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arcplaysgames · 1 year

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The Persona 5 Post-Mortem, Part One: What I Didn't Like 8C

I have reread my entire P5 liveblog to refresh my memory of everything that happened in the game, and I've been trying to think about how I feel about P5R and, frankly, whether I like the game. Which is a very basic question, I think, but one I am deeply struggling with, so obviously it's not actually that simple, huh.

The answer I am tentatively settling on is: I think the third semester saves P5R from being an Actually Bad game.

I think that Persona 5 Vanilla is actually… a 5 out of 10 at best, and in my heart it's lower than that. But Royal does so much intense heavy lifting, it alone, separate from the rest of the game and the original campaign, is an 8 out of 10.

That is an enormous discrepancy that I've really never dealt with in a video game before. I think the last game I played that I truly disliked to my bones was Fallout 4. FO4 remains the only game I've ever played were I genuinely and truly wanted a refund of not just my money but my time, the hours I spent in that meaningless, vapid fucking world. Even FO3 gave me some joy of exploration, for fuck's sake.

P5R is not as bad as FO4, but the main campaign is to me an enormous disappointment that…. if I had not been in the throes of a depressive slump and thus needing something to hyperfocus on, I don't know if I would have finished the game. My frequent references to Yusuke saving me from turning off the game were not exaggeration in the least.

So, I think there are two major problems with this game. And I understand that when I did my post-mortem on P4G, I started with my likes and then went to dislikes, but I think for P5R it's correct to reverse that, because my negative feelings far outweigh the positive.

I guess point one is obvious: I think the cast of this game is bad.

I refuse to sugar-coat it. The cast of P5 is just bad, with a few mild exceptions. Even the characters that I like, I enjoy them comparatively to the ones I hate. And I have never hated someone in a Persona game before, not even Joker Mode Yosuke.

The entire cast of this game is much, much flatter than you would expect from a game that is trying so desperately to be stylish and loud and garish. P5R is maximalist to its fucking core. The fusions are executions, item creation is an electric chair, the menus are nightmares of high contrast and bouncing shapes, everything is LOUD LOUD LOUD 24/7 in this game to the point that I, a person I think is fairly skilled at video games and played P4G on Normal and breezed through it, had to lower the difficulty of the game to fucking have fun, because I felt so inundated with stimulus, I was struggling to play the fucking game.

That maximalist spirit just vanishes in the characters, and it's so fucking jarring. All style, no substance.

When I was trying to figure out my thoughts on the characters, the thing I kept coming back to was that P5 has too many main characters in the party. And weirdly, I think I'm right! P3 has seven party members (excluding beloved Koromaru, eight if you count Shinjiro who is in the party for a month). P4 only has seven.

Persona 5 Royal has nine, and I think part of the problem is that to fit all of these characters into the party and the story and to keep the MSQ scene moving at a decent pace, everyone suffers for it and gets flattened. Even the vibrancy of Yusuke vanishes from the game in the final third, where all his interesting tics and quirks are phased out until he's just a guy here to say his lines to move things along. Almost everyone suffers from this, where they are focal points during their introduction arc, and then they just lose all their shine as the story moves on.

This didn't happen in P3 and P4. That's not rose-tinted glasses talking; I JUST played both of those games starting in December. P3 is my true love but P4 is a tremendous example of how the characters continued to be themselves in every scene, even after their introductory chapters ended.

So the poison at the heart of P5R is that the characters are both not as three-dimensional to start with (and there are only a few I would even consider three-dimensional), and from the moment their respective Palaces end, they're on a half life.

This literally might be why I like Haru best, because she's introduced so late in the game that she didn't lose her voice yet by the endgame.

This is all of course at odds with the fact that only a few characters are really good. Futaba probably deserves the most accolades for being clear and present in every scene and always maintaining her uniqueness. Morgana as well, seeing as his arc lasts the entire game and is one of the central mysteries. And Akechi, without whom I think the entire game might have actually failed? Without the complexity and unnerving energy from Akechi, this cast could not sustain the runtime of the game.

AND ON TOP OF ALL OF THAT, it does not help that I actively disliked two of my party members. Makoto has by far the worse introduction of any character in any game I have played and the way the game just did not understand or contend with what she did, the stalking and blackmail and endangering everyone, soured her so completely for me that she never once got party time. I never used her.

