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superhighschoollevelooc2014-02-19 11:11 pm
monomods) wrote in superhighschoollevelooc2014-02-19 11:11 pm
Feedback Post!
Hello darlings, sorry this has been so long in coming! We wanted to make sure that we had everything straight for what we’re going to change and what we’re going to keep the same. So bear with us while we run down the proposed changes, and absolutely feel free to give your own feedback in the comments. This post is open for everyone to reply to, not just players from round one, but anon commenting is disabled.
Overall, the trial system will remain unchanged in round 2. However, along with our overall more strict look at activity, we’re going to be much more strict about the required tag-in count. Remember, temporary hiatuses are still just fine as long as we the mods know about them. If you completely miss an investigation and trial without telling the mods, we will contact you about your character becoming the next victim.
The investigation system also seemed to come down to almost an art form by the end, so that too will remain mostly unchanged. However, one thing is that the amount of Evidence Bullets to be found will be stated at the beginning of the investigation, with a running tally being kept as the investigation progresses. This is to attempt to sustain activity through the investigation.
Death Rolls will be done on Sunday of the week before that death is slated to happen. This will effectively give the involved parties two weeks to hammer out the details of the crime, as opposed to the 3-5 days we tried to go for this round. This is simply because some of our best murders in round one were the ones that were planned more extensively, and we want round 2 to be even better than round 1.
There will be far fewer NPCs, especially in the endgame. We can’t say much plotwise, but we can say that aside from our beloved series mascot Monobear there will only be one other major mod-played NPC in the game.
There also won’t be any Hope Stars to turn in for regains. Instead, we’ve come up with a new system that involves much less HTML and mod tears. Every 20-comment thread will be worth a monocoin to be used in the Monomono Machine, which will be stocked with regainable items from the player characters. Unfortunately, it’s also going to be stocked with 90 other items from the actual Dangan Ronpa games. With every thread, there’s a 1/10 chance of regaining a player item, and a one in two chance of regaining one of your items.
Additional app sections: there will be two new sections, and an additional requirement for a third.
Character Underwear - exactly what it says on the tin. What kind of drawers does your character wear?
Regainable items - a list of five physical items from your character to go in the Monomono machine.
Canon Point - since round two will have memory loss, we ask that you give us two canon points, one that your character will remember and one that they will eventually regain memories of. Characters reapped from round 1 will automatically have “Post-round one of DRP” as their second canon point, although you are allowed to choose an earlier point for their first canon point. This includes SDR2s and DR1 survivors who appeared in round one. Round 1 reapps (that is, the 20 player characters, not counting DR1s and SDR2s) will count as their own canon, meaning that there is a “cast cap” of four round 1 reapps for round 2. More details on these sections and who’s appable and who’s not when we get the new app written up.
Round 2 will have 30 available character slots. In addition, we’re raising the cast cap to four characters per canon/company.
Round 2 will also have a much more strict AC (for characters who are still alive - dead characters still just have to check in as a formality): Two ten-comment threads with two different characters per week. AC threads can still come from the weekly mingle log, the body discovery/investigation log, or any player-posted logs from the check period, but again since the trials have their own activity requirements they are ineligible for the activity check. Failure to meet AC without informing the mods will result in a strike. Two weeks in a row will result in an automatic death roll. AC will go up on Sunday for the previous Sunday-Friday, and will close at 00:00 (EST) on the following Friday.
We would like to hear your feedback on what you thought about switching to a 3:1 OOC:IC day ratio for the endgame. Did this work for everyone? Would it work better if it was longer? Shorter? We do know that next time we will finagle the final trial to be OOCly on a Thursday+Friday+Saturday.
If there’s anything else that you think of that didn’t work, or that worked particularly well, please leave us some feedback! We want round 2 to be even more fun than round 1, and to do that we need to work out the bugs in the system.
Once again, thank you all so much for helping to make Dangan Roleplay such a phenomenal experience. It’s been a pleasure to mod, and we hope that it’s been just as much of a pleasure to play in. Thank you all, and see you again for Round Two!
