covaithe
Explorer
[sblock=ooc]I started a response to this earlier today, got distracted by something else, then several times when I tried to come back to it, I couldn't seem to manage to pick up the thread of what I was going to say. Which I suppose you could interpret as indicative of something relevant to the topic: Either that I'm not quite engaged enough to keep my attention on it, or that I'm not really quite clear on what it is that I was going to say in the first place, or simply that I'm stretched too thin. Any of those things is plausible, but... Eh. Analogy stretched too thin.
With respect to the game itself, I think we should certainly shoulder some of the blame, Rae. We seem to keep getting bogged down in the details of our clever plans, waiting on someone specific to post, and then when they do, we seem to keep managing to post in such a way that it's not clear whose turn it is to do something. I mean, if we had said two months ago, something like this: "Our plan is to find Turket, steal him away using a barrage of illusion magic to cover our tracks, then pump him for information. Here's how we plan to go about it: Fimble casts X, Tommy casts Y, then blah blah blah...", well, you could have responded with "It all goes well, but when you get in, Turket isn't home." We'd have gotten to where we are now, months ago. Instead we've tried to be coy, and gotten tangled up in our own plan. Roughly the same thing happened when we crafted stuff; we spend weeks in real time planning (dithering about?) what we were going to craft, instead of just getting on with it.
Part of it is just the inevitable PbP slowdown with age. Every single PbP game I've seen, in any forum, starts off with a flurry of activity, but gets gradually slower and slower until either it ends and the party splits up, or it trails off into silence. Continuations with the same DM and same players don't get a reset, unfortunately; it seems to count as the same game for purposes of post-frequency decay. In that sense, this game has lasted since almost the beginning of Tommy's career, years ago.
Another part of it is the open-endedness of this adventure. From the moment we arrived in Fallon, we've effectively had the whole city to play with, sandbox-style. That's great with eager, motivated parties who can agree with each other on what to do first, but with a party full of followers who like to second-guess themselves and each other... Well, maybe a bit more of a linear plot is called for? I feel a bit dirty saying that, but...
Finally, I wish I were well enough inside Tommy's head that I could generate a post for him in five minutes. It's usually more like 20 minutes these days, and I'm easily distracted.
I'd like to continue, if we can find a way forward. I'm still fond of Tommy (and of Keldar... I'd watch the Keldar Show) and I'd like to see this wrapped up nicely.
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With respect to the game itself, I think we should certainly shoulder some of the blame, Rae. We seem to keep getting bogged down in the details of our clever plans, waiting on someone specific to post, and then when they do, we seem to keep managing to post in such a way that it's not clear whose turn it is to do something. I mean, if we had said two months ago, something like this: "Our plan is to find Turket, steal him away using a barrage of illusion magic to cover our tracks, then pump him for information. Here's how we plan to go about it: Fimble casts X, Tommy casts Y, then blah blah blah...", well, you could have responded with "It all goes well, but when you get in, Turket isn't home." We'd have gotten to where we are now, months ago. Instead we've tried to be coy, and gotten tangled up in our own plan. Roughly the same thing happened when we crafted stuff; we spend weeks in real time planning (dithering about?) what we were going to craft, instead of just getting on with it.
Part of it is just the inevitable PbP slowdown with age. Every single PbP game I've seen, in any forum, starts off with a flurry of activity, but gets gradually slower and slower until either it ends and the party splits up, or it trails off into silence. Continuations with the same DM and same players don't get a reset, unfortunately; it seems to count as the same game for purposes of post-frequency decay. In that sense, this game has lasted since almost the beginning of Tommy's career, years ago.
Another part of it is the open-endedness of this adventure. From the moment we arrived in Fallon, we've effectively had the whole city to play with, sandbox-style. That's great with eager, motivated parties who can agree with each other on what to do first, but with a party full of followers who like to second-guess themselves and each other... Well, maybe a bit more of a linear plot is called for? I feel a bit dirty saying that, but...
Finally, I wish I were well enough inside Tommy's head that I could generate a post for him in five minutes. It's usually more like 20 minutes these days, and I'm easily distracted.
I'd like to continue, if we can find a way forward. I'm still fond of Tommy (and of Keldar... I'd watch the Keldar Show) and I'd like to see this wrapped up nicely.
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