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Tomn
Aug 23, 2007

And the angel said unto him
"Stop hitting yourself. Stop hitting yourself."
But lo he could not. For the angel was hitting him with his own hands

FoxTerrier posted:

We're not half Melachim. We can rule with an iron fist all we want. BWAHAHAHAHA!

Well, to a point.

If we're too much of an rear end in a top hat we may find ourselves under a siege tower with some bastard surfing the drat thing, beating us with a tree trunk, and yelling "ELLLLLLLLLL!"

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SerSpook
Feb 13, 2012




Tomn posted:

Well, to a point.

If we're too much of an rear end in a top hat we may find ourselves under a siege tower with some bastard surfing the drat thing, beating us with a tree trunk, and yelling "ELLLLLLLLLL!"

Do you plan on joining us for Judah? I think it'll be a much more relaxing game

DCBomB
Sep 14, 2008

FoxTerrier posted:

Right before Ibleam is about to be attacked we should run up a ton of debt with merchants there.

(not really but it would be pretty funny)

Don't forget, they're not all dead.

Vavrek
Mar 2, 2013

I like your style hombre, but this is no laughing matter. Assault on a police officer. Theft of police property. Illegal possession of a firearm. FIVE counts of attempted murder. That comes to... 29 dollars and 40 cents. Cash, cheque, or credit card?

DCBomB posted:

Don't forget, they're not all dead.

All the men of property are!


You know, maybe we could meet the dudes Enkidel sent to Baitel to study.

FoxTerrier
Feb 15, 2012

Perfectly logical poster who uses the tools available to him to come to solid conclusions

DCBomB posted:

Don't forget, they're not all dead.

Not yet :unsmigghh:

Also:

HOLY poo poo YALL

If we become King of Tadmor we get to read their temple records! SQUEEEEEEEEE!

FoxTerrier
Feb 15, 2012

Perfectly logical poster who uses the tools available to him to come to solid conclusions

SerSpook posted:

Do you plan on joining us for Judah? I think it'll be a much more relaxing game

Truth.

gently caress team Ashera and team El.

Founding Team Chillax as of now. Team
chillax = best team :2bong:

Tomn
Aug 23, 2007

And the angel said unto him
"Stop hitting yourself. Stop hitting yourself."
But lo he could not. For the angel was hitting him with his own hands

SerSpook posted:

Do you plan on joining us for Judah? I think it'll be a much more relaxing game

We'll see. I might watch on the sidelines, anyways.

Skellybones
May 31, 2011




Fun Shoe

FoxTerrier posted:

Right before Ibleam is about to be attacked we should run up a ton of debt with merchants there.

(not really but it would be pretty funny)

They'll recover the contract records from the temple and then Judah will have to become a debt slave to one of the babies Enkidel rescued who inherited all the credit.

Crudus
Nov 14, 2006

Well, I didn't post anything because I wanted to make sure I read all the replies to catch up, and I have been busy the last few days since this happened.

I realize the conversation has mostly moved on but I want to add that I am also disappointed in the way things ended. This game has been part of my (nearly) daily life for three years and it is disappointing to know that we are never going to find out the secrets we've been hunting for. I am among those posters that have had dreams about this game, or found myself ruminating on it at random times of the day. I was never as verbose as some other posters with theorycrafting, and never made it into IRC to take part in the discussion there, but speculation and nailing down the tacks of how the setting worked exactly is a lot of what made this game fun for me.

I can understand that dio is running a simulation and that we are not guaranteed a story. I can empathize with dio about goons becoming more and more fractured and there being just too much information backlog in the thread for us to make good decisions anymore. I respect that he has new ideas for how to keep things simpler going forward, and avoid some of those issues. I have not decided yet whether I am going to participate by voting in the new story, but I imagine I will find myself reading it in the future at some point and I hope that these ideas work and make things better for everyone.

There is one bone I have to pick, echoing a sentiment expressed by some other posters, however. And that is, I do not believe we will ever find out what is going on behind the curtains of the setting. Not only will our new character be further divorced from these mysteries just by the virtue of ***probably*** not being a half-melachim, I just don't believe that dio is ever going to tip his hand. I have thought a lot about what might be his motivations in running the game, and what makes it fun for him the last few days. Of course, I can only guess at these and I don't have a lot of real insight, since I don't know dio personally and have never even chatted with him in IRC. Other posters probably have better insight, but I tried to put myself in his shoes.

I understand that he is running a simulation of the world of Ur and in fact I think that the simulation aspect is what is most motivating for him. I believe him when he says he is keeping track of many things behind the scenes, and has crafted a lot of the setting and various plots that we have never seen that are influencing the things we encounter. The thing is, he could do all of this stuff and keep it to himself and never share it with anyone, but like many creative people, myself included, he probably has a desire to share things he has created with others, to be gratified by seeing how people react to it and even receiving praise for his efforts. I'm sure another motivator might simply be to introduce an element of randomness into his setting that he simply couldn't create himself: by having goons control an independent agent, he gets to have fun modelling how his extensive background and world reacts to an input he can't always predict.