Overall, the trial system will remain unchanged in round 2. However, along with our overall more strict look at activity, we’re going to be much more strict about the required tag-in count. Remember, temporary hiatuses are still just fine as long as we the mods know about them. If you completely miss an investigation and trial without telling the mods, we will contact you about your character becoming the next victim.
The investigation system also seemed to come down to almost an art form by the end, so that too will remain mostly unchanged. However, one thing is that the amount of Evidence Bullets to be found will be stated at the beginning of the investigation, with a running tally being kept as the investigation progresses. This is to attempt to sustain activity through the investigation.
Death Rolls will be done on Sunday of the week before that death is slated to happen. This will effectively give the involved parties two weeks to hammer out the details of the crime, as opposed to the 3-5 days we tried to go for this round. This is simply because some of our best murders in round one were the ones that were planned more extensively, and we want round 2 to be even better than round 1.
There will be far fewer NPCs, especially in the endgame. We can’t say much plotwise, but we can say that aside from our beloved series mascot Monobear there will only be one other major mod-played NPC in the game.
There also won’t be any Hope Stars to turn in for regains. Instead, we’ve come up with a new system that involves much less HTML and mod tears. Every 20-comment thread will be worth a monocoin to be used in the Monomono Machine, which will be stocked with regainable items from the player characters. Unfortunately, it’s also going to be stocked with 90 other items from the actual Dangan Ronpa games. With every thread, there’s a 1/10 chance of regaining a player item, and a one in two chance of regaining one of your items.
Additional app sections: there will be two new sections, and an additional requirement for a third.
Character Underwear - exactly what it says on the tin. What kind of drawers does your character wear?
Regainable items - a list of five physical items from your character to go in the Monomono machine.
Canon Point - since round two will have memory loss, we ask that you give us two canon points, one that your character will remember and one that they will eventually regain memories of. Characters reapped from round 1 will automatically have “Post-round one of DRP” as their second canon point, although you are allowed to choose an earlier point for their first canon point. This includes SDR2s and DR1 survivors who appeared in round one. Round 1 reapps (that is, the 20 player characters, not counting DR1s and SDR2s) will count as their own canon, meaning that there is a “cast cap” of four round 1 reapps for round 2. More details on these sections and who’s appable and who’s not when we get the new app written up.
Round 2 will have 30 available character slots. In addition, we’re raising the cast cap to four characters per canon/company.
Round 2 will also have a much more strict AC (for characters who are still alive - dead characters still just have to check in as a formality): Two ten-comment threads with two different characters per week. AC threads can still come from the weekly mingle log, the body discovery/investigation log, or any player-posted logs from the check period, but again since the trials have their own activity requirements they are ineligible for the activity check. Failure to meet AC without informing the mods will result in a strike. Two weeks in a row will result in an automatic death roll. AC will go up on Sunday for the previous Sunday-Friday, and will close at 00:00 (EST) on the following Friday.
We would like to hear your feedback on what you thought about switching to a 3:1 OOC:IC day ratio for the endgame. Did this work for everyone? Would it work better if it was longer? Shorter? We do know that next time we will finagle the final trial to be OOCly on a Thursday+Friday+Saturday.
If there’s anything else that you think of that didn’t work, or that worked particularly well, please leave us some feedback! We want round 2 to be even more fun than round 1, and to do that we need to work out the bugs in the system.
Once again, thank you all so much for helping to make Dangan Roleplay such a phenomenal experience. It’s been a pleasure to mod, and we hope that it’s been just as much of a pleasure to play in. Thank you all, and see you again for Round Two!
no subject
Anyway, first and foremost: congratulations on the successful first round! I can tell that both the players and the mods have put a lot into the game. It's been enormously fun stalking threads and following plotlines. I've had a lot of fun watching from the sidelines and theorizing with a couple of other like-minded friends.
In my feedback, I'm going to be talking largely about the game as a whole. If any of the players are interested in detailed feedback about their particular characters, I'd be happy to give it to them. I'm canon-blind for several of the series in question, but I'd be happy to give my thoughts about how they were presented in-game.
