Alright; I always endeavor to be candid in feedback, so here we go.
-> If an event like this was to be ran again, what parts would you like to see more of/what parts would you rather exclude, if you could choose?
See below for some of this, I feel this and the next bullet are slightly similar there. But:
-
More authority interaction. I feel that the players who were taken up by Greeneye were too few, and that’s too little interaction with the captor. By no means is it bad to have an isolated feeling, but at times it was easy to forget we were even being held by an entity other than the boards up there. And they weren’t even a particularly threatening or interesting entity this time—just... gnolls. Which can be made interesting certainly, but I don’t feel much was given on them or that they were used enough.
-
The spirits: I didn’t really know what to think of these guys. I can’t say I cared for them, as they seemed particularly random both in their behavior and how they showed up. There was never really much of a sign of the supernatural early on to the event, and I don’t feel their introduction was really given too much other than the OOC announcement of ‘CWs all around if you go off now’. They also just irritated me some from an OOC perspective, as I have a bit of a distaste for ‘bystander’ entities treated as positive characters (which did improve over time, so I didn’t mind them as much as Standard and Generic in previous runs). But that’s just a gripe from my own mentality there.
I also don’t feel that much was made out of them—they came randomly and then faded away with a simple emote in the form of ‘X leaves as you exit the cave’. I feel that if they were to be put in, something should have resolved with them in –some- way. I’ll discuss the event’s resolution with this later.
-
Less Gron:
Hear me out. There is nothing wrong with Gron as a character, or having an entity like Gron in the event. But here’s what I know about Gron:
-He gave out food for weapons.
-He had a big OOC flirty joke with Surthak.
-He became a love interest and friend for Surthak.
-He talked to Surthak a lot.
-Most of his interactions were with Surthak.
This is not a bad thing, I will repeat. Having a character specifically warm up to and interact with another character is normal, and that’s not the issue. The matter comes up when most of the event is riding on the DM’s action, and that ability to act is split by portraying a character.
In essence, it feels like a lot of attention used on playing Gron took away from attention that could have been used on larger events within the run of Kidnapped. And as a direct response, it felt like a lot of exposition or intrigue was being given to one specific character at times, or at least an excessively small group in the grand scheme of things.
Gron did not affect many people. He affected a small group, namely one person, and alone that’s how a character should work. But due to only having two DMs and those DMs being on with relatively limited time, this stood out to me during the event, and I fear it might have detracted some.
-> Was there anything you wanted to see that didn't come up?
More interaction. I’ll lump this one into the below question mostly, but I’ll address a few directly here:
-Guards. I feel that player guards add a great deal of interaction to the Kidnapped events. They add things for players to do and interact with, and they can provide interaction during downtime when the DM isn’t on. While I didn’t like the forced player guards in the former kidnapped, I preferred them to having no guards at all.
-Progression: I’ll touch on this when I talk about the cave, but in short I feel like there should have been something past the barrier other than a broken-up room and a cave. I’ll elaborate on this further down.
-> What were you looking to get out of the event, if you participated in this one (or any of the previous)? What did you expect, walking into it? (Were you positively/negatively surprised?)
Right, so I’ll put this forth as an accolade regarding the earlier Kidnappeds; Kidnapped 1 and 2 basically
defined Endling for me, and I consider her one of my most successful characters in terms of story output and general interest. It gave her difficult decisions and consequences to deal with and made me sit and think—‘how would this character deal with this, why, and what would they think’?
I don’t believe I had this come up in this run of Kidnapped. It may have been from my choice of character, but Seda wasn’t overly afflicted by what she endured—there were no hard decisions such as obeying an authoritative figure or aiding the captives, or opportunities to do much at all with their own situation. The primary thing I noticed in this vein was giving up weaponry for food, and while this could have had more of an impact, I feel it happened far too scarcely to have any real effect.
As well, it didn’t help that there was no real change on whether they had their weapon or not—there were few instances where this was actually a thing, or where hunger itself played a role. It was rare that people got jumped, to the point where the cavern was only really intimidating when we saw you were online. In which point people sometimes made the precise action to go off and wander away, in hopes of invoking some event due to it.
I feel that the lack of a clear authority probably played into this. In former Kidnapped events, you could act on this—defying the authoritative figure to be a pillar of strength for the group, taunting them to distract them from weaker captives, or going the other route and being an informant or a lapdog to their demands. These sorts of things are interesting for a character; dealing with the blanket issue of food and water on the other hand can be a hook, but it’s a hook that requires ramifications.