I can put myself in dio's shoes and imagine everything to this point, but what is frustrating to me, both as a player, and from trying to see from his perspective, is this fading to black and denying any further information, the end, no answers. As a creator, how can it be satisfying knowing that all of your hard work will never be presented? Perhaps he imagines that at some point, over playing numerous characters, he will get the opportunity to share everything with us, or that we will figure things out. But if he believes this, I think he is not being honest with himself about his style as a GM. We have already played for three years with players constantly resenting the withholding of information and taking it out against NPC authority figures in response. Maybe this is one of the areas he plans to change things with the next game, but given what I've seen, I don't believe he will, and that is the thing that makes me feel most like I wont want to keep playing from here.

I'm also frustrated by the nebulous "capyburas(sp)" that supposedly run the show here. It's all well and good to have a tongue-in-cheek bullshit name for the forces controlling his dice rolls or whatever but the honest truth is that dio is choosing what happens, dio is choosing to give us carrots of adventure to follow and then stonewall us against understanding. I have often had the feeling that he does in fact have a plot he wants to see happen, in spite of his constant assurances he doesn't, and that when goons don't go with his invisible rails we get punished by gently caress-you monsters or situations.

It's one thing to advise against actions and lay out the consequences and I'm not saying that the reason we lost couldn't have been predicted or voted differently for but as a GM if you are running a game you need to understand that if your players keep asking for x and trying to get x and making bad choices because they are motivated by x you might want to drop the facade a bit and give them some x.

And I guess that's what frustrates me most is it feels like Dio has fun running his sim and doesn't really care enough about the players to let them have fun and answers as long as he gets to keep running his sim and if he never shares all of his creation with us that's aok. Or he has an invisible railroad that we could follow to give us everything we want and let him share it but he got tired of waiting for us to reneg and fall in line so this is him taking his Enkidel ball and going home. That's why he pushes forward the new character thing in spite of the vast support being for hanging onto this story because he gets to keep running his little sim and hey we'll just all forget our hurt feelings eventually or we can vote I and he can just wave goodbye politely as we leave his sandbox.

This is all frustrating and obviously I'm feeling some resentment. I probably rambled a bit too long but I hope that going forward, whether I end up reading and voting with the new character or not, dio does some thinking about what I and others have said because if people aren't having fun in a game there's no loving point to playing it.

McSpanky
Jan 16, 2005






dog kisser posted:

I mean, heck, that too.

Hey man, remember where we are! It's not an either-or thing in Ur :pervert:

Grognan
Jan 23, 2007

by Fluffdaddy

Crudus posted:

Well, I didn't post anything because I wanted to make sure I read all the replies to catch up, and I have been busy the last few days since this happened.

I realize the conversation has mostly moved on but I want to add that I am also disappointed in the way things ended. This game has been part of my (nearly) daily life for three years and it is disappointing to know that we are never going to find out the secrets we've been hunting for. I am among those posters that have had dreams about this game, or found myself ruminating on it at random times of the day. I was never as verbose as some other posters with theorycrafting, and never made it into IRC to take part in the discussion there, but speculation and nailing down the tacks of how the setting worked exactly is a lot of what made this game fun for me.

I can understand that dio is running a simulation and that we are not guaranteed a story. I can empathize with dio about goons becoming more and more fractured and there being just too much information backlog in the thread for us to make good decisions anymore. I respect that he has new ideas for how to keep things simpler going forward, and avoid some of those issues. I have not decided yet whether I am going to participate by voting in the new story, but I imagine I will find myself reading it in the future at some point and I hope that these ideas work and make things better for everyone.

There is one bone I have to pick, echoing a sentiment expressed by some other posters, however. And that is, I do not believe we will ever find out what is going on behind the curtains of the setting. Not only will our new character be further divorced from these mysteries just by the virtue of ***probably*** not being a half-melachim, I just don't believe that dio is ever going to tip his hand. I have thought a lot about what might be his motivations in running the game, and what makes it fun for him the last few days. Of course, I can only guess at these and I don't have a lot of real insight, since I don't know dio personally and have never even chatted with him in IRC. Other posters probably have better insight, but I tried to put myself in his shoes.

I understand that he is running a simulation of the world of Ur and in fact I think that the simulation aspect is what is most motivating for him. I believe him when he says he is keeping track of many things behind the scenes, and has crafted a lot of the setting and various plots that we have never seen that are influencing the things we encounter. The thing is, he could do all of this stuff and keep it to himself and never share it with anyone, but like many creative people, myself included, he probably has a desire to share things he has created with others, to be gratified by seeing how people react to it and even receiving praise for his efforts. I'm sure another motivator might simply be to introduce an element of randomness into his setting that he simply couldn't create himself: by having goons control an independent agent, he gets to have fun modelling how his extensive background and world reacts to an input he can't always predict.

