Retrospective [OOC]

[Flyg0n]

Hello, and welcome to the part of AQ I’ve been looking forward to almost as much as the actual RP and ending itself. The retrospective! Where you get to roast me and point out every mistake I made (kidding, pls don’t lol).

In all seriousness, for those unaware, a retrospective is basically a look back at the entire RP, to help identify and discuss what worked, what you enjoyed, and spots you struggled with or didn’t like. And it's a way for me to gauge aspects of the campaign I was blind to.

It’s also my chance to share with you some fun behind the scenes, answer burning questions, and let you peek behind the curtain.

Any commentary is welcome. You don’t have to bring up stuff that didn’t work if you can’t think of anything, feel free to simply share what parts really resonated with you! Even if you don’t know why, just letting me know what's fun for people helps immensely.

There will be a couple basic rules to note before you post your thoughts, just for my own sake, heheh.

1. Please keep criticism constructively focused. If you have a critique to offer, try to think of ways you might have to work on improving it. Not to say you have to know how to improve, just that even seemingly unimportant suggestions might help give new perspective!
2. Keep it civil (this one is easy, goes without saying. Don’t start debate, this thread is here to share ideas and personal opinions/perspectives) and to be a discussion. Respect each other's experiences.
3. I thrive equally on hearing both what worked and what didn’t, so please feel free to highlight the parts you really enjoyed alongside anything that didn’t really click for you.

Guidelines aside, I’ll begin by sharing a bit of context on my end.

So, the first quirk of this delightful campaign - The week right after I agreed to have the campaign, I got covid. Then got a cat, who was sick. Then got hospitalized and from being sick, again, then got sick again, then had car problems, and a bunch of other stuff that happened in the first two-four months of the campaign, so that was fun. And set me back a nice bit, heh.

Next, I’ll highlight some problems I became aware of on my end, in the early months of the campaign. When I planned this campaign, it was planned to be a fairly small mystery with about 3-4 clues to reveal that Orzo was behind it all, and then some kind of fight. However, very quickly after starting it began to occur to me that the number of discoverable clues per scene was tiny, in comparison to the number of players. Each plot scene was going to have only one clue... and there really would only be 4, maaayyybeee 5 big plot scenes.

This would have created a situation where one or two players would have discovered every clue and solved the mystery without any other characters/players being able to have time to get involved. So, I rapidly began to add new tidbits of clues and things to discover that weren’t in my original notes. The main four-five clues remained the same, such as the suspect's color, the flakes from the paint, and the type signature, but I basically added minor tie-ins when I could, every time someone used an investigation power.

This didn’t exactly extend the time though, just a quirk of the RP.

The second quirk I realized is that in all my planning, I failed to account for the simplest factor of all - Group Size. While I was prepared for the amount of posts I thought I’d have to write, and how long it would take me, I didn’t account for the fact that in a big group (12-16 players), it would simply by nature of existence, take time for everyone to post, especially with disparate time zones.

Not to mention my silly self genuinely just did not account for the amount of NPC interaction! Don’t ask me how, but it never occurred strongly enough to me that folks would want to actually interact so much with NPC’s, so I had to rapidly scale to accommodate this, and write these characters, heh. And as a side note, I somehow never planned to have the mythicals be interactable either and then realized that would be silly, so I quickly added them on the fly as interactable. Which worked very well for the plot overall.
(Fun fact! The original plot featured 0 mythicals and a scene near the end where players could pick 1-2 legendaries to 'recruit' for the last battle. However, having myths vs legends actually fit so nicely and had more relationship with respective users. Neat bonus!)

So, all that took my plan for a 1–2-month RP and helped stretch it to... well the one we got.

In the future, I now know to either make a smaller and dense mystery, or plan for a longer one better. I don’t know for sure I’d do another mystery, but if I did I would have a better idea of how to construct one for RP. Two of those things being number of clues and group size.

As a last note, I am aware some folks felt left behind or left out, due to time zone constraints, or being less active, meaning they didn’t quite get a chance to have as much impact. This is a tricky thing to address, as I don’t want to punish active and engaged players, but I also want to accommodate others within reason.

If anyone has suggestions for ways to theoretically balance the idea of mystery components/general engagement between disparate users, I am all ears!

So yeah, feedback away! Also feel free to ask any questions - planning, process, writing, plot, and mechanics and literally anything related to the RP is fair game too. Please don't feel pressured to offer some big-brained take if you can't. Any and all feedback is helpful, even just 'cool NPC, thx'.

Once again, thank you everyone for your patience and your efforts. All of you truly made incredible progress as writers and put out some amazing work. You should be proud and thank you for sticking with me on this wild ride, you were wonderful to RP with.

P.S. Hopefully once holiday craziness is done, I can squeeze in some epilogue stuff/goodbye posts!

