Vote For Adventure: Series 3 Retrospective

That's right, I'm back again with another Vote For Adventure retrospective. I've done them twice before, go take a look.

The Setting

This time around I mandated a generic fantasy setting. I needed something easily digestible after the difficulties with the last one (survival horror). That isn't to say that the voters weren't given input, they were. What I did was allow every voter to submit a word. This word could be whatever they wanted, although I warned against profanity. The idea was that I would compile all of the words and incorporate them into the game in some way. I wasn't able to use all of the words, but some of the themes and motifs of the game came straight out of these words. One of the most important, the color red, was because so many people submitted words that were related to that color.

Character Creation

In S2 we used a % skill system that, while working, turned out to be difficult to use. Players couldn't remember what their odds were and many didn't feel particularly attached to the character. For S3 I switched things up again. This time around I simply introduced the adventure and created the character based on the choices they made in the very first poll. In this case they entered the dungeon by solving a puzzle and were plagued by recurring dreams. I combined those choices with some of the words from the setting to create the character. I also asked some follow up questions as about the character as we progressed through the Series (Male/Female, for example).

The character we ended up with was Kamala, a Vivid/Vibrant human female. A Vivid/Vibrant is a type of spellcaster that uses drains color from the world in order to power their magic. Kamala drains the color red and this element of the world and story was strongly influenced by the word choices from earlier. We also learned a little bit about Kamala from the actions and votes throughout the series. She is a treasure hunter, and acquires of artifacts. She travels far and wide and frequently manipulates emotions with her magic. Kamala is curious and has a bad habit of getting into trouble by poking metaphorical bee's nests.

The character's name, incidentally, was also voted on and supplied by the voters.

I would say that Character Creation was a resounding success for S3. It worked smoothly and everyone became attached to the character. I got a great level of "buy in" and a sense of ownership from the voters. So much so that when it came time to vote on what S4 would be the voters chose to build on to Kamala's story.

Mechanics/Rules

This time around I tried GM fiat as the method of resolution. I responded based on the actions chosen by the voters and what I thought made sense. This turned out to be surprisingly popular and was voted in again for S4.

I did feel that I wasn't as cruel as I should have been with my responses as I was worried about truly hurting the character without a dice roll or something to buffer the blame. This is something I intend to improve on for S4. I need to be more impartial about what happens.

Overall

I think S3 did really well. Traffic-wise it was probably a little less than S2, but it had a much more regular voter base without the massive swings. I think Kamala attracted a bit of a core following. I also had a lot of fun with this one, even if it started as a rather formulaic dungeon crawl. It grew into so much more than that.

You can read from the beginning of Series 3 right here.

Categories: Kamala, retrospective, Storytelling, Vote For Adventure

Vote For Adventure: Series 2 Retrospective

I have just finished the second series of Vote For Adventure, the RPG that I run via Tumblr and form polls I create with Google Docs. When I finished the first series I talked about what worked, what didn't and what happened. I'm doing it again with series 2.

On Setting

This time around I did things differently. I presented the voters with a big list of different genres and setting elements and told them to choose 3. I then took the top 3 responses and mashed them up into the setting for series 2. The top three results were Weird, Survival and Post-Apocalyptic. To me, this meant a weird apocalypse and for that I had to turn to Lovecraft. I came up with a setting based roughly on The King in Yellow, but modernized. This turned out to be pretty successful. People liked the setting.

Despite the setting being popular, it was an absolute chore to write for. The big issue here was the survival aspect. In a world where there isn't really anywhere to go, no hope or way to save it, there just isn't much of an ongoing plot. I really struggled to keep the plot forward moving. I won't be doing a survival game in with Vote For Adventure again.

On Character Creation

I also did Character Creation differently this time. I presented the voters with a big list of skills and told them to select 4. At the end I was left with a % for each skill based on the number of people that selected them. I used this as the baseline success rate for those skills whenever the protagonist tried to use one. This worked out pretty well, but the reality of how the character was played (aggressively) did not match with the character that was created (an engineer with little physical prowess). This is what ultimately lead to the character's demise.

On Update Schedule

I slowed the update pace down to 3 days a week (Mon/Tues/Fri) and this seems to be the sweet spot. It doesn't absorb my life nearly as much and I get less complaints about people missing updates.

Overall

I enjoyed VFA 2, but I moving the narrative really was a chore this time around. I started rooting for the character's death after a while because I just wanted to move on to something new. It didn't take long for him to pick a fight with a shotgun-wielding maniac, however, and I got my wish.

If you would like to read through Series 2 then you can start at the first entry here.

Categories: retrospective, Survival Horror, Vote For Adventure

Alvaro C. Vargas, Space Grifter

When I’m not busy slacking off from writing blog posts I tend to spend my time as a moderator for a role playing community known as r/RPG. I spent the last couple of weeks making daily updates to something I called the “Play by Poll Experiment” on this community.