I can put myself in dio's shoes and imagine everything to this point, but what is frustrating to me, both as a player, and from trying to see from his perspective, is this fading to black and denying any further information, the end, no answers. As a creator, how can it be satisfying knowing that all of your hard work will never be presented? Perhaps he imagines that at some point, over playing numerous characters, he will get the opportunity to share everything with us, or that we will figure things out. But if he believes this, I think he is not being honest with himself about his style as a GM. We have already played for three years with players constantly resenting the withholding of information and taking it out against NPC authority figures in response. Maybe this is one of the areas he plans to change things with the next game, but given what I've seen, I don't believe he will, and that is the thing that makes me feel most like I wont want to keep playing from here.

I'm also frustrated by the nebulous "capyburas(sp)" that supposedly run the show here. It's all well and good to have a tongue-in-cheek bullshit name for the forces controlling his dice rolls or whatever but the honest truth is that dio is choosing what happens, dio is choosing to give us carrots of adventure to follow and then stonewall us against understanding. I have often had the feeling that he does in fact have a plot he wants to see happen, in spite of his constant assurances he doesn't, and that when goons don't go with his invisible rails we get punished by gently caress-you monsters or situations.

It's one thing to advise against actions and lay out the consequences and I'm not saying that the reason we lost couldn't have been predicted or voted differently for but as a GM if you are running a game you need to understand that if your players keep asking for x and trying to get x and making bad choices because they are motivated by x you might want to drop the facade a bit and give them some x.

And I guess that's what frustrates me most is it feels like Dio has fun running his sim and doesn't really care enough about the players to let them have fun and answers as long as he gets to keep running his sim and if he never shares all of his creation with us that's aok. Or he has an invisible railroad that we could follow to give us everything we want and let him share it but he got tired of waiting for us to reneg and fall in line so this is him taking his Enkidel ball and going home. That's why he pushes forward the new character thing in spite of the vast support being for hanging onto this story because he gets to keep running his little sim and hey we'll just all forget our hurt feelings eventually or we can vote I and he can just wave goodbye politely as we leave his sandbox.

This is all frustrating and obviously I'm feeling some resentment. I probably rambled a bit too long but I hope that going forward, whether I end up reading and voting with the new character or not, dio does some thinking about what I and others have said because if people aren't having fun in a game there's no loving point to playing it.

haha you put more words into whining than actually reading what was going on

Tomn
Aug 23, 2007

And the angel said unto him
"Stop hitting yourself. Stop hitting yourself."
But lo he could not. For the angel was hitting him with his own hands

Crudus posted:

I'm also frustrated by the nebulous "capyburas(sp)" that supposedly run the show here. It's all well and good to have a tongue-in-cheek bullshit name for the forces controlling his dice rolls or whatever but the honest truth is that dio is choosing what happens, dio is choosing to give us carrots of adventure to follow and then stonewall us against understanding. I have often had the feeling that he does in fact have a plot he wants to see happen, in spite of his constant assurances he doesn't, and that when goons don't go with his invisible rails we get punished by gently caress-you monsters or situations.

It's one thing to advise against actions and lay out the consequences and I'm not saying that the reason we lost couldn't have been predicted or voted differently for but as a GM if you are running a game you need to understand that if your players keep asking for x and trying to get x and making bad choices because they are motivated by x you might want to drop the facade a bit and give them some x.

I think the key thing here is that Diog has said before, a couple of times, that he's running a full-on simulation of the world, which means that he ISN'T choosing what happens next - he's simply modeling everything based on the conditions he set down at the start of the game, and based on the consequences of our actions. He might influence the events to some degree as they happen, and he certainly has the freedom to fill in the details as he sees fit, but by his own lights he's just as constrained as we are and is ruled just as much by the systems, characters, and motivations he laid down initially. In his view, he CAN'T change things on the fly to better suit player desires without violating the integrity of the setting.

So the Melachim aren't withholding answers because Diog wants to string us along, they're withholding answers for reasons of their own that makes sense to them which affects not only their willingness to tell Enkidel anything but which informed all their actions from the beginning of time up to the present day, which means that if the Melachim suddenly change their minds and open up they'll flatly contradict actions they've taken in the past. And impossible monsters exist not because they're intended to punish players for whatever reason, but because their creation and existence is tied in intimately to the history of the world, and removing them from the situation would also require rewriting history to accommodate their new lack.

Now you might say that a more flexible GM should be willing to retcon wildly as needed to keep up with player desires, and certainly that does work for some GMs (Lowell's Dark Heresy comes to mind). But this more inflexible style has its own virtues as well - a large part of the depth and coherency of the setting exists because everything was set in stone right from the start, allowing them all to interweave with each other to form a single, unified puzzle that can be slowly unraveled. Everything fits together, and if you change one thing you'd either need to change everything else or accept an increasing degree of inconsistency in the setting. Arguably, the very reason that the setting is so interesting to dig into is the same reason it's also so frustrating, and to remove those particular frustrations weakens the very thing we're interested in.

So yeah, it's certainly understandable why you and others might be frustrated, but I'm not as convinced that there's an easy solution to it that still leaves the setting as rich as it was.

