HMD

[strangerpeople]

HMD


It's time for an HMD! As it is the end of the game, we welcome everyone to come and give feedback to the mods as to how we did/are doing/what we could do better next time. We are proud with how round 2 came out, but we know there's always room for improvement like, for example, a certain mod learning how to actually count!. And given how helpful everyone had been in the last round's HMD, we know you guys will have great ideas as to make the next round even better! We also welcome players to post here, if they would like some feedback from their fellow players!

And, last but not least: thank you! You guys are amazing players, and we are so glad we got to have you guys this round. You are what made this round so amazing, and we can't wait to see what else you guys do next time.

With that, round 2 has ended! We'll see you in the summer, for round 3 of 15 Strangers!!

Comments

[scienceofmagic]

Doing this from my phone so it'll be much shorter than I would like.

Overall the round was great. My biggest criticism is that when we got to the last week, by that point I couldn't tell if we'd made any progress. Every visible victory came with a death and it felt frustrating. I get wanting to keep some secrets but by the time Loewe died I was questioning if we'd truly made any real progress without a death at all. I get it's a murdergame but after awhile it made me wonder if there was any hope spots because they either tried and failed (Kurama) or tried and paid a heavy price (Helena, Loewe). Especially in something short and intense this is important. The changes and victories CANNOT all be behind the scenes. The only visible thing was the lily and that wasn't even explained until endgame EXCEPT when approached OOC.

[bestchefinparis]

Hey there, this is Nick. In general this round was a big improvement compared to the first round! And I'm glad I joined. I may not have been as active as I'd like to be, but overall I enjoyed my time here.

The players did great, and you moderators did a good job with the cases and with the setting. All in all, nicely done! I liked this game.

That said, I feel the mastermind trial had a dip in quality. The start of the trial was rather straightforward, too straightforward. The clues found didn't leave much ground for discussion other than presenting them, given how direct they were, and that led to a standstill that lasted a rather long time. Personally it felt like we were standing around waiting for the next thing to be presented.

Then came the middle part of the trial, when the masterminds presented themselves. Overall...four masterminds at once may have been excessive. In terms of importance in the living's final trial, it could be said that Yotsuya and Madoka were the two that truly mattered, while Japhet and Seven were...well, they were there. Japhet was largely a nonentity in the final trial, while Seven was more important for the dead side, at least from what I have heard -- which is more than fine! But he wasn't really a big part of the final trial.

It also felt...I don't know, it felt like there wasn't any urgency. For a final trial, until the point Yotsuya demanded them to vote and decide what to do, it all felt rather...rather anticlimactic. Maybe it's because we the players were rather united, but in general it almost felt like the masterminds just...accepted all that was happening. Which is great from a player point of view and for the most part from an emotional point of view, but...I don't know, it felt anticlimactic, like everything was ending way too easily.

Once Yotsuyu made them vote and decide, the last trial picked up the pace a lot, and I think in general the game ended in a high note.

[totalbullshit]

Hello, hello! I haven't been in R1, so I have nothing to compare to here but my experience with other murdergames at large.

I overall enjoyed my experience here a lot. The characters fit together very well with a lot of thought in interpersonal dynamics that was definitely encouraged by the mods and the amount of thought that was put into how the NPCs see every individual PC. I think that's a really strong point of this set-up. Having a high chance of building CR with NPCs that leaves an impact makes games feel more interactive and less like you're just playing a replacable part in a preplanned game. I'm very very happy with that.
I agree 4 Masterminds might have been too many, but I also understand that it's filling the positions TWEWY gave and it's not a major flaw imo.

