Feedback Post!

[monomods]

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!

Comments

warning: tl;dr approaching

[mirage_diver]

Ooooooooh boy. Here we go. I'm probably bound to have a whole lot of Unpopular Opinions here, but I might as well bite the bullet point list.

• While the in-character interactions worked, the entire overarching narrative felt... well, incredibly fixer fic to me. You can call it a gushing love letter, fanservice, or unfanservice ("Super Dangan Ronpa 2's plot wasn't good enough as it is, we have to make it happier! >:I"), but the point of the matter is, I had significantly more interest when the game was essentially its own thing, instead of getting tangled in the official Dangan scenario. At first, the appearance of canon NPCs in the RB and Aradia's ghosty-times was a fun little nod, but then it started becoming increasingly more clear that the story was ultimately about them and not about the player characters. (Do note that, for all my horribleness on plurk, at least the ideas/headcanons/speculations hinged off of the actions of the PCs and the ramifications of such.) I can only imagine how it felt for the final seven to essentially have the plot hijacked from them in the eleventh hour by NPC presence, but I'll leave that for one of them to address if they were unhappy with it. In all honesty, I feel a game like this should remain relatively unconnected to the series in all but setting and key points, and most importantly, invoke player agency.
  
• I don't like the idea of cast reapps. In fact, I'd like to take that a step further - I don't like the idea of players being able to come back for two consecutive rounds at all. I get that everyone (myself included) had a damn blast in this game, but Dangan is a huge fandom, and a successful run of a game like this - along with a Tropes page, of all things - is going to stir up interest even more than it's already been stirred. Allowing past players in over new blood is going to stir discontent and generate claims that the game is "cliquey", or that there's some level of grandfathering and/or RP nepotism in play. The best way to avoid this is to require a one-round "refractory period", I feel, as even people in the afterlife-box had plenty to do, even if it was reacting and popcorning at the proceedings.
  
• Panfandom games - particularly panfandom games where characters from the setting fandom are restricted in ways their original canon didn't intend - thrive on cross-canon CR. The three Ace Attorney characters in round 1 were interesting since they didn't actually get a chance to interact too much, and I noticed that Roxy didn't actually come into her own in the game until after Aradia and John had died, as well. As of such, I am entirely supportive of reducing the cast numbers to two instead of increasing them to four. I agree with Lucy in saying that dropping it all the way to single-character representatives isn't any good, either - apping pairs of characters is a popular way to enable people into games, it always helps for a character to have one tether to their former life (especially in memory loss games!) and sometimes the same-canon CR really pulls off something magical while still bolstering cross-canon CR. (If you want an example, look at what happened with Aradia and John - that sort of thing could have never happened lone canon warriors!)
  
• There was nothing wrong with the investigations themselves as far as structure. On the other hand, the quality of the actual evidence found varied depending on the incident and the players involved, with the Lysandre/Archer/Jumba trial being the pinnacle of what Dangan Roleplay could be. Every piece of evidence had a purpose, whether it was misleading or not, and with the evidence, we could piece together every bit of what happened. There were a few near-misses - Aradia and John had very little connecting links between the bits of evidence in that case, but still managed to get things together fairly well (It was unwillingness to implicate John that shot the group in the foot, that time) and for the most part, Maya/Fransizka and Veronica/Sam worked out pretty well, though the former had a smidge too much setup for Case 5 and the latter had the Case 4 problem of "things needed to be spelled out", though that was kind of an unavoidable case due to Sam's blatantly duplicitous nature. Short form is that there was too much need for hand-holding in the game overall, and too much reliance on ambiguous-but-definitive clues. If the players have to rely on a piece of torn clothing or "signs of a struggle" again to provide our conclusive evidence, then we're likely going to end up with the same "okay, everybody strip" ultimatum that showed up with distressing frequency in the first round. In addition, the less that the players can piece together on their own, the more that the mods or culprit will have to guide them through, which can lead to the endings of trials seeming rushed and sudden. You're going to have to herd your cats, while at the same time not just blatantly moving them where you want them to be.
  
• Regains-via-items sounds like a great idea in theory, but in practice it's going to be a delicate balancing act that you may or may not succeed at. Namely, you have to keep into consideration characters with purely internal powers - for instance, Madison and Sam in the last round, or someone like Superman. Either they've got a natural, obvious edge over everyone else and get to keep those powers, or they've got a natural, obvious disadvantage over everyone else and lose their powers the same as others but have no way to feasibly regain their abilities. I don't actually have any advice to give here, I'm just pointing out the natural hazards so that you guys can consider how to steer around it.
  
• There needs to be an emergency 'out' button, particularly in a game as fast-paced as this. Tying drops - be they related to inactivity or to a player needing to step away from the game - to the murders strikes me as an oppressively restrictive idea, and at least personally, it caused me to feel like I was obligated to stick around longer than I was comfortable with the game. In addition, if someone ends up in a situation where they simply can't play any more due to scheduling or due to RL sinking its claws in, there needs to be a faster turnaround than "okay, we need you to plan for this a week or more in advance". Life doesn't play by those rules, so expecting players to is rather rough.

I think that's covered all of my personal uncertainties about the game, but I can't speak with 100% certainty there; there might be something I've forgotten. If there is, I'll bring it up.