Really, I feel most development and intrigue was player-driven this time around; I certainly felt that my logs with Seda and her degrading mental health were more or less unchanged by most of what happened in the events. Another one to look at would be Geoni, who was playing out his various afflictions. These two characters did not progress in such a way due to the event at all—the same thing could have happened in a Shipwreck! event. The changes were products of passing time and lack of resources, which is able to be done in almost any survival event.
Again, these elements are fine. They cannot carry an event, however, and I feel that they were given too much expectation as to their effect IC and OOC.
-> Was the size of the crowd to your liking?
I can’t complain about crowd size; take as many as you can handle. I don’t find anything wrong with including larger numbers, especially in a long event.
-> Do you think there were enough RP opportunities away from the main events?
This is tricky to answer. There were certainly a lot of opportunities for socialization, but at times that felt like the only thing going on in the event proper. The cliques that formed fell apart or were non-factors quickly, and without player guards to interject their own events into the run we were left with –only- main events, by which I mean events you or Xigo had a direct hand end. Even if you didn’t mean it, everything you two did effectively became a main event, because that was the only point where much was really happening for players to act upon.
This could be seen as a failure of the social experiment aspect, but that depends on what you intended to get from that. As Grak said, boxing the captives in with a blanket character warning dispersed most of the possibilities of the cliques accomplishing much—because to plot or carry out plans you would have to be off on your own, making you obvious targets for bad things to happen to.
While on this note I’ll also say that in terms of the main events, I’d say there just weren’t enough. And again, this is largely to blame regarding the previous comparisons of player guards, which added an entity which could interact with the captives in various ways. Without these the DMs were the sole point of action, and there just weren’t enough events or enough time spent into them to make this effective.
To compare to another survival event—the initial Skin Thieves was very much a ‘do as you will’ event, where minor attention was required from the DMs. However, Skin Thieves had a mechanic—going out meant you could get jumped and have your character altered. The important thing there was that it didn’t end in death, which is ultimately the logical conclusion of this sort of ambush in Kidnapped—either the attackers kill the victim, or the attackers are impaired themselves when the group as a whole retaliates. Death doesn’t give character development, or at least it shouldn’t be a primary method of doing so—at least, as a personal opinion. So I feel this dissuaded a lot of hostile characters from acting out, as well as possible victims from branching off.
Because of all this, in short I do not believe there was enough to do in this event.
-> Was the area chosen for the event easy to navigate, fun to RP in, and overall to your liking? Why/Why not? (Do you have any suggestions for other areas to use in the future?)
I’m afraid I didn’t like the cave. I understand that’s the intention, but for the most part it just felt... empty. Devoid of any intrigue or reason for exploration, once it had been strolled through the first time. The place was also very visually draining to be in—and while that can be a plus, being static within a cavern for two weeks is draining both OOCly and ICly.
I’ll compare to other kidnapped events. The first I attended was at Alcaz, and it took place in a tiny cell, partially sunk with water. While this room may not have had much to do in it, it had better atmosphere; it was a dungeon, there were torture implements scattered all about. But beyond the cell there was a topside as well, with longhouses and a weird tower and... stuff. It made things more interesting, and when you finally got out and into the area formerly restrained to the guards it was a visible shift and an interesting change. This ties heavily into the gripe concerning guards and length (coming up), to note.
The others that I attended took place in Alterac (again, interesting outer area that people were brought into for events), the Island and the monastery (which people were given free reign over after a certain point, providing a welcome change of scenery).
Perhaps more important though is that while these areas were more interesting, they were also more visually appealing. The cave was blue and black. That’s it; blue walls and a ton of shades of black and gray. It really did all mesh together, and without additions the place was just –droll-, especially with the factor of time wearing down its appeal more and more.
The issue being, in short—the cavern wasn’t just a droll place ICly, but it was also a tiring venue ICly as well.
-> What of the length of the event? Was it too long?
In short, yes. I mentioned in the last two week kidnapped that I disliked the longer running time, and I stick to that. This one in particular felt even longer though, for reasons I’ve covered above. I feel that the event could have been ran in a week’s time, and not only would nothing have been disinclined, I believe that attention and interest would have been retained –much- better in such a scenario. There wasn’t much to define the days for me in this event unlike others, and I believe that if you had shrunk down the running time it could have been much more fluid.
