Medieval & Fantasy Minecraft Roleplaying

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Constructive Critique + Praise - Aeon, Act 1

Naelwyn

Non sum qualis eram
I'd like to provide some constructive critique and feedback for Act 1 of the Aeon event, in the hopes of helping smooth out some of the rough parts, and I'll go in order of the major ones.

Part 1 - Navigation and Scaling:

1) Visibility, blocking, and scaling spaces to large numbers of people:
Compare to the Shoreless Maze event and the paths in this event. When you are going to have a large number of people, sight lines are obscured and people will bump in to one another and make a location largely unnavigable. This is especially pronounced if one is keeping IC, and not walking through other PCs, and becomes even more frustrating on a time limit.

2) Vertical Navigation:

Not all players have fly per means of emulating climbing, and the climbing hook plugin is no longer available. It is preferable to not need DM assistance in navigating a space. A good selection of the maze could have been replaced with a parkour jumping challenge.

3) Lighting:

The combination of poor lighting and multiple paths caused substantive chaos in the event. Encouraging or allowing for deploying lighting is one means to bypass this, but also, one can use lighting to subtly direct people's attention to where they need to go.

This was done well (Possibly unintentionally) by the Lava in the first room, and by the lighting in the final room, but the interim area was largely directionless in terms of lighting.

Recommendations:

Make all maze sections 3x3. If using a very dark setting, use minor elements of lighting to direct vision towards areas of interest. Ensure a player without any permissions can navigate the map with the provided resources.
 

Naelwyn

Non sum qualis eram
Part 2:

Managing Large #s of players, aka - Letting folks actually see the event past the yellow

1) It was stated once at the start of the event to please keep chats to whisper range and the like. The event quickly devolved into everyone using RP chat and I literally couldn't navigate the maze because half my screen was occupied by yellow.

2) Splitting players into different event times or logistical groups
This was done /excellently/ for the prelude but wasn't stuck to for the main event. Staggering times here would have been impossible, but say, for the puzzle part of the map - could have had two different branching tunnels, got people to go into three groups for main/branch1/branch2 and had them speak in their own channel with their own DM actively guiding them and lessened the load.
 
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Naelwyn

Non sum qualis eram
Part 3:

Subtleties and controlling flow enough that they can be picked up on (There's some good stuff that I'm not going to spoil):

So, there were like, a lot of interesting things in this event. Like, a /lot/ of stuff worthy of investigation, but the pace was haphazard. People ran off immediately in different directions racing through the dungeon, leaving folks that wanted to actually examine the environment left behind.

Now, I managed to catch up, but I also got a /lot/ out of said examination, but I think most everybody completely blew by it and missed it.

I'm not too sure how to improve this without putting in some structural pacing, or by either removing the DMPC entirely and letting the players work out the lead pace, or by making the DMPCs personality and leadership stronger and having them corral the players more.

The door was a great oppertunity for that but people were really rushing to open it, I think due to the pacing of how long it took to get there. Possibly an issue of expectations.
 
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Naelwyn

Non sum qualis eram
Part 4:

Praises:

It's hard to praise the stuff I really want to praise without allowing for metagaming. Really nice job on the subtleties, allowing for foreshadowing and prepping for future parts of the event chain.

Also excellent job building tension on the latter half of the mission (I called it, I damn /called it/.) , slightly marred by the dense timed escape running into the same problems as the descent. The lit and patterned tiles were a nice touch, and a nice mitigation to the problem, but ideally can be structured to avoid needing them in the future.
 
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Somnastra

Puppycat Herder
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Somnastra
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Thank you, Naelwyn. This was a thoughtful and constructive critique. I appreciate it.
 
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