Post-Underside Feedback Post

[cancrymods]

Hello, Executors! As promised, now that the first dungeon has wrapped I'm putting up an OOC feedback post to hear some of your feedback and comments about the game so far! Can Cry is kind of experimental for me and uses a lot of mechanics and ideas I simply have not testrun in RP before so I am chomping at the bit to hear from you guys what you feel worked well, what you're enjoying, or what you feel could use a little more work as the game progresses.

I have my own notes on things I intend to tweak going forward, so please check them out!

⚝ DUNGEON TIMEFRAMES: Limbo's Underside was our first dungeon and was intentionally a little loosey goosey to help players and uh, me get used to running dungeons this way. The dungeon was absolutely not intended to run as long as it did or to run out of content as fast as it did. This will be resolved in future dungeons with soft deadlines for dungeon completion and combat wrapup, additional prompts and environmental details in the log itself and adjustments to the Combat Encounter timeframes. Keep reading to see what those are!

⚝ COMBAT ADJUSTMENTS: In future dungeons, Boss Combat signups will no longer be first come first serve, but will be selected randomly from whichever group of players respond to the signup post that will go up a few days prior to the dungeon. Priority will be given to players who have not taken part in a Boss Combat Encounter yet, and players cannot sign up for two Boss Combat Encounters in a row. And most important of all – important enough to get its own bullet point – deadlines are now enforced on Boss Combat Threads.

⚝ BOSS COMBAT DEADLINES: In order to keep combat moving along at a smooth clip, players now have a four day window (or ninety-six hours since the previous comment's timestamp) to respond during their turn in a Boss Combat Thread. Players will receive a reminder to respond at the three day mark, and if four days passes without a response from the player, their turn will be skipped over and combat will proceed from there. If a player misses the ninety-six hour deadline twice in one combat thread, their character will be removed from the combat thread and the remainder of their turns will be skipped.

And that's it from me!

A big thank you to everyone who participated in the dungeon this month and I'm looking forward to hearing everybody's feedback!

Comments

[alcahest]

i think the mechanics worked out just fine, especially for a first run, and the tweaks sound good! i've said it before but i really like the movement mechanic and i definitely think it helps focus the direction of combat.

one thing that i'm kind of just throwing out there as a vague thought is that i almost want there to be more... danger??? obviously we don't wanna get fucking murked. but i think you shouldn't be afraid to hit us harder or use like, idk status effects and shit to spice things up. i feel like it'd give characters more ways to interact during combat, especially the less frontline fighters. the main difficulty there is probably that there's no way to predict how long or short a combat thread will be due to factors like ic success and ooc time constraints so. if anyone else has thoughts on this feel free to jump in

OH ALSO i wanted to ask what your feelings on held actions are now that we're one dungeon down! just really basic things like. "mona uses one movement this turn to hold chronolock in preparation for the enemy's attack" which comes into effect in the boss' next tag and idk stops kingslayer from getting decked or something. or "kingslayer uses one movement to hold an attack for if the enemy gets near enough for them to hit". i like the risk/reward element of held actions bc you don't KNOW if you will have just wasted a movement, but it's a valuable play if it pays off.

[cancrymods]

Movement definitely is working out better than I expected! I think I definitely need to nail down some more precise examples of what does and doesn't count as an action that uses up Movement just to spare confusion down the line but hopefully that will sort itself out as we all get more used to the system.

re: adding more danger to Combat encounters, yes! Absolutely! Limbo's Underside was absolutely "easy mode" in comparison to the other planned dungeons or rather, was meant to be a sort of soft tutorial for the dungeon mechanics. This includes the boss combat thread! I just didn't want to overface everyone with a bunch of stuff flying around in a new system they were just getting to grips with, but I think I ultimately overcorrected a bit in a way that harmed playability. Next dungeon will be our first real encounter with Revenants so hopefully that will be a bit more engaging!

And now that I've gotten more used to the Boss Combat system I'm definitely open to testing out held actions! Obviously the next Boss Combat thread will be a ways off, but I am absolutely down for people to try them out next time.

Thanks for the feedback! I'm really glad things worked out in the end despite the clunk so uhhhh HOPEFULLY GOING FORWARD things should run a little smoother.