The experiment I had for r/RPG was to do something similar to a Quest Thread. A Quest is essentially a text adventure done over a messageboard or forum with one person leading the narrative and the rest arguing and/or voting for the main character to make actions. In my incarnation I created a survey form using Google Docs that contained an update to the story and a number of actions that the character could take. I would then post an update in around 24 hours with a new set of questions and a continuation of the plot based on the votes. I did this for a total of 14 updates with moderate popularity. The full story, sans unsuccessful options, can be read here.

What comes next is a bit of a post-mortem on the play by poll experiment, so you may want to read through the above link before continuing.

On Setting Selection

At the very beginning of the Play by Poll Experiment (hereafter referred to as PbPE) I put up a poll where people could vote on a setting tagline and a few character options. The taglines were a little tongue in cheek with options such as “in space, where nobody can hear you scream” or “in a land of rainbows and unicorns and man-eating giants” and I got a pretty good mix of votes among them. Space came out as the winner, but I couldn’t help but notice that there was a major drop off on interest once people realized their setting choice didn’t win. think the problem here was that I offered too many options and ended up splitting the vote. This ended up with a setting winning a majority when a minority of voters overall selected it. It would be too much work to setup a transferrable vote option to alleviate this, so I think the best option would be to provide fewer choices.

If I were to do this again I wouldn’t allow for more than 3 setting choices or I would go in the other direction with voters selecting multiple elements which get combined into something of my choice.

On Character Creation

The biggest problem with character creation was that I put it on the same poll as the setting selection. This meant that people had to select from options that wouldn’t necessarily fit with the setting they chose. There are two ways I can avoid this happening on a future poll. A) I could have the character creation on a second page with options determined by the setting selection or B) I could do a separate poll after the first had concluded for the character creation. I think B is the better option as it means I don’t have to create a bunch of options that will never be relevant.

I also think that the character creation I offered was too limited in scope. It consisted of selecting a race, sex, and tagline for the character. Unlike with the setting selection, I think voters were happy with the results of this section, but I think it could have been more engaging. The limited scope was partially due to trying to make the options somewhat generic and I think that was a mistake. I also found that as we progressed through the adventure there was call for a random factor. I’ll discuss this more in the next section but it boils down to me needing more things defined about the character in advance.

On Chance and Mechanics

Most of the games of this nature that I have seen before (Quests, for example) didn’t have any element of chance to them. They were mostly just pieces of guided fiction. I really wanted to capture the feeling of a group of people playing an old adventure book together, like Lone Wolf or Fighting Fantasy. This meant that there needed to an element of chance. Voters needed to be able to select from different options and hope that their character would be successful. I could have decided for myself, but I feel that takes something away from the experience.

I tried 3 different randomizers during the course of the game. The first was a simple coin flip. I asked the voters to vote on the result being heads or tails and if they were right they would get a positive reaction from their action. I didn’t really like this so for the next one I tasked voters for choosing a number from 1-3 and the % breakdown of the votes would be the chance of success. This actually worked rather well, although it resulted in rather poor odds. The third try was much the same as the last, but instead of using numbers I asked voters to pick who they thought would win in a fight and provided three options. I think this was more fun, but suffered from the same issues.

If I were to run another game like this I would have the voters select skills or attributes for their protagonist which I would then grant a percentage value. I would then use that percentage on all relevant challenges that came up for the odds of success. This means I don’t have to add a question that breaks immersion of the story and it becomes something related to the character instead of some outside force.

On the Update Schedule

I updated the adventure every 24 hours, give or take a few hours on certain days. I actually didn’t mind the pace, although I felt like I was letting people down when I was busy when the 24 hour mark came along (mostly on weekends). The problem with this pace is that it ended up losing people. Not everyone visits r/RPG on a daily basis, which is easy to forget when you are as involved with the community as I am. This meant I had a steady loss of voters as the adventure progressed because people would lose interest if they missed an update. I think a slower schedule might improve this.

I do worry that reducing the update frequency might cause the story to move too slowly. I think that updating every other day is probably the slowest you could go with something like this, at least at r/RPG which tends to be faster moving than an ordinary forum. The other thing I noticed is that votes tend to drop off at around 18 hours after the update. This is very much related to the nature of the community as the topic will drop from view rather quickly, meaning people won’t see it. It will be interesting to see how having if having it around an extra day will actually affect the number of votes it gets.

On the Narrative

I had a lot of fun writing a few paragraphs for this every day. I wouldn’t exactly call it writing I am proud of, but it wasn’t so poor that I would be ashamed of it either. I think it was very representative of role playing in that without the context of the back and forth between myself (the GM) and the voters (the player) it wouldn’t be particularly entertaining. The fun really comes from trying to adapt the story to what the voters/players have selected and the fun for the voters comes from seeing how their choices affect the narrative. It doesn’t need the writing to be of high quality, it just needs to be good enough to get the idea across.

Categories: Alvaro C. Vargas, Play by Poll, reddit, retrospective, Storytelling, Vote For Adventure