Same reason why banana gun was an option
Maybe the fates didn’t include it in this cycle?
this game was amazing
and the only flaw i can actually think of with this game in specific (i can point out a few with the formula, but) was… people just didn’t want to kill
which i think was a byproduct of people wanting to continue playing
…tfw your game is so fun to play people don’t want to progress it because it means they can’t keep playing
4 Likes
hostrant (you don't have to read this if you don't want to) (the words here are solely my own, not Luna's or Geyde's)
There were a lot of things about this game that were really great. I enjoyed writing the parts of the lore that were mine quite a bit, even when it wasn’t directly relevant to the game. I really enjoyed seeing you guys figure things out – things about the lore, but also solving puzzles. This game had a lot of great moments.
There were also some things about it that weren’t so great. It was definitely discouraging when players got upset about their actions not being processed exactly the way they wanted it because I failed to read their mind, or when I was asked to process actions for another hour at 9 AM when I literally hadn’t slept all night, or when people broke the rules, repeatedly, after warnings to stop. And to the extent that those things had a negative effect on the player experience – which some of them definitely did – I’m sorry.
I definitely think there are some things that we as a collective could have done better as hosts. We, and I in particular, didn’t always do a great job of communicating with each other, and that led to host dissonance, in some cases major dissonance, in ways that definitely impacted the quality of the game. I know a lot of players were frustrated by issues with action processing; some of those were unavoidable, or unavoidable unless I wanted to just get no sleep the entire game, but I acknowledge that they nevertheless had a negative effect on the players. Then, obviously, there’s the issue with the Theatre segment basically outing Trochi. That was actually something we as hosts discussed, and I personally tried to argue for that section being less overtly outing, but I have edit perms for every message in the host PM on the forum, I could have just changed it, and I didn’t, and I think that was simultaneously unfair to Trochi, and unfair to the rest of you, for not getting the chance to come to that conclusion entirely naturally. I also know that there were a lot of things that weren’t mistakes, exactly, but weren’t fun for the players, like the NEG, or like some of the more frustrating puzzles. I’m sorry to everyone whose gameplay experience was negatively affected by any of these.
I think, if anyone wants to host one of these in the future, I have some thoughts on specific things that can be done to make sure it goes more smoothly. I’m not going to say ‘just don’t do it,’ I don’t think that’s universally good advice, but I think that it’s definitely possible to improve on what we did here.
- Have cohosts. I cannot possibly emphasize this enough. Ideally, you want to have complete timezone coverage; one of the issues we ran into was that we had a European and two Americans, but based on how many hours apart we were, I was consistently staying up until 3, and sometimes until 4 or 5, waiting for Luna to wake up. Be sure to actually look at your active hours and come up with something that will work.
- Every cohost needs to be committed and reliable. This is a fairly obvious point, but all the ‘having a cohost’ in the world isn’t going to help if they don’t actually process half the actions, or they say they’ll design something and then don’t.
- Communicate with your cohosts! Make sure everyone is on the same page as much as possible. Host dissonance can lead to major issues with your game.
- Run the game at some point when you have a lot of free time. Hosting it will eat your life, and if you’re trying to do something important with your life it will get eaten. I basically have not been able to pay attention in class for the past several weeks because I’ve been processing actions. I know a lot of you are in high school, you could probably run one of these over summer break if you’re not trying to hold down a job.
- Plan out as much as you can in advance. We had all the Chapter 1 stuff ready to go before the game, but we built the rest of the chapters more-or-less during deadly life and the class trials, and in some cases that led to issues that wouldn’t have arisen if we’d planned the game better.
And – given everything that happened this game, I do feel like I have to touch on rulebreaking, because there was kind of a lot of it. From people threatening to break the rules in order to look town, to people overtly angleshooting and explicitly using their angleshooting-derived reasoning in the game thread, to people deliberately not leaving rooms they had left in-character in order to gain extra information (obviously sometimes that happens by accident, but there’s a point where it loses plausible deniability), to the Chapter 5 class trial, there were … a lot of issues with rulebreaks. I get that this is a Misc, and obviously not every rule on the FM rulelist is going to apply perfectly to Miscs, but that doesn’t mean that literally none of them apply whatsoever. If you can’t follow the rules, don’t play the game.
4 Likes
(it does suck to be the only non-mole mm that was shitty enough fo lose but w/e)
This game fucking sucked to host
Jesus fucking christ
It was a festering abomination at odds with normalcy itself
I lost so many hours of sleep
4 Likes
One more thing I’d like to say postgame. You people never used the coolest fucking murder weapon in the game, and I’m not even talking about AREADBHAR. No, I’m talking about the box in the Common Room.
None of you asked the question that I’d hoped one of you would ask- what happens if I break the glass?
Because if you do, the thing becomes a nightmare of weird physics, and thus becomes probably the most powerful tool for rube goldberg murders in the game.
4 Likes
me and arctic had a somewhat discussion about this
we had an idea of “if all the available puzzles are solved for the chapter, it auto-progresses to the next with free trial win”
not sure how implementable it would be but
(my hope was to win at final trial)
(this is where i call @Aelin a bitch and a nerd for killing because i was relying on him being alive ch 6)