. Perhaps she can fall asleep and explore a world filled with Tapirs and dreamotion and I am totally not trying to enable you into playing her in Songerein

truly, akane was the most ruthless killer who nobody ever managed to execute, she was dropping people left and right by like. giving them hugs. explaining stuff. BEING NICE.

Also you are free to try to enable me tho no promises lol i've never heard of this place.

See, I would have definitely gone for more CR but Kira was honestly a little scared of Akane! Like the whole time! It's pretty funny when I think about it

Omg, amazing. Why???

First, Akane was the only female char to tag him reacting to his face being different and going vroom, which was scary and embarrassing for him but ... Let's just say Kira has trauma, so having a woman find him like that made him actually start to have a panic attack which is why he hid in the closet. So that was an awkward first impression. Then in first investigation she screamed really loud so that was like ooh, oh jeez, watch out for that if I wanna murder you (tho he kinda didn't because he is not so into the weirdgirl type.) Then when she killed Moriarty extremely brutally he was just like noooooope!!! And then her ice hampered his buzzsaws.

So yep, pretty much the whole game he was like Not Worth It with her cause he doesn't really like to talk to girls he's not plotting to kill. But he didn't dislike her exactly and tolerated it when they did interact. Just low key scared lol

Edited 2023-07-30 06:25 (UTC)

It's been great, y'all! Hope my old man was satisfying to play with!

CR I did not expect to get coming into this: this one, esp with how INTENSE IT GOT

Man, I loved her so much nat!!

MY ONLY REGRET WAS I DID NOT GET TO RP WITH ROLAND MORE....I loved their cr, and I loved seeing the sunshine boy sunshine all over the damn place!!

MY REGRET: NOT BEING ABLE TO PLAY WITH KIRA MORE, I unironically loved their cr in that they both just acted normal at each other amidst the chaos, despite both of them being far FROM normal!

I love him though he's so good Des

THE OLD MAN WAS GREAT I sure didnt expect what he and Akane got but man it was so good.

I don't think either of us expected it, we went from 'teehee adoption' to 'Oh. Oh no. Oh no are we sure they're not actually related'

I DO WISH WE'D HAD MORE TIME BUT /looks at WCB, points at eyes points at you

INCREDIBLE that is perfect and I love it

Honestly, even being in deadland I loved keeping up with Hermes' antics, especially his arc into the game! Him realizing he was his own person at the end and making his own choices was great! Go raise chaos in Hades world, lil computer boy. You've earned it!!

FR, LIKE, STARTED OFF NICE AND LOW KEY AND THEN ALL THAT HAPPENED

He will still be terrified of making choices for himself for some time even though he'll still do it. Poor beep boop needs a therapist (and maybe a few items to ~~steal~~ borrow from the gods)

Edited 2023-07-30 15:57 (UTC)

I def wish we'd had some more time but golly we packed a lot into what we got, but yeah oh my gosh they were so similar it was crazy.

Old cranky dude was fun to play against! A shame he didn't last longer, but he was interesting from what I saw!

First off, I will congratulate you guys on finishing the round! Any mg takes an obscene amount of work on the mods part to pull off successfully to the end, and I thank y'all for making sure we all pulled through. Pat yourselves on the back!

I'll start with what I thought were good things from the round first.

I have to echo tulip in that the maps were very clearly well made, and a lot of thought did go into the setting details and clues. Mod responses were generally prompt or quick, which was also appreciated! The powers were generally pretty fun to work with, and I did appreciate y'all being so willing to work with me when I asked about how the dead could interact with the living and the battle to rejoin them.

Now I have to move onto the not so great parts.

First off, and this is a big one as someone who ended up spending a lot of time in the deadland: There was very little for the dead to do once they'd arrived, especially with mods having living characters they prioritized first over everything else. I'm not privy to what happened behind the scenes, of course, but a major reason a lot of dead characters just did not interact was due to that we were pretty much plopped down in a mostly empty space with very little to do, and this actively discouraged quite a few players from even interacting with the deadland. It also seemed like mods were expecting player characters to pick up the slack and make deadland fun with...very little to do or go off of. Especially given that the place we were in was a double of the House of Hades, it feels like this was an especially missed opportunity.

