[Breakaway~totheweird]

'Sup nerds. As some of you know, an event was held yesterday (4/10) in Law's End on request that the Anubite burial grounds were cleared. Everyone seemed to enjoy it despite some blaring hiccups at the beginning and middle portions of the event. I know that I (and maybe Chaos) don't mind hosting more IC events of similar caliber in the future. However, I'd like to gather consensus on what people would prefer to see next time, constructive criticisms, and everything in between to ensure a better experience next time.

That out of the way, I'd like to toss my two cents in: it was fun, but disorganized. And I will take full blame for that. This work week kept me wiped each time I attempted to go home and formulate/ pre-write. Shit, the people I asked to play NPCs had their dialogues ready for cranking out. All in all, it felt sloppy in my opinion. Not to mention that DnD-styled events are extremely foreign to me. They sound neat in concept, but were never touched on my end. Who knew there were injury sheets? I surely didn't.

There's also the fact that people have to work on Monday mornings. I forgot that's a thing. Sunday just seemed right after figuring out other people's schedules. But I digress.

On the other foot: There was a lot, A LOT, of OOC happening. Someone somewhere even described it as it being meme-ridden. Personally, I only had issues with, well, people not taking this very seriously at the start. For example (and I will use instances that I remembered, so keep the saltiness down), there was a blacksmith character in Law's End looking for materials. He explained the situation to the groups, albeit sterotypically, and his own account. There was a corbie who had to give rapid-fire one-line emotes about how convenient this all was. Maybe there were other people cracking the same jokes. Iunno. Jokes, much like crack cocaine, is fine in minimal amounts. Not when you do it every, single time.

I can't be motivated to provide quality RP scenarios when people are simply there to dick around. If you don't care, then let me know so I can stop wasting my time.

Another problem to consider was everyone trying to treat this like a speedrun. Again, it may very well have to deal with the fact some folks had to wake up in the morning. But when there's a bunch of vulnerable bandits camped off to one side, the bandits you were hired to merk, you should probably deal with them immediately. Not rush into the temple like it's no big deal.

Either way, that's what I can gather from memory. Feel free to say your piece.

P.S. I didn't know where to stick this thread at in the forums.

[GameMaster85]

To be fair, the event itself was rather fun, especially with the GM involved. I loved the event even though it was rather OOC-like at times, it was handled somewhat well. But let me give off a few pointers that don't exactly pertain to said event, but for general makings of events.

1: Plan for every direction, and keep the story loose but stable.
What I mean by this is make sure you have a story to tell, and not just a linear dungeon that the people will try to go through. What if I threw a stick of dynamite at the wall you wanted me to go around? That kind of stuff. Expect a LOT of detours in the original plan, and make sure to tailor your story to those details, because characters have the freedom to do whatever they want.

2: Assess the community / players, and make sure it is tailored to them.
So a lot of the players liked to OOC around, and that's a bad thing. But aside that, a lot of players like to rush in head strong, and make ideas for the future. Groups of 3-4 are common, and it isn't a bad choice to take advantage of that. Lot of the characters are fighters, but you can test them on that. For example, a character didn't want to use a huge, wide axe because he was afraid it would not be effective in a closed environment. Overall, tailor the whole situation and the roleplay to how Sigrogana Legends 2 is handled, and how the community handles things. That said, don't tailor things to headstrong characters. Challenge them, and change their outlook on the whole 'rush in' strategy. You can also tailor things to healers and craftsman as well. Maybe to disarm a trap or so!

3: Keep micro-details to a minimum.
Simple as this one is, it's often very overlooked. Do not ever micromanage the group. This is a bad thing. As for 1 is stated, you never want to have the group be hand-held around like a trip to disney land. We all went there, but it's best to keep the group loose and not have things go about as neat as can be. To control the group's movements too, you can simply put locked doors around the place to allow some form of flow (so people don't rush into the last room willy nilly), but nothing more then that.

