Game cancelled.

[Anastasia]

See topic.

Why? There's the aforementioned OOC stuff, as well as timing issues. We're all familiar with those; I won't rehash them here. More than anything else, Weekly has been a lighting rod for stress and ill will in one of the worst periods of my life. I've been hurting, unwell and generally miserable away from the computer, and all the stress has flowed into sentiment against Weekly with each and every irritant from it.

This has reached a point to where I'm simply not having fun in Weekly, nor able to plan for it well. I just reached a point of apathy, and I feel it would be better for all concerned if we focus on other games. I can't and won't blame this on any of you in particular, in the end I don't think it's any of your faults as much as the accumulation of stressors from inside and outside of Weekly.

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Good game, everyone. Overall I have to say that I got something from every player invovled in this.

Drac/Gavin: I loved your build. Amusingly twinky and dominating, and redefined 'UBERTANK'. Also willing to help out in the OOC room, which I appreciate.  RPwise you had some bumps, partly from world focus and partly not meshing with my/Rat's/Hotaru's/Merc's more detailed RPing style.

Hotaru/Seryf: Again, I loved the build. That exceptional strength roll redefined Seryf and added a really amusing angle. A bit quiet at times, but helped out when she did. Wished she'd spoken up a bit more in the OOC room. RPwise, did fairly well overall. Build was decent, but I wish she'd been able to build a bit more with Elaine/Gavin.

Merc/Elaine: Heh! I admit I wasn't as much of an early fan of Elaine as the other PCs were. I was more into the others on first impressions, but Elaine's personality won me over with time. Good overall both RPwise and game wise, but constrained by time issues. Wish she had more time.

Rat/Saul: Awesome. I have to admit Saul was my favorite this game; he just worked his ass off to sell Saul's character. I do regret my ruling on rounding up hit dice, but I liked how creative he was with low level spells. Rock on. Always tried to work with what I gave him, through good and bad.

Darius/Iddy: Mmmm. I liked overall, with the caveat that there was an RPing style difference. Iddy was better than Drac at projecting his personality, however, so he had a better time at it. I liked the angles and Iddy was always trying to help out. Iddy, I really appreciate that.

Overall I'm happy with what each of you did. Once again, well played.

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Corwin and Usagi, apologies. I wouldn't have invited you if I knew this would've gone downhill so fast. You two got gypped.

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I wish I'd made my wishes clearer early: I wanted this to be an 'adventure of the week' game with minimal world interaction beyond a base and setting. I think this lead to some issues with Drac as well as too much undefined real estate. We kind of got away from it, which hurt. I wasn't really happy with the capital series of events overall, frankly.

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Plotwise:

Pireth was meant to be a longer term thing to chisel on. I shot my wad there...I'm not sure why. I just did it and realised I didn't care about it anymore. I also wanted a smoother, more logical intro to it, but it didn't happen. Bleh.

Aalan was indeed the green dragon you saw on the cliffs. He was to slowly lure you into fighting more dragons - the plot here was to open up a dragon arc for the PCs. Aalan was meant to be played up as an uber green dragon, which would be on the PCs to eventually stop. As long as the PCs played along, he'd have them kill off other dragons, reestablishing his elite standing after resting for hundreds of years.

There was a ton I wanted to do but hadn't fully planned out once you continued onto the wastes, but mostly wisps and figments not fully gelled.

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If any of you wanna use parts of this world or the characters in another game, feel free. It's a shame that we won't see more of Saul, Seryf, Elaine, Gavin or Darius in this game, but I just can't work up the oomph.

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Questions and comments are more than welcome. I'd appreciate 'em.

[Dracos]

Anyhow, i rambled in the room already.

The short of it?

Game was named one thing.  It was a good thing.  

Players desired it be  two other things.  They were both good things.

A lot of suffering erupted from fighting over which good thing it should be.

I think, in all fairness, that the decisions on wanting these other things did not 'evolve' in the game, but were solid decisions made before the game ever started.  This is something I think we could've handled better at the outset by being a lot more open about what we wanted.  Everyone, including Dune.  I know it sounds rude, I don't mean it to be and of course it'll irritate regardless but:
Rat, I think you walked into the game wanting epic adventure.  Short adventure was never going to satisfy you and you pushed for it.
Hotaru, I think you walked into the game wanting a running narrative story with short adventure being an occassional highlight between the character interactions.

I think both of these are good and neat things.  I think dune put his heart into trying to make them true.

I think dune suffered a lot from the GMs dilemma.  He liked all of the ones suggested.  He wanted to make his players happy.  He wasn't wrong in doing so but at the same time he made himself unhappy by doing it.  It's a tough line to toe.  I think it would've been better had he been harder at the outset, but then I also think I was among those most there for the short adventure style and while I liked the others, they weren't needed to keep me interested in the game.  

I apologize, some of the above sounds like blame and it's not meant as such.  I just think that as a rule being open and forthright about what you want from a game as early as possible is important for everyone's fun and I think a lot of us could work on that.

Anyhow.... rest more on intent for short adventure games.

