GAME OVER. ENTER INITIALS: A__

[Huitzil]

As of now, On the Verge is DEAD. Gone. Condemned to the crypt of failed games. It moved so slow that even though it started months and months ago, I consider it "stillborn". I apologize to everyone, especially Brian.

Brian didn't make his character, I made it and asked him to play it. After a few days game time, Jim Gammel's associate would have "conclusively proven" that the only thing faked in that video was Gammel's voice. According to Brian, as the Concord Marines dragged you to a cell to await trial, Gammel was going to blow Harrison a kiss. Then, his REAL character, an Inseer whose name I forget, was going to help you break out of prison and track down Gammel and the man he works for. It never, ever should have lasted as many months as it did.

The man he works for is Roland 0708, a Mechalus assassin created by VoidCorp's black ops division to be a perfect infiltrator and killing machine. He was, in fact, the prototype of the so-called "external" species known as the Magus. He, of course, broke free and went berserk, freeing himself of VC's coded restraints but finding the he enjoyed murdering people more than anything in the world. Gammel worked for him, setting up hits, acting as a middleman since Roland would be unable to set down anywhere for fear of being caught. Roland was hired by Concord Free Now, and is (of course) the one who murdered Brian Cole. To assume the role, Roland observed the real Nleer Alamein, underwent some minor facial reconstruction surgery to look like him, murdered him, read all available data from his internal nanocomputer, then assumed his position. Cole was unable to tell the difference, Roland acted exactly like his childhood friend in every capacity, up until he killed him.

The death came by means of a small explosive placed in his food, that detonated during the speech, mauling Cole from the inside. 0708 then injected Cole with a paralytic agent mixed with an enzyme to dissolve the explosive; Cole was fully conscious but unable to move or speak as he bled to death internally, something the sadistic Mechalus enjoyed greatly. The video of the PCs was composited by Roland from security holo footage taken in the prior two days on the Lighthouse, and the reason it was nearly flawless was very simple: his victims were chosen almost completely at random. He scripted out the entire meeting, then looked for holographic "actors" that had performed actions that synced up with the "script". Finn (for example) was chosen because, while standing in line at a hot dog stand on the lower promenade, had spoken for exactly 8 seconds, looked to the left for 6 seconds, et cetera, and when placed in the composite would look as if she was responding to the other "actors".

The voices were originally provided by Gammel, who did it because Roland's sound editor needed a "baseline" to sound believable enough. They were all supposed to be altered into the appropriate voices, but Roland forgot a single line; Gammel worried that this might be because Roland was trying to get rid of him, but in actuality Roland was just losing track of things as the kill approached and simply forgot. The Concord security recognized him by voice. Roland di not plan for you all to be near Cole during the speech; that was simply a happy coincidence.

That was what happened, stuff that you may have been able to uncover had "due diligence" continued long enough. But it didn't. If you have any other questions, ask me.

What I would like this thread to have more than that, is suggestions and comments on the game, how I could have done it better, and what might have prevented its failure. I would like each player to weigh in on this, for all of our benefit.

[Prince Herb]

[1] Far, far too many players.   The more players you have in an game, the longer it takes to get a response from all of them, and the longer it takes for them to decide anything amongst themselves.

[2] GM inactivity.

[3] Plot not suited to characters.   Zippy and Harrison are just not suited to a detective work scenario, and the same is likely true of the others.   If you ask for characters to be built before a scenario without heavy GM input, then you have to pay a great deal of attention to what they've built, for a couple reasons.

Firstly, there may be no one with the skills your scenario requires, and annoying NPCs may have to be introduced.   Some players will feel that their characters are useless, and lose interest.

Secondly, by their choice of character, the players are giving you very strong clues about what kind of scenario they want to play, which you, as a GM, should ignore at your peril.   For example, if someone has put all their points in rocket piloting and the whole campaign takes place in a snowbound Finnish railway station well above the arctic circle, that player will be pissed off at the GM, decide their character is useless and lose interest.

Most particularly, you should give all the characters a chance to demonstrate their utility to the group early on, preferably right at the beginning.   You want to grab their attention, right?

[3] The choice of a detective scenario was a poor one, particularly given the size of the party.   More than most, this requires extended conversation, detailed knowledge of the background, etc, etc as people gumshoe about.   A single detective, a sidekick or two to run errands, and very experienced players would be what I'd be looking for if I was thinking about that kind of game.

[4] The no-sense plot.   As I've read it, there is no good reason for the bad guys to frame anyone, let alone a huge group of people.   That they all happened to be standing nearby when the hit happened was worse.   That coincidence did nothing at all to advance the plot and annoyed you when people began concentrating on it.

[Bjorn]

I don't agree with most of the points Herb made relating to the plot.  This wasn't a "detective" plot, it was a "clear yourselves of being framed" plot, which can work with any sorts of characters -- in fact, it's more entertaining with characters that have wildly inappropriate backgrounds.  Picking people nobody cares about as targets of the frame is reasonable to me, and as for the coincidence of us all being at the same place at the start of the game -- given the very public and important nature of the press release, it was plausible that we'd be there.  Besides, it was, in the end, entirely irrelevant whether we got picked up there or later and elsewhere by the police.  Why not indulge in some dramatic appropriateness?

