Jig

Wolf Manor

PS: What did you have in mind for motive for the killing of each character, if you got that far? :')

@MyCatGinger

Hider

It depended on who made it to endgame, which was based at least on activity, and would also have to factor in that the auction wouldn't be successful, so at least most of the deaths would be a witness-removing exercise.

But!

Jonas, as the least auctionable, was gonna definitely just be bumped off. Probably by Maria, who might have reverse-switched to pretend to be Lena.

If I could set Felix up as Lynne's confidant, he'd totally have betrayed her and everything she let on. In my head, she was going to arrange to meet him in secret to find Klara and a shotgun - possibly to teach Felix a lesson about doing the fuck as he's told.

The Wolfs' plan for Tom would be to hunt him traditional-style. Again, he probably wouldn't have actually got to die like this, but I'm pretty sure they'd try to set up a fox hunt with Tom as the fox. Quite how this would've manifested, I don't know. In my head, they'd have put him on a horse, taught him to ride it a little bit and got old-school English hunting clothes for him to wear, except the fox doesn't tend to ride a horse or wear the huntsman's coat, nor do they even have that tradition in Germany. That was a work in progress.

I'm pretty sure something awful and basically rapey would have befallen either Marci or Kim or both, and frankly I think we should all be grateful that we didn't end up having to write that because actually that probably would've been a bit much.

Graven would probably have been the first to bite it because of how easy it would be for him to vanish, only for his arms/everything but his arms to be found by the gang: his hunter couldn't be bothered to hunt him and just wanted the tats.

Obviously every time you guys put pen to paper, it changed my plans a little bit, so I didn't commit to anything.

{Closed}

Not sure that's Alexander's thing, ya know?

{Closed}

I tried to write some bits and pieces for this but, while it was fun, it still didn't connect me back into this. If I'm still welcome, something will, err, turn up or it won't. I'm not gonna put anything half-arsed out there, though. Everybody deserves better than a half-arsed effort. If anybody has anything for me to go on (I have read the IC, natch, but I haven't ploughed the OoC), that might make it a bit easier to reconnect.

Wolf Manor

For the record, my actual theory isn't aquawerewolves, I think it's that the Wolfs are the inner circle of some kind of sun worshipping Lovecrafty cult that needs to provide sweet foreign blood to appease the mini cthulhu in the lake every solstice. Not a solid theory, I'll admit...

@AuntFlavia

Just for my own amusement, I'd like to know what each of you thought was going on. I don't think any of you will actually get it (because you straight-up didn't have enough to go on at that stage), but I was firing Red Herrings at you like a tennis ball launcher, so I'd be intrigued to know what you picked up on. I'm actually really, really sorry (in all senses of the word) that we didn't get far enough into this for the actual mystery to become at least a little bit exposed.

When we start anew, will it be a new mystery entirely or along the same sort of spooky paranoia manor lines?

That would be up to the new GM, natch. Some things totally work about the manor setting - the GM has an environment that they can totally control which completely justifies the isolating a group of characters. On the other hand, there are lots of things that have to be worked around that arbitrary starting point which limits - or indeed, inspires - what you can and can't do. For what it's worth, the golden age of murder mystery writing took place long before mobile phones, and they're the first things you need to justify not working if isolating the cast from the real world is a necessary part of the plot.

In the unlikely but not implausible event that I'll be running another one (at least, any time soon), obviously all of the stuff I had in store for Wolf is now unusable (by me), because here's a GDoc ruining it all for everybody.

Click to spoil.

It's entirely possible that I've watched too much Jonathan Creek lately, because I actually wrote that GDoc like an actual fucking denouement. If none of you has seen Jonathan Creek, it's a quirky British mystery show where a self-effacing, socially-awkward deviser of magic tricks for a famous magician reluctantly works out mysteries using principles of how magic tricks work. It's less interested in whodunnit and more in howdunnit. Definitely recommend.

Wolf Manor

if need be I don't mind being GM.

@Kirah

I missed this

I can also co-gm if needed.

and only saw this.

please don't think I was subtly trying to make Kirah not-GM

#britishandneurotic #you'reallgoodchoices

Wolf Manor

Absolutely. That's one of the principle benefits of killing Wolf and starting another one: it's the most likely way anybody gets to find out what's going on. Limping on could get us to the end of the story, theoretically, but an official death certificate countersigned by everybody guarantees that everything I did and had planned gets published.

Therefore, none of us is burdened by how much we still fuckin' love this but by how hard it would be to kick-start. It seems insane that starting a new one would actually be an easier task for me than continuing, but when I was in the groove, in addition to having all the stuff on paper, I had it floating around my head and was actively making it make sense (at least; to me). It's kinda like trying to do a jigsaw puzzle, except I lost the box with the bigger picture on it. I can still piece bits together, but only the obvious ones, and only one at a time.

