D1: Ashin's Commission (El Jefe judging)

[Rystil Arden]

(OOC: I just want to say that I don't have any lingering resentment over this. You're a judge in one of the hardest positions possible--trying to pick up a game for a vanished GM. That is to be commended, and I don't think I could even manage to do it if I had to.

On the other hand, I will admit that the exact 'gotcha' thing you mention above is exactly what it feels like to me. At this point, we've spent months in character dealing with a very easy encounter and then come out apparently outsmarted by counting to three That makes me feel that we've already ruined this adventure to an unrecoverable unfun point due to a misreading/misunderstanding.

But what makes me saddest of all is that I've seen problem PbP players and, well, this situation is making me start to act a lot like they did, and that upsets me--I want everyone to have fun in a PbP game, and I definitely don't want to be making anyone else have less fun in their game...so before I do that (or maybe after, but I hope not ) I feel it is the right thing to do to bow out.

As an aside, and this isn't even entirely related to just this adventure (LPNN is part of it too), I admit I feel a bit stymied too--Zaeryl appeared on the scene at about the same time as a particular influx of characters, and due to a series of misfortunes with GMs and recovering adventures, he has been more-or-less unable to have many fun adventures or progress despite equal play time (some of them are as high as level 6 to Zaeryl's 3, with 3 or 4 completed adventures). I have had some interesting RP moments with Zaeryl in this adventure, and those were fun (except with Michael because beating up on other people's PCs verbally is never fun ), so I'm happy for those at least.)

 

[Erekose13]

(ooc: El Jefe, fwiw I think you have Eternity down. She is a young spirit and wanted to make sure that the soldiers were not dead. In the heat of combat, she wanted more to catch up with Zaeryl and the soldier he was after than to pick up the other one she had fried. When I posted that I thought we had all three it was cause I had thought Michael had picked up the last one. I played her as confused (which was kinda easy) and that came across in both her actions in my posts and the results of her actions.

When the argument with Michael came up (and when he cast his spell in the first place) I didn't post anything in reaction because I kinda fled from the OOC conflict that I saw inherent in the situation. It was probably a little irresponsible, but I was busy in RL too.

After that I just assumed we had all three and never thought to check. The flight and the argument made me as a player even stop to think about it. Given that I am playing Eternity in much the same way, I am happy to continue from here knowing and dealing with having left one of the soldiers behind.

I think that you have done a great job of picking up the pieces of doghead's adventure and commend you on taking it over. I've seen it happen all to often and am proud to consider myself your peer as a judge. I think that this can continue just fine with lots of interesting RP, though I don't know where we are going I am sure that will sort itself out soon enough.)

 

[El Jefe]

RA, E13 - Thank you both for the kind words. I appreciate it.

RA - Regarding "gotcha", I feel this is the result of the "verisimilitude" I was trying to inject into the game. You nailed it, it is a matter of style. In RL, people experience unpleasant surprises all the time, and that includes the lost car keys that emerge in the silverware drawer a week later. I wasn't sure just what the PC's were going to do about Private Stander, and the posted actions seemed plausible to me at the time.

In fairness, I'd be outraged to roll 32 on a Spot, only to be told, "you didn't look up". Unless, of course, I specifically mentioned that I was going over every inch of the floor, taking 20 to check the floor for hidden traps or anything else I might find. I tried to compare that example to what happened in this game, and the only thing I can think of that I maybe should have considered was that some of the characters passed fairly near to Private Stander when they were doing the "horse dropoff" thing, and might have seen him still lying there. But to me, those characters seemed consumed with making a getaway, not making one last check of the area before leaving to see if they'd missed anything.

RA - on another subject entirely, I have noticed the behavior you mentioned, and it both baffled me and frustrated me. I think two things were going on there. The first is that Zaeryl is an unusual character, one might say a "difficult" character, and you seemed to be true to the concept you defined for him. To me, that seemed to be trading off overall party enjoyment for the sake of good roleplaying. I became conscious of the temptation to judge you as a player because of a conscious decision to play such an extreme character, and I felt that would be unfair to you and would also lower me to a standard of DMing that I didn't want to descend to. So I simply assumed that you had something worthwhile and meaninful planned for Zaeryl somewhere down the road that would make the intra-party "difficulty" worth putting up with, and resolved to just accept it, even if I didn't particularly enjoy the effect on the party or on the outcome of the adventure. FWIW, you're not the only player who brought a "difficult" character along for this adventure, although I think Zaeryl stands out in that respect.

