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I was told not everyone may have wanted to post daily.
I could be wrong, but I think you may have potentially misunderstood. I believe the intention was to communicate to you that not every player always responds to a post if they don't feel they have anything to contribute or will otherwise alter the scene not that they are unwilling to post daily.
Personally, I've always felt "posting requirements" in PbPs are kind of self-defeating. If I, as a GM, make a post that only addresses only 1 or 2 players or targets a skill which only a couple characters have or one character who posts before another executes the Skill better than that other character could have, there's really nothing for those players to do except await the GM's response. I am not surprised when the other 3 don't put anything up for more than 24 hours (the posted daily agreement, etc.) if the next round of posts is essentially waiting on me.
I think of "posting daily" as "check the thread at least once a day to see if your character's input is required or could add something (especially if combat is occurring) to the scene." Not that I will see a post with each character's alias on it every 24 hours.
If we are not happy, I can understand. Real life gets in the way of posting every day. If it is time to call it, we can call it. This should be fun and not a chore.
Posting as Tibold is fun. It's the confusion on what's happening which also dribbles over to the other players not really responding to Tibold as they also wait to figure out what's going on which is a chore. And I'm not accusing the other players of ignoring Tibold, but rather that they sometimes seem to take a breath to see if you're going to respond with something before committing to responding.
I really think we've just gotten into a really strange pattern and the group's confused, GM and players, and what signals the time to move on and the time to continue the existing scene. Especially when not everyone's posts seem to acknowledge each other's actions or posts are made thinking we are in the same locations, conversations, and such only to have that turned around unexpectedly.
We just haven't been very good at communicating with each other. Maybe we need to start spoilering our posts with timestamps
"Ha-ha-ha!"
I don't know. I'd like to see things work, but if no one else is interested in a discussion (I see you, Brightberry), we really don't have much to more to try.
I check this post multiple times, every day. I chose to play a non social plant folk, who will may slowly warm up to everyone. I agree, I don't always see that I have something to add to a given situation, but if it helps that I give a nod, or ask an ivy vine a question, to "post", I'll be more than happy to do so. Our characters haven't really even gotten to know each other yet, and I'm still excited to see that happen.
So, if not everyone had something to add to a situation, should it be expected that everyone adds 'something' before a scene gets moved along, GM Tribute? Would that help?
As I currently GM my own game, if my daily work permits, I'm refreshing on the hour if not more frequently. (Today has been particularly tedious as my ticket queue has been empty and like no one is responding in any of my PbPs anywhere.)
I promise you, most of the time, it's not an issue of being able to post aside from things coming up like getting sick or whatever. It's very much more likely to be that I sometimes fail to see what I can add, or rather I feel Tibold's reaction or next move/comment is totally dependent on the next post by either a GM or specific player(s).
I just feel like there have been a lot of posts which don't seem to indicate that other people's posts actually happened which makes it very difficult to know what's technically canon or needs to become sidebar or redressed in a new post. That's been confusing the hell out of me most of the time.
I'm hoping there's still enough interest to solving that for a smoother experience on all sides.
Tibold I 100% agree with your assessment of everything, including people's reasons for not posting, especially the "waiting for a question to be answered/post to be addressed".
I also didn't expect the response to the reason not everyone posts every day (when sometimes there's nothing to respond to), to be going to a 3x a week. For myself, there may be a few hours between a post and me responding to it, simply because I'm mostly active at night. I work overnight, and am constantly online all night, and when I do sleep is likely the time that most people are posting.
It's true that given the circumstances the party hasn't really had too much time to bond/get to know each other, which will help keep the posting going.
The splitting the party/people wandering off doesn't help with the confusing posts either, and I recommend that if a party member or party members are separate from the main group, spoilers should be used to separate the main scene from the side scene.
I'm all for trying to iron things out and keep going forward. I think the structure of an AP going into Kingmaker might help a bit with keeping up a steady pace.
What time zone do you post from, Saoirse? I’m awake much more often than I’m asleep sadly, but, yes, my most frequent posting hours are between 10am-6pm AZ Mountain time in the US. For the blissfully ignorant, Arizona ignores that silly Daylight Savings Time routine the rest of the country gets involved in every so often.
