Post your name, along with what character(s) you play.
If you want, specify particular areas you would like feedback on! (It's okay to ask for just general feedback!)
Indicate whether or not you're okay with anonymous feedback. (It's totally cool if you don't.) You can also post links to your character's personal HMD if you'd prefer comments there.
Reply to other people telling them how you think they are doing.
Be polite and objective! If someone says they're cool with anonymous crit, that is not an invitation to be unfriendly. No one likes a Diamond Tiara! If you have something negative to say about somebody else's playing, make your points politely and suggest ways to improve. To give an example:
X - Unhelpful Diamond Tiara - "Jeez, Terri, can you learn to type? You've got about a billion typos in your posts!"
O - Helpful Not Diamond Tiara - "Hi, Terri, I noticed you have a number of typos in your posts. Something you might want to do is give your posts that one last look-over before hitting submit. It would really help with readability!"
?????
PROFIT
You don't have to post your own characters to give other people feedback! You don't have to post your characters at all if you don't want to. It is 100% OPTIONAL. If you do post, we would encourage you to give feedback to at least one other person!
The length was determined three-quarters IC, one quarter OOC. ICly, a week would have been stretching the boundary of letting ponies prepare as well as how much worry and alarm it would generate; OOCly, wouldn't a week have felt too short and even more futile? I was also concerned that once the reveal hit, the stuff that characters were doing would fall completely by the wayside. It took several days for stuff to get up and running, after all.
A week and a half just seems weird, but maybe that would have been a better time?
With regards to futility and failure as the only option... I'm going to approach this from two perspectives. The first one is that of the player of a villain... which is a far different mindset of "the character as a hero". The villain has to be a credible threat, and up till this point I had specifically been selling Zetta as a legitimate threat. (Stalliongrad, for example, happened specifically to make sure ponies could imagine the danger of Zetta succeeding... from both an IC and OOC perspective.)
So from this perspective, I did my best to ensure that efforts to deal with Zetta had some sort of effort, such as the raid managing to find out there were infiltrators on the scrolls. Despite IC speculation otherwise, that was very much not part of the plan and it could have threatened it. But on the other hand, the plan was specifically proofed against obvious interferences. If other things had been tried (some sort of scrying or locating spell on Zetta, as one example that comes to mind), it could have really thrown a kink into the plans.
And if the plan was cartoonish and easily broken, it wouldn't have been credible even OOC. (And for the record, it was pretty much all mine. The mods weren't involved except inasmuch as the NPCs provided Zetta some support he didn't absolutely need, if it came down to that.) So the balance there is that I did the best to reward efforts against Zetta that had otherwise been negated in the plan, without making the plan obviously easy to break. I did the best I could to avoid the feeling that Nothing Matters And Nothing Works, and I'm sorry you still felt it was that way. If you have any suggestions on where I didn't do enough or could have done better, I'm open to them.
From the other perspective, the truth is that Zetta isn't a villain at all any more. He doesn't realize it, but it's been true for months now. (Ironically, if he was still being villainous, his plan WOULD have had those gaping holes in it.) This is a part of a character arc for him. Also, a plan like this will never work again anyway, so there can't possibly be a repeat of it.
In concerns with the time frame, yeah, I'm echoing the comment about what could have done to improve it: add something to raise the stakes next time so it doesn't come down to being completely one-noted.
As well, after reading your post, I realize where my major concern was with the Failure is the Only Option problem. I remember Plurks being written up where you would mention that Zetta had X item that could stop Y hero's attempts at saving the day. It felt like you had too many plans to counter things. I remember people talking about wanting to send characters to space to stop the planets and that ground to a halt with "Oh, Zetta has a spaceship that can stop that."
Having plans to make sure something doesn't go off the rails is good and all, but you do not want any character to reach the level of "Bat-God" (for those comic-blind, that's a good decade of Batman stories where Batman was said to be able to beat anyone anywhere with "prep time") and that's what I feel it ultimately became. A good idea is to let the hero characters have a victory, even a little.
The spaceship thing was honestly unintentional, because Zetta ended getting that apropos of nothing back on Nightmare Night. That wasn't a case of Zetta having specifically come up with a way to stop the plan, so much as he had a resource earned in-game that could stop it, and not using it would be a cartoonish hole.
But I clearly phrased that plurk poorly, when my intention was only to let people know that if they tried, they would meet with opposition. I was worried, given how much discussion I'd seen, that there'd be some posts going up of people just shooting off to the planets without ever realizing that Zetta DID have a way to interfere. I hadn't meant for it to come off as absolute impossibility, just a fight up there. (And, uh, in my defense the plurk did get sidetracked with some other awkwardness.)
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
ponymeisters) wrote in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
mylittleooc2014-09-24 04:26 pm
no subject
A week and a half just seems weird, but maybe that would have been a better time?
With regards to futility and failure as the only option... I'm going to approach this from two perspectives. The first one is that of the player of a villain... which is a far different mindset of "the character as a hero". The villain has to be a credible threat, and up till this point I had specifically been selling Zetta as a legitimate threat. (Stalliongrad, for example, happened specifically to make sure ponies could imagine the danger of Zetta succeeding... from both an IC and OOC perspective.)
So from this perspective, I did my best to ensure that efforts to deal with Zetta had some sort of effort, such as the raid managing to find out there were infiltrators on the scrolls. Despite IC speculation otherwise, that was very much not part of the plan and it could have threatened it. But on the other hand, the plan was specifically proofed against obvious interferences. If other things had been tried (some sort of scrying or locating spell on Zetta, as one example that comes to mind), it could have really thrown a kink into the plans.
And if the plan was cartoonish and easily broken, it wouldn't have been credible even OOC. (And for the record, it was pretty much all mine. The mods weren't involved except inasmuch as the NPCs provided Zetta some support he didn't absolutely need, if it came down to that.) So the balance there is that I did the best to reward efforts against Zetta that had otherwise been negated in the plan, without making the plan obviously easy to break. I did the best I could to avoid the feeling that Nothing Matters And Nothing Works, and I'm sorry you still felt it was that way. If you have any suggestions on where I didn't do enough or could have done better, I'm open to them.
From the other perspective, the truth is that Zetta isn't a villain at all any more. He doesn't realize it, but it's been true for months now. (Ironically, if he was still being villainous, his plan WOULD have had those gaping holes in it.) This is a part of a character arc for him. Also, a plan like this will never work again anyway, so there can't possibly be a repeat of it.
no subject
As well, after reading your post, I realize where my major concern was with the Failure is the Only Option problem. I remember Plurks being written up where you would mention that Zetta had X item that could stop Y hero's attempts at saving the day. It felt like you had too many plans to counter things. I remember people talking about wanting to send characters to space to stop the planets and that ground to a halt with "Oh, Zetta has a spaceship that can stop that."
Having plans to make sure something doesn't go off the rails is good and all, but you do not want any character to reach the level of "Bat-God" (for those comic-blind, that's a good decade of Batman stories where Batman was said to be able to beat anyone anywhere with "prep time") and that's what I feel it ultimately became. A good idea is to let the hero characters have a victory, even a little.
no subject
But I clearly phrased that plurk poorly, when my intention was only to let people know that if they tried, they would meet with opposition. I was worried, given how much discussion I'd seen, that there'd be some posts going up of people just shooting off to the planets without ever realizing that Zetta DID have a way to interfere. I hadn't meant for it to come off as absolute impossibility, just a fight up there. (And, uh, in my defense the plurk did get sidetracked with some other awkwardness.)