GM Comment: Think I'm going to try to follow your advice and do about one update a week rather than alternate between 3 a week and then nothing for months.
Misc responses to couple comments:
I still really like this story
I'm not into MLP, but as Araph said, this is probably among, if not the best forum game I've participated in. Well written, interesting, based off a game that I really enjoy, I could go on
my quibbles are minor compared to the enjoyment I get out of reading this.
this is one of the best forum games I've seen on these forums.
You've thought everything out to an impressive extent, and crafted a very believable world
Thank you. It's good to hear that the consensus is that people are enjoying this.
Remember at the beginning, when Michael interpreted every command as "DO THIS NOW" and yelled at us for telling him to waste his money bouncing all over the map constantly? We thought that "do this when you're in the place to do it" would be obvious, but it wasn't.
Again, there are practical limits. Jumping for athletics, destruction training whenever you have spare magicka, stuff like that is fine to just take for granted. When you got sidetracked on the way to learn magic and the vote for which school to learn took place an extra episode prior to the actual opportunity to learn one, sure I just checked an extra couple thread pages back to see what the consensus had been. But stuff like the Edwinna/Yagrum thing...your promise to Edwinna was made in
Episode 40, on August 30th of 2013, on thread page 76. It became relevant in
Episode 52, dated March 29, 2014, on thread page 107.
Or, another example: Nalcaryra informed you that it would be necessary to procure hospitality papers should you wish you to engage in commerce in Sadrith Mor. That was in
Episode 26, dated June 24, 2013, on thread page 32. That became relevant in
Episode 46, dated January 6, 2014, on thread page 93
I think it's pretty reasonable for me to not just remember that kind of thing for you. I'm not trying to deliberately trip you up by having such such long delays between something introduced and it becoming actionable, but I'm just not going to maintain months worth of "do X when we next reach location Y" instruction sets.
About Tel Fyr: I am pretty disappointed that we didn't get to do find out about clover, or ask questions for Edwinna, but the constant reminders about the boat seemed to be "Guys get out now or you'll be stuck at Tel Fyr until Cinnia returns at an indeterminate time."
From my point of view that was a pacing issue. You were at Tel Fyr for 6 episodes. Ten percent the
entire lifetime of this year-long forum game you were in one building talking to people. That's ok if that's what you want to do, but to give a tabletop gaming metaphor, when the party spends 10 minutes at the entrance to the kobold lair debating how to go in...whether to disguise themselves, or sneak in, or go charging in with swords drawn, or to wait for dark or hide and look for patrols to steal their armor, and oh have you ever wondered whether kobolds are true lizards or whether they're mongrel lizardmen? What do you think, Bob? ...Bob? Guys? Where'd our cleric go? Oh, he's in the next room watching tv waiting for everyone else to figure out what they want to do.
...that's when it's time for the GM to step in and have the kobold scouting party return and attack the people loudly bickering outside their home.
Pacing.
You had plenty of time to track down Clover if you'd decided it was important. You decided talking to Yagrum was more important. That's fine. I offer no particular critique or comment on it. Just, please try to understand...you arrived at Tel Fyr in
Episde 48 on real world date January 17, Cinia reminded you that she was leaving in
Episode 51 on real world date March 25...and you nevertheless stayed in Tel Fyr until
Episode 54 real world date April 2,
three months later.
Totally a pacing issue.
I realize you wanted to talk to Yagrm. You got to talk to Yagrum. But January to April of 2014 was enough time to talk to Yagrum.
To be perfectly honest, yes, my enjoyment does decrease somewhat knowing there's ponies; I really, really dislike that fandom. And that's a problem with me, yes. But despite that, this story is good enough to keep me around. The many good aspects of it by far outweigh the things I perceive as negative.
I don't want to be too spoily here. There are still many ways this could possibly play out and I don't know which path(s) you guys are actually going to see...but if I were to venture a guess, I would guess that there will probably come a time in this story when the answers to all your questions seems to be "ponies." "What's going on?" "Ponies."
When that time comes, remember Applejack. Not everything is always what it appears.
Of course, I'm not saying that everything is tentacle monsters either. But there's still room for twists, yet.
As long as an actual pony didn't zap Michael into Morrowind for MLP reasons (which LB denies, thank goodness)
I will confirm that that specific and precise thing is in fact not what's going on here. I will further confirm that it was never what was going on, and I didn't change my mind after the reaction you guys gave to seeing the pony stuff. In fact, the more observant among you might put together the fact that I've gone on record to say that I only expected this game to last a couple months...and the fact that neither Awesomicus nor Clover were even indirectly introduced until Episode 26...and you might possibly thereby come to some interesting conclusions.
In any case...please remember that this was originally intended to be a couple month long forum game. I never intended to write a novel. I think we've done well here, but let's not build up our expectations so much that no matter what happens half a dozen of you want to crucify me.
I've got to wonder if Michael wound ever have realized our presence without Vivec. Heck, we didn't know we had an in-universe existence before Vivec told Michael. In fact, I think this may have been one of the main points of divergence from LB's plan. This game would have been written completely differently and been bereft of much metaphysical experimentation and faffing about without that.
Remember these questions when the game ends.
What is Michael's last name? I gotta check to see if it was mentioned.
Just checked. Michael doesn't know his last name. During the Legion Training. Interesting.
You have more information relevant to that question than you apparently realize.