I feel that there were a lot of things that went right, so I'll touch on my favorites:
- The mechanics of picking the killer and victim worked really well. Up until stuff went down, it was impossible to tell what was going to happen. The murders were fun, creative and interesting see investigated.
- I think the mods playing Monobear and Monomi really helped sell the setting. Their near-constant presence really helped make them feel like a part of the cast. They were a real delight to read and I was excited to see them every time they showed up!
- I actually really liked how regains worked in this round. I liked how it brought a piece of game narrative (hope shards) and turned it into something practical for the roleplay narrative (regaining powers).
- Using big hub posts for each week was a really smart idea. It was very easy to keep track of what was going, especially for an outsider.
- Even though it was only revealed recently, I think that the recyclebin was an awesome way to keep all of the dead characters relevant and their players active in the game. The threads in there are a real goldmine!
- I think that 3 OOC Days:1 IC day was a very smart move for the end-game. While it made the endgame feel like it was dragging on a bit, I feel like this system would be good to use for more intense parts of the game, such as trials and investigations. This would give a little more "breathing room" for people in unusual timezones to participate.
Here are some points that I feel that could be improved on:
Castmates. Instead of increasing the number of characters that can be played from the same canon, I feel like it would be smarter to decrease that number to two--or, better yet, have every character in the new round be a Lone Canon Warrior. The coolest thing about Dangan Roleplay was seeing the cross-canon relationships that developed between the characters: they were really and truly strangers who had to work together to survive.
Unfortunately, from the outside I saw a clear pattern that, if a character had a castmate, they were much more likely to tag their own castmate(s) than other characters on the island. While Jimmy and Aradia are notable exceptions to this rule, the other characters with castmates felt much more closed off than the characters who were there on their own. Reducing or eliminating the potential for castmates would fix this problem.
After mulling it over, I have to admit that I'm a little hesitant about the thought of Round 1 characters being able to apply for Round 2. While they can only take up four slots, it honestly seems a little unfair to any incoming new players. Would it be possible for these four slots to be involved in a more NPC-like role, or for them to show up as pivotal endgame characters instead? I like the idea of previous characters being able to influence the second round, but I don't like the idea of them being involved in a second mutual killing game.
Trials. While, overall, I feel that the trials and their investigations were a success, there were some points that I feel could have been improved on. There weren't a lot of trials that had true-blue Dangan Ronpa style banter; a lot of them seemed to end in premature confessions from the culprit, instead of the survivors slowly but surely unmasking them. Instead of the details of the crimes unfolding blow-by-blow, all of the details came out at once. A good exception to this was the trial for Jumba's death, which I would say was the best trial in the game. There were plenty of great moments in the trials, but I think the format could be touched up a bit.
Endgame. Overall, I felt that the endgame was clumsy in comparison to the rest of the game. It felt less like a unique roleplaying experience and more like a gushing letter to Spike Chunsoft about how much you guys loved the past two games. My thoughts on the endgame are pretty complex, so I'm going to try and break them down into bullets:
- The survivor pool was a little lackluster; out of the seven, four of them were either inactive, had limited CR, or both. It really felt like the Roxy, Jimmy and Madison show. I don't think Uuji even participated in the final log which, by all statements made on the mod account, should have caused the final trial to fail.
In general, I also felt like the entire cast had a few too many heroes and do-gooders. There were some really great morally ambiguous characters (Madison, Lysandre, and Sam are the first three that come to mind) their personalities felt drowned out in the much "louder" narrative of the heroes. On the plus-side, I really felt like the survivors were a very tight-knit, emotionally close group. It was very enjoyable to see them band so closely together.
- The survivors had a lot of information handed to them way too early. As soon as Hinata and co appeared on the island, all of the suspense was sucked out of the game. It made the endgame honestly kind of underwhelming, especially when the characters were given the answers to some huge questions in the game before the onset of the final trial. Because the characters all knew so much ahead of time, any conflict in regards to the forced shutdown, while well-played on Madison's part, felt rather token. The result of the final trial felt decided long before it really was.
