Anyria discussion

[Kaden]

It just...it really irks me how the blame suddenly shifted in this conversation. Who's responsibility do you think Anyria's is, ultimately? The creators/staff, or the members who look to the staff for guidance?

wat?

In the posts prior to that one, not a single person said it was all the members' fault. In fact, the sentiment of the thread can be summed up as "staff let it die." Then you launch in on how it's staff's fault. The blame never shifted off of staff. The closest anyone came to blaming members was Undrask when he said "I think that nobody wrote because nobody else is writing." Staff fall under the umbrella of "nobody" and that leads to the exact point you were making.

Anyria was an interesting thing to see for a lot of reasons. Overall, I agree with what Undrask said: inactivity perpetuates inactivity. Yeah, there could have been some big kick-off saga. I made the conscious choice not to. I actually did mean to finish the thread but honestly lost my desire to do so.

The intent was to always have the world very loosely defined so the players would be able to do what they wanted to with it. Again, a conscious choice. Sadly, it seems that was not communicated effectively.

Directly addressing Tyr's point about power progression: it actually is there. Instead of just using a number, though, I decided to obscure it through the use of Crystals and Slots. Since more crystals = stronger spells, more crystals = more strength. No, it doesn't make for direct 1:1 comparisons of strength, but fits very well within the design philosophy I approached the RPG with.

Reb brought up the idea of Staff as a "guiding hand" for the members, and it's a good thing to think about. Philosophically, I agree with Orion. If you're there to write, you shouldn't have to have someone standing there showing you how you're supposed to do it. The literature provided about the RPG should do that on it's own (and, as Tyr mentioned, that may be lacking enough to cause problems). Practically, I've always done the exact opposite. In all incarnations of CDBZ I usually went with the "lead by example" approach to both staffing and writing. I didn't for Anyria.

There are definitely some lessons to be taken away from this. I'm not going to write Anyria off as "dead" just yet, though I don't imagine much will change. If people are interested in getting a saga going, I'm more than happy to help with that. I do have plans of writing there, myself, but don't intend on pumping out posts like I used to.