Okay, things aren't working for me, people.

[Anastasia]

To be succinct, the board format+losing some of my interest is making this game moribund.  This isn't any of your faults and I don't want to cast any blame around. All of you guys are aces. That being said, I'm going to propose the following options:

1. I can the game. I'll post relevant info/spoilers and we all move on with our lives.
2. I try running this as a weekly IRC game. Odds are that 1-2 of you will need to drop this if so. Finding a day we can all reliably meet will be quite challenging as well. It's not impossible, but sacrifices would need to be made.
3. We keep running this as a slow, semi-active board game and hope we spark some life back into it. I'll be honest and say this isn't looking too likely right now.
4. We turn it into Strip Avatars.

Thoughts?

[Carthrat]

I don't have time for more IRC stuff that I already have scheduled. Honestly, while the avatars format in general looks good on paper, I can't see it panning out.

[Corwin]

Every single option past the first sounds like a chore from the way you're describing it, so I don't see a need for you to make yourself run it. The game's been fun, but it's been slowly dying for a couple months now, right?

[Anastasia]

2 is possible but I feel it would require cutting a few people to make times. I'd rather not sugarcoat that.  3 is more of the same and I don't feel that working out. So 1/2, Cor. Unless a bunch of you want to do IRC I'm inclined to just can it, yes.

[Ebiris]

Game feels pretty dead. Lets call it.

[VySaika]

* Gatewalker nods. Do what you've gotta do, man. I'd have to drop if it moved to IRC and if you're not into running it in PbP then no worries, we can just let it go.

[Anastasia]

Okay, that's good enough to call it here.


All of you played well and were game for a difficult and at times arbitrary Gygaxian dungeon crawl. A+, I salute each of you. Answers to various game issues below.

---

What was with the instructions that some of you got in PM?

A standard element of the game was 2-3 of you getting special, private objectives from the Dark One each floor. Success on these would net you extra bonuses. Failure would have no penalty. (Usually.) They were a way for the Dark One to fuck with you and further sow party distrust, which was already quite possible with the motley crew of PCs we had. Offhand, I believe Merc and Rat got messages at the start of the level, and I sent one to Flasheart after one of his deaths to spice things up a bit.

What, what were they? Slow down. Explain!

Okay, okay. Merc got instructions to prevent anyone from killing the Knight of the Marshes this level. He'd get a big reward to make up for the party losing access to the Samurai class. I was thinking extra stat points over the rest of the group, but I hadn't decided before it became moot. With the way things worked out, Merc never had much of a shot at it. It wasn't a great condition with a split up group now that I reflect on it. Rat got one to ensure that Lord Flasheart died a death at least partly at her hands.

Grue? What?

Yes, it was a grue. It's essentially an out of bounds penalty, if you find a hole out of the level you'll run into the grue. It was a souped up Tarrasque with True Seeing and a bunch of things so you couldn't just Invisibility past it.  I had the grue penciled in as the super boss of the game. If you ever beat it, you'd pretty much win then and there. Seeing a hint of that was my way of sadistically taunting anyone who ran afoul of it. Sacchin picked up on that right away.

Okay...right...so what the hell was with the Dark One?

He was a generic  bad guy. Duh. I played him as a NE asshole who was only interested in his own sick gratification and sneering disdain. I wanted him to be like a bad Saturday morning cartoon baddie.  I was going to have him taunt you more often, but I got bad feedback the first time I did it, when Drac and Merc got the Baby's rattle and bib.

I'd had him inked in as a CR 20-ish last boss if you ever reached him. I wasn't going to drag this into epic. Mother of shit, that would be a nightmare. Alternately, I was toying with the idea of having him be a disguised Gates of Hell Dispater. The Iron theme is right up his normal MO, and he'd love the sense of futility you guys have as you die and fail to advance.

Uh huuuh. Well, what was coming up if the game continued on?

I had the next two levels planned out. Level 2 was going to be Three Lane Highway. You'd split into 2-3 groups. There would be three steel 'highways' suspended in a void, 25 feet apart each. The idea would be progressing down the various highways, into tunnels, and occasionally needing to find ways to leap between the highways. You'd be able to see each other one highway away(So far left/far right couldn't see each other, middle could see both, ect.), so it would very much be a running level with everyone loosely working together. I thought it was going to be a pretty cool concept and I'll reuse it somewhere.

Level 3 was going to be Dragon's Belly. You'd start inside the stomach of a dragon, needing to work your way over half digested food and treasure, climb up it's throat, and eventually reach it's brain to kill the beast and win the level. I hadn't worked everything out yet, but thanks to Taishyr for the fucking awesome idea. I'll be reusing this one, too.