Dune, I think you overcomplicated things towards this end.  The barter stuff was cool.  taken a bit far, but cool.  More expressedly though, there  was a lot of encouragement to drag things out narratively.  You mention styles a bit and that's all well and good, but if the intent is short adventure games, stuff outside the adventure needs to be able to be resolved quickly or possibly handwaved through.  Otherwise you get bogged down and spend 2-3 weeks for each adventure cleaning up... Which to some point is what we did and very very rarely was any of it actually spent discussing/reflecting on the adventure (which would at least be reasonable).

Some of this was done to provide things for other players to do during 'small' sessions and snowballed, badly to the point where there'd be fallout in terms of stuff to be resolved 2-3 game sessions down the line and sometimes more.  Great from a narrative side or from a perpetual game but that sort  of wrecked havoc with the team adventuring deal, especially when it was often only relevant to 1-3 players on the five player team.

Sometimes there were scenes that were basically single character scenes.  These should've been done by the player themselves and whoever wanted to be there midweek to clear the path for, again, adventuring.

Yes, these lines sound silly if you wanted to run something else, but just again, these are suggestions along the lines of making a short adventure game work.  It doesn't if there's tons of stuff in the way of getting off and exploring the adventure that is tossed out.  The whole root of that game form is best expressed in the packaged 'adventure' modules where generally the fluff is taken care of ahead of time so the players can focus on the adventure of the day.  Not: "We spend x weeks on dragon armor."

I think grabbing a predefined setting would've helped here.  Just because it would've put us all on a more solid footing with 'common knowledge' and similarly would've helped some folks with the feeling that the adventures were happening in a void with the early stuff.  While the latter didn't bother me, I thrashed a fair bit at certain points on whether my 'common knowledge of the world' matched at all with what the world actually was.  I probably made it worse by bringing a culture and assuming it was generic D&D world which then had pokes that it wasn't really.

An aside on narrativeness?  When we got more heavy RP pushes, the fact that we had quickly rattled down settings for use really hurt everything.  It was irresponsible of us the players and to a degree the GM to charge on with that and I bet added a bunch of stress on all fronts.  I went from just eyeballing it to sitting down and getting up an entire hiearchy of knights.  Why?  that was totally pointless from a short adventure standpoint, but needed for some stability to RP OFF of from a character perspective.  The city descriptions, and heck, world culture was suddenly insufficient as we had to RP react to them all instead of ignoring them in favor of "We adventure."  We had a pretty complicated setup in paxburg that got more complicated as folks pushed and pulled and really reflected itself in how the next city came about.  Meh, this isn't saying it right but I think the answer a lot of people gave on paxburg was 'let's expand it".  Either implicitly or explicitly.

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As a random aside?  I'm personally fairly disappointed how the whole RP side fell out after a while with interparty relations and I think a lot of it had to do with OOC stuff and side preferences.  I intended to RP a fair friendship with Seryf and Elaine and often found that pretty hard to do after the halfway point.  I got siderailed into other stuff and found much of an iron wall later on.  There was a good set of builds to work off of there but it got totally squished after a while and almost seemed actively ignored which made it really hard from the gavin side to do any casual rp stuff on it.  Glancing back at the last 'rpish' scene done with Gavin, sitting with both these characters (and no one else), they might as well almost not be in the same room which in many ways kind of accents the feeling I was getting towards the end.  I may have seemed more focused on adventuring than ever at that point but that was also because I don't know if I was really having any fun whatsoever with the other stuff, aside from a few choice conversations, it often felt like pulling teeth.

I think as a group?  We didn't come across as knowing each other for many years, which was in a lot of our backstories and I felt got pushed aside at points in favor of thickening the RP of the moment.  About the only person in the group who's tie in wasn't "I knew these guys for x years now" was Darius.  And, as dune fairly puts, Iddy is good at pushing himself out so that was dealt with easily on his side.  Heck actually, I might be forgetting, I think darius had that added in at some point pre-adventure as well just to make it easier.  I think a lot of it could've been helped by us just going out of our way to view it as a virtue hanging out.  Instead there was a real impression a lot of the way through that if half the characters wandered off, the other half wouldn't even blink an eye.

Rambling now a bit and acknowledging it's well past 1:40 am my time so coherency isn't very high?  I thought the whole playing on racial lines bit also squished this.  I know some folks were quite annoyed with my 'can we can the team elf' stuff bits, but I really think both ic and ooc the racial differences card got pulled out far too often and as a player, the chants of team elf annoyed me.  I really could've done without them in the ooc room and I think they also helped shape the momentum of the game in a fashion that made it awkward long term.  I dunno, it felt awkward at more than a few points playing the token human and it did irritate me that everyone tossed elvish blood.  Perhaps, in the same vein of earlier handling, it is something that should've been brought up early after all the char designs were up and just dealt with at a campaign level.  4 out 5 players wanted to play elf or elf varients and it could've easily been shifted to an elven centric world setting.  Instead we had sort of clashes of vision going on, garrisons of elves sitting in a city in the middle of a decadant human empire or something.  Just more messy than it needed to be.

hum...  oh well... end on positive note.

I did enjoy myself dune and am glad you ran the game.  I'd be glad to come back for another round of such gaming at another time.  I appreciate you trying to please everyone and all the work you did getting stuff set up for our devouring pace.

Dracos
Tired Tired.  And hostilely impatient! =D