Crudus
Nov 14, 2006

^^Nice low effort troll. How exactly does one put words into reading?

Tomn, I understand not wanting to compromise the agendas or hard coded motivations of various actors in the world, and it is very possible dio codified some things to himself from the outset. However, I don't think that every character or npc we encountered existed at the story's outset, and after seeing us bang our heads against every wall trying to find answers it wouldn't have been impossible to make new characters and situations that would have let us find some gratification.

One of the most satisfying moments of the game, for me, was finding Amok and finally getting some confirmation about our heritage. Did dio create Amok from the outset of the game and leave him buried there until we stumble upon him or did he come up with that encounter at some later point in time? I can't know the answer to that, but I highly doubt he generated everything in the short reprieve he took between the start of this game three years ago and the end of Madgod.

I just think there is a big disconnect between the speed at which Dio wants to release information and the speed players want to learn new things and this kind of expectation he's creating of "hey, start a new character and take another crack at discovering the lore and secrets of the world" is disingenuous given the thread's history.

If he doesn't want us to find things out, then just come out and define the expectations for the game. He's drawn a hard line before with things like trying to use real-world knowledge of technology to make innovations in game, i don't think it's unreasonable to draw hard lines about what he expects from players and what they can expect from him as to how to play the game beyond "you are in a hardcore simulation."

Crudus fucked around with this message at 06:53 on Feb 17, 2016

Grognan
Jan 23, 2007

by Fluffdaddy

Crudus posted:

^^Nice low effort troll. How exactly does one put words into reading?

Dunno, figure what the gently caress was going on before pontificating and expressing your disappointment that things hurt your butt?

Crudus
Nov 14, 2006

Grognan posted:

Dunno, figure what the gently caress was going on before pontificating and expressing your disappointment that things hurt your butt?

Oh, so this is a rehash of the "wrong voting" thing then. I don't think I was the post skimming, uninformed voter you're trying to cast me as, and anyway it doesn't matter anymore how we got the game over as the gm has pretty clearly decided what direction hes going with things from here and that is to reboot things with a new character. I'm trying to express why I found the game to be frustrating in terms of player-gm disconnect so that hopefullly he can take that feedback and work it into his changes and style going forward.

Tomn
Aug 23, 2007

And the angel said unto him
"Stop hitting yourself. Stop hitting yourself."
But lo he could not. For the angel was hitting him with his own hands

Crudus posted:

Tomn, I understand not wanting to compromise the agendas or hard coded motivations of various actors in the world, and it is very possible dio codified some things to himself from the outset. However, I don't think that every character or npc we encountered existed at the story's outset, and after seeing us bang our heads against every wall trying to find answers it wouldn't have been impossible to make new characters and situations that would have let us find some gratification.

One of the most satisfying moments of the game, for me, was finding Amok and finally getting some confirmation about our heritage. Did dio create Amok from the outset of the game and leave him buried there until we stumble upon him or did he come up with that encounter at some later point in time? I can't know the answer to that, but I highly doubt he generated everything in the short reprieve he took between the start of this game three years ago and the end of Madgod.

I just think there is a big disconnect between the speed at which Dio wants to release information and the speed players want to learn new things and this kind of expectation he's creating of "hey, start a new character and take another crack at discovering the lore and secrets of the world" is disingenuous given the thread's history.

If he doesn't want us to find things out, then just come out and define the expectations for the game. He's drawn a hard line before with things like trying to use real-world knowledge of technology to make innovations in game, i don't think it's unreasonable to draw hard lines about what he expects from players and what they can expect from him as to how to play the game beyond "you are in a hardcore simulation."

Well, it might seem unlikely, but on the other hand consistently running a CYOA of this magnitude and with this much detail for a bunch of howling goons for three years with almost no breaks and without once snapping from frustration and going on a drunken rant about everyone here or going into a gibbering wreck anytime someone asks him a question also seems pretty unlikely to me, hey? :v:

But more seriously, there's no reason why he couldn't have laid down the groundwork for Paradise Lost while Madgod was still running, or even earlier. And while I agree that there's probably a number of characters made up on the fly, these seem to be universally the more minor characters, i.e. people who didn't figure into the history of the world and know nothing useful to us. It's not at all impossible, I think, that he laid down the basic groundwork for all the characters who COULD potentially answer our big questions before kicking things off (even if some of them might have been done more en bloc rather than individually - the general attitude of the Melachim, for instance.) I'd be willing to bet you a SA gift certificate that Amok's general character and location was laid down if not right from the start, then at least very early on. But even if Amok WAS created later, or even if he COULD have created a new character that told us all we wanted, these characters would need to slot into the existing cosmology of the world in order for everything to make sense - something that might preclude the very possibility of a character who can and will tell us everything on a dime.