I know I was told I could contact the mods more, and that there were irl issues with the mods. But to be fully transparent, it felt absolutely awful to be ignored and waiting on mod tags which were my only way of playing in the game for a long period of time while watching you play out the badger thing in the living area. It genuinely added to the feeling of being a complete afterthought, and there were times I also considered just giving up as well because of it. The major reason I didn't was because I didn't want to potentially leave the living in a lurch with deadland only information being inaccessible to them, and that I genuinely loved the cast. I understand that this was not the intent of the mods, but unfortunately it is what ultimately happened.

Something I also have to stress is that I was not pleased with mods outright removing player agency at times or just not communicating with players on things they should have - a minor personal gripe is I would have preferred to have seen Moriarty's execution text before it was posted, in order to make a few minor characterization suggestions, but the most major thing that sticks out to me is giving a player a 'get out of death free card' and then forcing it to be used without contacting them or the character that was going to be revived first. It was an unpleasant shock to find out, after making plans with and looking forward to playing with Hubert in deadland, that no, he wasn't coming, and no, neither his player or Kira's had been even asked ahead of time about the usage of the item. I did make a complaint to the mods when this happened, but I have to stress again that something like this is not okay, especially in a hobby that relies on OOC communication like this one does.

Players can choose not to use a special item given by the mods, and this is okay - the fact that the revival was apparently pre-planned from the start doesn't change that you didn't let the two people who were involved with this know ahead of time.

This also dovetails into another complaint: a lot of the plot genuinely felt like players were just there to watch or react to it, with not much personal stakes in it beyond 'get out and stop being in the murdergame.' A lot of the visions were more focused on characters that, while having a connection to the true mastermind, meant very little to most of the player characters, or just seemed extraneous. I'm a newcomer to 15s, but hearing that there had been multiple rounds first that involved essentually random characters beyond the DMC ones that may or may not have been callbacks to previous rounds did...nothing for me. Especially when the reveal with Aoi and Hubert was made, and the whole 'we're in a timeloop' thing was revealed. There would have been a much better and more compelling storybeat if players got visions of those past rounds they participated in, especially in a Zero Escape themed round. As it is, it made it feel like only certain special characters ever really got to do anything. Zack was an especially big example of this, as week 5 felt like the mods just hammering in that he was very special and important to the plot over and over again. While he did end up being important to the plot, also having him be a player character on top of it made it feel very 'look at my character'. The final trial with the mastermind also felt very...well, it was mostly about characters that the living playerbase had no way of communicating with, and the dead playerbase had a hard time tagging. Nero as well felt like a part of the plot that could have been removed with very little changing about the overall story.

I was also not thrilled with the inclusion of an entire Canon OC character connected to one of the player characters - again, that you did not let said player know about ahead of time - being a major basis of the plot. I understand that the desire to have things remain a secret in regard to plot is a big one, but your first priority as a mod is to communicate clearly with your players and not blindside them with stuff they would need to have known about beforehand. This is an easy mistake to make (god knows I have in the past) but next time please either let a player know or re-write so there is no connection to them at all. It sucks having to re-write, but it's better to do that than risk alienating your playerbase.

In the end, I feel the plot of the game would have been better if it wasn't a three-way canon mashup, because a lot of the plot of the game felt stapled on together and didn't really naturally flow with each other. I wish more time would have been spent making sure the plot was more cohesive, instead of on the smaller and ultimately inconsequential details.

On a more lighter note, I also have to admit that I felt the minigames were an afterthought that didn't actually really...need to be there, and felt more like they were either due to a tradition or just to give players something to do. This on top of a weekly investigation (which would often give players more clues than the minigames) was just an odd decision, especially when said minigames were often late or even skipped over in one case. Again, I understand rl mod issues, but when this was a constant issue it would have been better to not have them at all.

I will also say it felt downright awkward or uncomfortable to be in the discord chat at times, though that is mostly due to a mod that has already stepped down from the team, so I will only say that I was not impressed with the team as a whole and will not be returning for another round. That being said, I do wish all of you well in any future endeavors, and hope things turn out better for you all next time.

