Response to Recent Feedback (Sept 07)
I have received a veritable avalanche of feedback this past event, from Event Recap Forms and personal conversations with many of you. It is clear that some of you have had a less than enjoyable last few events. Rest assured that we have heard and continue to hear you. I also deeply appreciate the fact that so many of you who have expressed your unhappiness to us have taken the time to remark on your continued fondness for the game, and also of a desire to help in making it more rewarding for all players.
Discontent has a tendency to build up quietly until things reach a tipping point. The tipping point was the main mod on Saturday night of this past event, which left some people excluded and understandably frustrated in the end. There were several elements that contributed to its inability to entertain most of the game, but lack of effort and lack of genuine desire to show you all a great time were NOT among them. Doug and Bob, the chief architects of it, lovingly poured an entire day's effort into constructing an extraordinary mod site and spent the better part of many months orchestrating the concept in their minds. The original plot concept was designed for just over a dozen PCs at most. Despite the authors desire to keep it a side mod, I pushed very hard for it to be the main mod for the weekend. As a result we had to alter ideas at the last minute and it caused problems of execution and communication, the result of which was that you all went to the mod, but then very few of you got to actually experience the action and excitement of the mod. The new plan we had come up with called for PCs to be cycling through it as those within were knocked out and replacements had to charge in. We didn't quite nail the mechanic correctly for this, and then on top of that the PCs who first went in came up with a simply brilliant plan for handling the challenge. Finally the battle intended to keep the players outside the mod-site entertained was cut short through in-game RP before it ever even began and as a result the people on the outside where not entertained much. We will spare you the play-by-play, but the final outcome was that a smaller group of players had an excellent time on the mod, while most of you did not get the opportunity to enjoy any of it. How all of this happened is something that we now have a strong grasp of, and while we will certainly continue to try innovative mod concepts in the future, the lessons learned here will be applied to future endeavors.
But it would be wrong to simply analyze the problems that arose from one mod and call our work done, because as I have said, that mod was not the problem; it was merely the tipping point.
The problem is that since July we have failed to deliver the quantity and quality of plot content that you (and we) are accustomed to. In particular, we have faltered to reach out to new players and offer them challenges and rewards that are accessible to characters whose statistics can be read more quickly than War and Peace. That this has been so is extremely disappointing to us, in particular the Storyteller group, which was established precisely to address these types of gaps in plot content.
The fact is, entertaining a large group of characters with a highly diverse range of levels has always been and will always be a considerable challenge. We have discussed at times how much easier it would be to manage plots and encounters if we instituted a level cap that would place a fixed limit on the possible divide between high and low level characters, but such a solution would be the lazy way out, and less exciting for those of you who have big dreams for your characters futures which is probably all of you. Rather than restrict the game in ways that would make the job of plotting it easier, we have tried and continue to try new ways to achieve the goal of entertaining characters of all levels at each event. We have never achieved perfection at this, but we have done better than in the past few months.
The short-term fix is assured. The Officers, Storytellers, Monster Marshals, and other constantly helpful players are all invigorated by the challenge of reversing this trend of mediocre entertainment. In addition, the casting call for main plots that I issued a short while ago has brought in several good candidates that are being scheduled for upcoming events. The combined efforts of so many determined people will make the next few events quite exciting for everyone, we can promise you.
But what about the long term? How will we sustain the momentum of excellent plots and diverse challenges once this initial rush has passed? These are the questions we are discussing presently, and there are no sacred cows when it comes to changing or removing elements of the game organization that are in the way of progress. We will continue to pursue new ideas to solve the problems of running and entertaining a game as large, diverse, and complex as Knight Realms. We ask that you continue to share your ideas and opinions with us, and we promise to weigh them all carefully.
Thanks for reading this, and thanks for making Knight Realms your game.
- James C. Kimball
- James C. Kimball Director, Knight Realms
