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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
- Trials. Really unpopular opinion, but honestly, I think that nothing should change for the trials. Part of the fun (and stress) was the rapid-fire speed of the entire thing. Stretching it out to a 3:1 day ratio would definitely encourage more participation, but it would also take away from the urgency and speed, which is honestly what I liked best about the trials. They genuinely felt like a life-or-death situation (even when everyone got distracted by Maurice/the bunnyplane idea). This is obviously not ideal for all players, but I believe that this should be sort of a caveat for apping: you must be able to be around on trial day - if you have a one-time commitment that's perfectly fine, but if you're apping in and you can't make any of the trials, then we have a problem.
One of the things I've heard people say is that confessions came too easily or the trials felt forced somehow. I will agree that some of the confessions seemed to come out of nowhere, but after experiencing what it was like for myself, I understand completely. Going in there playing the culprit is extremely stressful and the trials are very long; basically the confessions come about because it's wearing the player down as well and once you get to a certain point, you know you're just going to have to let your character explain what happened. I honestly don't think there's anything to be done to change that; I can't come up with a way to make the trials more like Dangan Ronpa, where things are revealed a piece at a time. We got lucky with case 5 in that things slowly were revealed, but I can tell you that none of that was planned at all.
- Investigation. Personally I liked the way things were run when it came to the Evidence Bullets. I preferred having no idea just how many things I was looking for, it encouraged players to think outside the box and search in places that might not be incredibly obvious. While having a set number of bullets won't change that, I feel like it will cheapen the effect of finding something OOCly. There's also the part where the log will most likely just die once everything has been found. People will also be more likely to keep searching if they have a strict number of Evidence Bullets to be found, so we wouldn't be entering any trial without some pieces of evidence, which I thought was very interesting.
- Death Rolls. I'm very pleased that you guys have decided to go with two full weeks to plan out a murder instead of just three days. Some of the most fun I had in this game was plotting to murder someone with Dal, so I hope everyone has enjoyable experiences like that! I don't know if you were planning on it, but I think the motives should all be decided in advance so you can hand them out to the people who were rolled and they can figure out if they want that motive to be a part of the trigger for the murder.
- Motives. This round's motives were very weak. I understand not wanting to crib shamelessly off DR or SDR2's motives, but it felt like there really wasn't much effort being put into the motives. While "Lysandre's marriage to Monomi" was an incredibly funny motive, it definitely wasn't taken seriously and no one was going to kill over it. I think next round all - or at least most - of the motives should be designed to get the characters to kill one another. The snow motive was probably the best, but it didn't work because of the hotel which could provide food, shelter, and a place for literally everyone to stay. It's a good thing to think about in the future - how will the setting effect this motive and will this motive stay relevant? It's also good to think about your cast of characters - this round probably wouldn't have reacted to motives like money, but next round maybe we'll have more selfish characters.
- Applications. I'm going to agree with most of the people here in that I believe that cast caps should be limited. I like the idea of only allowing 2 characters per canon, but even then I think there should be a limit - for example, characters from DRP round 1 should not both be able to reapp into a cast. So, Roxy, John, or Aradia can app back in, but not two of them, if that makes sense.
On the subject of reapping, I understand where others are coming from in that they're afraid that old players will beat out the new. This is certainly understandable, so perhaps there can be a cap on how many returning players you guys will take? In a similar vein, I don't believe that the returning characters should just be limited to 2 if you decide to drop the cast cap for any reason; having only two out of thirty people knowing what they're doing in investigations and trials is going to be a nightmare. While it might be more fun from an OOC standpoint if no one knows what they're doing, ICly it's going to be a headache and we'll get five hours of back-and-forth banter rather than anything actually happening and I'm sure the culprit's player will want to tear their hair out. Four out of thirty is slightly better and I would be fine sticking with this number, or even increasing it a bit (five or six maybe?). The point is that characters (and players) who have been here before know how the game is run, so they can help others figure out how to respond to the investigations/trials. I know it took me weeks to work out how to play properly, so having people there who can help guide the others is definitely a good thing. I also agree with Dal's point that characters should only be appable for two rounds before they're "retired," so to speak.