Eastern (New York). I'm most likely to post between 11pm and 11am E.S.T.
I'll admit Edoom is confused. Not only did he join the party late and miss some of the introduction, but the "Not necessarily the good guys" thing makes it difficult to understand how to react sometimes. By nature, "Not Good" characters are difficult to trust, and the nature of Pbp not having visual ques makes it even harder. I've never been a fan of "Burn it down" tactics, as I feel you can also burn down clues, hurt innocents, and it's kind of an "I call the Police" type move.
However,... I'm more than willing to go along with group decisions as I become acclimated to how the group plays... which is what I'm struggling with.
I like Edoom and would like to continue playing him, so please let me know what he can do to help integrate him more into the group. The teasing about Whisper is a good start I think... but who knows what she's up to.
In summary I think a lack of information/communication among the PC's is the biggest hurdle but not one that can't be overcome.
So as I mentioned in recruiting, the odds for getting a good PbP group going are slim just by the true statistics on these boards. When I started this game I joined some games, and over half the long-term APs I joined have folded. All but three of the remaining have slowed dramatically. One metric all the guides to PbP from the best seem to agree on is posting frequency is the most important. My best ongoing games had a daily posting rate, but I reluctantly agreed to relax that standard. It definitely takes me out of a rhythm which was five times a week at the same time in the morning for me.
Another problem with not posting is PCs that post more dominate the game. In our case, our most frequent poster Brightberry by a significant margin is a character that does not forcefully take the lead because the character as just not that type of character.
"The party considers the direct route to their granted kingdom, marching directly east through the wild riverlands, or the safer route back up the river and through Brevan territory to Oleg's Trading Post."
So the above statement seemed a simple two choice option. Option A would have had me starting the exploration of hexes on the way to Oleg's from the West, Option B starts Book 1 traditionally. I cannot continue until there is a decision, and not posting does not allow a consensus to build.
I could have made it a more "railroading" statement or put you on a default course and made you overrule it if you disagreed, but that is not my style.
Edoom makes good points. And yes, the not good guys was not my plan, but players wanted to have evil characters. It has turned out the only evil character really was an evil character that became an NPC. So I can see your confusion about how the not good guys credo can be confusing. I don't think you have seen anyone in the group be anything but a good guy.
My experience with PbP is that small low CR encounters take too much time to run through, so I make fewer high CR encounters that are dangerous with a real chance of player death. We amped up character power significantly to avoid the risk of player death.
So I do hear your concerns and have tried to change to accommodate player input. Evil characters are allowed, you have no daily posting requirement, you are no longer low fantasy characters, you have little chance of character death, but the game still needs to change. Let me ponder how I would change it and still keep a game I would want to continue.
I do know the nature of Kingmaker with kingdom decisions will not be conducive to a low posting rate game. In my slow Kingmaker game the GM posts about once a week and the player like to split up and go off in multiple groups.
Just putting my 2 cents out there as the thoughts come to me.
I feel like we're in a weird place.
When we started we had a little bit of time to RP some and find our character's feet but once we left for the initial journey, the pace quickened to the point where we would have a GM post in the evening followed by a GM post in the early AM before anyone could reply. I think at one point someone even mentioned how quickly time was moving for us.
I understand that we don't want to drag for days waiting for a response from someone, that's what we have botting for, but as Tibold said, not everything needs a response from everyone. It's a hard balancing act, for sure. Because now we've swung so far into the other direction.
Edoom I think part of the struggle for you stems from that desire of "let's get to the next plot point." We got to have some RP and Brightberry brought you up to speed some but perhaps we could have kept that going while on the way to our next destination. Once we arrived at the mines, we all just jumped into action because, well, we were dropped into combat right away. There's not a whole lot of room for intercharacter RP in combat. As far as "not good" goes, I would place the party's alignment, as a whole, as CN. We all seem to be after our own goals and the band of misfits just kinda came together to help each other get there.
It's funny you should mention "burn it down," Brightberry and Remis actively fought against a forest fire which was set by an NPC only to be blamed by the enemies for setting a forest fire. But in this particular situation, I think it makes 100% sense for how things were handled. The first 2 combat encounters our party dealt with, we had multiple near deaths including a near TPK. Both to Orcs. There's no way we're sliding down a rope where there are more orcs waiting to ambush us one at a time.
