damned_lounge | HMD #5

Entry tags:

!mod,
meme

HMD #5

damned_institute HMD Meme

PLEASE READ ALL OF THE BELOW RULES BEFORE POSTING.

1. POSTING TO THIS MEME IS COMPLETELY OPTIONAL. This means that if someone chooses not to participate, you must respect that decision and leave their characters out of any crit you post. Conversely, if you do choose to post your character(s) to the meme, you must accept all constructive input you receive. You do not have to agree with everyone's crit; however, any replies you post are expected to be courteous and respectful.

2. NO UNCONSTRUCTIVE COMMENTS. Regardless of the kind of input you're giving, be it reinforcement of something positive or calling attention to something questionable, you must ALWAYS give concrete reasons for why you feel the way you do. "Because," "due to," and "since" are examples of the kind of vocabulary you should use in your feedback. You are also, of course, expected to be courteous and respectful toward your fellow players.

3. PROHIBITED CONTENT IN COMMENTS:

• Unconstructive input, be it negative or positive
• Breaking any rules set by the original input request
• Malicious or sarcastic wording/emoting
• Threats or demands
• Falsification of facts
• Spamming

The above apply both to input givers and input receivers. Any comments containing the above will be subject to being deleted, frozen, or screened, and their posters will be subject to penalties.

IF YOU SEE ANY COMMENTS CONTAINING ANY OF THE ABOVE ISSUES, please do not reply to them and instead notify one of the Head Mods immediately.

4. IP LOGGING IS TURNED ON. However, Court, Psyche and I are the only people who will be able to see the IPs, and we will absolutely not share this information with anyone. The logging will only be used to identify rule-breakers, should the need arise.

5. PLEASE USE THE TEMPLATE BELOW FOR YOUR INPUT REQUEST. If you would like to specify certain guidelines, explain yourself, or ask for focus on a particular aspect of your playing, feel free to do so in the "other" section. Remember: if you're uncomfortable with receiving input in a public setting or if you'd like to give Anons the option of giving you input without their IP being logged, you are perfectly welcome to specify your preferences and link people to your character's personal HMD.

Name/Handle:
Character(s) Played: Character Name (

char_username), Character Name (

char_username)
Anon input allowed?: Y/N
Other: (optional)

---

We're fairly certain no significant problems will arise, but if they do, please e-mails us at damned.mods[at]gmail[dot]com. Alternatively, you can also PM, IM or private Plurk either Court, Psyche or myself. If you have any questions, concerns, or reports about the meme, please do not hesitate to bring them to us.

Thank you!

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

I've been trying to come up with a way to suggest things for the game for a while, but I realize that it's more of a criticism than a suggestion. I don't feel adequately immersed enough in Damned's setting half the time to make suggestions on plot, and I'm not sure "plot suggestions" are the way to go. I think that might fall on you guys.

But ... to be completely frank, I'd like for more plots to be less things that happen to characters or things the characters respond to or have to go look at or whatever, and more things that will actually lead to some end. At this point, Damned has been going for a very long time, and the playerbase has shrunk down a lot. I feel as if Damned could successfully pull off plots that involve aspects of the playerbase base at slower paces than what's typically going down. I am not saying they get out of the institute or anything like that. But there is only a handful of things and for me, as a player, the prospect of "a new area to explore" is really boring for me as a writer. I realize there's a plot, but the plot is ran about 90% by NPCs and what information the characters do have, they aren't able to employ it as well as they'd like—if at all.

Other games (ones I'm in, ones I'm not in) have been able to employ plots that give characters information to run with. Damned, in a lot of ways, has the constant feel of things being the same. Stickers/badges/missions/etc. are different things to do, this is true, but it doesn't ultimately add up to much. I understand the game is survival horror, but it feels less like that and more like trying to hopelessly find things before you come up for air before a new day starts. I'm not sure if that's what Damned is meant to be.

