balmung Noirzea - Eorzean Noir using Fate-14 - Sign up thread

[RiniKett]

Rini will assist An in her wrong doings! And try to talk her out of it... lawl

 

Breaking and Entering

[Khunbish Avagnar]

Blueblood sands

[Chompie]

Heyyyy guess what I'm capable of being back. Possibly. I think.

 

Arblis is a perfect fit for Breaking and Entering though. Just like old times!

[S'imba]

Sign me up for breaking and entering....let's add to S'imba and An's rap sheets.

[Nihka]

Turns:

 

Player Turns: 30

-Hihisa Hisa, Prepare (1 turn)

-Hihisa Hisa, Prepare (1 turn)

-Hihisa Hisa, Investigate (2 turns)

-Khunbish Adarkim, Investigate (2 turns)

-Anstarra Silverain, Discuss (2 turns) - Being organized

-Anstarra Silverain, Act (4 turns) - Being organized

-Hihisa Hisa, Prepare (1 turn)

 

 

Remaining Player Turns: 17

 

Khena, Investigate (2 turns)

Anstarra, Prepare (1 turn)

Anstarra, Prepare (1 turn)

Malin Greaves, Contacts (2 turns)

 

Remaining: 11

[Verad]

Put me in for breaking and entering.

[LystAP]

Maybe entering? Nyah!

[Nihka]

With the end of Noirzea, I need to reflect on elements of the plot and of the way it was run. I’m borrowing yet another idea from Verad and writing up a little Post Mortem to reflect upon elements of Noirzea (both running it, and the story itself).

 

[align=center]What Worked:[/align]

Turns:

Adopting the turn system that Verad ... adopted from somewhere else... was the best thing I did for Noirzea. When I started the plot, I knew I wanted people to be taking action in the background, between events. Initially, I tried setting blocks of time akin to “office hours” where people could take action. However, very few people took advantage of these time periods.

When a resource is limited, it becomes more desirable. The Turns system gave a clear incentive for players to take action before the turns ran out. There are quite a few tweaks that I think might improve the turn system, though. Most of them, Verad has already mentioned in his own Post Mortem:

 

“Discuss” is pointless

Act is difficult to schedule and can delay plots when trying to coax players into being available

 

I was faced with players wanting to use their turns to do large tasks, akin to an Act. It is something I intend to contemplate further, as I allowed players to perform a skill challenge, multiple rolls with greater risk and greater reward possible. It meant players could do more complex tasks behind the scenes without needing to create a whole new event for it, and provided good IC post fodder (which sadly, rarely came up).

All that said, turns were overall an incredible boon to the plot and I suggest anyone wanting to run a story to adopt some form of turn rules and limits.

 

Mister Blue:

The recurring voidsent popped up late in the plot, and I couldn’t be happier with how it turned out. Though very few of the players actually got a chance to meet him, I will never not enjoy playing this character. 

 

The Butler:

Yep, the butler did it.

 

Little goofy clues:

Even if no one saw them, I peppered events with hints and red herrings. In the very first event I ran for Noirzea, a fisherman was packing kippers into a crate. If you don’t know what a kipper is, it’s a smoked herring or other tiny fish, often colored red due to the preservation process. Everything he said was wrong, and red herrings like this were all over the story.

My favorite has to be the roegadyn named Rhotfisk (literally: Red Fish) who was a suspect in the death of Fufutilo Keketilo. No, he didn’t do it. It was the butler.

 

[align=center]What maybe worked:[/align]

The Ambiguous Ending:

Trying to do Noir has left this plot in a difficult place. Many crime stories end without a clear answer, especially gritty and dark stories. However, I knew that my players wouldn’t want to let it go. I had to wrap up more details of the story than I originally intended to.

I think it resulted in a slightly unsatisfying ending for both player and GM, and it is something that anyone who wants to run a noir style game will need to take into account when they start. I think a more casual mystery might have worked better, rather than trying to fit it into the dark noir aesthetic. A mystery with a clear and final solution.

Many people have no idea what the final resolution of Noirzea is. While this suits a noir thematic, it does not suit a plot run for many people. Something I will need to think about.

 

 

[align=center]What will be improved next plot:[/align]

Weird side-plots:

I have a tendency to create large webs of weird side plots that are only tangentially related to the main plot. It can be beneficial to some types of stories, but does not lend itself well to mystery, where everything could be a clue. 