But even she was a relief next to fucking Ryuji. Ryuji, the token best friend character who turned into The Teammate Everyone Hates for me. He was a mean, emotionally dense, disrespectful and dehumanizing asshole for the entire fucking game. And I am used to the Best Friend Guy who messes up and grows over the course of the game (see: Junpei and Yosuke) but with Ryuji there is no growth, there is barely acknowledgement of how cruel he is. And the fact he never actually apologized to Morgana for his bullshit in the middle of the game lost me completely on him. Ryuji made me as the player on the other side of the screen uncomfortable. That's…. wild, tbh.

So we have a cast where I can barely stand two characters, I'm ambivalent on three, one I regularly forgot she existed, and three I liked a lot.

That's a fucking mess, y'all. For a Persona game, which is a premium Hangout Game, where so much of the point is the characters? That's a huge problem.

The other games in this franchise like Shin Megami Tensei tend to have characters that are flatter and more allegorical in nature, but that's okay because the focus is on the themes and the writing of the world.

Which leads directly to the other problem with Persona 5.

The writing. On several metrics, the writing is Bad.

On the first point, the fact that this game has an 80 hour runtime if you are lucky, and that's just the vanilla MSQ. It feels like an 80 hour runtime. I felt every goddamn minute of how long this game is.

Structure is the problem here, in my opinion, and it goes hand in hand with the character issue. Just as this game has too many characters, it has too many set-pieces and arcs. To justify Makoto's presence in the game, there is a long, superfluous arc with Kaneshiro that should have just been cut entirely. Kaneshiro is about 10 hours that could just be snipped out of the game with nothing lost thematically or narratively.

And even more that P4 and DEFINITELY more than P3, the game will essentially…. repeat scenes.

As someone who did this entire liveblog with screencaps, I cannot tell you how many times I thought I missed capping a specific line or moment only to find out that it was in a nearly-identical scene a little bit earlier. Sometimes there were three different scenes that conveyed no new information, just restated what the characters knew, and that's just ridiculous. That's truly just too much.

On top of that, this game just gives the player way too much time. I didn't fill out every SLink in this game, but that's because I actively chose not to out of disinterest in a few of them. If I wanted to, I think I could have done every one without a guide. I spun my wheels for OVER TWENTY IN-GAME DAYS MULTIPLE TIMES. The pacing is a nightmare.

Another point I mentioned a lot was the technical quality of the writing.

This game is so over-produced, so maximalist, has so many small details, but the actual script as written for the game feels like it was done under crunch. Like, extreme crunch. Original FF7-style crunch.

It's hard to explain what this means, but in P4G, the script was lovingly crafted word by word and everything was incredibly naturalistic and conversational. There was never a moment when I had to refer to the log and reread anything, no point where a conversation lost me.

In P5R, this happened regularly. Awkward phrasings, responses that didn't make sense, repetitive sentence structure, and weird conversational pivots that did actually force me to go back and reread to understand what was being said.

Localizing a game of this scope and budget is a herculean task, and I know the game's English release was delayed. It just was not enough time. I would guess that this game needed at least another month or two to cook, but more than anything, the localization process should have been started a year before it was. The localization needed to be happening concurrently with the final year of development for a text this fucking dense.

It is so weird to see the extreme polish of the presentation of this game and then to just read the text aloud and go "wait, what" numerous times in a single playthrough.

(also this barely feels like its worth mentioning with the other issues but the lack of translation of the textures was unacceptably bad. I had to get a JPN-speaking friend to translate some things for me, and I really genuinely feel like missing out on some of this shit diminished the context of the game. Maruki's place is the most egregious offender but its everywhere.)

And finally, the last writing complaint is that until the Third Semester, this game has nothing to say. The Persona 5 Vanilla version of this game is……. meaningless but masquerading as thoughtful and rebellious.

Which is frankly hugely disappointing because this game does start strong with Joker and the repeated motif of imprisonment and betrayal. In just the first hour, Joker is beat up in an interrogation room, he's falsely accused of assault, his probation officer tells him he deserved it for stepping out of line, and every figure of authority from the principal to the teachers to his fellow students treat him like a murderer. It was a potent start to a game.

And in the end, Yaldaboath is just repeating the same fucking shit that Izanami did in P4G. People? More like SHEEPLE, amiright? People care more about being entertained than the TRUTH, and they want to be shadows/imprisoned.

Blah blah fucking blah. Persona needs to come up with something new to say because this was NOT it, chief, and was just disappointing given the strong start with Joker. I think this game's Big Theme can confidently be boiled down to "phones are like prisons," and its infuriating.

So much superfluous text and so little to say.

Until the Third Semester, anyway.

Next post will be about the things I liked, I promise.

