Dawnpick was a happy accident. For the most part anyway. I can't really argue with the numbers, which are shown below:
The top graph shows how many unique people posted on a given day, as well as the running average. The second graph shows the number of words posted in a given day, as well as the running average. Neither graph tries to account for the content of the post. That is, people posting things out of character, "PTW" and so on still count, but those were rare enough that I'm not overly concerned about the effect on the results.
Note: The words per day numbers are lower than they should be because Omicega came back years later to delete all of the content of his posts. I don't know why he did that. It's pretty upsetting and throws off my analysis, so if anyone knows, I'd be glad to find out. Not that I expect anyone to come back and read this later, but you know what I mean.
Anyway, the graphs show some pretty interesting results. I believe that I started Dawnpick at just the right time by accident. Glitterglen was already well underway by this point, but as it was beginning to wind down, some of the players migrated over to Dawnpick and began to pick up the pace of the game by quite a bit. Maybe it was the change of tone from Glitterglen? I don't really know.
The game continued to gain speed until somewhere about 6-7 months in, at which point it began a slow descent into apathy and decline caused by burnout among the players and a lack of things to do. It ended rather abruptly at that point, but as the graph shows, there were still a few heavy scenes posted after that point, largely as ending scenes. Maklak posted a large dump a while after that, which resulted in the peak at the very end of the graph.
What did I do right?As mentioned above, I think Dawnpick was a happy accident of theme and timing. It was light hearted compared to Glitterglen and started as Glitterglen began to wind down. There was a good balance of violence and slice of life that I never managed to recapture, and the players as a whole had a large amount of freedom to work with character development. I guess the environment encouraged that.
What did I do wrong?Oh boy. It didn't show up in the thread as much as the behind the scenes chat rooms, but you can get a feel for it on the odd post from angry players.
The bottom line is that I'm not a particularly good GM or moderator. GMs have to be moderators. Players are going to have conflicting ideas, and they're going to get mad at each other. I did a very, very bad job of managing that in Dawnpick, and that led to a lot of infighting and groups forming. This probably directly led to a few players not returning for subsequent games.
I also didn't do a good job of planning for Dawnpick's ending. Any time I even entertained the idea of ending it, I got a
lot of mad comments, so I kind of gave up on it. Eventually, after interest began to wane and players dropped out silently, I ended it with what amounted to "The End!" ending. That and the overarching story could have used a lot of work.
What would I do differently next time?Note: This is being written years and years after Duskfields, but I'm going to write this from the POV that I had at the time that I ended Dawnpick.
Firstly, I would try to take a much stronger role in mediating and moderating among the players. By far the biggest problem in Dawnpick was the player arguing. I'd love to make that not be a problem in future games.
Second, Dawnpick's story was very loose. So loose, in fact, that players were free to come up with conflicting story ideas that made people mad. That's bad. It also meant that I had no ending planned, which led to the unsatisfying "The End!" that we all got. I think that in future games, I would try to enforce a stronger and more coherent story in an attempt to mitigate that risk.