Fun extras:

Spoiler

Soundtrack:

https://soundcloud.com/alexandre-darnay%2Fsets%2Fconfronting-the-golden-king

View: https://soundcloud.com/alexandre-darnay/sets/confronting-the-golden-king/s-jYsdNCdAKnf?si=bb737a0e086a42a194cf84f16473de48&utm_source=clipboard&utm_medium=text&utm_campaign=social_sharing

Sus list: (This was not 100% accurately tracked, especially as the campaign went on, but its fun anyways)

Sussy times

docs.google.com

The battle sheet: (Please note; The battle sheet is not a true mathematical calculation or a balanced version of mechanics. It is much more like a flavor guideline to loosely inform how I might handle flavor for that turn, and to help me roughly keep track of who was doing what and said effects. Do not be surprised at damage outputs, as I frequently added more or less, even to the 'final' number, and I fudeged and rounded everything in favor of flavor. This is also why I stressed not to minmax and to cooperate.
My loose rule of thumb was multiple everything up by adding a 0 to the base damage, then slapping on some modifiers for STAB, SE, & etc. By the time I got near the end I basically was just winging it, which is why the last turn or so isn't even there. This document is just available for the funsies
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1kNDygxSHfP-e3plx_a73lIrimTsehb9anpONnvAbkhs/edit?usp=sharing

 

[IFBench]

Honestly? My only critique is how much it slowed down IRL after the break-in. Other than that, I absolutely loved every part of this! The characters, the interactions, the settings, the whump, the final battle, ITEMS, and so much more!

Thank you so much for hosting this! It was amazing!

 

[Flyg0n]

Honestly? My only critique is how much it slowed down IRL after the break-in. Other than that, I absolutely loved every part of this! The characters, the interactions, the settings, the whump, the final battle, ITEMS, and so much more!

Thank you so much for hosting this! It was amazing!

Just to clarify, do you mean physically slow OOC or that the pacing of the 'story' felt slower?

 

[Hanafuda]

I really loved all of this. As soon as the signups were open, I didn’t think twice about entering my OCs. I’m glad they could interact with yours, Tetra. This was an epic experience. Even Noro was fun to interact with.

Your choice of music was brilliant, too.

 

[IFBench]

Just to clarify, do you mean physically slow OOC or that the pacing of the 'story' felt slower?

Physically slow OOC.

 

[Flyg0n]

Gotcha! Thank you for letting me know

 

[Seren]

Firstly, I want to make clear that this experience was amazing! From the very idea of this campaign way back when, just a little game for all our fic characters to interact a bit, to what it became, it was absolutely a blast to be a part of! Especially for me personally, as this was my first real experience with any sort of long-term RP. (Huge thanks to everyone who I got to scene with, but special shout-outs to Phoenix for helping me ease into it when I was nervous at the beginning, and Sind for being a constant joy to play with and tolerating my constant presence!) Also huge respect for you, Tetra, for both setting this up and hosting it! Honestly I really do hope we get to do something like this again. I looked forward to it quite a lot after coming home from work, and it's going to be strange just... not having it happening in the background anymore.

Now, I am also going to second Bench here, although I'm going to take it a step further. The entire campaign felt a liiiiittle bit slow on my end. And to be fair, that was fine at the start! There was plenty of RPing going on, nothing really happening yet plot-wise. But as that started to get introduced, and things went along, I did feel a bit like either clues were coming too slowly or we were just taking too long to put two-and-two together. I know a lot of that was IRL complications for sure as well as having to plan or accommodate when the players deviated from the original plans, among other various reasons, but there were points where it did feel like the scenes that wanted to happen got done and then there was a bit of... waiting around for the next night/day phase to happen. This also happened a lot during the final battle, although it had been going on a lot before that, too. Like I get wanting to give a couple days for everyone, accounting for various time zones, to coordinate and post flavor, but there were some points where it felt rushed and others where we waited several days after we were ready for anything to happen. I think the point I'm trying to make here is that, yeah, I get that life happens, especially when the commitment lasts significantly longer than planned, but it felt like the day/night extensions, etc. happened very frequently, and there were a couple points where I'd been expecting things to get going and it just... didn't. In terms of ways to fix this, it really depends on why those delays happened. Idk how many of them were due to irl obligations, but it's not like you can plausibly say "nah I'm not going to work today, I promised an AQ post tonight". I suspect it's probably just an experience thing. Now that you know what it takes to run something like this, you can better gauge how long a future game might take, factoring in more/less complicated mechanics, how often you'll allow deviations from what you planned and how long it might take to accommodate those, etc.