I will note that I feel like we the players could stand to be more flexible, though. Yes, Diog's style of GMing may be inflexible, but if he's committed to that inflexibility, isn't being inflexible yourself basically a commitment to bashing your head against a brick wall? Or to put it another way, if you genuinely believe that you have a railroading GM and he doesn't respond to any attempts to get him to change, what is gained by staying in the game and constantly trying to jump the rails instead of either working with the rails to see what happens or better yet finding something more fulfilling to do? Yes, it may suck to leave Enkidel and Paradise Lost behind, but if it's absolutely not going in a direction you can accept then you weren't going to get what you wanted out of it anyways. It's why I left Paradise Lost myself for a time, after all.

I don't think it's really that Diog doesn't want us to find anything out - rather, it's more that people aren't willing to work with the methods he's been providing to find things out, for whatever reasons of their own. And this isn't all on non-El players, let me be clear - we could have run off with Bareen, or become Indor's student, or lived on a permanent basis with the Bug-Folk, but enough people decided they couldn't accept those methods that they didn't happen. Conversely we could have become a student of Baitel or hewed more unwaveringly to Ishamal's teachings, but clearly we weren't willing to do that, either. Ultimately, it seems like we cherished our independence above all else, which is a fine and acceptable choice but it comes with the cost of not being trusted enough to be provided with easy answers. If we really want fast answers, it honestly seems like we'd need to align with SOMEBODY or other, and align fully and demonstrate great loyalty. If we're not willing to do that, then it's gonna be a long, slow slog to find what we want, and we'll just have to live with that. Though, admittedly, thinking about it, it may not have been really that we cherished our independence, and was more that we couldn't agree on who to pledge loyalty to - independence due to indecisiveness rather than choice. Which is, uh, not a problem which I think will be going away any time soon. H'm.

I had a thesis when I started this, but I think it got a bit lost in the writing. Oh well!

Tsyni
Sep 1, 2004
Lipstick Apathy
I kind of like when things get heated and I am not the one calling everyone a shitlord. Makes me feel more sane.

B.B. Rodriguez
Aug 8, 2005

Bender: "I was God once." God: "Yes, I saw. You were doing well until everyone died."

Tsyni posted:

I kind of like when things get heated and I am not the one calling everyone a shitlord. Makes me feel more sane.

We wouldn't be goons if we weren't at each others' throats for petty poo poo. Calling and getting called a sperg or poo poo lord is a rite of passage, our own manhood trial, if you will. If people aren't mad at you for something here, you aren't trying hard enough.

UppaTree
May 4, 2013

Alright, I was trying to bite this back, but...

We were told, several times, that if we died we'd get a black screen and NOTHING ELSE. I could dig these up if you like, but this was one of the core rules of the game, and one of the things that had me voting for survivability pretty often. We died (?) and we got no answers, as promised.

You can say "a game where the players don't have fun is a bad game!" but I say "a story that brings out genuine emotion in the audience is a drat good story". I have felt pride, fear, dread, happiness, triumph, despair and relief from this game, and that is BECAUSE the world is unforgiving, and death has high stakes.

When I settled in to fight at Ibleam, I knew I was risking everything against slim odds, that was THE POINT. It wouldn't have been anywhere near as tense and satisfying if I knew that death would get me answers anyway.

As someone who registered entirely because of MadGod, I can tell you that this is a gutpunch, and I feel it, but them's the breaks. Denziroh left Akkad with many, many mysteries left unanswered, and that's okay. Denziroh also got hosed over by Vorlor, and disregarded multiple warnings from everyone he knew, culminating in reaching into his own mind and tearing loose a seal that he never knew was there. It ended in a drat-near apocalypse and his banishment. The only reason he got ANY answers was because he lucked out and Operation Heat The Gold succeeded - otherwise? He would've died, and probably wouldn't have been called back because OneGod wouldn't allow the horrific rituals required.

If that hadn't worked? We'd probably die and get nothing there too. Diog-games work on the principle that you only have the information your character's senses relay, which is what makes them engaging, but it also means that if your character's mind stops working, you don't know anything.

So while I feel it, and I wish it weren't so? I'd like it if you'd kindly stop casting aspersions on the guy who's provided you free entertainment for three goddamn years, TIA.

HiHo ChiRho
Oct 23, 2010

Tsyni posted:

I kind of like when things get heated and I am not the one calling everyone a shitlord. Makes me feel more sane.

You hurt my butt everday.


Wait that came out wrong

TK-42-1
Oct 30, 2013

looks like we have a bad transmitter



Technically, we didn't lose until people voted to help Paebro, and that was an option we as players made up/decoded all on our own. I'm sad we aren't going to play a beautiful nubian god anymore.

Jester Mcgee
Mar 28, 2010

A lot of things have happened to me over my life.

FoxTerrier posted:

B I'm very curious to know what this 'interesting' vantage point is. That and I agree that mortals usually have more freedom, so we're less likely to have to deal with Celestial bureaucratic silliness going down that road.

I just found this post from the very beginning of the thread. It looks almost exactly like a vote for Judah. It has grown in poignancy over the years.

Diogines
Dec 22, 2007

Beaky the Tortoise says, click here to join our choose Your Own Adventure Game!