That said, I had one big complaint through the round and that was scheduling.
Being a mod is really taxing so I understand the need to give yourselves leeway. Modding is still a hobby and not a job after all. But the uncertainty this leaves is really difficult on the playerbase.
With two hours room given for trial to go up, we spent time in the position where the whole group of players spent those two hours on stand-by - neither playing in the game because there was nothing to do nor doing anything else because being there for the start of the trial is important to many murdergame players. The same of course goes for mod disappearances in the middle of trial.
Being a dedicated player in this game included a lot of stand-by as mods were at work or napped or whatever else. More direct communication about that would have helped me a lot. Just a heads-up a la "trial goes up at soandso today" and "mod tags will be on break from then to then" and so on would make a world of difference. Ideally, mods should be free for trial all the way through, but it seems that with work schedules in this mod team it isn't possible and of course that takes priority. Overall, the current time arrangements are very much workable, but it'd be nice to not be constantly surprised by them. Players plan their real life around the game as well and it's annoying to call off things only to find out nothing is happening to start with.

But really, to reiterate, I absolutely do not regret playing in this game. I had a blast, thank you so much!!

[incrediblystressedout]

Everything I could think to complain about has been brought up already, re: scheduling and pacing, and I don't think any of it was so egregious it needs to be repeated. So I'm going to give this an unqualified "I had a lot of fun and made friends, and that's all I go to RP for so good job."

[notgentle]

This is Lenga. I want to thank all the mods so much for running a good game where I had many positive experiences! I hope this feedback comment is not so late as to be troublesome. You deserve a nice long break until the summer if desired. Because, seriously, what a game! More happened here in four weeks than in some years.

Because the other comments did focus on R2 exclusively, I am going to take initiative and draw a greater number of direct comparisons to R1, although I was just a spectator. I will also be throwing some pretty specific suggestions out there, since that seemed to be well received in MT feedback and R1 feedback. Your performance should not be evaluated by incorporation of my exact whims.

Any 15S round is apparently always going to be based on a preexisting canon that justifies character powers and motivates a murdergame for more than mere entertainment. This is one type of good premise and draws from tested ideas of other creators. However in R1, as early as the first motive, reverse image search could be used to identify the source material. The learning curve in R2 was much better, where the signs were present from the very beginning, more obvious hints appeared at the end of week 1, and sourced images were openly being used by the start of week 3, which still left open the deeper question of where the metaplot would actually go.

Another benefit to revealing some parts before the very end of the game? NPCS WITH ICONS. And, even better, before this reveal Coco was also allowed to have placeholder icons! THANKS FOR THIS. I say as a player in all seriousness that my gameplay experience was hugely improved by this break from R1 tradition. There is still room to give Kana placeholder icons or something, though, JS.

Others have observed that the elite four in the final trial, plus Coco and Nephilix, adds up to 6 NPCs, which is a lot. Before saying whether this number is too may, I do want to point out that R1 had 8 NPCs, with only Elenwen being unambiguously antagonistic. Babette effectively sacrificed herself over the course of the radical-6 motive, Farkas was brutally victimized, and “Alexis will be killed if there is no murder” was presented as an incentive to the entire group. So even if “the fabricator squad” theoretically occupied an antagonistic position, readers were asked to sympathize with them. To say nothing of the 4 NPCs allied throughout their appearances: Camilla, Linkara, Santa, Serana.

The R2 NPCs by contrast were always written in a different position from the fifteen strangers, even if some of them had the nice personalities of good people. Coco survived electrocution where Wake did not. Any decision for the PCs to feel positive towards the NPCs came 100% from the autonomous players.

At the same time I must state that the same mechanical functions could work with even fewer NPCs. Coco or Kana as the sweet daytime hostess capable of switching into the underground, Yotsuyu the spicy puppetmistress who presses the button on executing robots and can promptly pact with the easy target struck by a rebellious player character, and in the final boss fight they partner up. You can get the psychological interplay of a sugar and spice dynamic as well as have different types of content available to tag in all parts of the game, midgame and graveyard and endgame. It’s really that simple. I don’t understand why you have to go so far in the opposite direction as to literally give the execution mechanic a soul.

Now, I’m with Luna that the R2 NPC content itself is good. Everything was written with nuance to canon characterization as well as individualized reactions to the player characters themselves. Please just be conscious that this is a narrative choice you have been making. This tendency can even apply to
the part where both R1 and R2 had “other rounds”.

