Please do not take this statement as maliciousness on my part:
I hope that everyone who fought me to get rid of deadlines and the like is making the most of all this extra time.
It's very hard to convey the sincerity in that remark. I'm happy so long as this extremely slow pace is allowing for the desired characterization that drove the lobbying. I would just be disappointed if this wasn't the case.
This right here is what we call a straw man of Stay Puft proportions.
The context, as Seraphs pointed out a lot more patiently than me, for that lobbying was the disastrously brief amount of unstructured time to interact. You know, that time when a timeskip to missions cut short;
-A party that never got to start
-A trip to Vale
-A trip to the swimming pool
-A fight at the lake
Four interactions, each with at least three characters involved (save the swimming pool, but given that more than three were involved in all the others, it ends up being a
low estimate), which adds up to at least twelve players that had their plans cut short permanently so we could transition to these "all-consuming and gelatinous gravitational anomalies". Puts a whole different spin on the concept when you can go and apply it to the first problem that crops up, doesn't it.
That said, I lobbied against mission deadlines, too. Because you wanted to set them at a time that would require getting everything done over finals and holidays, which would have lead to the majority of them being cut short
anyway. Because I speak from a lot of experience when I say that creating a deadline doesn't create more time to do everything you need to, it leads to stress and cutting things from your schedule to create the
illusion of more time.
Such things really have no place in an RPG done for fun. Now, Seraphs covered it pretty well himself:
<Snipped quote by Lugubrious>
I think the lobbying for more time was in situation when people had full and complete control over where there characters went and what was happening. Like a weekend adventure or some such. I think it was unfortunate that the petition for less deadlines came just as a mission was approaching because I think self contained events like the missions, combat classes and such, things that will only affect those that participate in them should be regulated in order to keep the RP moving. It's when there's an after school moment and a number of characters are cooking something up and it gets timeskipped over that problems start to arise. I think we should start wrapping up the missions within the next two or three weeks. You really can't tell me that after all this time you actually need more than that to finish whatever is going on.
The petition for a lack of deadlines was with the intent of giving players the ability to actually have some autonomy, instead of trying to squeeze what we want to do inside of tiny blocks of time within the arbitrary schedule.
Missions, on the other hand, are not autonomous. They're rigid and inflexible, and that means that when a member of your team (or your antagonist) is taking a long time to post, you can't get anywhere. BASL and JCL? We want to get Brewing Storm done. At this point it's a chore for a list of reasons longer than my arm, and we're fairly punctual about getting posts done to do it.
But there are eight people involved. Eight. When a single one delays, usually for reasons outside of their control, the whole thing gets gummed up. And every other team has this potential, admittedly with a few fewer players. I could run the math on how much rigidity in missions increases the probability of delays, but I just finished my semester and I really don't want to. Not when the point is logically apparent.
I'm in agreement that missions should be wrapped up soon, and discussion should be had on how better to regulate missions and combat classes in the future. But blaming delays in missions on a lack of deadlines is a straw man of the highest order, given that deadlines would just have cut them short.
I don't even think the problem is that the missions have gone long, because it sounds like everybody has been working at it. The bigger issue to me is that it seems like 80% of the teams decided to do things collab-style, which really doesn't let anyone else know how things are progressing and makes the IC and OOC dead as fuck apart from the team or two that are doing things post-by-post.
This is completely true, too. Collabs are the bane of an RPG's survival the moment more than half the game is taking place in them. BASL/JCL and VGNB are currently the only teams actually posting within the main topic aside from releasing the latest installment of their collabs. As a result, no one needs to check the topic. As a result, the topic slows to a crawl.
These are factors to consider, instead of just throwing straw men at the problem.
