Post-Mortem
So here's what worked:
I'm done with Fate-14 for now. It's fine, it's fun, other people want to run things for it, and I have no further material I want to add to it. I am currently working on playtesting a system which does some things more effectively than Fate-14 - faster rolls, in-game roller - at the cost of some things other people like - such as Stunts - to see how well that fares in future storylines. To that end, the next thing is a closed storyline done for the sake of playtesting. Stay tuned for IC posts for Verad Bellveil Vs. The World.
So here's what worked:
- Turns:Â The adopted system taken from Seasons worked really well, and I have to credit Halren Rhalsgard for coming up with the original. It was extremely useful for managing the actions of many people. I think I need to make adjustments for maximum number of turns a character can reasonably use at once, dispense with the Discussion action as being generally useless, and figure out some way to allow multiple people to work together on single actions that aren't important enough to be turned into Act events, but otherwise this was a great system and I highly recommend both the original and the modified version used in Merchant, Marine.
- Commodore Haelstyrmm: Man, people hated this guy, which was as intended. He did a number of useful things for me - he made the storyline more complicated than "re-establish Limsan sovereignty over these turncoats," he spat in the face of the "show don't tell" rule writers use to great effect (at no point did I ever show him engaging in wanton acts of physical cruelty, merely implied by reputation and OOC, with the sole exception of Osric's post involving the Black Spot), and he proved there's nothing RPers hate more than a sense of smug rudeness.
- Organizing Large Events:Â Normally Fate events run at about 4-6 players to help minimize the amount of OOC that has to be done. The scale of the big naval battle around Gloam, however, demanded more players and opening that event to such a size required me to adopt new organizational practices to accommodate everyone. After a rough first hour, everybody adapted quickly, and an event I was afraid might take two days was successfully ended before midnight my time. I highly recommend using smaller parties with OOC "Callers" for each player's actions, as was done for this event, not just for ship combat but mass combat.
- Trials:Â Back in my days of RP on WoW, I remember many a guild attempting to run some public trial, and I remember all of them being total embarrassments. Every character insisted on acting like they were the protagonist of the trial, replete with all the shocking twists common to Phoenix Wright games and old courtroom dramas. I was very interested in working with this not only to see if trials could be done more effectively but if they could have real weight without the pre-determined outcomes they tended to have in the many events I saw. The overall result of this was a success - the Morris Trial in particular was a high-stakes event with a lot of emotional investment on all sides, and the first event of a Trial, "An Impartial Martial," let all participants know that the conception of Limsan naval codes in this storyline was a kind of half-applied farce more reliant on the opinion of the captains than on the codes themselves. The final trial for Haelstyrmm's hearing was a bit worse, but even that had some variation in outcome (and was related to other reasons which will be discussed below.
- Theme:Â Well, I wanted a Limsan sea story that wasn't about Nym or Treasure Island/PotC-style piratical antics, and I certainly managed that much. Looking to the works of Melville and C.S. Forester proved a valuable resource for avoiding the standard tropes of buried treasure and pirate curses.
- The Immersabilis: Last year, shortly before the end of Crimes, my partners in crime in that story found me screaming "MAGITEK SUBMARINE" at them in various chat windows. It was too good an idea to pass up and entirely plausible given the nature of Garlemald and Garlean technology. It served as an excellent first point of focus in the story as the players and characters alike grappled with how to develop the technology to beat it.
- The Warrior of Light: I will die on this hill and I don't care. I did not plan on including the WoL as an NPC, but once the circumstances made it sensible that they would arrive once players started dragging Scions into the circumstances, I thought it would be stranger not to include them. I also managed, in my view, to create the right means of including the WoL - as a heroic but ultimately passive figure that steps up when it seems all else has failed, and one so indistinct that nobody really quite recalls their appearance in any meaningful way. Saved me a lot of time on description, let me tell you that.
- Eamon Eglantine: At Fanfest last year, Edda picked my brain on the course of the plot and became curious as to whether she could work Eamon into it. We conspired to have him in the background quietly supplying the Gloam separatists as part of a deal with his Garlean connections. The hope was that the blowback from this would eventually affect his business and Edda by proximity, but circumstances kept arranging such that the character was able to skate by without much trouble, and most of the players found more immediately pressing things to do than investigate his connection to the plot. While his background contributions were important, I do feel bad that I couldn't include Edda more thoroughly than I did. Don't worry Edda! Your number will come up.
- Not Enough Pirates:Â So when I made this storyline and the ship rules intended to accompany it, I had the notion that pirate players and pirate-themed FCs would join the storyline because it would let them actually do piratical things with their ship. This didn't happen - in part, I feel, because I reneged on the plot restriction described below. Thus, most of the players who joined with ships were generally Maelstrom loyalists whose ships were part of the auxiliary fleet command structure rather than being of a more piratical or privateering bent. There's nothing wrong with that in and of itself, but that did lend to the more militaristic, legalistic theme the story eventually developed.
- Not Enough Coordination: Too many cooks would be another way to put this, but I don't want people to hear the song in their heads. Suffice it to say that many people underwent different plans which all faltered not because there was anything wrong with any one plan - I'm flexible, and most responses are feasible, if difficult. Rather, people kept getting sidetracked as to which plan they wanted to implement, which led to many abandoned actions halfway through. One thing I'll need to work on with Turns is player coordination to prevent players from burning through many turns on an idea they then abandon shortly after.
- Everybody Was Wanted:Â By the end of this storyline at least 2/3rds of the cast were wanted in Limsa for various crimes. There's nothing wrong with this in and of itself, but it can be easy for that to dominate the plot when everybody has reason to distrust everybody else and a reason to sick the legal authorities upon them.
- Not Enough Co-DMs:Â In Crimes Against Nature, I was supported by Nihka and Spahro. They helped me with sideplots and main plot material alike. This didn't happen as much here. Spahro was unavailable for IRL reasons, and while Nihka was initially helpful, I didn't rely on her as much as I rightly should have. In larger storylines, I plan to correct this so it doesn't happen again.
- No Plot Limitation:Â This takes some explanation. I had originally planned on limiting this storyline so that new players could sign up without fighting for spots with more experienced Fate-14 players. However, I did that on the expectation that veterans had other plots they could play instead, and the linkshell's roster of storylines was at a low ebb; many were on hiatus or outright cancelled. Thus, there seemed to be no problem with removing the restriction. In hindsight, that was a mistake, because the other plots started up again weeks or months after. I feel I should have stuck to my guns, which would have prevented some of the other problems described above.
- Too Much OOC Communication:Â This is unusual to say, but bear with me. This was the first storyline where Roll Eorzea had a Discord. This meant the players were in more regular OOC contact than was the case in my past storylines. Not a problem in and of itself, but in a storyline where characters started turning and fighting each other, it led to a lot of OOC taunting that started out in a good-natured fashion but, as time proceeded, became more genuinely hostile and stressful. In future storylines, I will be finding some means of limiting OOC communications just to keep players from stressing each other out.
I'm done with Fate-14 for now. It's fine, it's fun, other people want to run things for it, and I have no further material I want to add to it. I am currently working on playtesting a system which does some things more effectively than Fate-14 - faster rolls, in-game roller - at the cost of some things other people like - such as Stunts - to see how well that fares in future storylines. To that end, the next thing is a closed storyline done for the sake of playtesting. Stay tuned for IC posts for Verad Bellveil Vs. The World.
Verad Bellveil's Profile | The Case of the Ransacked Rug | Verad's Fate Sheet
Current Fate-14 Storyline:Â Merchant, Marine
Current Fate-14 Storyline:Â Merchant, Marine