Why did Flasheart die that last time when taking 10 was an option?

DM mistake. I didn't realize it until later and I never got around to dealing with it, since the game was dying off anyway. Sorry Flash. For some reason I didn't broach this with Eb and it kinda hung in the air, though the game was heading down at that point anyway.[

How else did you fuck up?

I think I needed more of a deterrent against dying. This mostly worked, though I think Flasheart might've been discouraged a bit by the end. I'm not sure, I was debating the entire thing. I also should've kept things moving, reached the end of the level and taken a break to refresh. Oh well. Alternately, my mistake was running this as a board game. 3-5 people and IRC would have worked much much much better, I reckon.

Wheel probably needed to be shorter so it could be done and moved on with. Oh well, hindsight.

Do you want feedback from the PCs?

Sure. Good and bad would be nice. I think I did an okay job of running Avatars. It had a few bumps, but it was the first floor of an experimental dungeon. These things happen.

Hey, it goes both ways like a miko! What about the PCs?

Honestly, all of you were good. The only problems were a few timing problems and I got feedback right away when I botched things. I hate to rely on a '...you did good' non-answer, but it's true!

Strip Avatars? What the fuck?

It made sense at the time. I dunno.

[Dracos]

So yes, saw this.  :)  Semiagreed.

So feedback:

I think I've made the comment a few times, but a board game where the players never have OOC conversation going about the game as a group is way more vulnerable to heavy slowdown, loss of interest, and death.  Partly my fault for not regularly showing up, but this isn't just this game.  At the least, it's good to have face time at minimum weekly with the GM (Though if the posting goal is daily, then daily is generally better) for them to go "Your turn, hey let's keep it moving, random jokes  of the moment?"   Even a few small talking periods is really beneficial.  Seeing the rest of the group talking and posting is energizing.  It's why I tend to comment on a board+chatroom model.   Given here, we have folks that are way more familiar and comfortable with just pure chat models (and we occassionally competed with those for attention), but all games benefit from positive peer pressure loops.  Others are having fun, participate.  Others are people, don't forget them, etc etc.  Really something we should all (Self included) keep in mind with board run games in the future.  If you strip out that social element (which I keep seeing happen), it's a lot easier for all involved to start stalling out and slowing down.  I know in the last two months, the only player I talked to about avatars was Dune.  I suspect others were somewhat similar there.

Prod slow players early.  Self including.  Just like it's important to run wrangler when you notice that one of the players hasn't spoken up in a half hour, avoid letting a player get to be several days without saying anything in a board game.  I know on my side, sometimes things just got very energetic and busy in real life for days/weeks at a time, and it wasn't that there was no time for posting, but just it would leave my mind (especially if last I looked, I had last post).  This is way easier with some regular social side of things.

The first floor was huge.  Way too huge.  I think I went through about 20 rooms or so.  I suspect that the other team went through around 20-30.  We never met and I think we only crossed through one shared area.  No matter the experience level of the group, a smaller start experience probably would've been better.  The game had unknown levels of floors to complete, so iterating the first couple times on size, scale, density, probably would've been a very good idea.   This would've gotten rewards out there.  It would've given a breath moment and let us have gotten a feel for the larger game.  It would've let us build more momentum and therefore desire to finish.  We didn't get through a single dungeon and from my groups perspective, the actual end of the dungeon was indeterminate distance away.  For me, I lost a sense of progress.  I just was going room to room, hoping I found something that made sense.

I expected we were almost done with this floor in december.  Just tossing that out there.  Rat and I were talking back then on how the breakup would be next time around.  I don't know what happened but I don't feel in the 4 months that followed that I really got anywhere closer to solving the exit of the floor, just covered more area.

Seven (or greater) branches in an area are bad.  They're hard to discuss, they're hard to direct around, and they're hard to keep track of.  I was totally glad when we got out of that area because as you noticed I was going "Uh, go down one of the ones we didn't yet".  Thankfully most of them were quick dead ends but that's a more an organizational challenge than anything else.  If you've got to do lots of leaving points from an area, split them up in some meaningfully descriptive way.  "You enter a room, there are two doors on the north side, two doors on the east side, two doors on the west side".  Boom, now I'm dealing with three groups of two possibilities rather than a group of six.  I can easily say which ones I've gone through, because they're separated.  If you asked me after that seven branch area where I'd gone into, I really couldn't tell you, even though I went into almost all of them.

