The Fifteen Strangers Mods (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
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notasstrange2023-07-29 07:56 pm
strangerpeople) wrote in notasstrange2023-07-29 07:56 pm
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!
1/2 I... I broke the character limit....
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.
2/2
If Lenga did have some provable source that leaked to her all of the contents of future unreleased plot points that she supposedly infomodded, I apologize for the misunderstanding on this thing particularly, but given that Lenga also later got removed from the server because one of the mods was upset that Makima icly had a negative opinion and made a negative statement, and this was dragged out to ooc conversation and blew up as if the ooc/ic divide didn't exist.... It made it hard to trust that, like, ic actions, reactions, and deductions, would be allowed to stand without ooc consequences being assigned for them, and that made it hard to engage with the plot, or trust that the mod rulings would be unbiased by said ic stuff.
On to actual structure, I guess, but the way that the canons were mashed together for this game in particular made them feel less like any kind of unified whole that was the way it was for a specific reason and a lot more like a few different canons just got stapled hastily together. I feel like there were more elegant ways to blend them together than, for example, the Gigantic just sort of sitting in Hades' front lawn, with a hell tree leading away to the DMC Set. Additionally, as has been mentioned as well, I know this got pitched as a Zero Escape round, but there was almost nothing whatsoever about this that felt like Zero Escape to me. The setting and the glossary had some ZE baked into them, but other than that there was very little about this round that read as remotely Zero Escape, and if the names of everything had been changed I really don't think it would have been recognizable. Since this was pitched to me at least as a ZE inspired round, the fact that there was a ZE veneer and nothing beneath that seemed remotely ZE inspired was disappointing.
On the subject of things that just felt like they got hotglued on in any old way, the minigames kind of felt like wasted potential. I'm still not sure what the doll theme had to do with anything, honestly, and the minigames felt like an afterthought or just something that the players could do midweek. Some of them were fun, some of them were interesting ideas but were hard for execution (like the secrets one), but on the whole they very much felt like they were an afterthought, and that's a shame, because it seems like they could have been used as part of the larger plot or to reveal larger plot details and could have been more impactful. The fact that the game canonically took place during a time loop also felt like a massive missed opportunity with how things were handled, which also dovetails into the SHIFT visions.
The fact that none of the characters except for Aoi, a mod character, and the single character of Hubert got any ic indication that they were trapped in a time loop until Aoi and Hubert actually came out and told everybody that they were in as many words, removed what could have been a super memorable and cool mechanic of the characters slowly being able to learn about what was happening to them more organically. Similarly, the SHIFT visions, and even Roland's visions, dealing as they did almost exclusively with characters who were not in the round, when they weren't about Akane (or occasionally Aoi), felt like another miss. This would have been a super easy way to tie in alternate timelines, images of all the characters in this round dying or whatever. I personally don't know quite a few of the characters who appeared in the SHIFT vision and, like with the DMC characters, if I haven't been introduced and don't have a reason to care, then it's hard to actually care about the visions as anything other than x-pass machines. A lot of the visions seemed to boil down to 'some randos are also playing a murdergame,' and there's not really anything in that that would icly seem particularly relevant other than 'oh, there's more of these things going on'. Icly as well as oocly, that also seems to have been the extent of what they were there to do. There were a lot of cool things that could have been done with sudden visions, and a lot of cool ways they could have been tied into the game as a whole, they just... weren't.
This is more of a personal opinion thing, but I will say that it felt in poor taste to me that some very active characters were killed off in early game, and quite a few who were mod characters or less active or both made it all the way to endgame. I enjoyed my threads with everyone who did survive and had fun with them, and just enjoyed the characters themselves and their portrayal, but there were still a bunch who were around dramatically less for the entire game than some of the early victims. Since, as I understand it, the plans that were originally in place for graveyard were largely scrapped, it seems like it would have been better to have less actives more likely to die than more actives, especially in the first 2 cases.
And on one final note that's probably going to be fully irrelevant to games in the future unless you guys decide to reuse the mechanic, I felt like a lot of the x-passes were an odd fit with those presented originally in canon. In ZTD, the longest xpasses shown were 6 letters, with preference given to shorter words, and most of the words were more generic or obscure than some of the ones here, which seemed very on the nose occasionally.
On the whole, while it's obvious that you poured a lot of love and work into a lot of the tiny details of this game, and that you were passionate about research and cool tidbits, some of the major pieces of the game felt like they had a lot less thought and effort put into them then some of those minor details, which made it feel like that passion was focused on the wrong things. The foundation felt a lot less polished than some of the details, and it's much better to have a uniform finish than focusing on the little things and details to the exclusion of all else. Still, despite all of this--the fact that you succeeded at all really is commendable! Running anything, let alone something as intensive as one of these, is a lot of work, and that deserves acknowledgement all on its own.