#p5 #persona liveblog #post mortem #LONG post #warning this post is VERY negative

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liskantope · 4 years

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I’ve just reread my collection of political articles written by H. L. Mencken, in the book A Carnival of Buncombe: Writings on Politics. These articles span early 1920 to late 1936, over five presidential elections.

Below are a few of the passages I found the most interesting, as a glimpse into American political culture during this period (although Mencken is overtly snobbish and somewhat bigoted -- far from an objective observer -- and seems remarkably obtuse about some pretty obvious things).

[This turned out long-ish. For me, the most interesting passage is the last one I quoted actually, although I’m not really sure if any of my followers would be that interested in any of it and this is for my own note-keeping as much as anything else.

After living abroad for a while, I’ve become increasingly interested in what is unique about American culture and common American mentalities, and it’s interesting to see the following musing from a century ago:

It seems to me that this fear of ideas is a peculiarly democratic phenomenon, and that it is nowhere so horribly apparent as in the United States, perhaps the nearest approach to an actual democracy yet seen in the world. It was Americans who invented the curious doctrine that there is a body of doctrine in every department of thought that every good citizen is in duty bound to accept and cherish; it was Americans who invented the right-thinker. The fundamental concept, of course, was not original. The theologians embraced it centuries ago, and continue to embrace it to this day. It appeared on the political side in the Middle Ages, and survived in Russia into our time. But it is only in the United States that it has been extended to all departments of thought. It is only here that any novel idea, in any field of human relations, carries with it a burden of obnoxiousness, and is instantly challenged as mysteriously immoral by the great masses of right-thinking men. It is only here, so far as I have been able to make out, that there is a right way and a wrong way to think about the beverages one drinks with one’s meals, and the way children ought to be taught in the schools, and the manner in which foreign alliances should be negotiated, and what ought to be done about the Bolsheviki.

- from “Bayard vs. Lionheart”, July 26th, 1920

On President Harding’s inaugural address (this, like many other things, makes me wonder what Mencken would have made of Trump):

I rise to pay my small tribute to Dr. Harding. Setting aside a college professor or two and half a dozen dipsomaniacal newspaper reporters, he takes the first place in my Valhalla of literati. That is to say, he writes the worst English that I have ever encountered. It reminds me of a string of wet sponges; it reminds me of tattered washing on the line; it reminds me of stale bean-soup, of college yells, of dogs barking idiotically through endless nights. It is so bad that a sort of grandeur creeps into it. It drags itself out of the dark abysm (I was about to write abscess!) of pish, and crawls insanely up the topmost pinnacle of post. It is rumble and bumble. It is flap and doodle. It is balder and dash.

- from “Gamlielese”, March 7th, 1921

At the risk of being redundant, here is Mencken’s comment on the lack of defined policy differences between the two major parties as they existed in 1923:

Both [major political parties] have lost their old vitality, all their old reality; neither, as it stands today, is anything more than a huge and clumsy machine for cadging jobs. They do not carry living principles into their successive campaigns; they simply grab up anything that seems likely to make votes. The old distinctions between them have all faded out, and are now almost indiscernible. The Democrats are just as hot for centralization as the Republicans, and just as friendly towards a protective tariff; they stand together on the money question; there is no choice between them on the question of foreign policy; they are both wet and both dry.

The only reality that remains is their division on sectional lines. In the South the morons still vote the straight Democratic ticket. But even this brand begins to wear off. We have seen Maryland and Tennessee take to the fence; we have even seen some wobbling in Virginia and Texas. The time may come, and it may be soon, when the solid South will fall to pieces. Out of the wreck, I venture to believe, a new alignment of parties will come, and it will be based, not upon outworn traditions and shibboleths, but upon genuine differences of opinion. What those differences of opinion will be I do not risk prophecying, but it would not surprise me at all if one great party advocated the inspection and control of bootleggers by rigid Federal legislation, and the other, clinging to the tattered remains of local self-government, advocated licensing them by the commune.

- from “Next Year’s Struggle”, June 11th, 1923

Mencken’s (rather lofty and prejudiced) perception of cultural differences between rural and urban America and how they play into differing attitudes towards Prohibition (the Volstead Act):

Prohibition is essentially a yokel idea. It mirrors alike the farmer’s fear of himself and his envy of city men. Unable to drink at all without making a hog of himself, he naturally hates those who can. When a city man goes on a grand drunk, the police take charge of him humanely and he is restrained from doing any great damage. The worst that happens to him is that his wife beats him and he loses his job. But when a farmer succumbs to the jug his unmilked cows burst, his hogs and chickens starve, his pastor denounces him as an atheist (or even an Episcopalian), and he is ruined. Thus he favors Prohibition, especially if he is given to heavy drinking -- first because he hopes it will protect him against himself, and secondly because it harasses his superior and enemy, the city man...