If I get some super-duper commitment from literally everybody here (and a post from Cops :P), I'll commit to at least trying.

Wolf Manor

I'll be clear: if I'm GMing - either this or Tolf Manor -, I'm probably doing that on my own. This old dog can't learn the trick of anything less than extreme secrecy, and I don't think I could leak secrets for Wolf to just one person, or share GMing with another non-player. When I say it'd be fun to see a new perspective, I do actually mean that, while I think I bring a particular technique and style to GMing that has benefits, I don't think it's perfect and would genuinely like to see how somebody with knowledge of my successes and failures approaches it. If that person... also happens to be me, then that's not ideal, but still workable. Apart from anything else, I am very very floaty-off-in-my-own-head-y, which doesn't mean I wouldn't make time if I committed officially, but does me that that time would be on my own terms, and even if I was a team player (surprise! I'm really not!), it simply wouldn't be practical for me to try to work with another person at that pro-actively creative level.

But!

Our options expand:

• Limp on _{srsly tho no not the best choice}
• Jig tries again
• Aunt Flav + Ging co-GM
• Ging + TM99 co-GM
• TM99 + Flav co-GM

Note that any co-GM in the last three options wouldn't need to announce their co-GM-ship, which would allow for secret IC steering of the plot, which I didn't have access to _{and would have swapped a kidney for}. Just a thought.

{Closed}

Bleurgh. I'm useless. Let me know whether to ship out or to catch up.

what kind of armor

A gimp suit.

It doesn't raise your defence stats by very much, but grants you useful resistances to lightning and fire, while granting your attacks the chance to cause the 'Awkward' status condition.

Note that the British and Priest-classes are particularly vulnerable to Awkward.

What makes a great GM?

What are great ways to keep players engaged both IC and OOC?

Dead easy. I call it A) X, B) Y, or C) Something Else.

Basically, you want players to have wiggle-room to do what they want, but also to not make them feel burdened to drive your game on their own. Every time there is a natural break in the action, give your players two options for how they want to progress, while leaving options open for them to come up with their own ideas.

A) Explore
B) Have a fight scene
C) Open offer to do something else

This way, if people like your own ideas (A and B), they'll say so. If they don't, they'll suggest something for C. This gives players options for how they want to progress without railroading them or without overburdening them to drive your game without support.

The other key thing is: don't leave player characters unattended - otherwise, you're only leaving them with Option C. When a game first starts, each intro post is each player finding their feet. If they intend to engage other characters (which is normally where an RP succeeds or fails in my experience), facilitate this. RPing is communal storytelling. If you leave (most) players to tell the story on their own, they'll run out of steam and leave. Or, at least, I will.

Basically, players should feel like they have something to contribute in their own way. This means constantly leaving strands obviously open for them to pursue, if they so choose - which means constantly leaving them things to pursue, while not being tied to any one arc.

Never ever adopt the sandbox mentality. If your players wanted to drive a game, they'd GM their own.

Should the character submission be the only factor in accepting players?

No. The key thing for me is getting a game. If you get a game, but submit a character that won't work, the GM can explain to you why they don't work and what would work instead. If you don't get the game - you never will, either because it's not the game for you, or because the GM isn't presenting it clearly enough.

How do you deal with the players who have seemingly disappeared from the RP?

Shit happens. Honestly, it does. Make no character indispensable and pre-build in your strategy for removing each character from the game if it comes to it. You can't force people to stay.

In the same vein, how do you effectively prevent the above from hindering your other players?

Prepare for the worst - hope for the best. See above. If push comes to shove, the forum would probably be happy for you to Godmode to keep things swimming along.

What is the most graceful way to end your RP due to inactivity or (*gasp!*) your own loss of interest/time?

By being honest. If you don't have time for it, you don't have time for it. The best you can do is hope people don't hold grudges, but, if they do, it's because their own life isn't as complicated as yours, so they're lucky to have the time to be bitter.

Surprise!
The single magic bullet that I would recommend is a good OoC atmosphere, one which allows for idle chatter as much as actual OoC discussion. The idle chatter keeps people liking each other and involved at least at a checking-in level, while the latter keeps people giving a shit about the plot and their characters - if they lose interest in their own characters, they simply won't write for them any more (and thereby withdraw from the game).

MUGCoD

This stands for Mass Unguided Conversation of Doom, which, in my experience, is the kiss of death, and to be avoided at all costs. Never leave more than three characters alone without having some plot planned to disrupt the action. RPing is super-flawed in that it's basically impossible for Player Characters to have natural conversations without planning them before writing, and the more characters you have involved in a given interaction, the messier it tends to become. If you don't have an end-goal to any given interaction in mind, you're relying on 3+ players to all maintain roughly the same level of activity and for at least one of them to have the confidence to draw that scene to a close.

Tl;dr

Keep players engaged. You do this by fostering a chatty OoC atmosphere and an IC where each character has the freedom to contribute their own thing.