by LordofFail » Fri Feb 14, 2020 3:08 pm
Modrant / series discussion:
Okay. Gonna try to keep this short. I'll probably be updating it here and there as I think of more things to say.
First off: this game. A couple things to cover.
1. Mechanics of the game itself
Travel time / limited movement / secret tunnels: Probably won't do it again, at least not in this manner. It seemed to really slow down the pace of the game and being alone in an area sucked a lot. I tried to put in a lot of secret passages to compensate for this but the travel time on them was too long, making them almost worthless. I like secret passages as a concept, but with no travel time they have very limited use. So maybe future games will have a blend where it takes a few minutes to go from room A to room B but secret tunnels take you there immediately, allowing to perform a couple actions before the rest of the group gets there or something. Or maybe I'll just keep them for discovering secret areas instead of moving between rooms, or for ones that go between rooms, there will be lore hidden in them like the College-Winery passage.
Free Skill Points: Loved it. I really enjoyed giving the players the freedom to essentially build their roles how they wanted to play them. In the past, I would give stats based on how I felt the role "should be" played, so killing roles would have good combat stats, sneaky roles would have good stealth based stats, etc. But this way it allows players to look at a role, decide how they want to approach it and choose their stats based on that. So I think overall it worked out well.
Combat: Speaking of combat though, I'll be honest, I have no idea what I'm doing, and it really showed on a couple occasions. I'll try to come up with a more concrete system for combat for my next game, there was a lot of salt in combat. Combat will definitely remain turn-based though, being able to just unload 4 or 5 bullets from a gun before the opponent can react is something I just can't allow unless death is meaningless like in GTH.
Decision Games vs Ambidex Games: They have potential. This game was definitely a trial run for them, and there were loopholes exploited in this game. I allowed them to be exploited because I didn't think of them beforehand, although I probably just should have not allowed them to be exploited at all. I do feel that they provided a nice variety and a difference from the standard AB game which has been overly metad to the point where its almost routine to ally, and kill anyone who betrays. Rewards / penalties for the decision games will also probably need tweaking, I felt bad killing 3 people with them (even if one of them was replacing out anyway).
2. Overall thoughts on the game:
As a whole, I really liked it. Mechanically, it wasn't as good as CBS but I might like it more because I think ETL has stronger characters. I gave people more serious roles to play and was pleasantly surprised that people filled those roles well. I was half expecting the game to devolve into standard everyone-for-themselves VLDR where it becomes more about staying alive and reaching your wincon than playing a character. So I'm glad that the characters were as good as they were.
The game had a good flow to it (even if it was slow at times because of the trains), and overall I think it was a solid game.
3. Miscellaneous notes / fun facts:
- That long key chain thing was bad. Sorry to TNO and Schultz for that. Your awful luck on that didn't help though. Guess TNO spent all his luck on russian roulette.
- Stadium puzzle should have had a hint somewhere in the room to indicate that you're trying to get to 50.
- Chubby got screwed with bad rolls, and some bad hosting.
- I'm probably not going to allow gasoline poisoning in future games unless the drinker rolls nat 1 for perception or something. People aren't so dumb that they won't realize what they are drinking isn't wine. So apologies to chubby for this, definitely my bad, but no more gasoline poisoning in future games. Probably should have just said no outright on it.
- People need to read the room descs more. There were many times that a vital clue or element of a puzzle was in the room desc and people ignored it. Embrace reading please.
- Text phone chat was fun and it was a mechanic made up on the spot. Actually all of Main Street was made up on the spot I didn't have descs for any of the stores lol.
- People faking their death was fun. Allowing their inventory to be looted, even the hidden item slot was a hosting error, probably shouldn't have allowed that but once I did for Xerxes I had to for milte for consistency purposes.
- Arckas: The wheel you got in Water Filtration went to a valve in Water Filtration. There were two doors next to the console you never opened, behind one of them was a spot to place the wheel on the wall and get a decision game that was basically a game of chicken. It was even mentioned a couple times. Also you could have used your spy item to make a lie detector or something to help figure out who is who, or a stun gun to kill people easier. Your role was hard, but you definitely didn't take advantage of the resources you were given.
- The roles of this game were loosely based on the roles in Coup:
Leader - Duke
Spy - Ambassador
General - Inquisitor
Detective - Contessa
Framed - Captain
Tyrant - Assassin
- This game was a comedy of errors with the violence of Macbeth :>
Thoughts on the series as a whole:
Making a series of games at once is hard. Especially knowing there will be time between the games so there will be the inevitable "what was happening again". So I had to try to keep things as simple as possible between the games for that reason.
Anyway, the overall theme of the game is about life not being a zero-sum game. Just because the east wins doesn't mean the west loses, and just because the east loses doesn't mean the west wins. I could go into more examples on this concept but I think the game did a fairly good job illustrating this point in the ending.
Anyway, that was the overall idea the series was going for, which can then be applied to real life in out of game situations.
CBS illustrated the background to the conflict.
GTH explored reasons for conflict in the character traits. The idea behind the traits is that they were to represent things that I consider as petty and not worth fighting over, such as race, religion, influence, affluence, political opinion and language.
ETL showed possible resolutions to the conflict and how looking at the conflict as a zero-sum game can only bring about mutually assured destruction for all parties involved. Sure, you might win the conflict, but in a real-life situation where the conflict is some disagreement between coworkers in the workplace, the party that wins the conflict may be looked down upon by their peers for engaging in such a petty conflict in the first place, so really nobody wins.
Anyway, as a series as a whole I liked it. I might take a break from hosting for a while since I've been working on this series for well over a year, so I don't plan on doing anything like this again anytime soon. But I might do other games or things if I get inspiration, and if I have enough ideas / inspiration I may do another series in the future, having a storyline extend across multiple games is definitely an idea I liked working with from a hosting and creative perspective. Maybe next time it will be more open ended and actions taken in a previous game can influence future games since in this series all games would have been pretty much the same regardless of how previous games went.
Last edited by
LordofFail on Sun Feb 16, 2020 12:59 pm, edited 3 times in total.
"The Hardest Game to Win is a Won Game"
~~ Emanuel Lasker ~~
Mystery Link