Really, pacing was a big issue in that regard, and some of the stuff from Seda’s entries were quite mirrored in my OOC perception—it felt like there was very little accomplished most of the days, and that nothing much had shifted in the grander scale by the time the event ended. The only change of momentum came when powers began to be given back, which was only really a big thing in the last two days.
-> Was there anything in particular about it that you did/didn't like? Why's that?
Right—the ending is probably my biggest gripe.
Through the run of this event we heard that the bad guys had harpies, ogres, and gnolls [as well as a big, bad gnoll]. And possibly more. One assumes they needed more than a single room and cave to house such beasties.
Not every event should end with a dungeon crawl or the like, but it felt like we were going to be leading towards one or that one would have been appropriate; running up and ransacking the bad guy’s hideout, fighting through the droves of baddies, and most importantly
offing something notable. In the past the notable person was Faceless, of course; and that worked fine, since it served as a sort of catharsis and IC endpoint. “She’s dead, we’ll not have to worry about this again!”
I’ll segment again:
-
The event in general: The ending event felt a bit rushed. It was a large mass of the same NPCs spawned, with a big guy in the back. The affair was comparatively swift, was carried out in trust with general ‘you hit, trade blows, etc’ sorta deal, and only once did the mind control thing play a part, for an excessively brief time. The big guy in the crowd wasn’t even given many notable emotes amidst all of this, and fell down alongside the rest of the crowd.
-
Even progression: I was fine with the relatively nonclimax of the initial fight, especially when we heard Greeneye fleeing and when we reached the staircase—the idea of getting summoned into a bigger place immediately came to mind, since it seemed to be a logical leap that these guys had a sizable little operation up top. But instead there was nothing but a cave and machine upon leaving—we came up into a room, got all our stuff and Gron’s kid, and were done. This seems more like a halfway point than a conclusion—from here I expected us to go on and –use- the newly acquired gear in more fighting, or at least have to expend some more energy on our push out.
-
Resolution: Again, Faceless got offed in the end of the previous events; this was fine. It gave a proper conclusion since the big bad of the event was put down. I expected the same with Greeneye—not because RAAGH BLOODLUST but because that’s just how the narrative usually progresses, and it provides the end with something of IC
worth atop of the other things.
Compare to other Kidnapped events, again; in terms of IC merit, we took down Faceless. We took down the head honcho of this evil place and then we stormed out all heroic and whatever. I’ll go ahead and address Xigo’s reply here as well. I guess I’ll just toss another segmentation and talk specifically on...
Greeneye: I did not find him particularly compelling, because he felt like a comparative non-entity to Faceless. In terms of having the bad guy make it out, I’d be fine with that if the bad guy was notable. But for
most people, their only interaction with Greeneye was hearing him shout, and the one time he opened the trapdoor and told them off. Very few saw him, very few interacted with him. This is fine, but compiled with the relative slow periods throughout the event and the assumption of his working for another person, he came off as... another Faceless, really, and a Faceless that was more truly apt to the name since we didn’t see much of him.
In this sort of scenario it would have been a big boon if Greeneye had a Dragon [
this kind], to give the players something of interest to fight in the end. That way he didn’t have to die, but at the same time there would have been more personality to the fight than just a large mob of undead. In fact, the presence of an ‘important goon’ character would have added a lot in making Greeneye more of a mastermind-esque character, since you’d have the muscle doing his bidding and in the end, making the sacrifice for his escape. More importantly this goon would have been a recognizable face, and thus would have given some progression in terms of the shift.
I understand the intention with what you mean, I do. But due to the way the final event played out it ended with a large non-climax; this is not just to the fault of Greeneye, as the slack could have been picked up with a crawl through the bad guy’s base, or whathaveyou. But just as it was, Greeneye’s retreat left us with no real BANG to the end of the event. And without that for a two week long event, it just doesn't leave a pleasant taste in the mouth.
...
In a small aside:
Regarding Meadowrest: I really feel something needs to happen with these guys, and interaction with the true force behind Kidnapped seems long overdue. They're reaching past the suspension of disbelief at this point, and I feel that it's hard to justify their continued actions without more... information on them, I guess. Right now they just seem implausible and cartoonish in the lengths they go to to carry out these events continuously, with no obvious purpose.
That about wraps it up. I'm sorry if anything I've said comes off harsh, and I don't intend to cause any anger.