The setting was excellent. IMO contemporary settings are an unsaturated niche in murdergames. You can still take these lessons into settings with less unmitigated awesome factor than TWEWY noncontemporary settings, you know. Less intense material deprivation that players didn’t directly sign up to play out. The condition prior to any unlocks that something, but not too much, is missing. Memorable rooms with specific names and specific items inside, but not a list of three discrete objects in a barren void where player creativity withers.

I enjoyed reading the colorful the IC rules. The Life Coach did a great job of clarifying anything the players asked… and in just a couple of intriguing cases, not clarifying what the players didn’t actually ask. The motive announcements were a moderate length that managed to prompt lively IC discussion.

One virtually perfect part of the game was the powers, and I hedge only because I haven’t spoken about this topic with every single player. A good mix of nothing deeply unfitting to the character like a sweet pacifist getting the ability to put someone in an Iron Maiden; but not ridiculously fitting either like Dio summoning a knife. You gave the Strangers something to grow into. The instinctive use of the power and IC public printing of the power were both changes from R1 that contributed to my high fun level. And there were no bizarrely specific prerequisites to power use the way there was in R1. Every single trial ended up involving a power somehow but I don’t think it was at all shoehorned. My one observation is that the power description did not update with the evolutions. The titles were also good and managed to be a memorable way of briefly highlighting each participant even though we had three B’s and three N’s. Nastacious has become an iconic partnership name, so you clearly did something right with these monikers.

The minigames were a huge success in my book; they both played into the motive themes and everything! It was probably for the best, though, that we had them just week 1 and week 2. We should be aware that this was an experiment, to my knowledge the very first time that anybody incorporated minigames into a murder mystery game. In the future you might even get good results with solely a minigame or two designed just to be played in the days before anybody dies. I’ll admit that I happened to have an extra positive experience as the first culprit; the timing worked out very well where I could tag everyone more before dying and even deepen my CR with the first victim.

Moving forward from the starting conditions, the case work was extremely good, and likewise the fabricator remains a great mechanic that significantly enhances the mass execution style. The cases seemed to completely reflect the intentions of the culprit without being as simple as the probable result of the culprit character working alone. For one thing the larger cast of characters allowed the mods to completely avoid any cases perpetrated directly by “the fabricator squad”, and it happened to become a huge theme of the game that any coercion existed only in the culprit characters’ own minds. So I really want to thank you all tons or holding onto the dream long enough that all fifteen of us could gather and murder together.

At the same time, both the second and the third cases saw some participants feeling obligated to apologize for the case being too hard. Now, I know all of us love player freedom in 15S, so this proposal of regulation might sound counterintuitive. That said, it could actually help to have a designated trial midpoint where the participants check in to see how the trial has progressed. Machine talk battle is just one way to do this. In situations where the culprit’s personality is neither forthcoming nor careless, the trial progression could even be facilitated by means other than the culprit.

This isn’t suggesting that two hours into any unsolved trial Cessy/Elsie should start dropping hints in the form of illustrated diagrams. However, the players have expressed their concerns about bad end situations such as 15SMT, so our freedom would actually increase with an earlier trial wind-down after which players could begin waging riots. You might ask, how would player freedom increase when they are being given less time to possibly do their work? The answer is simple. Not all players have the freedom to tuck themselves into bed at 6AM EST after the trial has finally ended. For one concrete example, see how the afterparty hosting shook out even though some players made repeated offers to do some afterparty, just giving up at approximately 4AM EST.

But I mean, as far as I’m aware, all the potential hosts got character social opportunities later, so it works out, and the mod team clearly at least sort of learned from the second trial riot by more reasonably timing the third trial riot. I love how in 15S we have to differentiate the multiple riots this way.