Paradise Lost: Clash of the Heavens!

Crudus posted:

This is all frustrating and obviously I'm feeling some resentment. I probably rambled a bit too long but I hope that going forward, whether I end up reading and voting with the new character or not, dio does some thinking about what I and others have said because if people aren't having fun in a game there's no loving point to playing it.

Crudus, I read everything you said and I can appreciate your frustration. The point of the game is for everyone to have fun, though our game also has rules and I am going to stick to them. I would hope that consistency is part of what made the game fun.

BoneMonkey
Jul 25, 2008

I am happy for you.

Diogines posted:

Crudus, I read everything you said and I can appreciate your frustration. The point of the game is for everyone to have fun, though our game also has rules and I am going to stick to them. I would hope that consistency is part of what made the game fun.

Actually its sticking to the rules that I'm finding not fun.

Diogines
Dec 22, 2007

Beaky the Tortoise says, click here to join our choose Your Own Adventure Game!

Paradise Lost: Clash of the Heavens!

BoneMonkey posted:

Actually its sticking to the rules that I'm finding not fun.
As far as I know, all of the other CYOAs are narrative driven. Ours is not.

BoneMonkey
Jul 25, 2008

I am happy for you.

Diogines posted:

As far as I know, all of the other CYOAs are narrative driven. Ours is not.

Oh no, I love the Sim style game. Its awesome and unique! I just wish we didn't have to roguelike it. Especially when the sim is so deadly.

Rahul
Dec 10, 2004

Is there any chance that at some point in the future you might explain in a bit more detail how exactly you run this thing? All I can imagine at this point is that you have literally thousands of spreadsheets or something, and I have no idea how you can keep track of all the information required. I suspect you try to keep the inner workings of this all vague to discourage metagaming, but I am really curious about how the backend of this whole thing works. After the next game runs it course would it be possible to get a 'behind the scenes?'

There Bias Two
Jan 13, 2009
I'm not a good person

Diogines posted:

As far as I know, all of the other CYOAs are narrative driven. Ours is not.

The fact that you make it feel narrative driven is a testament to your excellent writing abilities.

Jester Mcgee
Mar 28, 2010

A lot of things have happened to me over my life.

Rahul posted:

Is there any chance that at some point in the future you might explain in a bit more detail how exactly you run this thing? All I can imagine at this point is that you have literally thousands of spreadsheets or something, and I have no idea how you can keep track of all the information required. I suspect you try to keep the inner workings of this all vague to discourage metagaming, but I am really curious about how the backend of this whole thing works. After the next game runs it course would it be possible to get a 'behind the scenes?'

I want to second this. I am interested in running a game with some friends, and I find the rules-blind system that Ur runs in extremely interesting from a player's perspective, but the problem is that I can't replicate it because I don't know the rules. Even some general tips on running a game with no explicit rules that the players know would be appreciated.

Granted, anything I tried would necessarily be extremely different because of the shift from forums based CYOA to real-time, in person, tabletop game, but I would still be interested in any words you had.

Travic
May 27, 2007

Getting nowhere fast

Crudus posted:

Well, I didn't post anything because I wanted to make sure I read all the replies to catch up, and I have been busy the last few days since this happened.

I realize the conversation has mostly moved on but I want to add that I am also disappointed in the way things ended. This game has been part of my (nearly) daily life for three years and it is disappointing to know that we are never going to find out the secrets we've been hunting for. I am among those posters that have had dreams about this game, or found myself ruminating on it at random times of the day. I was never as verbose as some other posters with theorycrafting, and never made it into IRC to take part in the discussion there, but speculation and nailing down the tacks of how the setting worked exactly is a lot of what made this game fun for me.

I can understand that dio is running a simulation and that we are not guaranteed a story. I can empathize with dio about goons becoming more and more fractured and there being just too much information backlog in the thread for us to make good decisions anymore. I respect that he has new ideas for how to keep things simpler going forward, and avoid some of those issues. I have not decided yet whether I am going to participate by voting in the new story, but I imagine I will find myself reading it in the future at some point and I hope that these ideas work and make things better for everyone.

There is one bone I have to pick, echoing a sentiment expressed by some other posters, however. And that is, I do not believe we will ever find out what is going on behind the curtains of the setting. Not only will our new character be further divorced from these mysteries just by the virtue of ***probably*** not being a half-melachim, I just don't believe that dio is ever going to tip his hand. I have thought a lot about what might be his motivations in running the game, and what makes it fun for him the last few days. Of course, I can only guess at these and I don't have a lot of real insight, since I don't know dio personally and have never even chatted with him in IRC. Other posters probably have better insight, but I tried to put myself in his shoes.

I understand that he is running a simulation of the world of Ur and in fact I think that the simulation aspect is what is most motivating for him. I believe him when he says he is keeping track of many things behind the scenes, and has crafted a lot of the setting and various plots that we have never seen that are influencing the things we encounter. The thing is, he could do all of this stuff and keep it to himself and never share it with anyone, but like many creative people, myself included, he probably has a desire to share things he has created with others, to be gratified by seeing how people react to it and even receiving praise for his efforts. I'm sure another motivator might simply be to introduce an element of randomness into his setting that he simply couldn't create himself: by having goons control an independent agent, he gets to have fun modelling how his extensive background and world reacts to an input he can't always predict.

