MOD HMD;

[asgardmods]

Hello, hello! It's time for Asgard's first ever:

How's My Driving: The Mod Edition
which we hope is every bit as exciting for you as it is for us. As you may or may not know, last September marked the year anniversary of Autumn, Draggy, and me being mods in Asgard, and this December marks the two year anniversary of Asgard as a whole. We think the very best way of celebrating these awesome landmarks is to bend over and cough to make sure everything is working okay! If this HMD proves fruitful, we may consider doing one of these at the end of each story arc. So slap on some gloves and give us your everything, guys, this is open forum.

If you aren't interested in participating in mod HMD and would like to skip ahead to the player poll RE: Arc 4 and endgame, go here!

HOW THIS WORKS

Responding to this meme is not mandatory. However, we would greatly appreciate any and all feedback / criticism you might have, as it helps us better the game for your enjoyment. This post will not be comm-locked as the player HMD is, because the face of the game affects not only current players but past and future players as well, so we are leaving this open to everything. Anon is disabled, however, because we feel that our players are the only speaking authority on the game's successes and failures and we want to know that we can have a discussion with our players.

Because we understand that dishing out crit is not the easiest of tasks, we've decided to break down the things we feel are most important to be addressed so that you can simply respond to them if you feel the need. Think of it like the "Known Problems" part of the player HMD; these are the things we would most like feedback on, but they are by no means the limit to what there is to critique, so you can make your own comments as you like. The basic breakdown will be as follows:

• EVENT FEEDBACK: We've listed out every event from Arc 3 with links to all related informations posts / logs in separate comments. You guys can give us your thoughts on the successes / failures of each one individually or on the month as a whole.
  • Consider the set-up of the logs and the timing of the events. Was enough information given to understand the event? Was there enough for you to work with in terms of plotting, or were you left uncertain of what to do? Do you like our use of volunteer positions or do you think we do it too often / not often enough? Things like that!
  • We also listed the opt-out options that we've given in separate comments. Please let us know whether or not these opt-out options have worked for you. Did they help keep your interaction with any plot you didn't want involved with to a minimum? Were they interesting / enjoyable alternatives to the main plot event? Is there anything you would like to see more of? Etcetera, etcetera.
• TONE / PACING FEEDBACK: Let us know how this Arc's set-up worked for you. Were the events placed far enough apart / too close together? Were there too many of them? Did the tone fit the theme of the story arc? Was it too dark / too light-hearted / an uneven mishmash of all the squishy bits inbetween?
• NPC FEEDBACK: You can call out one NPC in particular or speak to the presence of the NPC cast as a whole. Are they fun to interact with? Are they easily accessible / do they make enough appearances? Is there anything we should encourage more / less of?
• INDIVIDUAL MOD FEEDBACK: If you feel the need to address any one of us in specific, here is the place to do so! We do pretty much everything together, as we have constant communication up in the background, but if there's something any one of us has done that you'd like to discuss, we're happy to do so.
• MISCELLANEOUS FEEDBACK: For anything we might not've covered in our headers!

And that's pretty much it as far as the HMD goes. It's a free-for all, so respond to as much or as little as you'd like wherever you'd like. This post won't really close, since there is no deadline or AC for it, so feel free to respond and discuss at your leisure. We appreciate anything and everything you guys have to say to us, so have at it!

Before you go, though, we want to talk shop with you all. Arc 4 will begin in January, and though the overall storyline will follow Yggdrasil's collapse, it will also be pushing us closer to Ragnarok 2.0, which will likely take place in Arc 5 and ultimately conclude Asgard Eventide's run. Because of this significance, we are going to let you guys decide what direction the game takes as we move towards end-game. This is super duper important, so even if you don't choose to participate in the HMD, please still vote in this poll! To make room for questions and discussion, we've put the poll in a separate post over here.

Comments

Just gonna comment to this one rather than both haha

[asgardmods]

But yes, this is definitely something we've noticed ourselves. The festival was a special occasion and the prank wars were meant to tie into Loki's illness as the cure, but we're trying to direct positive events towards the current state of the city since we can't do random curses the way we did in Arc 1 and 2. The gods aren't going to do a hugging competition right now when their city is on fire. As much fun as those things are, it's just not appropriate anymore.

So part of what we've been struggling to do is finding lighter events that do tie into the current state of things without getting repetitive or lacklustre. For instance, we can't really do another Can We Fix It? type event because there's really not much we can do to make it more exciting than the last one, and because those kinds of reconstructions are now at a constant across the city. We run into the task of finding something that is interesting, light-hearted, and unique, which is difficult when we're also trying to direct the plot events and make sure everything is staying on course.

I'm not really sure what you mean by victories though. Can you tell me a little more about that and what you'd like to see?

Re: Just gonna comment to this one rather than both haha

[livedtwice]

Honestly, moments where the characters come up with ideas that succeed. It seems like it's all the gods succeeding, and while that's great, it doesn't really lead to moments where the characters feel like they have a ton of agency. That's why the watering hole plot stood out to me in your list above. Sure, the characters had agency, but it came to bite them in the ass. Sure, the characters fought well during the frost giants attacking the city, but it came to bite them in the ass. Even with the mirror plot, the same thing came in to play. It's kind of hard for the characters to feel like they're succeeding in helping or doing anything if the only rate of "helping" is the greyness meter.