The other thing that arose out of this was my reaction to this, and it came back to that verisimilitude thing again. For example, if your character insults a sheep, nothing much happens unless that sheep has some reaction to your body language. But if your character insults an intelligent NPC, then I don't think that as a player you should be shocked to find that NPC develops some antipathy to your character. In the context of this adventure, I felt that you thought the NPCs should be pushovers, and became determined to give them a fair shake given their training, organization, and level. In retrospect, I wouldn't be surprised if you told me that came across to you as if I was trying to "beat" your character with my "characters". I didn't do that and won't cop to it. But I am quite guilty of trying to push you into a style of play you may not be comfortable with (contrast this thread with the Laynie and Vanitri adventure!), and that may have detracted from your enjoyment of the game. "Verisimiltude" is a tool I use to create an immersive environment, one where actions have logical consequences, to the point where the pine forest acts like a real pine forest. (Trees are not 5' in diameter, and one can easily travel in a "straight" line with a little bit of squeezing, although visibility is often no better than 20-50' in broad daylight.) But if my efforts to create an immersive environment end up detracting from the enjoyment of the game, all I can do is apologize for overdoing it. Sorry about that.

 

[ajanders]

Ooc

If Michael's presence here is causing this much conflict, I will be pleased to pull him out -- it's a valid storypath for him.
Similarly, I don't game where I'm not wanted. If my company is inconvenient, say the word and I'll go.

I'm not terribly upset by the party conflict on a personal basis: don't confuse Michael's hurt feelings with mine. I confess I hope he's proved right.

El Jefe, it's been a pleasure working with you: no hard feelings if you have to make a decision.
The rest of you, also: no hard feelings if you have to make a decision.

 

[Rystil Arden]

felt that you thought the NPCs should be pushovers, and became determined to give them a fair shake given their training, organization, and level. In retrospect, I wouldn't be surprised if you told me that came across to you as if I was trying to "beat" your character with my "characters".

(OOC: I'll admit that it did. This is mainly because the actions the soldiers chose were, in my mind, actually very stupid actions that someone with training would not realistically take but actually happened to be choices that exacerbated the situation. In effect, they made it even more certain that they would perish (well, they managed to survive because some of the other PCs chose to keep them alive, but they would have perished if we actually wanted to kill them) in exchange for simply making the situation more difficult and causing Zaeryl's readied action not to trigger. The weird movement without attacking? That was an incredible tactical blunder in that it gave plenty of time to allow their third ally to be easily ganged up against, even when they knew we wanted the stone from him primarily. If they had just attacked, they may very well have offed Zaeryl before the other slowpokes meandered over there and thus been able to gain an edge on us. This is, of course, all in my opinion, but it seemed like another 'gotcha'. Tactics that I thought were actually good tactics for soldiers to use that screwed us up? I'd have just laughed and said 'Good one'. For example--throwing a bolas to get Zaeryl tied up or something like that. However, the particular tactics had the appearance of being metagamed, though I am of course not saying that they actually were.

However, this is indeed the first point where I was being frustrated.

RA - on another subject entirely, I have noticed the behavior you mentioned, and it both baffled me and frustrated me. I think two things were going on there. The first is that Zaeryl is an unusual character, one might say a "difficult" character, and you seemed to be true to the concept you defined for him. To me, that seemed to be trading off overall party enjoyment for the sake of good roleplaying. I became conscious of the temptation to judge you as a player because of a conscious decision to play such an extreme character, and I felt that would be unfair to you and would also lower me to a standard of DMing that I didn't want to descend to. So I simply assumed that you had something worthwhile and meaninful planned for Zaeryl somewhere down the road that would make the intra-party "difficulty" worth putting up with, and resolved to just accept it, even if I didn't particularly enjoy the effect on the party or on the outcome of the adventure. FWIW, you're not the only player who brought a "difficult" character along for this adventure, although I think Zaeryl stands out in that respect.