The point about having too many players is a good one.  The bane of forum games is having to wait for one person to post so everyone can proceed.

"GM inactivity" is a bit strong, but there a couple of times when a post from the GM to demand player response (like, "You suddenly realize that the time Finn asked you to wait before heading up is almost all gone,") would have been appreciated.  I know you often tried to do this in IRC, but the game was forum-based.  If it wasn't on the forum, it didn't really happen.

This whole initial segment was probably too long.  I don't blame you for misjudging that, because a forum game is a lot slower-paced than I'd expected, and I didn't care about while we were playing, because I thought it was the whole point of the game.  I would have really been frustrated, though, if after all this game-time we'd been thrown in jail regardless of what we'd done and then having the "real game" start.  What would have happened if, in the last few posts, Finn had pulled the trigger?

To summarize, the game just lost momentum.  The GM has to avoid that, by posting regularly himself (forum games aren't conducive to letting the GM stay silent and letting the players drive themselves), dealing with characters/players who start lagging, and keeping the plot moving forward at a face pace depsite the limitations of the forum.

[Dracos]

Okay, as promised, comments regarding this game.

Herb covered a lot of things, but I'm going to ignore that and just ramble on some of those points again from my perspective.

You seem like you suffered a lot from the transition from running face to face games to running net games and in particular forum games.  These are very different fish.  In a real life game, it's a lot easier to organize the players and keep it smoothly running.  In a net game, there are other concerns you have to deal with and you didn't deal with them and they really slaughtered the game for the large part.  A net game takes more organization.  More stating from the GM: "This is how things are going to run and how we are going to make sure we don't stall".  It requires communication, regular communication, between the GMs and the players.  The more of it the better.  You had void to use and you really should've been using it more and being more aggressive.  We should've been seeing shouts of the nature of "Guys, get posting, I'm waiting on you."  "Player X, you NEED to post or I'm going to have to get someone else for your character."  Etc.

Additionally, you have to realize that if players pause they are almost certainly waiting for GM confirmation.  If there's not been any posts in some time frame that you decide, you have to post and you have to keep the game moving.  There were plenty of times that the game flat out stalled where we were waiting for GM confirmation or other players and were just left hanging.  This wasn't good and really requires you to keep reign of the players and the events to prevent.

Now, large crowds of players is another problem.  It's difficult enough managing that in a face-to-face environment.  It quickly becomes much harder in a forum environment.  Without proper management the game quickly pulls down to the slowest person playing rather than either a happy medium or (preferrably) the rate of the fastest.  There are many tricks to getting around this.  Setting up a defined "Be here, not be here" area to explain when a guy is gone is one way, but not enough!  Having defined playing requirements ("If you cannot do 'this' reasonably, do not join, we'll require it) is another.  A very important tool is 'partners'.  "Hey, I'm not going to be here, my partner Bjorn though may run my character as needed."  This way you half the possibility of the game stalling as players are workin as teams on characters and can run another players character if they aren't there and something needs to be done with them.  This wasn't done here and would've been a great help with some characters.

Herb covered inappropriateness of characters from a game design perspective, but I'll touch upon it from a "know your players" perspective.  I, prior to playing, did not really know everyone else involved.  You though should've known enough to refuse me playing a servant type robot as the game was packed with players and needed more aggressive playing types around to keep things moving.  I might have found it cool to play a servant/bodyguard robot but it really wasn't the game for it and with the player dynamics you did not need me playing a passive design character.  Similarly, there were several players that should never have been given key/important 'moving the plot' roles with the amount they were capable of playing.  This should've been researched beforehand and hinted at in character design.  Know your players.  There is no more important advice I can give a GM.  We all fail at this sometimes, but the better you get to know how people play, the better it is.

Complexity of plot was a big one.  You started with something that was intended as 'grand'.  That's a dangerous way to start a campaign that's not oneshot.  Can it work?  Yes, but a lot of the time starting folks on small bits and getting used to them first is a good idea, building the player dynamics up from the ground before you toss them into a mess like that.  If they are already working together as a team, they can handle it a lot better.

Player characters: Brian never got a chance to introduce his char...but there was another problem with this setup.  The way things were going we were likely to be, in a reasonable fashion, quite xenophobic when his real character appeared.  That's a bad party dynamic to be introducing a new character into.  Can it work?  Yes.  But you were playing it risky and I really wouldn't have recommended it with this size crew.  All it would've taken was one guy who's attitude was "This is another trap, blow his fuckin' head off and let's jet from this place" and it would've tossed a hell of a wrench in the plans.  The more complicated the game design the more things can throw a wrench into it.  And this game design was way too complicated for the number of players in it.

Anyhow, this is the second game I've played in alternity that's crash burned.  I still would like to get some experience in the system, but it's really hard to appreciate it when the games it's in stall to a halt before the intro arc is really even finished.

Dracos

[Dracos]

On a side note, I'll be moving this to the old games area in a bit.  Given this is being used for good and well meaning improvement of the gaming quality, I'll leave it here for now to allow everyone to respond and read what's being said, but I'll likely move it over there in about a week.  If it suddenly vanishes, just look over there.

Dracos