That's why I suggested plots where characters could come up with a solution, but you guys could point us in the direction of how to do that. Room for proactiveness on that front would be nice, and the characters being rewarded for it would be pretty awesome.

I honestly think this is why everyone is drawn to the militarized point on the poll—it'd give characters room to act more than the other two (where characters are inevitably passive participants).

[asgardmods]

Okay, now I understand a lot more! And I definitely agree with you all - I read through your other thread as well - that we want to see more pro-activity coming from the players and the PCs. I think what was most poignant in your response is that the tone has moved towards horror/survival, which like you said, is not what we want.

That idea of finding hope or feeling like you're actually contributing to the war is really important and we want to see more of that, but every plot we've tried to run where the characters come up with a solution has fallen completely flat with little to no response until we had to resolve matters ourselves. Take for example the first Holes plot we ran, where we asked everyone to discuss and find a way to clear the Reapers out of the city before people got hurt. This was a small, throwaway task that got a lot of response for playing out the Reapers' attacks and about two people that suggested an actual solution - and those two people didn't get any discussion on their suggestions or discuss it between each other. We ended up just deciding on one of the two ourselves after five or six people asked what happened with the Reapers.

A better example would be the first battle of Ragnarok in November of last year. That battle was intentionally designed for Asgard to be on the losing side of things because it was the set up for Arc 2 and to keep the game running longer than a year. Haha But in the months before the battle, the mods opened up what I thought at the time to be really interesting opportunities for involvement and pro-activity. There were watch guards set up for each of the districts, that was when the Guard and the Medic Corps were started as well as a third group, the Engineers, and very few of these things ever made it off the ground. The Guard and the Medic Corps only made it because Kami and I thought they were brilliant and really useful. Either no one else thought so or no one else cared enough to put in the time.

This was the mods pointing players in the direction of how to be involved, how to contribute and find a way to push back in the war, and no one took it. Even if that event was designed for them to lose, there were smaller battles and a lot of opportunities for characters to help each other out in several different ways that didn't all involve the fighting aspect of the war, and no one got took it.

I'm not telling you this to say that we don't want to run plots that are solved by the characters or that we don't want to help you figure out how to do that. I'm telling you this because it's extremely difficult, and we have never had an instance where it succeeded, but we want it to. I wrote the militarisation as a possibility to run because I saw people discussing these types of things both ICly and OOCly, which tells me that there is actually some energy flowing behind these ideas and that we might be able to tap into that with the right type of events. We want to get you guys rolling so that you can play an active role in the plot, but it's really hard to do because mods can't write events towards a player solution. It needs to be player driven, and that is really difficult to achieve.

The only compromise we've found is writing events with these polls to determine a conclusion, and they always have the Other option that still never gets used. This is why I spent some time asking around the AHD poll to see what ideas the players and their characters come up with, to see if we can use that to try and push people in the direction of solving things on their own, because I am so serious, we want to see it happen. We want so badly for you guys to succeed. We just need you all to work with us on it, because there's only so much we can do from this side of the game.

The watering hole event was written that way because the Travellers were really closely divided on that one, between killing him and imprisoning him, and we wanted to show them how important that split is because in a war, the life of one man that bears only ill will towards you and your cause can make a difference in its success. We really wanted to drive that idea that you guys will make decisions that will impact the game in one way or another, and you aren't always going to be right. The Travellers that ended up killing him were hilariously the people that voted to kill him in the first place ( thanks, RNG ), so that was a really good tool for emphasising that point. Most of the Travellers that voted to imprison him learned that they have to bear the weight of that decision and think more critically in the terms of war.

These are the things we want to see. We want to see discussion, debate, good and bad effects of either option. We want you guys to have that power between each other and not us, our role as moderators is to help facilitate your movements. We want to see things like that where you guys make a call and the effect it has on the game moulds to the concept that we are in a war, and every step we take is important in its success or failure. We want characters to have hope that they're doing the right thing as well as shouldering the burden when they aren't. This is the direction we're trying to push the game in, which is why it is exciting for us to see how may people agree that they want to have more weight in the plot. That's exactly what we were hoping for.

But in order to get there, we need cooperation and discussion. We will try to write more open ended plots, but we can't do it if no one steps up to the plate to actually tie it off. Think of it like plotting for an event; you go to your CR and try to discuss what to do to achieve an ends. We need you to plot with us on a larger scale. If you guys have ideas or thoughts you want to weigh in on the direction of the plot, we need you to come to us to discuss it so we can find a way to reach that end.

So we will try to write more events with player polls and open boxes for discussion as well as just general events of small victories, but as always, we really want to remind people that we run almost 95% of player plots that are brought to us. If you guys want a specific type of event to happen, talk to us, we will make it happen. Even if it's just the idea of "I'd like to see a new weapon introduced" - which is literally exactly what happened with the hippie plot, Dawn said she wanted a new mythical animal and I wrote hippies hanging out with forest sprites - then we will be more than happy to write a plot to do that. We will do what we can to push PC contribution, but it'll work a thousand times better when we have player contribution to back it. We want to work with you all, but we need you to work with us!