- Activity. The thing that bothered me most about this round was how characters were rolled completely randomly, taking out some of the more active ones and leaving some inactive ones. I definitely agree that there should be repercussions for not participating in the game, but I feel like there should be some sort of section in the application screening process to get a feel for how the player is going to handle something rapid-fire like the trial. My biggest issue was not the fact that characters weren't showing up, it was that the trials seemed to have all the same faces and it came down to the same characters to come to conclusions. My suggestion is to run a mock trial sometime before the start of the game, where anyone who is interested in apping can come in and tag. Or maybe a mock investigation? I'm not sure, either way it would give new players a feel for how the game is played. I think a section should be required on the app showing that the characters have threaded in either a mock trial/investigation. Unfortunately, this means more work for you guys, but I think this might help in picking players who will be active through the investigations and trials, which are (in my opinion) the most important part of the game. I definitely agree with raising the activity and forcing it to be cross-canon, so hopefully that will help!
- Time. Part of the fun (for me at least) of Dangan Roleplay was how fast it was. Everything moved along very nicely (for the most part) and I wasn't left wondering how to get my character involved (and I played an antisocial jackass). I honestly believe switching to a 3:1 time ratio would make the entire game feel slower and feel like there's nothing to do in the down-time. Sure, you could switch it up and have the 3:1 ratio for trials/investigations and leave the week on a 1:1 day ratio, but that just raises the question of "what day is it??" and that could get really annoying really fast. If you have some way to ensure that the characters have no idea what day it is or what time it is, then that might work better, but honestly I liked the way things were in this round and wouldn't change it. I'm fully aware that not everyone can play in a game like that, however, which while it would cut down on the number of apps, would also leave some potential players very bitter.
- Regains. I'm not sure how you plan on setting it up this time, but honestly I don't think characters should keep their powers or be able to regain them. Part of the fun of the Dangan Ronpa games was that anyone could kill anyone else, there wasn't an obvious power imbalance. If we have superpowered characters running around with the ability to melt someone's mind, then yeah, we're going to run into problems. Maybe the character(s) wouldn't use their power(s) to kill someone because it would be too obvious. That's all well and good, but what if the death is an accident or in self-defense? It would be stupid to think that a character with powers like that would immediately default to using a knife when they could just blast someone in the brain and kill them. This would make the investigation and trial easy and would remove all the suspense the investigations/trials usually bring. Basically, I don't see any reason for characters to have powers. If there's something I'm overlooking here, please let me know, but I just don't see the point in letting characters keep their powers.
For item regains, I'd impose the same sort of limit - you can't obtain weapons from canon. Full stop. Magical items are a bit hit or miss, so I would talk to the players before deciding whether or not an item can be brought in. So basically, anything that can be used as a weapon: no, anything else: yes. I think it's also important to note on the app that character regains don't need to be serious items, they can be gag items and things that a character wouldn't want to regain. The last thing we want is someone trying to smuggle in super high powered weapons or godly abilities in the form of items just to have them. What it comes down to is that all the characters should be on equal footing.
- Emergency Out. I agree completely with Dal and Katar; having a way to leave the game if something comes up IRL should definitely be something the mods consider. However, I feel it is incredibly important that players realize just how much time and effort this game takes to play. Perhaps adding a section in the app that asks for what times a player is available will help you in deciding if the player would be a good fit for the game? Someone who isn't available on the weekends might not be a good choice, for example, but you have no way of knowing that until the game gets started. So I'd suggest including a section on the app that asks for time zone and what hours the player is available during a normal week. Obviously unforeseen things come up, and if it's once or twice that's fine, but skipping out on the trials every week is a huge problem.
- Characters. Unpopular opinion time, but I seriously think that you guys should limit the number of "good" characters. It's great to have characters who will try to get everyone to hold hands and sing, but when it comes down to it, this is a murder game. If we have a cast of characters composed of entirely people who would refuse to kill for any but the most noble of reasons, it's going to be a repeat of this round, which honestly, wasn't as entertaining as it could be. It got to a point where I was like "oh, another altruistic killer" and was severely disappointed. I'm not saying the entire cast should be genocidal maniacs and warmongers, but keeping a balance in mind when you're going through the apps would be a good idea. Of course, this doesn't work if the players all app good guys, so hopefully players will consider this and app more morally gray characters in the next round. Characters like Lysandre are perfect: they get along well with everyone else and form friendships and seem like they wouldn't hurt anyone... and then they turn around and commit the most gruesome murder in the game because they're actually really twisted. I'd love to see more characters like that, but general jerks are always good too. Basically, I thought this round was made up of characters who were entirely too good for the situation they were put in and it lead to predictable murders. Maybe next time consider letting Maya or Sam get away with things and killing at least one or two people!
...Okay I'm just going to end this now before I come up with something else to say. I'm sorry this is so long and thank you guys for reading through all this!