Post-round crit post

[petoskeymods]

Please place any crit or comments you have on how this round was run and how things turned out. This has been a first time running a murdergame for both mods, so we're still learning the ropes and any crit is greatly appreciated. Also, we tried out some different mechanics this time around, and opinions on what worked and what didn't will help us with deciding on what to use in future rounds.

Comments

[backspacing]

Eski covered most of the stuff, but there are a couple points I wanted to hit on too:

- In regards to the power nerfing, that's a thing we're definitely planning on fine-tuning as we go on. We want to nerf as little as possible, just because the setting of the game has a lot of possibilities in terms of what to do with said powers. The Foundation especially would not nerf a lot of powers, since they use said powers all the time in the name of 'protecting humanity'. And honestly, given how like 99% percent of games completely nerf powers all together, we wanted a setting where characters can have a bit more fun with them.

I think to strike a balance between 'having fun' and 'fairness', we might use a 'one time only' policy going forward. So like, something like Ren's third eye ability would work the first time, but after that the powers that be would go 'nu-uh' and not let him use it again to find clues. Something like that would allow us to better fit the game to what the players decide to do, since we can roll with the punches and go "awesome use of your power. Now don't do it again" instead of just saying 'no' to everything. That's our thought for now, at least. We're going to try that out in Round 2 and see how it works.

- In terms of endings, Eski and I had a very specific plan for this round (and will have similar plans for future rounds). Basically, we don't want 'golden end' to feel like a given. We don't want the best ending to become expected, because we feel like that cheapens the game as a whole.

So when Eski and I planned this round, we specifically did not plan for a 'golden end'. The absolute best ending we had planned for this game still involved sacrificing at least one character to Sol to allow the dead to come back to life. And honestly? That worked out amazingly. Because everyone in the graveyard saw what we had to offer, and they went "nu-uh, we're finding our own answer." Which is, honestly, what a golden end should be! It should be the players completely upending the game and finding an answer that even the mods didn't plan on.

Given how well it worked this time, we're likely going to stick to it in future rounds. The 'good end' we plan will still be relatively positive, but also bittersweet. But the players won't have to just settle for that ending, they can make their own, better ending if they come up with a way to do it. That way you guys are earning that happy ending. I feel like that's a much more satisfactory way to do it than planning out a 'golden ending' and having a list of boxes to check off to get there.

- Finally, thank you for playing with us, and thank you for the crit you've given us here. We're going to be taking it into account as we do our planning for round 2 (and, for the stuff that doesn't apply to mafia-style games, round 3), so it really helps us a lot.

[finalguard]

Hearing this power nerf idea just makes me more excited for R2! Generally having the powers there is amazing (especially now that we know the setting), but this would probably balance them way better.

And I feel you on being fed up with Golden Ending (tm), haha. I was rooting for getting a worse ending in quite a few of my past murdergames. In this one it just really hit me how young and largely innocent our characters were so I was just going 'must. wrap them. in blankets'. Overall I am very happy with the end though now that we're all working with it. It leaves exciting postgame perspectives and the continuity aspect is also really cool.