Northwind - Skin Thieves Feedback

[DaveM]

Yea, I well agree. If it's a Detective-Survival-Horror event, you're entirely right. But if that's the case, I wonder if 40+ detectives works. It's working now because ~8 are playing detective, ~10 survival, ~20 horror, or such.

I was giving the feedback from under a perspective that it's more rather a Horror-Survival-Detective event ( )

Whichever the case, risk should feel real. Doing risky things, even if demanded by plot, should have consequences that even the player-of-the-character would want to steer away from.

[Loxmardin]

I agree with that, yes! I believe there should be rougher consequences (and bigger rewards, at the same time) for daring things that are obviously dangerous. I'm not sure how well that'd be applicable, though, considering it's such a big crowd. ... And some people just leave the crowds because they want to roleplay in private or simply get away from the masses.

It's a tough scale to balance out, entirely.

[Noble]

I'm sorry, but I just couldn't do the event, it was overcrowded and people weren't exactly on their most polite characters, plus a friend of mine backed out so that just discouraged me further.

[Grakor456]

Aye, feel free to give me feedback here as well, though this has quickly become Rigley's event (seriously, this guy is just running with this idea!)

I understand I probably should have been more upfront and clear with the Skin Thief mechanics so that the event would run smoother. That was a pretty big blunder on my part.

[CappnRob]

We need more little things to do in between the hauntings, Greed episodes, and what have you. The fun of Vanilla Northwind is every little action you do can mean something. Granted, this is hard to do as I'm sure Rigley doesn't want to be bombarded with thousands of whispers every other second. Maybe get some assistant DMs to help with the enviromental stuff, idk.

[Rigley]

We need more little things to do in between the hauntings, Greed episodes, and what have you. The fun of Vanilla Northwind is every little action you do can mean something. Granted, this is hard to do as I'm sure Rigley doesn't want to be bombarded with thousands of whispers every other second. Maybe get some assistant DMs to help with the enviromental stuff, idk.

The issue is that there is a -ton- to Northwind in the solo events; practically each book that isn't just crammed on a bookshelf can be read if you desire me to type it out, for instance, and each footlocker usually has something of worth. Basically a highly interactive environment is -very- hard to do in mass, yeah?

As far as assistant DMs go, it doesn't help that said ledgers are usually made up on the spot, because I tend to change which entries people read and so forth. So... also difficult.


I do hope people understand that that's just a limitation of my own due to the event. Solo Northwind is a bit more in the scale of what some people are looking for, I imagine-- but, this is my best shot at a large-scale event with it. :B

[Dae]

We need more little things to do in between the hauntings, Greed episodes, and what have you. The fun of Vanilla Northwind is every little action you do can mean something. Granted, this is hard to do as I'm sure Rigley doesn't want to be bombarded with thousands of whispers every other second. Maybe get some assistant DMs to help with the enviromental stuff, idk.

The issue is that there is a -ton- to Northwind in the solo events; practically each book that isn't just crammed on a bookshelf can be read if you desire me to type it out, for instance, and each footlocker usually has something of worth. Basically a highly interactive environment is -very- hard to do in mass, yeah?

As far as assistant DMs go, it doesn't help that said ledgers are usually made up on the spot, because I tend to change which entries people read and so forth. So... also difficult.


I do hope people understand that that's just a limitation of my own due to the event. Solo Northwind is a bit more in the scale of what some people are looking for, I imagine-- but, this is my best shot at a large-scale event with it. :B

Perhaps, for little things like food, minor potions, and other non-plot items, you designate the contents of and how many containers are inside each building ICly in the thread as the areas become available to the players. Whether they find the "containers" as a barrel, or in a pantry or anywhere else is up to the characters. You could add more "containers" later if IC supplies are low and have the characters simply search harder ICly if necessary. Have players report that the player characters took the contents in the event thread.
I mean, it wouldn't necessarily ease your workload as you'd still have to write all this down and make it available to the players, but you could do this beforehand rather than on-the-spot, would have an active record of what was found, and have players able to find things even when a coordinator isn't online to verify their findings.

As for features of the environment, just specify what's different about the location from what in-game depicts. Make the books illegible unless they're important, maybe? I know I have dozens of ruined books in my Elder Scrolls characters' inventories. XD

[CappnRob]

SO RIGLEY.

THAT ONE THING WE DID TODAY.

YOU KNOW THE ONE.

That was goddamn cool.

As you already know, of course.

Looking forward to seeing SO many more of those.

[Dae]

What I'd like to see is for the Thieves to have an individual agenda- something they can't help but desire and pursue, both to prevent thieved characters from laying low to the point that its just plain bland, as well as make them have something to do other than just "Make more thief dudes."
I had been kind of going for this with DoppleFlora having a crush? Fixation? (are they capable of love?) on Gan, and it gave me a fun, alternative thing to focus on, since I kind of had to bench Flora's character development while she was possessed.

I'd expect they'd have personal interests relating to being alive (yearning for another character, wanting to get stone-cold drunk, etc.) though plot-related agendas would also do nicely, I bet.