I have never encountered a genuine city man, not obviously balmy, who was in favor of Prohibition. There seems to be something in the urban mentality that rebels against such imbecilities. Perhaps the fact is to be ascribed to familiarity with the police. The yokel, seeing policemen very seldom, retains a considerable fear of them, and a high respect for the laws behind them. But the city man takes the cops lightly, and the laws with them. He has no respect for laws as such; he respects them when they are useful and plausible. Such grotesque concoctions as the Volstead Act he knows to be neither.

The yokel’s answer to this sniffishness is that the city man is a scoundrel, and ought to be kept under restraint. His opposition to Prohibition, as the hedge pastors argue, is due to a consuming love of rum. But that argument quickly runs aground on the fact that the city man, despite the Eighteenth Amendment, still has all the rum he can consume. For he is not only contumacious; he is also ingenious, and knows how to beat laws that he dislikes. So the yokels and their spiritual advisers have to fall back on the doctrine that Prohibition is ordained of God, and is hence binding upon every good citizen, regardless of his private convictions. But the city man simply laughs at that. He observes that the chief agents of revelation are Methodist bishops, and that he has heard too much balderdash from them to have any confidence in them.

- from “Real Issues at Last”, July 23rd, 1928

Commentary on Herbert Hoover’s character just before his election, as I provided it in the comments section under the (very interesting) SSC post on Hoover:

The contrast [Al Smith] makes with his opponent is really appalling. Hoover stands at the opposite pole. He is a man of sharp intelligence, well schooled and familiar with the ways of the world, and more than once, in difficult situations, he has shown a shrewd competence, but where is character ought to be there is almost a blank. He is the perfect self-seeker, pushing and unconscionable; it is hard to imagine him balking at anything to get on. His principles are so vague that even his intimates seem unable to put them into words. He is an American who came within an inch of being an Englishman, a Republican who came within an inch of being a Democrat, a dry who came within an inch of being a wet. He is what is today because it has paid him well so far, and promises to pay still better hereafter.

- from “Al in the Free State”, October 29th, 1928

Now Mencken’s attempts to predict the results of the elections of 1932, in which he demonstrates how oblivious he was to the effects of the Great Depression on public sentiment:

That Dr. Hoover will be renominated by his party next year is as nearly certain as anything human can be, and that he will be reelected at the ensuing plebiscite is highly probable.

- from “The Hoover Bust”, May 18th, 1931

Barring acts of God of a revolting and unprecedented character, Mr. Hoover is almost as sure of reelection next year as he was of election in 1928... [Mencken argues in terms of several states that Hoover might lose but won’t need anyway.]

All this should be plain to anyone able to add and subtract. It is as obvious as that 2 and 2 equal 4.

- from “Hoover in 1932″, July 27th, 1931

Right before the election, Mencken finally recognized that Hoover was going to lose but seems to emphasize almost every other complaint against Hoover (particularly his acting on the wrong side of the Prohibition question) over his failure to cure the Depression:

My guess is that the thing which really finished the right hon. gentleman was his singularly disingenuous and unconvincing dealing with Prohibition.

- from “Pre-Mortem”, October 24th, 1932

I’ll end with the passage I found maybe the most interesting. Mencken had identified as a Democrat and enthusiastically voted Democrat in 1928 and 1932 (although he didn’t support the Democratic candidates in 1920 and 1924 and loathed the legendary Democrat William Jennings Bryan). But well before the end of FDR’s first term, he had turned against the president’s new-dealing ways. Here is an excerpt from his article on the eve of FDR’s reelection:

Nevertheless, and in spite of all Hell’s angels, I shall vote for the Hon. Mr. Landon tomorrow. To a lifelong Democrat, of course, it will be something of a wrench. But it seems to me that the choice is one that genuine Democrats are almost bound to make. On the one side are all the basic principles of their party, handed down from its first days and tried over and over again in the fires of experience; on the other side is a gallimaufry of transparent quackeries, puerile in theory and dangerous in practice. To vote Democratic this year it is necessary, by an unhappy irony, to vote for a Republican. But to vote with the party is to vote for a gang of mountebacks who are no more Democrats than a turkey buzzard is to an archangel.