I guess my overall crit is to have some kind of plot (or multiple plots) that employs the characters more and has them carry things out and potentially have good, bad, and neutral endings to each plot. Have things change as a result of things that the characters do, rather than what the NPCs are doing around them. That way, it's a lot more constructive and the characters might eventually see a point in building up a better system of communication within. Perhaps another way to alter Damned would be to come up with ways to promote that communication within the characters beyond a third party (IE the radio). I'm not sure what that can be, either.

I want to repeat: I think that the game itself and its structure is fine, but adding new things to work with that aren't things that have a stop and start, things that can actually build up and go somewhere, etc. might help add some new feeling to the game. I think plots designed around the characters actually affecting it instead of responding to crap happening to them would be more effective, and if executed well, the people not interested in those paths could just as easily avoid them. I think the world of Damned is rich, and I think altering the way the story of the game flows so that it really depends more on the characters could help. I'm not sure how, since I don't know where things will be going, but I find myself disinterested in the current sum of things because while it's interesting to play my characters through the horrors, there's a part of me that asks obvious questions: why don't all the characters just meet in the same place every night and work together? why haven't certain things just worked? why don't they have certain areas figured out? The smaller the game gets, the less believable it is for me as a player that these characters wouldn't be getting each other on the same page in an adequate fashion. This is through no fault of the players, mind you, but in the amount of handwaving and the way the game is set up. I guess I'm wondering if something new can be added, and if that might change the atmosphere.

I'd like to second this. There's a lot I love about this game - obviously there must be or I wouldn't have come back. :-) But I remember the first time around, I got really frustrated at times because it felt like everything the characters did was largely meaningless in the grand scheme of things.

I'll add a third for this.

As much as I love playing here and playing the characters I have, the lack of productive outcomes is making it really hard to play most of them as anything other than annoyed and tired which... well, gets tiring. And I know it's the reason why a number of players from years back had to let characters go; they just weren't getting anywhere. While I may play one perpetual optimist, he's a rarity for being able to survive this kind of setting while the productive ones are more suited for it, so that kind of backwards?

Am I making any sense?

Hi! First off, thank you so much for taking the time to comment. We really want to hear feedback from players, so we're glad you approached us about this.

We've actually had this concern ourselves for awhile and have tried experimenting with different ways to give players more flexibility and more power over some of the setting without compromising the structure of the game. It's a delicate balance. The initial harshness of the military's take-over was directly related to the player-organized riot the day before. Missions, and how they subsequently allow characters to have a little more influence on the setting, were supposed to be a step in that direction. Failed missions can yield a variety of consequences that players are free to opt out of if they choose, while the opportunity for characters to directly change special storylines have also come up (a specific example is the impact Scarecrow and Depth Charge had on the traitor subplot during the military arc).

Of course, some ideas we tried didn't pan out exactly how we'd hoped for a variety of reasons, while we believe other ideas we've come up with can eventually help open up other ways to world-build more later.

I will say that one issue we've had with having more character-driven plots is that sometimes players don't or can't follow through with them for whatever reason, and the storyline stagnates before it can reach its potential. But we still haven't given up on trying to carve new facets of the game for players to explore.

Something we're figuring out is a system that potentially pits other patients against each other in a way that hasn't been done before. We'd also like to finally expand the story in an outward direction in order to flesh out the world itself and open up new features of the game that are unlike anything else we currently have. Hopefully we can get some of these rolling out in the near future.

Also, I realize this doesn't solve the bulk of the issue, but I feel like it's worth noting all the same: if players want to organize things like a massive patient meeting, or distributing maps of explored territory, or trying to make a more concentrated effort to do things, they're more than welcome to do so. We'd love to try accommodating people who want to do more institute-wide things, as the smaller playerbase makes it easier to do so.

Thanks again for commenting. Please let us know if you have anything else to add or any other suggestions.

Hmmm, off handdddd

Is there any chance you can contact players or maybe even do a polling post OOC with anyone who wants to do some kind of long-term plot? Furthermore, what about designing plots that could eventually be transferred to someone else—fail-safes, so to speak? Maybe build in something like that.

That's the first thing that came to mind.