I’m good at little clues, the clever connections between two seemingly unrelated things. The hints that get missed, but can mean a lot to the people who notice them. Sometimes, however, I go a bit overboard. I’m not going to stop including the weird side plots that I like to do, but I will be rethinking how I go about them, to improve relevance to the plot as a whole.

 

Character Limits:

I didn’t limit characters at the start. This is an incredibly touchy subject because people hate feeling left out of things. Everyone wants to be involved in every plot, but when this happens every plot suffers for it. Scheduling becomes a nightmare, as there are only so many nights that the active GMs can run, and we GMs do like to play, too.

Some players added several characters to the plot, and this makes it impossible to get any single character fully invested in the story, and investment is what’s important. A game like this can never live up to its full potential if the players aren’t worried about what will happen next, if consequences cease to matter or if one player has an alt that can solve any trouble between events.

 

In Character Posts:

I didn’t make nearly enough posts to support my own plot. This resulted from two things: limited time and mystery theming. Initially, I avoided writing too many in character posts because I did not want to give away the mystery by writing about it. This ended up not mattering, as I wrote an in character post in which I gave away that the butler did it, and no one noticed. That said, because I was trying to spread myself too thin, between Merchant, Marine; Noirzea; and Starsfall, I did not have a lot of time that I could put into writing these posts.

These posts, on the part of the GM and the players, drive character involvement and allow players a chance to show off their spotlights. I want to make these posts a greater focus in the future, to shore up this weakness that plagued Noirzea.

 

Hiatus:

When I became overwhelmed by the plot and took a break from it, the interest in the story itself crumbled. Though Noirzea ended on a high note, it never fully recovered from the period of time where I was unable to run events. I think it is important for everyone who runs, or wants to run a plot: avoid burning yourself out, pace yourself with events so that you don’t need a long break. If this means only running an event every one to two weeks, but you think you can do it consistently, then do it that way. Not every plot needs to be epic or world spanning. I tried to make Noirzea as big as Crimes was, but I tried to do so without any backup. This meant I needed a break to recover. Next plot I will keep in mind the scope, and what I am capable of, to avoid this.

In addition to the damage the hiatus did to Noirzea, it resulted in an unstable environment for every other plot that was active at the time. Without an easy way to know how many events there would be, many players lost interest, or moved to new plots, and then were faced with the difficult choice of which plot to get involved in with their limited time.

Everyone is welcome to try their hand at being a GM, and as the owner of the linkshell I highly encourage it. But my advice to anyone who wants to try is to avoid biting off more than you can chew. It would be better to have a multitude of small plots than to have a series of major stories that struggle to come to completion.

 

Rules:

This is an issue not with the plot, or with the linkshell. This is an issue with gamers in general, and I deal with it every week with my local gaming group. There are many players who simply don’t read the rules. We like to learn by doing, which isn’t inherently bad, but does result in a lot of misinformation getting spread about between players like a giant game of Telephone.

 

 

[align=center]What’s next?[/align]

 

I know that Verad is running something new as a playtest. But some day in the future, he will run another plot meant to be large. And when that day comes, I’ll be right there beside him to offer my full support and assistance with the story and with events.

To that end, I need to avoid getting too involved in my own plots, which fits nicely with my intentions as is. My next plot, which will be starting once I’ve had some time to do a lot of much-needed work for the Linkshell administration, is going to be light-hearted with a focus on fun and an aversion to grit, seriousness, and world-shattering consequences.

 

Before I can do that, I need to finally collect the results of the first Roll Eorzea survey, and take action based on what was found. I intend to have one survey every quarter, which will be used to cull inactive members, and to determine what sort of services players want or expect from the linkshell. 

I want to grow our community, because the more players we have, the more plots we can sustain without having too much overlap. With more players, the issue of character limitations per plot can be reduced. My dream is to someday have several plots running at all times, with characters moving from story to story when one ends and another begins.

 

There have been some complaints of cliquism, and I need to address this. People will always be more inclined to play with their friends more than strangers, and I don’t want to fight against that. However, I implore you all to keep an open mind to the stories we tell and the friends we bring into the linkshell. Remember, we’re more than just a small group of people playing in a single event. We’re the linkshell dedicated to spreading the joy of dice roll systems into MMO RP.