I can put myself in dio's shoes and imagine everything to this point, but what is frustrating to me, both as a player, and from trying to see from his perspective, is this fading to black and denying any further information, the end, no answers. As a creator, how can it be satisfying knowing that all of your hard work will never be presented? Perhaps he imagines that at some point, over playing numerous characters, he will get the opportunity to share everything with us, or that we will figure things out. But if he believes this, I think he is not being honest with himself about his style as a GM. We have already played for three years with players constantly resenting the withholding of information and taking it out against NPC authority figures in response. Maybe this is one of the areas he plans to change things with the next game, but given what I've seen, I don't believe he will, and that is the thing that makes me feel most like I wont want to keep playing from here.

I'm also frustrated by the nebulous "capyburas(sp)" that supposedly run the show here. It's all well and good to have a tongue-in-cheek bullshit name for the forces controlling his dice rolls or whatever but the honest truth is that dio is choosing what happens, dio is choosing to give us carrots of adventure to follow and then stonewall us against understanding. I have often had the feeling that he does in fact have a plot he wants to see happen, in spite of his constant assurances he doesn't, and that when goons don't go with his invisible rails we get punished by gently caress-you monsters or situations.

It's one thing to advise against actions and lay out the consequences and I'm not saying that the reason we lost couldn't have been predicted or voted differently for but as a GM if you are running a game you need to understand that if your players keep asking for x and trying to get x and making bad choices because they are motivated by x you might want to drop the facade a bit and give them some x.

And I guess that's what frustrates me most is it feels like Dio has fun running his sim and doesn't really care enough about the players to let them have fun and answers as long as he gets to keep running his sim and if he never shares all of his creation with us that's aok. Or he has an invisible railroad that we could follow to give us everything we want and let him share it but he got tired of waiting for us to reneg and fall in line so this is him taking his Enkidel ball and going home. That's why he pushes forward the new character thing in spite of the vast support being for hanging onto this story because he gets to keep running his little sim and hey we'll just all forget our hurt feelings eventually or we can vote I and he can just wave goodbye politely as we leave his sandbox.

This is all frustrating and obviously I'm feeling some resentment. I probably rambled a bit too long but I hope that going forward, whether I end up reading and voting with the new character or not, dio does some thinking about what I and others have said because if people aren't having fun in a game there's no loving point to playing it.

This is pretty much spot on for what I think. Well put. I was much more of an rear end in a top hat about saying it though because I'm angry. A blank screen is the correct in-universe explanation according to Diogines rules. But it's still a dick move. We didn't get the secrets of the universe because we're continuing with a new character, but we didn't even get the results of the vote. Diog said he was going to try some new things to help with "cryptic mystical bullshit" so that may help, but I still don't fancy our chances of learning much of anything. If Enkidel couldn't learn anything Judah has no chance. He did promise an epilogue too, but we'll see.

Travic fucked around with this message at 15:56 on Feb 17, 2016

KPC_Mammon
Jan 23, 2004

Ready for the fashy circle jerk

Diogines posted:

As far as I know, all of the other CYOAs are narrative driven. Ours is not.

It feels like a narratively driven game though. And you've been shown to use misdirect when it fits your needs.

I wouldn't put it past you to tell us it is a sim to get us voting like it is a sim.

There Bias Two posted:

The fact that you make it feel narrative driven is a testament to your excellent writing abilities.

This, too.

ArbitraryTA
May 3, 2011

KPC_Mammon posted:

It feels like a narratively driven game though. And you've been shown to use misdirect when it fits your needs.

I wouldn't put it past you to tell us it is a sim to get us voting like it is a sim.


This, too.

If we start voting like a sim isn't it a sim?

Absum
May 28, 2013

UppaTree posted:

Alright, I was trying to bite this back, but...

We were told, several times, that if we died we'd get a black screen and NOTHING ELSE. I could dig these up if you like, but this was one of the core rules of the game, and one of the things that had me voting for survivability pretty often. We died (?) and we got no answers, as promised.

You can say "a game where the players don't have fun is a bad game!" but I say "a story that brings out genuine emotion in the audience is a drat good story". I have felt pride, fear, dread, happiness, triumph, despair and relief from this game, and that is BECAUSE the world is unforgiving, and death has high stakes.

When I settled in to fight at Ibleam, I knew I was risking everything against slim odds, that was THE POINT. It wouldn't have been anywhere near as tense and satisfying if I knew that death would get me answers anyway.