ABSOLUTELY AGREED! I loved their CR so, SO much! They had so many good threads together and he truly was this positive ray of sunshine that I think came in handy a lot of the time XD

Moriarty was such an MVP! I loved all the trickery in his case and how sad it was in retrospect, plus leading the charge in graveyard and even getting Eva out of the tree at the right moment! Plus he was always so heartwarming and funny. Thank you for being brave enough to kinkshame my stupid cat man.

Thank you.... 💕 I also regret not doing more, definitely gonna try and hit you up on post game stuff soon!

YEAH MY ONLY REGRET....was being picked early, but such is rng I guess....Thank you!!

If nothing else, Moriarty can and will kinkshame anyone if they do it in public.

THANK YOU THOUGH, I was actually trying for good trickery in his case because I love cases where you have to think through and realize what the contradiction is....even if it didn't exactly work out like that due to moriarty's grandstanding. BUT HE WENT OUT LIKE A VILLAIN SO WHO CARES ABOUT THE HIDDEN SECRET SAD TRUTH, AMIRITE

As is becoming tradition, I'm going to start with the good!

First off, it was obvious that there was a great deal of passion that was poured into this project. There were a lot of tiny details that were lovingly considered, and the excitement from the team at being able to share their baby was obvious. It's always neat to see that much enthusiasm poured into something.

On that, and dovetailing with that, were the maps, as were mentioned by others as well. Some of the deadland maps seemed to be a little excessive for what they ultimately needed to be able to accomplish for the characters, but they were impressively accurate, and as someone who is often also a stickler for details that was fun to see and I'm sure they were fun to make. They certainly made the layout of the space very clear, and that's extremely useful for someone like me, who does get stuck on tiny details. Ask me how much time I spent pouring over the different aliveland maps to try and figure out where the best place was for Akane to practice her ice skating or do a summoning circle lol. The layout of the Gigantic maps was a little more obscure on the physical amounts of space that were available to everybody for the like, probably Just Me who wanted information on it for something like the above, but they were clear and functional and useful to have!

I'm again going to second (or third?) that the new powers were a lot of fun to have and to explore, and that some of the unexpected ways people managed to use theirs really brought a lot to the game. A lot of the questions, at least in my case, for the powers seemed to only get answered in ways that could increase the chaos, and I appreciated that a lot. I also really enjoyed the gimme's slow transformation from weird stinky shadow man to Charon, and the relationship that he developed with the cast on both sides of the veil. That was very nice.

Additionally going to echo that the mods were usually very responsive and quick to answer questions, and that my experience personally with the mods felt good.

And now the not so good.

To begin with, I know that the mod team had some difficulties, between irl scheduling issues, health issues, and All The Rest Of That, including one member of the mod team leaving the game shortly before endgame. I don't know how much of what I'm going to write below was affected by that and what wasn't, but I wanted to let you know that I do see your difficulties. The time commitment and requirements of running a game like this are clearly intensive, but it did seem like not every member of the team was equally prepared for that. I'm not sure if Rook had IRL stuff come up suddenly, but I very rarely saw them around at all, and I know that Letty's work and Mandy's health made that kind of time commitment challenging to maintain for the entire span of the game. Letty in particular was a superhero when it came to the amount of mod stuff she managed while she had so much else going on, but from the outside looking in, some of it did make it feel like a weird time to choose to run a murdergame.

Having said that: while I did have a lot of fun this round, I'm afraid that a lot of that fun felt like it was more in spite of the plot rather than because of it, because there was a truly fantastic cast and a lot of excellent players.