I want to reinforce the fact that I am not attacking anyone with this next part, I agree that we lack some communication, however, I feel like we're not getting a whole lot to communicate about and when we do, we are jumped forward to the next beat.
Yeah, I felt that we were kinda lead to jump down the whole, so I didn't want to railroad the adventure line, but you're right, Remis. It seemed like certain death to jump down the hole. It wasn't a wise decision.
Tibold's wagon. Would it make it across country? Taking the road to the trading post to drop off the wagon before delving into the wilderness is what I was thinking we needed to do. Of course, I didn't say that. Poor communication.
Edoom certainly didn't want to jump down the hole, but after doing some scouting, he found another way in... or we could have waited for them to emerge and attack there. I just think we jumped too quickly into "Burn it down" without really knowing what else was down there. We could have burned up a library with important documents, or many innocent captives. I just think we could have been a little more patient and tried to see if there was another way. Again I think it boils down to communication increasing.
Thanks for chiming in, everyone. It sounds like there’s still a desire to make this work somehow.
From what I gather, GM Tribute wants to be able to make posts advancing us on a fairly regular schedule, so should we handle this like elementary class assignments?
For anyone too old to remember, in elementary, the teacher would teach a subject lesson say Math or History then give the class an assignment which the students then have a set about of time to complete. If they finish early then they get to work on other assignments, projects, draw, etc.
Should we style this as the GM is going to post on a specific schedule, we all make our necessary acknowledgment posts then it’s freestyle roleplay until the next GM scheduled post? The expectation being the GM won’t really look at or answer anything in freestyle since they’re not germane to the scheduled posts?
I’m just throwing out ideas to try and find a way we can reduce the confusion and the problem of not feeling like their actions/comments aren’t being acknowledged.
The only way to know what was down there would be to go down there, which felt like certain death. Given that the party has been in a similar situation that went badly before, and that we were supposed to leave the place at least neutralized, what would be the main adventure/campaign, it made sense, both in character and tactically to at least make it unusable for the orcs.
What's ironic is that it's kind of playing out in character. When the scenario was first pitched to our group, We were kind of like "why do you guys hate orcs so much?" Then they almost butchered us.
Now we're like "kill those bastards on sight/drop a building on them", and Edoom, who didn't have that experience, is like "why do you guys hate orcs so much?"
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As far as burning the out buildings—again unless I somehow misread what the GM told us—it was intimated they were all empty and decrepit with infestations of various types of vermin.
We weren't here in search of a McGuffin nor under any impression there were captives or any other such thing. Like a government covert ops team, we were acting on the intel our information brokers gave us (the guard captain and the druid). Neither one provided any warnings of such need for caution nor did the one NPC Edoom encountered who seemed much more interested in a spontaneous tryst than her or anyone else's safety.
For me, that all lines up with our reaction: "Nothing here really matters (to our characters) + the safest and fastest way to complete the objective = Profit!"
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One metric all the guides to PbP from the best seem to agree on is posting frequency is the most important. My best ongoing games had a daily posting rate, but I reluctantly agreed to relax that standard. It definitely takes me out of a rhythm which was five times a week at the same time in the morning for me.I am totally OK with your daily posts. But we need to understand your expectation of those posts' content.
Another problem with not posting is PCs that post more dominate the game. In our case, our most frequent poster Brightberry by a significant margin is a character that does not forcefully take the lead because the character as just not that type of character.
While I haven't necessarily displayed it here, when time permits, I can post circles around most people. But typically, I like to interact, so my posts are designed to receive a response and therefore leaves me at the mercy of the poster to continue. If it just me, I could have Tibold RP with a cactus for hours, and as long as it pricks him every so often to prove it's still there, he could carry the conversation for a long time. I submit my first several Tibold posts which included all of his inner monologue, one post in particular creeped Remis out. However, I want interaction, so I'm basically self-regulated.
If we need to "cap" posts relevant to the story/GM post/etc. to one per person per GM post, that's fine with me. I can write up 20 flavor posts that mean nothing if feel like it and my ticket queue allows it on a given day, but understanding that's just for me will allow me to know what I can and need to include in my 1 player post per GM post (if we settle on something like that).