As someone who registered entirely because of MadGod, I can tell you that this is a gutpunch, and I feel it, but them's the breaks. Denziroh left Akkad with many, many mysteries left unanswered, and that's okay. Denziroh also got hosed over by Vorlor, and disregarded multiple warnings from everyone he knew, culminating in reaching into his own mind and tearing loose a seal that he never knew was there. It ended in a drat-near apocalypse and his banishment. The only reason he got ANY answers was because he lucked out and Operation Heat The Gold succeeded - otherwise? He would've died, and probably wouldn't have been called back because OneGod wouldn't allow the horrific rituals required.

If that hadn't worked? We'd probably die and get nothing there too. Diog-games work on the principle that you only have the information your character's senses relay, which is what makes them engaging, but it also means that if your character's mind stops working, you don't know anything.

So while I feel it, and I wish it weren't so? I'd like it if you'd kindly stop casting aspersions on the guy who's provided you free entertainment for three goddamn years, TIA.

FoxTerrier
Feb 15, 2012

Perfectly logical poster who uses the tools available to him to come to solid conclusions

FoxTerrier posted:

B I'm very curious to know what this 'interesting' vantage point is. That and I agree that mortals usually have more freedom, so we're less likely to have to deal with Celestial bureaucratic silliness going down that road.

Ha! Oh Lord, that certainly is a thing you found, Jester.

And you guys, truly. On a different note, it's OK for us to have a wide range of opinions on a controversial game ending. It really is. It's only natural.

But can we please stop back-biting each other over 'wrong' ideas and get back to what's really important?

Like, how exactly we intend to revoluntionize the interior and build a defense capable of taking on demon armies? Personally I think subjugating our neighbors is a waste of time, and we should work instead on turning Tadmor into a mini-hermit kingdom, hoarding all our resources for an eventual mass defense.

Poldarn
Feb 18, 2011

Does anyone have a link to the post where Judah gets conceived or mentioned after that?

hollylolly
Jun 5, 2009

Do you like superheroes? Check out my CYOA Mutants: Uprising

How about weird historical fiction? Try Vampires of the Caribbean

In the Donut people really have no concept of so-called "demon armies"....right? Zepath is in the part of the map where they draw monsters and say "here be dragyns" but a demon army attack in the Donut?

Things are not yet so dire, surely.

Arkanomen
May 6, 2007

All he wants is a hug

Poldarn posted:

Does anyone have a link to the post where Judah gets conceived or mentioned after that?

Enkidel was off getting trapped by a princess after getting krunk all night and then waking up next to a strange Melachim. It was right at the start of the Baitel trip where the king was like "Please knock up all of my daughters, mighty men." And Uriah was like "don't mind if I dooooooooo" and then had sex for easily a day and a half.

Tomn
Aug 23, 2007

And the angel said unto him
"Stop hitting yourself. Stop hitting yourself."
But lo he could not. For the angel was hitting him with his own hands

FoxTerrier posted:

Like, how exactly we intend to revoluntionize the interior and build a defense capable of taking on demon armies? Personally I think subjugating our neighbors is a waste of time, and we should work instead on turning Tadmor into a mini-hermit kingdom, hoarding all our resources for an eventual mass defense.

Well, if we pick up the reins from grandpa we don't have a choice - we've ALREADY subjugated all the surrounding cities, if you recall, after tower-surfing their kings.

That said I'd quite like the idea of reforming the subjugation into more of a hegemony - a powerful city that strongly influences but doesn't actually outright dominate the neighbors, and which is respected as the leading city amongst them. Soft power instead of hard and all that.

Cornuto
Jun 26, 2012

For the pack!

Crudus posted:

Oh, so this is a rehash of the "wrong voting" thing then. I don't think I was the post skimming, uninformed voter you're trying to cast me as, and anyway it doesn't matter anymore how we got the game over as the gm has pretty clearly decided what direction hes going with things from here and that is to reboot things with a new character. I'm trying to express why I found the game to be frustrating in terms of player-gm disconnect so that hopefullly he can take that feedback and work it into his changes and style going forward.

Its was a valid criticism, as is the 'poo poo certainly doesn't feel as planned out as we're told.'

For example the abundance of roaming monsters that can party-wipe bands of mighty men seem to have been a pretty recent invention, and make zero sense given the story this far.

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TheCog
Jul 30, 2012

I AM ZEPA AND I CLAIM THESE LANDS BY RIGHT OF CONQUEST

Cornuto posted:

Its was a valid criticism, as is the 'poo poo certainly doesn't feel as planned out as we're told.'

For example the abundance of roaming monsters that can party-wipe bands of mighty men seem to have been a pretty recent invention, and make zero sense given the story this far.

The fact that the wilderness is super dangerous is something we've known since like our manhood trial. Remember eyesceam?

This wasn't news to me at least.

Tomn posted:

Well, if we pick up the reins from grandpa we don't have a choice - we've ALREADY subjugated all the surrounding cities, if you recall, after tower-surfing their kings.

That said I'd quite like the idea of reforming the subjugation into more of a hegemony - a powerful city that strongly influences but doesn't actually outright dominate the neighbors, and which is respected as the leading city amongst them. Soft power instead of hard and all that.

Go hard or go home! :colbert:

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