4: Reward good roleplay.
Not only will rewarding good roleplay encourage MORE good roleplay, but this allows people to take a step back on the whole meme orgy. Basically put, there's two things you can do to reward roleplay. The first one is giving a response to a well written roleplay that has to do with the current scene. For example, if a character decides to look around and inspect his surroundings, you can give him a chance to roll to spot something that might have endangered him if he didn't spot it, like a trap or a monster. Another way is to give tidbits of information to characters as they go along. If a character inspects a wall, maybe he finds some writings hinting to a puzzle ahead? Or maybe he finds a note? Either way, reward people with progression to your event, and people will not only strive to roleplay more and better, but will actually move the event forward in a more safe manner.

5: Plan with a big picture.
This mostly goes towards actually making events more. Essentially, don't just put some goblins in a cave and be done with it. Ask yourself this question every time you want to add something to the situation: "Why." This is rather important. Maybe those goblins live in a tomb, or maybe they found something that they dug up. Maybe said something is an artifact belonging to a royal family of the past, but taking it triggered their family's wrath as the burial place of their family starts to awaken with revenge. The family itself could have been royals with deep knowledge of magic, giving those zombies the power to throw fire. Anything, really. Have a reason for everything, and make sure you have a story to tell for everything that happens. Eventually, you'll start to plan out large books and stories about what is going on, and this helps with creating that non-linear event I was talking about.

That's about all I can write for now, but yeah. It's all I can say when it comes to making events. Overall, make sure your event is more of a -story- then anything, something that adds to the world and the lore of it in a small way. But at the same time, make sure you can handle things well. It's rather hard, but something to get used to. It's all about experience and the outlook of things, really. Good luck!

[Ranylyn]

I did not attend, due to logging off early for health reasons, but I'd like to reinforce GameMaster85's point 1. Tremendously. One always needs to account for players taking things in a different direction than planned. As a regular player of D&D, even as a PLAYER, not just as a DM, you can't expect your party to take things in the obvious route, because, as proven by the internet, "Common sense" is an ultra rare card, despite the name.

I know I'm using D&D (And heroes Unlimited) examples, but it's all relevant; Running an RP event is a lot like running a campaign.

To give you just a few examples from my own games...

1) We find an ornate door, underground. Unbeknownst to us, on the other side, are the antagonists who have been giving us a hard time. If we enter quietly, we get the jump on them and can wipe them out then and there. Our rogue goes "I'll pick the lock." Our warrior goes, "I'll shove him aside and break it down." As he's breaking it down, I exclaim, "You fools, we haven't even checked if it's locked in the first place!" It was not, and because of the noise, the DM running the campaign flat out told us, "If the full amount of enemies were in there and alerted like that, you'd all be dead, so I'm scaling it down for you, but I'm not doing it again. Listen to the cleric and check for locks before picking them next time."

2) Our party is staying the night at a refugee camp, as we're all fleeing from the same army that displaced these people. My own character has enhanced hearing and can hear the War horns of a raiding party approaching, and is organizing those present into a defensive line to protect those who can't fight. Pretty solid idea since we've got plenty of shields and spears, we're only expecting a calvalry charge, and Charisma is my highest stat so I'm doing a good job of rallying everyone into not fleeing. Right as we see the 18 riders emerge from the darkness into the torchlight, another one of my party members yells at some nonbcombattants to run. Well. Just think about how nervous these hesitant militiamen were. What do you think happens when someone screams "RUN!" nearby? Squad morale broken. My own character just going "... REALLY!? REALLY!?" The only way the DM could think of, on the spot, to not instantly murder me (18 vs 1 and heavily armored vs leather and a wooden shield) was for them to fan out, surround the encampment, and stop prople from escaping, allowing our group (one of which was asleep until someone tripped over him) time to take them out 2-3 at a time.

3) We have a mage (my sister, conveniently) with a light spell. To create a source of light. We also have an ENTIRE PARTY with Infravision of at least 30 feet, if not 60, so it's not that useful. Our eyes are adjusted to the dark. We get attacked by a chimaera. She casts the spell to help us see. We're all blinded. She is now out of spells to cast, and hides under a nearby table while once again, we only end up with like 2-3 people not unconscious out of our group of 7.