Also, I'd like a chance to have some pre-event bonding with the other participants in a Skin Theif event. (Like maybe let people RP on the Zepplin if there's another airship crash) This would help found the social dynamics and let the characters who start out as thieves get established in the group and story.

[CappnRob]

I had been kind of going for this with DoppleFlora having a crush? Fixation? (are they capable of love?) on Gan, and it gave me a fun, alternative thing to focus on, since I kind of had to bench Flora's character development while she was possessed.

NGL I was feeling sad OOC when DoppleFlora was begging Gantrithor not to let the survivors kill her and Gan was all "HGGGN NOT SURE IF REAL FLORA" and when the real Flora did show up, Gan had interacted with the mimic so much that it was like she didn't even know him at all D:

THAT WAS SOMETHING MAN.

[Grakor456]

I learned quite a few things from this event. So, let me ramble a bit, using Dae's post as a sort of starting point:

What I'd like to see is for the Thieves to have an individual agenda- something they can't help but desire and pursue, both to prevent thieved characters from laying low to the point that its just plain bland, as well as make them have something to do other than just "Make more thief dudes."

One major problem with this event, in terms of giving individual goals, was the sheer size of it. We had a full raid for the entire event, constantly having to cycle people in and out over time. In other words, for the vast majority of the event we had over forty people active every day. This made doing anything special for individual skin thieves nearly impossible. We were having a hard enough time getting individual player "side-quests" in, and pretty much only certain characters particularly familiar to Rigley.

In Skin Thieves 1, the STs didn't have "living" needs and didn't want to leave the playing area. This gave the STs more to do than "make more thief dudes" because they would do things like poison food supplies, destroy tools, etc. etc. This wasn't possible due to the story of Skin Thieves 2, where the STs wanted to leave and had "living" needs because all undead are alive. We wanted to do a "three-way war" and all. Unfortunately, this ended up disarming the STs of a lot of their threat. If a Skin Thieves 3 happens, which I haven't decided will happen or not yet, I'll have to make sure the STs aren't playing side-show like they were in this event.

I had been kind of going for this with DoppleFlora having a crush? Fixation? (are they capable of love?) on Gan, and it gave me a fun, alternative thing to focus on, since I kind of had to bench Flora's character development while she was possessed.

This is why I wanted the real characters to remember some of the ST memories, that way the real characters could still get development while a ST was out.

Also, I'd like a chance to have some pre-event bonding with the other participants in a Skin Theif event. (Like maybe let people RP on the Zepplin if there's another airship crash) This would help found the social dynamics and let the characters who start out as thieves get established in the group and story.

You know, one of the things that makes the Skin Thief concept work is when you have characters that interact often, and thus can more easily detect differences in behavior/beliefs between the "real" and "fake" versions of each character. This worked better in Skin Thieves 1, I think, because there were fewer characters and thus they had more time to personally interact with each other. In ST2, so many people were around, many of which didn't know each other or didn't interact with each other more than a couple times, which made the detection much, much harder. A "warm-up" period just for interaction can be good to help that, but runs the risk of being boring and can cause the event to bloat to an even larger duration.

One thing that I like about Skin Thieves, at least on that aspect, is that it's a concept that can practically run itself. STs are villains and players end up making their own fun. Most survival events can usually run with minimal observation, but the Skin Thieves concept is especially good at it. That said, this event was very heavily slanted towards the Northwind part of it. I don't regret that for a moment, but I do feel like the Skin Thieves part suffered in a way that was simply unavoidable given the premise.

What we got, though, I think was far better than Skin Thieves 1, because Rigley did an *amazing* job of keeping things exciting and moving.

[Dae]

I just have to say here that I don't think any one of us are going to hold it against you for enforcing a limit on participants in the future; what you did was crazy. Awesome yes, and somehow pulled off beautifully, but still crazy.

[Wuvvums]

Some might and some might not, especially since server-wide events dominate the rp for an entire week. Basically there's little rp and if you couldn't get into the big event then you could potentially be missing some of the biggest rp on the server. I have to say this is one of the best events I've been too and I would have been pretty bummed if I missed out. I do think the shear number of people at times made it swamped, but it eventually evened out to being a handful of active people per day.

[Dae]

Some might and some might not, especially since server-wide events dominate the rp for an entire week. Basically there's little rp and if you couldn't get into the big event then you could potentially be missing some of the biggest rp on the server. I have to say this is one of the best events I've been too and I would have been pretty bummed if I missed out. I do think the shear number of people at times made it swamped, but it eventually evened out to being a handful of active people per day.

Then maybe for future events of this size, perhaps have another coordinator or two and have each of tem in charge of smaller, separate groups that converge a few days in when the new-event rush dies down?

And is there anyway to shift some of te responsibility to the player, at least in terms of handling the experiences of their own character? Te Skin Thieves are certainly good for that, but if we can make things a bit easier on the event GMs, that's good.

Since Northwind seems to "reset," perhaps we could all write down the stuff our characters found and used, so that you can more easily respond to discoveries in future visits?

Oh, and if you need an active threat while a coordinator isn't present, maybe spawn some kind of mobs? Even if the monsters just did one damage and maybe slowly drained character life force ICly, it would still give them a more tangiable reason to not just wander about alone out there.