Thanks for the suggestions! We'll likely do OOC posts or polls to try to organize something in the future.

As far as fail-safes go, they sound like a good idea, but with the slower pace of the game, it can be a challenge to design ways to fairly determine whether a player won't/can't follow through with a story, and then to effectively transfer plotlines to other characters without dragging the process out longer than it needs to be. That's partly why in our experiments to involve other characters in major plots (like letting Maya handle the device intended to give everyone their powers back), they've been over a shorter period of time, and a little smaller in scale than what people would probably like to see.

The three of us would like to put up a discussion post in the future in order to gauge interest in some of our current ideas, and see what kinds of things other players might like to do in the future. We'll probably put something like that up in the near future.

Thanks again for your comments! Please let us know if you have anything else to bring up or add.

A little late in chiming in with my agreement here, but yeah, this addresses a lot of issues I've been having as well, especially:

but the plot is ran about 90% by NPCs and what information the characters do have, they aren't able to employ it as well as they'd like—if at all.

I'll admit, this is why the Military arc ended up being a flop for me. Most of it involved NPCs my characters had zero contact with. Things were going on, but everything was so far removed from the actual patients that it might as well have been a radio-play broadcast over the speakers occasionally.

And I feel like there has *got* to be a better way to disseminate information. I know that was brought up in earlier discussions... Patients are very cagey about sharing what they know, which means if you want to find things for your not-in-the-know characters to do, you sort of have to meta-plot your way into having them meet with the right people. I like NS events, but a lot of them seem to be very... passive. Some 'effect' happens and disrupts plans, but the medical wing event aside, there's rarely anything for people who don't know secret locations to aim for.

TL;DR - I think we need more opportunity for active plot-oriented things that might make night shifts less stagnant. Over-arching plot things are cool, but they need to be more than set-dressing done by NPC characters almost no one gets to see.

Agreeing with the "man, is information hard to get sometimes" issue. Some patients get to the basement within three nights of their arrival, while others struggle just to get basic information about the over-arching plot.

I've had three characters in the game forever, and getting the location of the basement entrance for the one I actually wanted to send there from the get-go (Edgar) was admittedly like pulling teeth at times, and he's only recently managed to get it. Scarecrow has known forever, but was never really all that interested in it until now because he wasn't really aware of most plot-related things going on- and being the fluffy marshmallow he is, a lot of characters aren't willing to share too much information with him at times. It's only because of the mission he went on that he's gotten into all that, since his investigations of other areas have turned up flat.

I guess it'd be nice to have more to do and find within the building that is plot-related for those who are exploring and still feeling it out. Not all of them know about the secret area, and it feels like so much of the other stuff is just kind of out there and not touched often because it doesn't seem to have much of a purpose.

Also generally agreeing with this. The trouble is that right now, the only platforms through which players can interact with NPCs and the plot on any level at all is through missions and the basement. Missions are a good start, but since it's randomized to small groups chosen once every other month the vast majority of players are left feeling at a loss and distant. Leaving aside that their connection to the plot isn't clear for a moment, the basement and caverns are a problem, since it requires consistent threading from at least three players through two obstacle courses and a rough in the coliseum, which, at minimum, takes at least two ic nights and therefore four ooc months. Factoring in general player slowness right now- people often find it hard to even get to the ballroom, let alone the rooms- and you end up with nights in which it feels like nothing is being achieved at all. There are only so many times you can thread a character going to get supplies or going to ruins in which nothing actively happens.

Really, it comes down to the fact that Damned has such a strict setting that it's really necessary for the plot to ensure that things are going on. It's not like most other games where players can run game-wide plots that have far-reaching effects on characters- that's fine, and I wouldn't want Damned to be anything other than what it is, but it does mean that players rely heavily on the plot to give them things to do.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

HMD #5

Re: GAME THREAD

Re: GAME THREAD

Re: GAME THREAD

Re: GAME THREAD

Re: GAME THREAD

Re: GAME THREAD

Re: GAME THREAD

Re: GAME THREAD

no subject