4) Now from a different game, but still a tabetop RPG. We're protecting a train from boarders. Using cars, not horses. My character is a psionic with a paralysis ability. I paralyze the driver in the lead car as multiple cars pull up at once. Chaos ensues. The organizer seriously just looks at me and goes "Now I need to think of something else for you to fight, that was too fast." Meanwhile, my character was also a demolitions expert and made firebombs out of the drinks in the bar on the train, so any car not destroyed there is now on fire because I distrubuted them to my team. What was meant to be a grueling, long fight was instead just "... welp, that happened." Combining this with one of my friends getting complete BS rolls both for his stats and his combat, we ended a one-off campaign planned to be 6 hours long in 3.


The point I'm trying to make is... "Be flexible. I know it's incredibly tempting to script things out, but the moment players deviate from it even a little bit - and trust me, they ALWAYS do - suddenly your script is useless. Instead of running things quite that way, instead, plan for somewhat more vague scenarios. Start with an objective, an end goal, and ideas for several branching paths that could be taken."

I'll just leave you off with this one last beautiful example of "panning goes to hell because of one player being a player:"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=soeCJlo3sxU

[Breakaway~totheweird]

I appreciate the feedback so far. It would be nice to have a nice middle ground - where there's a nice blend of organization, and player freedom. As much as I'd like to entrust that everyone will act accordingly, personal experiences have proven that that will never happen. Especially on a game like SL2.

[Exxy]

I'll give a quick (and hopefully concise) response based off things you addressed and my personal experience with the event (this has no particular order and only responses from Purple's initial post will be given in this):

-Hiccups are to be expected, especially when people are involved.

-At times long walls of text are good, sometimes they're not. The Blacksmith being a decent example, I think.

He mentioned a few things that didn't connect well to the story (at least from my take on it) and repeated himself a few times if I recall and said the same thing. Although this makes sense for a bystander character, I felt like it could have been pulled back a bit. I'm also a bit confused why he wasn't particularly fearful of an immense group coming up to him but maybe I missed that part due to the next bit-

-While OOC is fine in small doses, it probably reared up a little too much (at least in my group, granted I was partly to blame) for it to be beneficial to RP. Probably one of the things everyone reading should take away from this thread.

-Some area-based event were hard to distinguish (although this may be in-part due to Chaos having to tackle tracking two groups, sometimes up to four), I knew I went past one spot unknowingly and was pelted with comments about it in both IC-OOC and OOC if I recall.

-About mid-way through the event, the rampant DCs were an obstacle- this made things difficult to relay in the story due to having to IC-OOC and beg for someone to either tl;dr it back to you or to repost.

-On top of that, when you're in back of the group that's going around a corner and stops on said corner (with your character being cut-off) you can't see event text. At all. This killed part of the event for me[strike], especially with Kunai leading,[/strike] a lot more than everything else on the list except for IC-OOC.

-Another example of where events were hard to distinguish were the bandits outside the temple. The exposition for it confused the crap out of me (I think Chaos had something about the bandits "seeming inactive" and I managed to read that as whatever could've been in the temple killed them).

-I would've enjoyed seeing monsters that were similar to another event series going series going on currently (but that's due to me being a Level 60 that tends to use one of the more optimized class combos usually, not everyone at the event was Level 60 or using optimized class combos due to their own character-RP restrictions). Not necessarily the same as said event but ones with altered stats/uncommon Skills/etc for the 'strong'/combat-maniac groups to handle would be nice.



-[strike]I would enjoy an antagonist that I can do things to other than just trip.[/strike] Lastly, the boss seemed a bit over-kill.

Yes, I'm well aware of the fact this was meant to be scripted so the series wouldn't be killed off at Square 1 but it presents a few issues, one being more personal than others (it'll be the one right after this sentence, for clarification). But personally, an invincible boss is something I've always view as horrible taste in Game Designing (even if for an intro/event - that was the personal bit). Yes, it gives the impression they're in a class of their own and that you're not meant to kill them immediately but this can easily be detrimental to RP. Why you ask?

1) Solution! You present a weapon that can be used to kill them- oh wait! Only one person. . . can use said weapon at a time. . . [strike]who will be the chosen one?[/strike] This pidgeon-holes the boss into only being able to die by said item-wielder and everything rests on them, essentially making them -the- focal point of the plot. This can sometimes ruin the RP and make others feel they're "Non-essential" to the plot or progression. . . I feel this one sums it up the best but there are more reasons why this is detrimental to RP (probably winding up hitting on the same note but here I go trying).