We could introduce "a tell," a specific sign off at the bottom of a post to signify our character is ready for GM response/advancement post, so you can know our roleplay from that point forward is just to kill time or whatever.
"The party considers the direct route to their granted kingdom, marching directly east through the wild riverlands, or the safer route back up the river and through Brevan territory to Oleg's Trading Post."
So the above statement seemed a simple two choice option. Option A would have had me starting the exploration of hexes on the way to Oleg's from the West, Option B starts Book 1 traditionally. I cannot continue until there is a decision, and not posting does not allow a consensus to build.
You're not wrong. Saoirse stated we should go to Oleg's. Tibold didn't disagree with the decision just made it clear he wanted to get his wagon. I realize, I should have expressed at list in OOC that Tibold agreed and Oleg's had his vote. I kind of assumed you'd assume which is my bad.
Edoom makes good points. And yes, the not good guys was not my plan, but players wanted to have evil characters. It has turned out the only evil character really was an evil character that became an NPC. So I can see your confusion about how the not good guys credo can be confusing. I don't think you have seen anyone in the group be anything but a good guy.
As far as "not good" goes, I would place the party's alignment, as a whole, as CN. We all seem to be after our own goals and the band of misfits just kinda came together to help each other get there.
The title "not the good guys" is interesting because typically it's used as the foil for it's opposite: good guys/bad guys = good/evil. So if you came into this thinking everyone's evil...no, that's the incorrect assumption.
Here, the term "not the good guys" means we're not running a paladin's code where anyone feels obligatory actions to help/save/self-sacrifice for anyone we don't feel like. We are literally just not the Good Guys, but we're also not the Bad Guys (unless we just decide to be).
Please don't think anyone said "Burn it down!" with the zeal of an arson. We were literally describing burning down abandoned, empty (per GM's description and no one's desire to investigate to the contrary), vermin-infested buildings. The idea here was simply to remove potentially usable facilities should the orcs & co. return. We were ordered to remove the enemy base of operations. Burning down all the buildings and sabotaging their entrance into and out of the mine at this location was, I thought, a well-considered solution to the task we were given. It was definitely not just an anarchist, let's-kill-and-burn everything-cuz-we're-eeeeeeeeeeeeeevvvvvuuuuuuuuuul kind of answer.
I hope this helps to clarify what's pretty much been our status quo as an alignment.
I fully endorse all elements of Tibold's post.
I find it hard without full maps, its kind of not quite clicking for me overall.
I removed full maps when they led to a character death. I can fudge movement on a theatre of the mind map.
I will think again if I can make all the conflicting elements work.
The other team is using real maps, but they are in hard mode. They just narrowly averted an animal companion death.
I will think again if I can make all the conflicting elements work.
I'm very curious what you think is conflicting.
Here is a summary of requests made to you:
Our main goal is find a way to ease our communication with you most of all, GM Tribute, so that we can also be successful when communicating with each other in character. All we're asking here is to work together to solve the confusion by creating a posting format or schedule or structure or all of the above. Whatever that takes, is what we want.
I've contributed a bunch of ideas on how I thought that could be accomplished, and I'm sure the others may have some of their own. If you really think some of these requests are conflicting or contradictory, I'd personally love to hear your thoughts because I don't currently understand where you're coming from at all.
Hokay, so.
Prior to Tibold's original post which kicked off this discussion, I was already feeling a little burnt out on this game.
I don't know if it's just our play styles don't gel or what but something just isn't clicking. Combine that with the concerns raised above and well...
I have no negative feelings towards anyone, from what I've see everyone here is a talented player and roleplayers but, it's just not working for me.
I officially stepping away from this game.
I hope you all are able to come to an arrangement and have a good game.
This should be a game you want to play. No hard feelings.
We can call it here as I don’t think another recruitment is a good idea.
Sadly, I'm not really surprised this is how things ended up.
Sorry, Brightberry. Maybe the Plant Force will sprout in another game. :(
I'm so very sad. For the forest.
I wasn't expecting the game to be shut down.
Wow. Okay. It's been fun...parts of it at least. Hope to game with some of you again at some point.