(OOC: Zaeryl is definitely an unusual character. However, I don't think he ever got to be a problem in-character--even with Michael, Zaeryl was actually morally-enough in the right (for perhaps the first time ever against a LG cleric) that pretty much any NG or CG character I've created would have taken the general path that the other PCs did--agree with him that Michael was wrong but chide a bit for the unkind way he said it. In that sense, Zaeryl was actually doing so willingly--he likes this group (except Michael), and he was willing to be a scapegoat that people didn't like and be the 'crazy' guy who threatened to kill Michael for the others' sakes and to protect their freedoms.

So I don't necessarily think it's Zaeryl in-character but more that I'm just getting frustrated out of character at being stymied at every turn.)

The other thing that arose out of this was my reaction to this, and it came back to that verisimilitude thing again.

(OOC: I'm actually with you on verisimilitude--I think it is a worthwhile goal, and I always have NPCs react in a way I consider to be realistic. However, in my personal opinion, I think you go too far when you actually mess up the verisimilitude in the name of verisimilitude. What do I mean? Well, I hope the following doesn't sound too harsh. I don't mean to be harsh, but I'm having trouble finding the words here, so I'll just have to use them. If you think the tone is harsh, please ratchet it down about three levels, and that's what I wish I could express, but I can't. Anyway, here goes.

You've ruined my verisimilitude for Zaeryl. Zaeryl has the highest Intelligence and Wisdom point buy combined of any character at this level that I've ever made (I typically dump Wisdom to have fun with absentminded smart characters, typically with good charisma too). He's an observant genius (with social issues, granted) and if he doesn't always make the right choice, he's at least tactically on top of every situation. And it was within my stated intentions to be sure we had them all. Not only that, it wasn't even that I was negligent and ignored the thought of the three soldiers out of character either. I actively out of character recalled the three soldiers and read through the thread (without voiding the other people's SBLOCKs until just recently) with the intent to ensure that we had them all and I was convinced that we did. There was not a single post that I could have possibly read that would have led me to believe otherwise. No "They only have the two soldiers". No "Zaeryl sees the fallen soldier on the ground." It was literally impossible for me to read through the thread and discover the loss of the third soldier without asking metagaming OOC questions, and even when I just went through to check tonight, I still thought we had all three. But that isn't the thing that frustrated me most--this is that Zaeryl came out of it looking like a complete idiot. He's expounded like ten times on how we can't let any of them be left behind. But we already did leave them behind? That's perhaps the thing that destroyed my morale and my fun, the only part of this situation that I can look at and honestly say that I think you were simply 'wrong' and not just that it was a difference of opinion. It's not that we're screwed by leaving the soldier (which we are, but that doesn't matter), not even really that it still seems like a gotcha (which admittedly it does), but because you made my character look like a mentally-challenged otyugh, just like the failed Spot check for not 'looking up' made that player feel that their keen-eyed scout character was being made a buffoon. I would have greatly appreciated a post when Zaeryl came past that either we had only two or he saw the third, but the thing that I can't deal with and has made me not want to continue the game (because, and I want to find a simple way to say it that isn't 'I don't trust you' because it isn't quite that, but it almost is--I'm expecting a 'gotcha' around every corner) is that at least the first time Zaeryl brought this up, even if it was already too late, you didn't send a little OOC with 'by the way, you only have two of them'.

Now, you may have noticed this, and I'm not saying I'm right to be this way, but I just noticed it myself: I'm typically pretty laid back until the GM starts 'gotcha'ing me, and then, when I feel the GM is being adversarial, I stop trusting that GM to have me go with the flow and start trying to micromanage, to bring up rules to make sure all the players don't keep getting screwed, etc. For an example of what I mean, Isida Kep'Tukari makes long updates in her games because she is rather sporadic lately, and she extrapolates actions for characters to make those updates. And I've never had trouble with letting her choose actions for my character or writing out a paragraph or two of what my character did. Why? Because she's never used that to screw us over. I'm willing to let things be simple and go with the flow, especially to end something like that which was so complicated. The fact is that I assumed we had the three soldiers along with several other details because it seemed to say that we did and I didn't want to be 'that guy' who stalls the game for a week asking OOC questions like that before we could leave--I just wanted to let us leave and I trusted that if something weird like that happened, you would understand that all the players were trying to help you clear this confusion up by going along with it and point things out or give us the benefit of the doubt.

