balmung [Periodic] Merchant, Marine Sign Ups

[Verad]

The last few posts in the thread close out Merchant, Marine as a storyline. There is more to be written about Gloam - at least a couple more posts - but without motivation to do so that can wait for another day.

 

Let's get to the part everyone really cares about - experience!

 

The following players receive Major Milestones:

Literally everyone. You get one if you participated in even a single event. Enjoy!

[Verad]

Post-Mortem

 

So here's what worked:

 

• Turns: 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: 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: 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: 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.
  

Here's what I think worked and maybe other people don't:

• 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.
  

Here's what I think didn't work:

• Not Enough Pirates: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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.
  

What's Next?

 

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.

[Melkire]

Guilty! Guilty! Guilty! A "Merchant, Marine" Synopsis

 

Osric

-Guilty of Already Being Guilty

-Guilty of Circumstances Beyond His Control

-Guilty of Eating Ledgers

 

Tengri

-Guilty of Slow-Motion L'Oreal Hair-Flip

-Guilty of Breaking Travel Rules Concerning Communication

-Guilty of Fruitless Efforts of the First Degree

 

Leanne

-Guilty of Sedition

-Guilty of Justifying Said Sedition

-Guilty of Guilting Others for Not Approving of Said Sedition

 

S'imba

-Guilty of Taking A Bath

-Guilty of Operating on Impulse

-Guilty Because Hydaelyn Said So

 

Yheli

-Guilty of W.M.D. Development

-Guilty of Fruitless Efforts of the Second Degree

-Guilty of Ignorance Concerning Naval Procedures and Protocols

 

Gallien

-Guilty of Abetting Sedition

-Guilty of Grand Theft Crystal

-Guilty of Making the Crew of the Immersabilis Feel Inadequate

 

Liadan

-Guilty of Caring Too Much

-Guilty of Racial Tolerance

-Guilty of Respecting Haelstyrmm

 

Tiergan

-Guilty of Caring Too Much

-Guilty of Chivalrous Tendency to Protect Damsels In Distress

-Guilty of Breaking Familial Prohibition on Sweets

 

Lurial

-Guilty of Showing Interest But Not Following Through

-Guilty of Extended Absence from The Storyline

-Guilty of Rightfully Suspecting Gallien Vyese

 

Orrin

-Guilty of Minimal Involvement

-Guilty of Posing as a Sadist

-Guilty of Attempting to Sneak a Vacation at Costa Del Sol

 

Aya

-Guilty of Believing The Best of Everyone

-Guilty of Violently Pole Dancing By Way of Garlean "Volunteers"

-Guilty of Missing Too Many Shifts at the Quicksand

 

Virara

-Guilty of Being Everyone's Friend

-Guilty of Assaulting Potion Sellers

-Probably Guilty of a Flying Drop Kick

 

Zanzan

-Guilty of Making A Lot of Sisters Cry

-Guilty of Actually Attending A Training Course

-Guilty of Catamaran Shenanigans

 

Qara

-Guilty of Crimes Against Paint

-Guilty of Loving a Vegetable

-Guilty of Catamaran Shenanigans

 

Chahka

-Guilty of Tsundere Tendencies

-Guilty of Vegetable Hatred

-Guilty of Murderous Murderlizard Murder

 

Aigiarn

-Guilty of Fantasy Prone Personality

-Guilty of Enabling Ding-Dong-Ditch on Gloam's Doorstep

-Guilty of Extensive Knowledge of Borealis-Class Stealth Assault Bombers

 

Hihisa

-Guilty of Panicking

-Guilty of Playing with Daddy's Toys

-Guilty of Getting Daddy in Trouble with Daddy's Friends

 

 

Anstarra

-Guilty of Showing Up Late to the Storyline

-Guilty of Flirtatious Displays Unbecoming An Officer

-Guilty of Murderous Murdercatte Murder

 

Ojene

-Guilty of Showing Up Late to the Storyline

-Guilty of Being Wright to Holsk's Edgeworth

-Guilty of Believing Everyone Else to Be Several Cards Short of a Full Deck

 

Khunbish

-Guilty of Showing Up Late to the Storyline

-Guilty of Not Being Guilty of Anything Else

-Not Guilty (Excepting the Aforementioned Guilt)

 

Edda

-Guilty of Charity

-Guilty of Association with Monetarists

-Guilty of Character Development

 

Eamon

-Guilty of Nobility

-Guilty of Mercantilism

-Guilty of Profiteering

-Guilty of Treason By Way of Collusion With The Garlean Empire

-Guilty of Getting Away With It

-Guilty of Being Sir-Not-Appearing-In-This-Storyline

-Guilty of Being Too Handsome For His Age

-Guilty of Being The Subject of Too Many Slash Fics

-Guilty of Being Shipped with Commodore Haelstyrmm Eynarhmsson

-Guilty of Being Most Guilty

-Guilty of Being Guilty of Being Most Guilty

[RiniKett]

Well I had loads of fun. Thanks Verad!