I know that blending of canons is sort of what 15s is known for, and that really is fine, but it kind of felt like the mods just sort of assumed that everyone would be canon familiar--both with the formation canons for this round, as well as with the overall canon of previous 15s rounds. And, frankly, that's not the case. I just usually don't have the executive function to untangle everything that's gone on around these parts for the past 6 rounds and still be able to function in this round, I'm afraid, and while I was familiar with Madoka and ZE and Hades, I am also entirely canon blind to DMC. Like, I've heard of the name, and that's it. Before all this I didn't even know that it was video games. Resultantly, I know absolutely nothing about any of the characters and also did not care at all about any of them--but, more to the point, I wasn't given any reason to care about any of them before the final trial popped up, and at that point it was kinda too late for me to be invested. The mods clearly cared about the DMC characters a whole lot, and I know that Jess did too, because Alastor had canon connections to them, but it was hard for me and probably others to share any excitement about what was going on other than as a means to an end. Because I didn't have a reason to become invested and care about the outcome, watching them do stuff was kind of just waiting for time to pass on my end. As a result of that and three mod dmc npcs being the central point of the final trial, especially with how long it got dragged out, it just sort of felt like we, the characters, were just wasting time until enough comments had been made or something and the mod NPCs could talk to each other and make the plot progress. All this only made how long it took even more intensely frustrating, especially when Ni had said she'd been AFK for large stretches on the first day for a non-emergency. I was deeply burned out and felt like any contributions I'd made had been incidental at best by the time things finally moved on into the final battle.

The final trial feeling at times very railroady and hamhanded wasn't an isolated incident either, unfortunately. I mentioned to Mandy, before she left, and was told that it wasn't intentional by her, but regardless of if it was or not, I felt like Akane was being railroaded into making certain choices or specific actions or reactions (which maybe was exacerbated by the fact that Mandy was very enthusiastic about involving Akane in some of Aoi's threads, or requesting that she come and do one thing or another with/for him, though I don't think I've let that color my reading of events--there was a good reason to want them to be interacting and close, after all). But for example, the fact that I got tapped by the mods during Hubert and Aoi's trial to be told that Akane was not publicly acting sad enough about Aoi's death, when their relationship was by that point quite fractured and she'd been unconscious when Aoi got schlorped, felt weird to me. It felt like there were specific beats that the mods, and maybe Mandy in particular since Aoi was her character and Akane and Aoi do have the canon connection, wanted Akane to hit, and that I kept being nudged towards in an attempt to make me hit them without actually telling me what they were. It also wasn't just Akane. One larger example was the X-door and X-passes. Several characters proposed going immediately to the door and opening it as soon as all 15 passes were gathered, but were oocly told not to do this, and then had to justify not doing it icly. After it had been so justified, two whole days later on Wednesday, we were told that it was now time to open the X-door. As far as I could tell, nothing whatsoever changed between Saturday night and Wednesday morning as far as the situation of the characters and the game, so being told not to do the thing and then being told to do the thing felt very, very much like we just weren't supposed to open the door until the plot allowed. I'm really not sure why the characters couldn't just have put in the passes when they got them, and then--if the delay just had to happen--maybe a timer could pop up saying that the x-door would open in so many hours/minutes/seconds and there was some kind of countdown to allow any final preparations that needed to be made or something. There were ways to do this that would have felt a little less blatantly like everybody just waiting for the plot to happen again, and like the characters had some kind of agency in the matter, that their choices were actually relevant. The fact that some of the characters names were not even spelled right in the list for the maps screen didn't help the impression. I know that was done quickly, and was not initially planned, but also: why wasn't it? It's information that would be useful to have. And why wasn't it at least doublechecked for spelling errors before being posted?

Even beyond that, based on how the plot was centered around Aoi and Zack in aliveland and the twins over in deadland, for me large portions of the actual plot of the game felt less like a game and more like a psl that we were allowed to touch. I felt like very little that I as Akane did actually mattered to the plot as a whole, and any contributions I managed to make to the overall structure were because that was the plan anyway, and character space alpha needed to be filled by somebody, she was just the one who was there first. A lot of what I tried or planned was shot down, and it got kind of frustrating to keep getting the same answer to things and to feel like I didn't have any affect on the plot whatsoever. This was in my case particularly jarring and bizarre because, especially in the first half of the game, Akane kept just showing up in things and being used for things, and in the second half she was the future mother to a mod oc. While I understand that Akane has a major and central role in ZE canon, the fact that I was never consulted about any of the things that she was used for other than Moriarty's execution was weird to me. Several of the posts that she was involved in from the mod account outright contradicted my headcanon and interpretation (in one case literally contradicted canon, though that was corrected promptly when I pointed it out privately) and it was never discussed with me, and when I mentioned several of these concerns in response to some of the early ones, and ways that things could be brought back in line, I got told not to worry about it. After those early problems with consent regarding what she was doing and when and where and not being allowed input on it, once Ayame started becoming a more major portion of the plot as a whole, it really did feel like Akane's meta position in the plot as a whole had been reduced to a womb with legs, especially based on the strong impression that I got that it was just sort of expected that this Akane would definitely have this baby some day and that this Akane would bond with her immediately because she was her future baby. It all felt very weird and bad. And beyond that, Akane's very position in this plot and how many connections she had to everything without my involvement were weird to me in general, simply because: while I had a lot of fun having her here, and do not regret bringing her in, the primary reason that I did bring her was Mandy enabling me hard to bring in Akane specifically. If Akane was slated to have heavy plot connections and you did not want to bring me in for those plot beats to even doublecheck if the ways she would be involved were okay with me, let alone allow me to make any suggestions on them, then why was I so heavily encouraged to bring her? At times she felt like a stealth NPC, which was deeply frustrating for me, especially when the things I tried to do with her were so often shot down or ignored.

