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An Apology for The 3rd Sanctuary Forum Game

Arnox

Master
Staff member
Founder
Messages
5,285
As the 3rd forum game concluded, I knew that it didn't really end in a good place. I want to apologize for this and give an explanation.

The first strike was that I didn't give enough information at the beginning of the game. At the time, my intention was to shroud the entire Castle of Iron and its origins in mystery and intrigue, then slowly reveal the (large) backstory for it over the course of the campaign. But I feel like I may not have given players enough of a hook at the start.

The second strike I made was simply that there was just too much damn lore that I felt I had to reveal in order to give players enough context to effectively make decisions, but there was too much of it. Not enough given to the players at a steady enough rate, but also ironically so much that it started interfering with the moment to moment decisions of the game. "Who is this guy? Should I care about him? What is that?" The short of it is too much exposition and lore, and not enough intriguing choices given to players.

The third strike was that I probably shouldn't have allowed such early access to Point B2 where Kara was. This really did a number with the overall pace of the game, and Vendor found himself now needing to make decisions about things he probably shouldn't have had to at such an early point in the game. Further, it was very probably going to lead to Kara getting unbound earlier than she should have, which meant the players had no chance of opposing her if they wished to.

All in all, I'm really damn happy with the lore I created for the game, but still, I could have presented everything better and ran it a lot tighter. For the first Sanctuary Forum Game, I focused simply on giving players good entertainment and interesting decisions to make while lore definitely took a backseat. And while I think I definitely could have gotten away with adding more lore, it could have been done in a much better manner.

Anyway. I plan to give everyone free forum titles until the end of the fourth forum game in exchange for putting up with that and assurances that I will make the next forum game much more interesting to play through. Thank you for sticking through it all the way! <3
 

Vendor-Lazarus

Arch Disciple
Sanctuary legend
Messages
937
I would've liked to know what constitutes a turn of ..action.. or not. How much can you move around? I'm assuming map point to point, at the most, but inside? How many non-Active things can you do? How much talking is too much?

Yeah, the drip-fed one-liners of Memories were only confusing. The diary was a good plot device, albeit too cursory here, and didn't explain anything we didn't already know.
 

Houseman

Zealot
Sanctuary legend
Messages
1,068
Ya gotta remember game design 101

If you don't want someone to get somewhere, put an unbreakable barrier in front of it, and then require that you need three keys from different places to unlock it. Then you can put your lore in those three places.
 

Battousai

Brother Sharp
Sanctuary legend
Sanctuary contributor
Messages
560
Occupation
Cookmaster supreme
Ya gotta remember game design 101

If you don't want someone to get somewhere, put an unbreakable barrier in front of it, and then require that you need three keys from different places to unlock it. Then you can put your lore in those three places.
Make it an FPS key hunt, you need 3 colored keys and can only get the 1 of them at a time since the other keys are behind locked doors leading to other areas you have to explore to find them,
 
Last edited:

Arnox

Master
Staff member
Founder
Messages
5,285
Make it an FPS key hunt, you need 3 colored keys and can only get the 1 of them at a time since the other keys are behind locked doors leading to other areas you have to explore to find them,
And then you need to fight the cyberdemon.
 

Arnox

Master
Staff member
Founder
Messages
5,285
I would've liked to know what constitutes a turn of ..action.. or not. How much can you move around? I'm assuming map point to point, at the most, but inside? How many non-Active things can you do? How much talking is too much?

Yeah, the drip-fed one-liners of Memories were only confusing. The diary was a good plot device, albeit too cursory here, and didn't explain anything we didn't already know.
Whoops, totally forgot to answer this post

Basically, a turn is roughly a D&D round in length, so six seconds of in-game time. Generally, you can move to one point a turn, although if absolutely nothing happens to anyone during a turn and they're just travelling, then I'll go ahead and skip turns until something meaningful comes up. So, say on turn 1, you wanted to move from point A1 to point A3, and you've already seen A2 and nothing significant is going to happen there. In that case, a turn will simply be skipped so you're then at point A3 at turn 3 without any waiting. As to inside a point, again, as long as your entire action can conceivably fit within six seconds of in-game time, then it's allowed.
 
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