U_P makes some excellent points. I'd like to share my perspective on how it went down. If you guys feel like I am bullshitting here, feel free to say so. that's why I said to go ahead and complain.
Tbh this whole mission has me peeved.
lm 90% sure its not intentional, but the whole thing feels like you're just doing whatever you think you can get away with in order to achieve a tpk.
maybe its just the fact you hide certain rolls without subtle descriptions to let us know they've occured.
but at this point it honestly feels like you're actively sabotaging us, to me anyway.
This mission was more or less lost as soon as both supply carts were destroyed. the fact that you guys had an opportunity to reclaim them was a genuine positive from the Christmas gift !!fun!! But it wasn't supposed to be easy to get them back.
I never intend a tpk. I tried to get people moving away from the severely corroded and collapsing first room. I gave plenty of options for people to leave when the giant monster appeared. I warned mj more than once that trier was risking calamity with his med rolls and his attempts to drive the carts. I warned spaz about driving the carts into mj's crystal room, which is where you guys set up shop to get the carts back, by the way - same broken room full of rubble, hanging by a thread. Ad i warned you guys that Noir was not the best pilot for the cart, even going so far as to allow Ebony to attempt to communicate with her through a spell not really intended for that purpose.
oh, and -2s. Let's talk about player stats on that one. Noir has three -2s. Intelligence, memory, and general knowledge. Frankly, it's lucky she hasn't caused much more harm so far.
You are right that I hide certain rolls without mentioning that they happen. Honestly, I am not sure how much of that I should reveal, since some of it has to do with information that would not be known otherwise. heck, I've rolled "Does this player have a clue about what's about to happen? Let me give them an opportunity to figure that out" more often than I've rolled any other hidden action. there have been times where I was like "This outcome is going to be confusing. let me roll to see if they figure out why it happened this way." If the roll is low, I can't really help IC. so I wait for an objection and respond to that ooc.
I'll admit, the Christmas gift experience was more of a monkey's paw than I expected, and that added to an already rough experience, and like you, I was glad we had finally gotten rolling, but by then, I felt that it was already too late, due to the destruction of the mission supplies. And I couldn't just autodrop more supplies, since the supply issue was written into the mission from the start. And I made that clear before this thread even got made.
thats kinda the problem I have here.
I mean sure it took a longass time to get going, but as soon as cho and samuel started making progress with the metalpedes it seems like ozarck got bored with the rest of you dicking about in the starting rooms and decided to hit the nuke button so he wouldnt have to deal with this mission anymore.
I feel like I set the nuke on a timer, placed it right in front of the group, with a big red "push me to stop the nuke from exploding" button, and watched as everyone started hitting the thing with rocks. After a certain number of giant-ass boldtexted warnings, I kinda had to follow through.
I was kinda confused for most of the mission to where noir actually kinda was and noir...did not really know what to do...or how to do it....Also the whole cart thing....was...kinda annoying. And just stalled things when the mission could finally get going.
I found this to be a big challenge: keeping everyone informed of exactly where they were, simply because I felt that I spent a lot of time saying (to variuos players) "you are in the starting room, right next to the carts. And you are in the room next to the starting room. You've been in that room for the last eight turns. You are two rooms away from tehstarting room. You just re-entered the starting room. You are right next to the stairs. honestly you could just go up the stairs. No need to climb on the highly unstable rubble right next to the fall int onothingness. Nope, still in the starting room, which is, seriously, for the third time, about to fall off into space."
I honestly have been confused at how unclear my directions have apparently been, with maps and everything, on that matter.