Unfortunately, it seems that the way that we viewed the situation were completely opposite. That isn't to say that I don't see your side--I absolutely do. We could have put in OOC questions about whether we had all three soldiers, etc, and we didn't. I just don't want to be in a situation where I have to be wracking my nerves over the details in already-confusing situations and/or getting adversarial with the GM--I like to be friends with the GMs. Every GM, especially a Judge who took over a game like you, deserves respect and friendship from the players. GMing is not easy, and it is a commitment taken to bring fun to the players. GMs deserve better than to have to put up with grief over a game, and so I don't want you to have to either, and I predict more grief in the future with the way this is going. So anyway, that's why I feel I need to leave the game. And I'm hoping these posts are helping you understand my position, but if you feel they are also giving you grief, I can stop posting them too --the key is that I don't want to mess up the game for everyone else


EDIT: And ajanders, it definitely isn't you. Your roleplaying is excellent and interesting, and indeed I often vote for you for best RP in those monthly vote thingies. There's no reason that you would have to leave.)

 

[El Jefe]

ajanders - I would not dream of asking anyone to leave at this point, especially not Michael. If anything, I'm just trying to give us all an opportunity to cool down and reconsider a few things.

(OOC: I'll admit that it did. This is mainly because the actions the soldiers chose were, in my mind, actually very stupid actions that someone with training would not realistically take but actually happened to be choices that exacerbated the situation.

Without nitpicking this to death, I felt just the opposite about this. In reading over the paragraph that you posted (the first sentence of which is quoted above), all you've done is restate some assumputions you (RA? Zaeryl? I really can't tell in this particular instance) made back during the encounter about the soldier's goals and motivation. OoC, all I can really say is that you're reading the soldiers wrong, and that their actions make very good sense to me within the context of those goals and motivations. I agree, if this had been a simple case of "There are these 6 people attacking us, and we have to deal with that", then those actions would have made no sense and the 3 soldiers would have done something completely different.

In effect, they made it even more certain that they would perish (well, they managed to survive because some of the other PCs chose to keep them alive, but they would have perished if we actually wanted to kill them) in exchange for simply making the situation more difficult and causing Zaeryl's readied action not to trigger. The weird movement without attacking?

The fact that Zaeryl's action wasn't triggered was purely an accident of the asymmetrical tactics of Zaeryl and the soldiers, and was neither an IC goal of the soldiers nor an OoC goal of mine. The soldiers certainly didn't know that Zaeryl had a readied action, nor did they know what powers he had. OoC, I thought the encounter would be more enjoyable for everyone if Zaeryl did not attack, but was resigned to just "playing it out" if he did (see previous posts on how I viewed Zaeryl). It turned out to be a pleasant surprise for me that what I saw to be the logical response of the soldiers ended up delaying Zaeryl's attack through no plan of mine or theirs.

That was an incredible tactical blunder in that it gave plenty of time to allow their third ally to be easily ganged up against, even when they knew we wanted the stone from him primarily. If they had just attacked, they may very well have offed Zaeryl before the other slowpokes meandered over there and thus been able to gain an edge on us.

The key point is at that time, the soldiers saw Zaeryl as an annoyance, not a threat, and saw the rest of the party as neither. Between the effects of Michael's spell wearing off, Zaeryl's IC actions (which the soldiers misunderstood and misinterpreted), and Hulgyr's actions, Private Stander had an "Oh, Sugar!" moment, where he realized that he'd really screwed up. But his screwup was in misunderstanding the threat to the three, not in anything that he did while he was operating under that faulty understanding.

(OOC: Zaeryl is definitely an unusual character. However, I don't think he ever got to be a problem in-character--even with Michael, Zaeryl was actually morally-enough in the right (for perhaps the first time ever against a LG cleric) that pretty much any NG or CG character I've created would have taken the general path that the other PCs did--agree with him that Michael was wrong but chide a bit for the unkind way he said it. In that sense, Zaeryl was actually doing so willingly--he likes this group (except Michael), and he was willing to be a scapegoat that people didn't like and be the 'crazy' guy who threatened to kill Michael for the others' sakes and to protect their freedoms.

So I don't necessarily think it's Zaeryl in-character but more that I'm just getting frustrated out of character at being stymied at every turn.)