The mechanics were fun, although I had wished they felt a little more impactful. We got a lot of "yep, this is the same thing we found in a previous area" which... well, was good for confirmation (and a few move-types throwing things off) but otherwise it felt like we just weren't really making much progress with them. That said, I am kind of sorry that we didn't end up using the "accusation" part, but honestly I did really enjoy the plan everyone came up with to reveal Orzo out in the open, the break-in investigation, and all of that. I think we got a much cooler lead-up to the final battle than the "hey you're the villain!" and leaping into the battle that I think I was originally expecting! Although, considering you'd mentioned the planned whump bit since the beginning, I suspect I may have been shortsighted in my original expectations; sounds like you'd probably planned the grand finale to happen after meeting Darkrai and going to Orzo's realm all along.

All in all, my outlook was highly positive! If you hadn't told us this was your first time hosting a game like this, I probably would not have noticed. (Yeah, the expected game length vs actual game length was a huge difference but not an indicator all on it's own.) It definitely felt a little long at times, but life happens, and I don't feel like that impacted gameplay at all until the final battle. But I had a great time RPing with everyone, and once we got things rolling with the clues and whatnot, it really was exciting! The music choices were spot-on. I also really ended up feeling bad for suspecting Xavian near the beginning, when the poor guy genuinely just wanted everyone to have a good time. The characters and NPCs all felt memorable in some way, and the interactions with them (mythics too!) were fun and interesting. Even Noro.

The whump bit was fantastic, of course, and probably unsurprisingly my favorite part of the entire thing. I honestly felt like that segment brought out literally everyone's best writing and shoved it into the spotlight (even Q, who hadn't really been playing anymore to that point, wrote and shared one! And Bench gave us bonus scenes with Coleane's friends!). I'm very pleased with my own nightmare scene (although I did spice it up after posting and will probably edit it more later down the road and either use it in my fic or add it as a bonus chapter or something). So yeah, I personally got a lot out of this, both in terms of others' content, and some spicy details and ideas for my own fic! Honestly I fleshed out Kimiko a lot more than I'd expected to when starting this, and it was fun to write for Olivia and Lucy too since I just haven't had a chance yet!

Anyways, this is long now. TL;DR is that the game did kind of last a long time but I had a ton of fun interacting with everyone and just playing. Huge respect and appreciation, Tetra, you should be proud of this!

 

[Flyg0n]

Now, I am also going to second Bench here, although I'm going to take it a step further. The entire campaign felt a liiiiittle bit slow on my end. And to be fair, that was fine at the start! There was plenty of RPing going on, nothing really happening yet plot-wise. But as that started to get introduced, and things went along, I did feel a bit like either clues were coming too slowly or we were just taking too long to put two-and-two together. I know a lot of that was IRL complications for sure as well as having to plan or accommodate when the players deviated from the original plans, among other various reasons, but there were points where it did feel like the scenes that wanted to happen got done and then there was a bit of... waiting around for the next night/day phase to happen. This also happened a lot during the final battle, although it had been going on a lot before that, too. Like I get wanting to give a couple days for everyone, accounting for various time zones, to coordinate and post flavor, but there were some points where it felt rushed and others where we waited several days after we were ready for anything to happen. I think the point I'm trying to make here is that, yeah, I get that life happens, especially when the commitment lasts significantly longer than planned, but it felt like the day/night extensions, etc. happened very frequently, and there were a couple points where I'd been expecting things to get going and it just... didn't. In terms of ways to fix this, it really depends on why those delays happened. Idk how many of them were due to irl obligations, but it's not like you can plausibly say "nah I'm not going to work today, I promised an AQ post tonight". I suspect it's probably just an experience thing. Now that you know what it takes to run something like this, you can better gauge how long a future game might take, factoring in more/less complicated mechanics, how often you'll allow deviations from what you planned and how long it might take to accommodate those, etc.

"nah I'm not going to work today, I promised an AQ post tonight".

RIP to my dreams of quitting my job to run pokemon RP's 😞

This is an excellent point, ty for sharing your insight! A lot of it was due to a few prime factors: Irl problems in the early stages, burnout in the final half, and sometimes overextending to try and make sure everyone had time to post. Which, you're absolutely correct and I think now that I better understand campaigns, this is something I have a clearer idea how to plan for.

Consistency will probably help a lot with this and set the schedule better. I suspect I overestimated myself initially in how fast I could post, which is why sometimes things moved quick and other times I basically had to take a day (or several) lest I risk complete burnout. I'd definitely try for a slower paced consistent schedule going forward, to avoid any franticness or exhaustion.

Anyways, this is all just to share perspective. It's really helpful to know that the pacing was off, so it's something I can plan and accommodate for if there's ever a next campaign (I say maybe but lets be real, I probably will eventually do something lol). I'm glad you had such a good time anyway though, I absolutely loved seeing your characters and having you around! Thank you for sharing and if you think of anything else, don't hesitate to add it!.