To share one with the others that I commented to dune earlier: In deathcrawl dungeons, they are a lot more fun if viewed as puzzles then sets of traps.  Especially if the player is coming back, there should be things that they can do (the more classes that can do it, the better) to navigate/solve a trap. 

Beware of death by slow cuts, especially in death trap.  Twice our group tried to take a rest because we'd exhausted our resources.  If we're genuinely trying to stay alive and treating that like important (which I think our group did pretty well at), we're going to have problems if we've erased our margin for error by slow cuts.  This isn't to say that every trap should be fatal, but equally, there needs to be escape possibilities from 'any trap' will be fatal.  It's stalling, and if all players are in that state silly.  The game was most fun when it ran in the 25-100 percent resources rate.  Where we could look and say, okay, we really got to be careful, but we're totally capable of continuing on.  D&D 3.5 characters (4 fixes this) are not encounters based.  They are day based with an assumption inherent that their resources are going to be put against a certain number of encounters appropriate for level.  The dungeon we were looking at was way bigger and denser in encounters (traps and monsters) than one would reasonably expect our resources to last.  I literally ran through most of my inventory with solutions to traps but it was a basic workaround to the fact that we'd totally exhausted our renewable character abilities very early and once that happened.  Running through my resources and even dealing with a fair bit of it being gone was fun!  Looking forward though and realizing I was nearly entirely out meant that eventually we were going to fall to an encounter because we didn't have anything left to throw at it.  The healing potion you dropped in at one point was an excellent example of how to combat this.  My personal resources were way too low.  So low, I couldn't even risk directly trying out the potion, because had it been say, acid dealing 1 hp of damage, that would've killed me.  Razor thin margins are stalling rather than fun.  Small margins are fun rather than stalling.

On the same note, be wary when the resource amounts differ heavily.  Both times we had this in my group, ended up in the player with resources having to take every risk.  It's part of how we killed gate (sorry gate!), because he was the only option with any resources left worth speaking of having just joined us fresh.  This isn't fun.  Shared risk taking makes deathtraps fun where we're all taking a time.

One guy has nothing to do.  This is what was the final section was for us, but not the only section.  Merc was sitting there on a log constantly waiting for me to come back.  And I did have to keep coming back.  I was semi-stunned when I found that the switch I found didn't give him a solid opportunity to come on.  He was an armored cleric I believe.  He had really bad odds for swimming (I didn't have good ones either) and so the longer we stayed in that environment, the less he was doing.  I came back because I was expecting to be able to drag him along and get us moving again instead of me just heading around the water looking for switches.

Bias: Flex the situation to keep things going.  The heal potions you added were a great example of doing this.  Getting me out of being stable at zero hp, also a good example of doing this.  The more this was done when one or more players 'weren't participating' the more the game kept going nicely.  Keep an eye on the challenges.  Is one or more characters sitting back?  Why?  How can we get them moving/participating again?

Layer complexities with time.  I wasn't aware there was encouraged backstabbing early on.  It didn't really happen anyway.  But moreso, was it really good to get that out there before we made sure we actually could even effectively complete dungeon levels?  Same with the length of the level and the resistance against helpers, the goal of a first experience in any long game really should be "This game works".  I think the game did work in the beginning with both groups posting quickly.  I suspect if we'd moved on and been getting changed up, it would've helped.  It also would've been great for additive challenges with floors as things got introduced.  As it stood, from my view of things, the dark one didn't matter and neither did any of that.  I hadn't been in the experience (in the entire length of it) long enough for it to be a purposeful part of the game.  I hadn't seen any rewards yet, so if I'd gotten such backstabbing instructions, I wouldn't have any context for them.

For me the reasons not to die frequently were simple:
A)Deathtrap dungeons aren't fun at all if you don't take them seriously.
B)Every death had a metapenalty of having to redo a character.  This was something that was going to be larger with time.

I can't really comment on good in game deterrents, really.  I wouldn't suggest a penalty, because that has a feedback loop of making it harder to survive usually.  But for note, those were my things.  I was glad as long as I wasn't discouraged from taking deaths seriously to take deaths seriously.  Only thing that ever discouraged from it on my end was no way to recover resources but death (making death an advantageous option since you always come back with full resources).

The bottom line:  I agree, I think you did an okay job of running Avatars.  I think the real hampers were a lack of social element for the game, death by small cuts, and just a hugely scaled starter dungeon.  Referencing some of Ebs and your games, you can often fit several sessions of dungeons in the amount of rooms we covered.  Last time you ran avatars, you had a way better start dungeon size.

And Inane Comments:

Wow, I started the Death Count topic and never managed to die.

Though admittingly, me sitting on the edge of death was a major slowdown point.