Well, in my perception, one led to the other. It's not so much a matter of morals as of assumptions. Given certain assumptions, Zaeryl's actions were the "right" ones to take, and given certain other actions, Michael's were. What happened here was that all the chickens that had flown the coop during the "ant" encounter (recall when Hulgyr started to ride off to attack the ants and had to be restrained?) came home to roost, in spades. And that greatly contributed to my OoC frustration. It was possible to handle that entire encounter without ever entering combat, but I had to deal with one character plotting (and starting to implement) a surprise attack while simultaneously another character was planning a parley. I'm sure you see the absurdity of pursuing both strategies at the same time. OoC, I was hoping that both the players and the characters would resolve that before approaching the soldiers, but when that didn't happen, I felt the only way I could resolve it was to have everyone just roll initiative and play it out.

And the party worked at cross purposes on several occasions during that encounter. Individually, all the PC's actions made sense for that PC. But a group is capable of functioning as more than the sum of its parts, and during that encounter the party functioned as exactly the sum of its parts, no more, no less.

When you started getting frustrated and losing faith with me, you started micromanaging and bringing up rules issues. I felt you were being adversarial. But because I'd made a couple of genuine rules mistakes, I felt it was only fair to give your character his due and to allow him to do whatever the rules allowed. Just the same, all the retconning interrupted the flow of what was already becoming a complex and confusing encounter for everyone else, and my frustration was mounting. Moreover, I couldn't really blame you or anyone else for my mistakes, could I?

I think we reached the height of absurdity late in the encounter, when you suggested that the encounter was basically over and that since everyone in the party was doing exactly the same thing, we could just arm-wave the conclusion. After over a dozen turns of tracking detail after detail, I was all too ready to do exactly that. And then, just as I was prepared to step out of combat time, two party members who had agreed to do exactly the same thing proceeded to declare that they were moving in opposite directions.

I need to go, and don't have time to properly finish this post. But I do want to say that I don't consider Zaeryl to be an idiot, or that he acted like one. From a spoiler block marked for "everyone but Ironwood":

"Now that the party has started running out of things to argue about and has clumped together somewhat, things are getting much simpler. Everybody but Ironwolf is in a small clump in the middle of the woods. Everybody is mounted. Hulgyr has Private Squatter draped over his horse. Michael is leading Ironwolf's horse by the reins. Ironwolf is nowhere to be seen, but judging by the sounds coming toward the party from the direction of Duvik, he is probably about 30-40' away and about to pop out of the trees at any moment."

At that point, I felt that if Zaeryl wanted to count noses, he had the perfect opportunity. And OoC, if you wanted some clarification, you had a golden opportunity to do likewise and bring it to my attention. But previously (just a couple of posts earlier), you had posted to the effect of (paraphrasing) "Zaeryl wants nothing more than to ride away from the camp at the earliest opportunity)." Again, I'm not a mind reader. Zaeryl had mentioned attrition and had studiously dragged a soldier through the woods himself. But I honestly couldn't tell if your concept for Zaeryl was "let's make sure we have at least one soldier to interrogate" or if it was "let's get as many as we can but still get out of here quickly" or "let's make sure we get every last soldier and scoot". I took the actions and posts of the group at face value, and maybe that was a mistake.

 

[B4cchus]

I'm not going to come close to the word count in my recap and opinion of the way things went. I'm also not going to involve myself in the discussion between RA and El Jefe or discuss El Jefe's DM style. I will give my own, short opinion about the whole situation and my thoughts on how to continue.
First off, we have had quite some frustations during the course of this adventure, both ic and ooc.
IC our party interactions have had thier struggles. It is a very versatile party with characters who thinkk about and react to situations in a completely different manner. For instance, ooc i'm not surprised about michael's casting of calm emotions to prevent Hulgyr to do his usual hot-headed reaction and provoke the soldiers into attacking or attack them himself. IC Hulgyr has a whole other opinion on the matter.
OOC we had frustations due to the very slow pace of the game and long pauses due Doghead's problems. Like RA I see my other characters progress much faster. They've catched up with Hulgyr xp-wise in a fraction of RL time that hulgyr took to get where he is, while hulgyr is my first LEW character.
I think this encounter has taken the last bit of patience and flexibility we had out of us and blew the lid off the whole thing.
I don't see any reason (except maybe someone's own personal reasons) for anybody to quit the party. Zaeryl and Michael won't like each other.. Hulgyr will be suspicious about Micael's spellcasting (but still thinks of michael as a swell guy given past experiences together). Hulgyr will also think Zaeryl get's out of line too fast and should be nicer to Michael. But are those really reason's to shrink the party by one member? Not in my opinion.
It would be nice to continue the whole thing in a bit faster pace (maybe random encounter less here or there. Anything to get the sense that we're 'on the path and getting things done' again).
Finally to El Jefe: I concur with the already noted praise on you picking up this abandoned game. The situation isn't easy, the party isn't easy, we'll just have to make the best of it together and try to go have some fun out of it.