Of those things, one that I mentioned previously to the mods but which probably bears repeating here is the fact that Zack was strangled with Akane's bra specifically. It's still odd to me that this happened, especially when the bra had actually been ripped open (since the hooks were ripped off), and like, if it had to be a bra, why not use Val's? She had one, per Indy, and was at that point already dead... though in general just the fact that it was a bra that was used has some very uncomfortable sexual overtones to it, especially given that it was specifically ripped open and the hooks were broken, especially when the hooks being broken afaik really had no bearing whatsoever in the case. Like, it was kinda bad without that, it was worth with it. The fact that ultimately the culprits in that case were her blood brother and her adoptive brother just made the whole thing a lot worse in that regard. I do not know how it wasn't caught, because I'm pretty sure that if it had been a pair of panties used to strangle him instead that would have been flagged early as inappropriate and sexual and likely to make someone uncomfortable, but a different article of women's underwear wasn't? Especially the youngest female member of the cast (who was actually wearing a female body at the time, anyway, Ritsu is weird to compare to) and who was the smallest and weakest physically of anyone in the round. Again, weird and bad and I'm really not sure why I, at minimum, didn't get tapped to ask if that was okay.

Moving on.

I can understand that the mods had a story in mind, and that they were excited to tell the story to the players and didn't want to "spoil" it by bringing players in on plots that involved their characters, but in my opinion that's a mistake. Roleplay is inherently collaborative, and a rpg isn't a good opportunity for the mods to tell a story so much as it is a place to set up a framework for the story to rest on and then invite the players to create their own. It's not a chance to tell the story, it's a chance to hear one, listen to it unfold. This game didn't feel like a story that we were telling, it felt like a story that we were being told. Being able to surprise your players is a delight, but removing player agency and the information they'd need in order to make sure things are played correctly so that you can surprise them down the line is not great. Everybody really, really does have to work together for these kinds of things, when they are in any regard directly involved, even if it removes the surprise for a handful of the players.

Another issue I had with the storytelling, though I hate to say it, was with Zack. I hope that this wasn't intentional, at least? But Zack felt like the clear main character of the round. This was frustrating on multiple levels, one of which is that an rpg is a bad place for a main character in the first place; the cast as a whole should be the heroes, with no specific character receiving more special attention than any other. The fact that 'what's up with Zack' was framed as a central mystery that everybody needs to care about (to the point where it was called out in the week 6 post as one of the reasons for the characters to spend more time on the ship after they had gotten the x-passes needed to escape), that he was secretly icly from the game all along in a weird way, that it was implied he had something to do with starting the killing game up here, that the vines chased him after the penultimate trial and absolutely nothing came of it other than That Happened, the fact that clues to his background such as maps of Rochester were scattered around the ship as well as showing up in the final investigation, despite the fact that iirc they never ever ended up being relevant in the final trial. I oocly understand that Zack = Zagreus, and so his still being in the underworld was as good a reason as any for him to still have his canon powers, the fact that he was the only character to keep his powers (plus get new devil arm powers) was just, like, another reason to show that he was more specialer than anybody else here. It really wasn't a good look. ICly I also had a really hard time figuring out how to handle All That? And that, primarily, was due to the situation that unfolded with Lenga.

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HMD

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Eski/Moriarty

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1/2 I... I broke the character limit....