- I felt that the endgame of the RP borrowed a bit heavily from the endgames of Dangan Ronpa (DR) and Super Dangan Ronpa 2. Knowing spoilers for those games made it really easy to know or guess what was going to happen. As such, the ending didn't feel very unique to the game's very unique set of characters and circumstances.
- The ending of the game felt dissonant with the endings of DR and SDR2. Both of those games had survivor pools that were faced to make enormously difficult decisions and their own horrible mistakes. At the end of the games, the defeat of the mastermind was not necessarily a "happy" ending for the characters. In DR, it meant that the survivors were forced to confront a post-apocalyptic world; in SDR2, it meant that they had to confront a post-apocalyptic world, the fact that they caused that post-apocalyptic world, presumed body horror considering Shenanigans, and the fact that their friends were pretty much vegetables. Both games had very powerful endings, largely in part because it was such a struggle to get there.
In comparison, the RP's ending felt very ... convenient. There was a very pointed happy ending that, to be frank, came off as very saccharine. The dead characters revived, the culprits were forgiven, everybody gets to go home and/or join the Future Foundation, even Sam the horrible eldritch abomination. I like good endings when they're earned; I can't honestly say that as an outside reader, it felt that the survivor pool earned their good ending in the same way that the survivors of the games did.
- Finally, endgame just plain took too long to get there. The last few weeks of the game honestly dragged on for a very long time, when not much happened ICly.
Thank you very much for reading all of my thoughts. They're a little disjointed, but I hope they make sense. /)\\\(\
no subject
Unfortunately, it's hard from a mod perspective to police the trials in an attempt to get a more Dangan Ronpa feel to it. In Dangan Roleplay, as opposed to in the games, everyone essentially has a chance to "wear the protag pants," as we lovingly referred to it for round 1. Ideally, we would like for the trials to seem more organically Dangan Ronpa, but practically we haven't come up with a dependable way to implement the kinds of mechanics that steer the trials in-game (MTBs, Climax Inference) without sacrificing some player autonomy.
I can also comment on the ending because I can safely guarantee that round one is very much going to be the exception that proves the rule. We admit that the endgame for round 1 came across as blatant wish-fulfillment (we also admit that it was), but round 1 was an experiment in many ways and since we weren't even sure if there was going to be a round 2 while we were planning the overall plot for round 1, we wanted to go big or stay home. It (along with RecycleBin) was an experiment in trying to keep players of dead characters from feeling shafted or shut out (a problem obviously not present in the games, since the games' sole protagonist obviously survives). In some ways, it was a success, but we also learned enough about what not to do in later rounds to avoid copying the same formula verbatim.
Do you think that perma-death (that is, whether or not there's an afterlife comm like RB, the victims and executed culprits don't get to come back to life at all, and are rendered unappable for later rounds) would help? It was an option that we've considered a couple of times, but ultimately shied away from for a few reasons.
Thank you again for your thoughtful reply, and we will touch on your commentary about cast caps and round one reapps after I've had a chance to discuss it with my co-mod.
no subject
Speaking again of the trials, this thought has been bouncing around my head all day: have you considered, in addition to having assigned culprit and victim roles, making sure that other characters had certain trial roles to fall back on? While playing DR and reading/watching LPs of SDR2, I've noticed that characters participating in trials tend to fall into particular roles:
Protagonist: A character who has been involved in the investigation, but doesn't necessarily understand how the pieces fit together. (Ex: Makoto and Hinata)
Investigator: A character who has been heavily involved in the murder investigation and has a deeper understanding of the circumstances. Sometimes they guide the Protagonist in their understanding, sometimes they mislead them. Whatever the case, they don't just spill the beans right away at the start of the class: they allow the protagonist to help convince the rest of the class of their theories. (Ex: Kyoko, Byakuya, Nanami)
Witness: A character who has testimony about the murder. This testimony may or may not be truthful. (Ex: Celes, in Trial 2, testified that Chihiro was in the warehouse with a duffel bag and track suit. This testimony was crucial in uncovering the culprit.)