The metaplot was good. I think you quite correctly anticipated that fans of Zero Escape and Persona 5 and Homestuck and the like would appreciate the themes of a chaotic world under a complex authority. A special shoutout goes to the graveyard for being unequivocally the best I have ever played in. There is nothing wrong with a graveyard that is a glorified sandbox for intraghost CR, and there is nothing wrong with a graveyard that separates ghosts from the setting with only the thinnest of veils, but there is something wrong with ending up in those situations when what you set out to do is instead to provide the ghosts with a place to be dead but not forgotten as they face their own struggles and certainly aren’t at rest; and the 15S R2 graveyard accomplished all of this for once, without mechanically penalizing anyone who exercised their quite reasonable right to withdraw or relax after death, to boot. Chasing!!! Cats!!! Ten thousand out of ten. If you’re looking to repeat this success, I would seriously suggest using a canon with precedent for a reversible afterlife.

This is the part where I talk about scheduling more, since Nick discussed the qualitative wonky parts of the final inquisition better than I ever could, being a player in the survivor pool. Let me just put on the record again, I thought that the final game was ending December 23, I was not alone in this thought, and some of us were also very surprised at getting an opportunity to tag NPCs in a parallel final trial because up until then interactions were always initiated by us. We didn’t know in advance when the minigames would occur, we didn’t know when trials would end because there might be riots. Yes, some of these things are optional, even voting to a certain extent, but it’s important to some of us to try and participate if we have advance knowledge that we’re going to have that chance.

Intra-moderator discipline is another point I want to bring up. At no fewer than three separate occasions Des said something in the graveyard chat and then Ni later directly contradicted that content. Ni is the head mod and all so I would understand if she had overruled Des at an earlier stage. Instead, the mod team delegated these tasks to Des, and she told us things that we players naturally thought were game canon at the time, and then Ni ignored all that. Though there were clearly good intentions, this behavior did not improve appreciably over the course of the game. Any mod contradicting another mod so flagrantly is a problem, of course; and I may be disproportionately attuned to these particular instances because I am online at certain times and so on. Well, that’s everything clever I can say about it; I don’t know what actually happens in the moderator chatroom, between all of you; good luck.

Inter-player discipline was also a problem. The Discord server is very difficult to moderate. Maybe the same OOC rules post applies, but the scrolling live content makes Dreamwidth standards of “content warnings in subject lines” completely inapplicable. Wildly divergent interpretations ensued; graphic discussions of child abuse occurred sometimes, and then other players hesitated to so much as mention suicide, even though there had been a game canon storyline about Kurama shooting himself. And one player was banned from #chat… subsequently, #plotting became “like #chat, but that person isn’t banned”. If anything the appropriate content standards should be higher in #plotting, not lower! I know from experience how hard it is to ban people but you have to also remember the bystanders being made to feel unsafe by the unbanned person. I’m not saying you have to ban every single person who ever dubiously behaves. So much could have been mitigated by even the admission that the Discord server is a space where it’s impossible to put warnings. Or the implementation of any actual content rules in the Discord server, that works too.

To wrap this up on a positive note, I want to talk about the very best part of this game that actually also involves the players. More than any murdergame I’ve been in, I truly felt that the hard work of the player characters, especially exploring the setting stuffed chock-full of prewritten clues, was resulting in progress towards their happy ending. It’s ironic that this sentiment of mine is diametrically opposed to Ana’s comment (and of course please listen to her, we are separate people and both of us have valid opinions) because I actually felt that Croix was the single most triumphant example of the way that these plots were more facilitated in R2 with the Fabricator willingly coming forward and leading an exploration of the setting with privileged information (as opposed to R1 where the Fabricator was revealed in an anticlimax). Helena and Kurama and Loewe’s deaths were all depressing but a very direct result of their actions, not any other character’s fault, and the moderators worked really hard to reflect the wishes of those players, as well as other players who made progress outside the context of those events. You always made an effort to facilitate each player’s plotline, including my own, starting as early as “their captors clearly aren't badass enough to have chosen [superhero] movies like these themselves”.

Yeah, their captors were not badass enough. And you know what? You guys are.

Thank you.