How's My Driving | January 2014

[ironwood]

WELCOME WELCOME, THE QUARTER QUELL HAS ARRIV-- wait a minute, wrong script. Good evening, ladies and gentlemen! It's that time of the (new) year again! Read on for the details of this, the newest of our quarterly HMDs.

How's My Driving?
While each and every character must have an HMD page available, we offer a gamewide HMD once every calendar quarter. This is an opportunity to get together and discuss IC interpretations and portrayals in a respectful, beneficial fashion. In a nutshell, it's a chance to see how we're doing in the grand scheme of things.

There are a few ground rules to cover off before we can start:

• Participation in the quarterly HMD is 100% optional.
  
• Be respectful, anon or not. It's a lot easier to give and receive crit if all parties are making it a discussion of it rather than an argument.
  
• IP logging is off and anonymous commenting is on. You can offer crit signed-in if you like, but the option's there.
  
• New! We ask that each concrit provided consist of one positive and one constructive bit of feedback. Bring up something that you like about that player, and in the same comment provide something that you feel they could work on. This is to help round out the feedback and provide a better experience all around.
  

That's it, that's all!

And, to make things easier, here's a handy-dandy codeset:

<big><b><i>Player Name</i></b></big> <i>Character Name:</i> <i>Canon:</i> <i>User Name:</i> <I>Focus:</i> Optional. Do you have particular concerns about your portrayal that you'd like to be the focus of crit? You can link any threads you'd like a second opinion on here. If you're looking for structural feedback, or would prefer things like grammar not be mentioned, put it here.

Comments

[lostundercover]

While I'm glad to see the Hannibal murder plot resolving successfully, I admit that I was kind of disappointed with the progression of it. The initial murder had such potential for awesome twists and turns! Then things became a bit convoluted and weren't communicated super well. When I reached out to you in plurk and PM, you were awesome about answering. Don't get me wrong on that.

My concern is more.. For example, you mentioned putting up a plotting post or some other way to get everyone involved on the same page about the plot and asked that I wait because you were working with the mods on something (which I assume was the Emperor's assassination). No plotting post came out and I didn't hear more on it. It wasn't until Eve mentioned it that I even knew it was potentially being resolved without Hayley and Tony's involvement, which would have been upsetting to me as a player whose character was so deeply affected by the plot.

This was an awesome plot and it was super cool to see such a large impact resulting from it. I would just consider, in future, trying to be more proactive in your communication and making sure to include everyone so that more people can enjoy it to its fullest extent! c:

[bonvivant]

Hey there - regarding the OOC plotting post, I had asked the mods beforehand if it was okay to use the mod-made OOC plot announcement for that purpose so there weren't two posts in a row saying essentially the same thing. But you aren't the only one who was unclear on that, so I messed up on communicating it somewhere along the line, sorry about that. I probably should have asked the mods to edit that into the announcement post and plurk so everyone would be on the same page.

I think that's what affected the rest of it too: there was communication going on between different groups of people all on different platforms (OOC comm, Plurk, journal PM) rather than everyone being in the same place which made things difficult to track and ended in different groups coming to different conclusions. I wanted to let the players have full say in how Hannibal was caught instead of feeling like they had to play by a plan I had in mind - but, again, because I didn't communicate the centralized OOC plotting post effectively that ended up being more confusing than it had to be and I'm really sorry for assuming that the players involved had all come to an agreement instead of actually checking in and making sure.

Although I doubt I'll be running another plot of this scope at Tu Shanshu (because I don't want to hog too many important plots and this was already the biggest player plot apparently, haha), I'll keep it in mind for any smaller plots that might come up as well as plots at other games in the future. This was my first really big game plot and I was uncertain at times of the line between being too involved and not giving any room for player creativity, and being not involved enough and having players that don't know what's going on. Based on your feedback and others I can see that I swung too far in the direction of the latter, so I'll work on that in future plots. I hope that the conclusion we were able to work out was satisfactory and thank you for the feedback.

[everylittlegirl]

I completely understand what you mean about the various platforms, haha. Also I forgot to say that I do really appreciate your flexibility on this in terms of allowing affected players to handle what happens. That's very much appreciated.

Thanks for taking the time to explain your side and for considering my words. I know how hard it can be to coordinate game-wide events or other large plots and, overall, I think you did well in terms of creating something cool that will be remembered. Making mistakes is how we learn, etc, and hopefully your next plot will be even greater because of it.