Jury: A member of the jury is a character who, while maybe not as heavily involved in the investigation, is still heavily involved in the trial conversation. They may have some wrong ideas about the murder that need to be cleared up. SDR2 also introduced the concept of jury members throwing out wild ideas out there that just happened to be right.
False Culprit: A character who has been implicated in the murder. To get the trial to move forward, the class needs to eliminate them as a suspect. (Ex: In Trial 3, Hiro was implicated as the culprit despite being totally innocent.)
True Culprit: Exactly what it says on the tin.
Although Dangan Ronpa's static, pre-planned narrative is inherently different from the dynamic, organic narrative of a roleplay, I think there's merit in the idea of assigning other minor roles in the trial. If the culprit and their victim are the stars of the narrative of the trial, false culprits and witnesses would be the support structure that holds it up together. I don't think it's very practical to assign a specific "protagonist" role; I think part of the fun of the trials was watching various characters try their hand at that role.
All of these roles are important. If every character were an investigator, the trials would be over quickly. Without members of the jury bouncing wacky ideas back and forth, there's no "wordplay". False culprits lead to twists and turns, while witness testimony helps banish inconsistencies and pin down culprits. I'm not entirely sure you could assign all these roles before a trial, but I think that figuring out witnesses or false culprits (who don't know everything themselves either) during the extended murder planning period has the opportunity to make trials even more interesting.
I have to admit, I'm relieved to hear that future games won't be mimicking the same formulas or getting a Totally Happy Ending Everybody's Not Dead. Frankly, I don't like narratives where character actions or plot events happen and then there's no consequences or fall-out for them. They just aren't very satisfying to me. Part of what makes the DR and SDR2 narrative so interesting for me, personally, is that there are some very strict consequences for character actions. They both have bittersweet endings--endings that, while they're overall positive, have underlying elements of tragedy.
In regards to perma-death... yes, but in certain ways. I think that the recycle bin was an absolutely fabulous way to keep "dead" characters involved in the game. When those communities were opened up, it was really easy to see that, even though they couldn't affect hands-on narrative of the story, they were still a really important part of the overall narrative. I thought it was one of the smarter ways that you tied the narrative of the roleplay to the narrative of the games; the interactions between SDR2 characters and the characters of the game were very interesting.
In regards to perma-death... to be honest, yes. I think that perma-death is the most logical "consequence" to a mutual killing game. I think that if players aren't prepared to be suddenly removed from the primary narrative of the game, they probably shouldn't be applying to a game devoted to sudden and heart-wrenching character death.
However, I don't think that perma-death is the only consequence that there could be in the narrative of DRRP. If Round 2 continues in a digital setting, I think there are plenty of potential consequences that could be used outside of perma-death:
- Not all of the characters get a chance to "wake up" in the end. How would the ending have felt if, say, Lysandre or Aradia had remained trapped in the recycle bin?
- Characters not being able to return to their own homes. I think one of the more powerful themes of the DR narrative is that both casts experienced a true loss of "home". They may have escaped their mutual killing games, but what kind of life are they going to live after that? (Note: I think Jumba-mun and Madison-mun handled post-game exceptionally well on this subject.)
- Characters suffering from damaged memories. Maybe they can remember what they experienced in the mutual killing game, but what about the circumstances leading to before it? What about their own histories? DR and SDR2 were not shy when it came to playing with those, and I don't think that roleplaying games based off of them should either.
- Character home worlds being affected somehow?
Those were just a couple of elements that could be used to temper endings; a "give and take" between positive and negative elements is very important when it comes to endings.
This has been discussed on plurk already, but thank you very much for taking into consideration my (and others') thoughts on castmates. I think that it's an important issue that deserves attention, thought and discussion. Ideas that have come up about it so far have been really great. :-)
And since
Phew! This one got a little long too... thanks for reading it! Go get yourself a cookie! I'm gonna go get a glass of water...