 

[Patlin]

Ironwolf's in character dispute with Zeryl is strictly an alignment matter -- a dispute that I'm accustomed to as a roleplayer, and one which the structure of the game encourages.

His in character semi-dispute with Michael is over revulsion to attempts to control his mind, which has caused him to have some doubts as to his previous close relationship with the cleric.

I don't have any ooc disputes with anybody in the party.

I would like a faster pace, but I'm somewhat notorious for that by now.

 

[Rystil Arden]

I need to go, and don't have time to properly finish this post. But I do want to say that I don't consider Zaeryl to be an idiot, or that he acted like one. From a spoiler block marked for "everyone but Ironwood":

No, he was definitely made out to be an idiot when he continually mentioned how they had all the soldiers and we couldn't leave any witnesses. I even mentioned this OOC a bunch of times too.

Well, in my perception, one led to the other. It's not so much a matter of morals as of assumptions. Given certain assumptions, Zaeryl's actions were the "right" ones to take, and given certain other actions, Michael's were.

I actually feel, OOC, that Michael's assumptions are unreasonable and borderline suicidal given specficially the instructions of our employer in the adventure (I had a post up that quoted Ashin a few times somewhere back there), Do I have PCs that would have done something similar? Yup, but I would have done it knowing that.

It was possible to handle that entire encounter without ever entering combat, but I had to deal with one character plotting (and starting to implement) a surprise attack while simultaneously another character was planning a parley. I'm sure you see the absurdity of pursuing both strategies at the same time. OoC, I was hoping that both the players and the characters would resolve that before approaching the soldiers, but when that didn't happen, I felt the only way I could resolve it was to have everyone just roll initiative and play it out.

Not to hit on ajanders here at all, as it wasn't his fault, but I think everyone in the party except Michael did come to an agreement here. I've talked to at least one other player in private who had come to the same conclusion about the proposed plan--ask for the crystal nicely, see how they respond, take it and not attack if they gave it, and attack otherwise. Believe me, if Zaeryl was actually planning to implement a surprise attack, you can bet this would have actually turned out much more easily, as he'd have just gone up to them and blasted them. The problem was that he was trying to let the group do it the way they had all agreed--Zaeryl actually followed the plan, whereas Michael started changing it (like I said, this is probably Zaeryl's first and only time of being the one basically in the right, as he certainly wasn't on previous occasions

When you started getting frustrated and losing faith with me, you started micromanaging and bringing up rules issues.

I don't mean to nitpick again, but I was only getting frustrated then--the one and only thing that made me lose faith was what just occurred.)

 

[Rystil Arden]

(OOC: El Jefe--I need you to look over post 730 (just after Zaeryl defeated his soldier), read it carefully, and then honestly and truly tell me that you feel justified in the following assertion you made. I'll quote both below--remember, this is the first time I mentioned this, and I remember doing so to make my intentions clear (I later continued to stress this in and out of character)

*Zaeryl beats the soldier once again for good measure in case he was only staggered, then drags the body back towards the rest of the group--they can't let the enemies recover either of these soldiers now or else they'll tell the tale of the party and cause Duvik's safety to fall in jeopardy.*

Again, I'm not a mind reader...I honestly couldn't tell if your concept for Zaeryl was "let's make sure we have at least one soldier to interrogate" or if it was "let's get as many as we can but still get out of here quickly" or "let's make sure we get every last soldier and scoot". I took the actions and posts of the group at face value, and maybe that was a mistake.