2) Like I said, it gives you the impression of they're in a class of their own but at the same time you run the risk of making them seem un-killable and no one likes to try playing a game where you can't win - short and simple. It's a very morale-detrimental concept to work with, it can kill the bond/experience you're trying to make with the RP at Stage One due to you're supposed to try to build intrigue and connectivity through the story you present.

3) Your guess, I've rambled on way too long to be socially accepted.

Overall, I enjoyed myself despite the bumps in the road. I'd definitely be willing to give it another crack in the future. I apologize for the boss bit winding up being almost half the content of the post but I think it needed to be addressed at least somewhat seriously.

P.S. Mission Conciseness = Failed.

[Breakaway~totheweird]

1) Solution! You present a weapon that can be used to kill them- oh wait! Only one person. . . can use said weapon at a time. . . who will be the chosen one? This pidgeon-holes the boss into only being able to die by said item-wielder and everything rests on them, essentially making them -the- focal point of the plot. This can sometimes ruin the RP and make others feel they're "Non-essential" to the plot or progression. . . I feel this one sums it up the best but there are more reasons why this is detrimental to RP (probably winding up hitting on the same note but here I go trying).

It was mentioned ICly that there is an item-based solution. Not sure if you caught onto that, or not.

[Exxy]

Breakaway~totheweird » Mon Apr 11, 2016 2:35 pm[/url]"]

1) Solution! You present a weapon that can be used to kill them- oh wait! Only one person. . . can use said weapon at a time. . . who will be the chosen one? This pidgeon-holes the boss into only being able to die by said item-wielder and everything rests on them, essentially making them -the- focal point of the plot. This can sometimes ruin the RP and make others feel they're "Non-essential" to the plot or progression. . . I feel this one sums it up the best but there are more reasons why this is detrimental to RP (probably winding up hitting on the same note but here I go trying).

It was mentioned ICly that there is an item-based solution. Not sure if you caught onto that, or not.

I did, I'm on the fence about it but it's up to the storyteller on how to tell their story - I was just giving my two cents. Also, while I'm responding to this I agree with the parts of what I read on GameMaster's post entirely (albeit that I skimmed rather than actually read).

[Breakaway~totheweird]

Oh, then, yeah. I felt like that's the most appropriate solution rather than going down the "beat down on this villain long enough and they'll stop". Which, from what's been seen, looks like what most storytellers aim for on this game.

Long-winded posts aren't my forte, so forgive the lack of detailing:

My goal with these series of events is to have it be a long-term quest. No, not spanning the course of several months, mind you. But something that a) imposes a threat that not everyone can smack over the head and call it a day and b) hopefully spurs on an amount of creative thinking for solutions.

Tl;dr You got a problem that can't be solved with lolbattlemechanics, a quest is had to find something to weaken it, then you use said item to finally murder it off with lolbattlemechanics.

[Exxy]

Breakaway~totheweird » Mon Apr 11, 2016 2:55 pm[/url]"]Oh, then, yeah. I felt like that's the most appropriate solution rather than going down the "beat down on this villain long enough and they'll stop". Which, from what's been seen, looks like what most storytellers aim for on this game.

Long-winded posts aren't my forte, so forgive the lack of detailing:

My goal with these series of events is to have it be a long-term quest. No, not spanning the course of several months, mind you. But something that a) imposes a threat that not everyone can smack over the head and call it a day and b) hopefully spurs on an amount of creative thinking for solutions.

Tl;dr You got a problem that can't be solved with lolbattlemechanics, a quest is had to find something to weaken it, then you use said item to finally murder it off with lolbattlemechanics.

An item that weakens it while in the presence of them sounds better than a monster-bane weapon. . . to some extent at least. I'm sorry to have gone on, on the same topic for so long but I'd like to think there's more merit in the post than just that. If there's anything you'd like for me to explain in greater detail that I hit on in my post feel free to ask.

[Breakaway~totheweird]

What would you do in regards to that specific portion of the storyline, then? If I can make this aspect well-rounded, what details am I missing? This thread is meant for what other people would like to see (and critiques). Otherwise, I wouldn't have slapped it on the forums.

Lay it on me.