This exchange of principles, with the party labels unchanged, is naturally confusing, abut it is certainly not so confusing that it goes unpenetrated. Plenty of Republicans who believe sincerely in a strong Federal Government are going to vote tomorrow for the Hon. Mr. Roosevelt, and plenty of Democrats who believe sincerely in the autonomy of the States and a rigid limitation of the Federal power are going to vote, as I shall, for the Hon. Mr. Landon. Whether the shift that confronts us will be be permanent remains to be seen. But while it lasts it is manifestly very real, and those who let party loyalties blind them to its reality will be voting very foolishly.

This is particularly interesting to me because it reflects an interpretation of the history of our political parties often claimed by Democrats: “The two parties switched places.” I’ve always been a little impatient with the simplistic way this is put (although of course it’s nowhere near as bad as Republicans, including the president, who love to imply that theirs is still the party of Lincoln out of one side of their mouths while idolizing Andrew Jackson, the founder of the Democratic party, out of the other). It’s not as though the parties one day just up and decided they wanted to switch names or switch positions. Mencken himself had pointed out in the early 20′s, in one of the passages I quoted further above, that there was little differentiating the two parties at the time apart from the demographic and geographic subgroups of Americans who formed their respective bases. Moreover, the Democratic party had been displaying somewhat of a fiscally progressive streak in the past few decades, arguably starting with William Jennings Bryan in 1896. (Although to be fair, the Republican party flirted with progressivism in a very big way thanks to Theodore Roosevelt, and none of this earlier progressivism looked that much like the revolution FDR was waging anyway.)

That said, if one had to point to a single turning point in history for Democrats and Republicans which played the greatest role in directing them towards where they are today, the early 30′s with FDR’s New Deal is probably the most reasonable choice, and Mencken’s above contemporary commentary is evidence supporting this.

#H L Mencken #american presidential politics #herbert hoover #fdr #william jennings bryan #indecision 1932 #indecision 1936 #alcoholism #Prohibition

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grobolom · 6 years

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Five Offboarding Tips

Having left my position at Hearst, I was responsbile for tranferring almost two years' worth of knowledge to the tech leads that would replace me in a just a couple short weeks. This was a daunting task, but, while there were some hiccups, I think I was able to do so successfully. It required some forethought and a good place to store and share documentation, but at the end of the day just making sure to care about the process did the most good.

Now that I'm through the process, I'd like to give a few tips as to how you can ensure the same process at your company, be it when you yourself leave or when someone else is getting ready to. Some of these will be tips for outside the actual offboarding process, as ensuring good offboarding means setting up good practices even during less turbulent times.

Have a single docs location that everyone on the team has access to.

Schedule regular knowledge sharing sessions and deep-dives.

Set up a 'Q&A' section that everyone can post to.

Quickly schedule knowledge shares for missing gaps.

Assign an offboarding 'point person'.

1. Have a single docs location

Having a single point where the whole team goes to for documentation is crucial in any organization, not just for the offboarding process. However, it may not be obvious how critical this is until a high-quality contributor leaves. Whatever the situtation, make sure that during this time, you make sure all the documentation related to this person leaving is moved to a single source of truth, and that everyone on the team that is participating in the transition process can easily get to it.

Having this in place will guarantee that everyone stays focused on what is important - leaving behind a consise record of what is known, what is unknown, and where to go from here. Having multiple docs locations, or no clearly assigned spot, means someone may have to spend time reconstructing a web of relationships after the contributor leaves, which wastes time at best, or loses knowledge permanently at worst.

2. Schedule regular knowledge shares and deep-dives

This is another tip that can be implemented immediately, but one of the best ways you can ensure that losing someone doesn't crush your productiviy or kill a team is to regularly schedule knowledge sharing sessions. One of the ways I've seen this happen is to schedule a weekly 'developer chapter' meeting, where engineers are encouraged to talk about and give presentations on work they have done recently on their teams, or even things they have learned or worked on during their spare time.

Keeping well ahead of inevitable team changes is critical. One of the biggest benefits is that doing these sessions ahead of time means that the knowledge tends to be fresh. Scheduling these sessions only at the last minute means a contributor may be trying to remember design decisions or challenging problem solutions at a time when they are being bombarded with hundreds of other questions. It also means that the time spent offboarding can be left for the really tough questions - post-mortem-style questions like 'what would you have done differently on this project' or 'what are the likely upcoming technical hurdles' rather than minutia.

3. Set up a Q&A section in the offboarding docs

One of the better ways to guarantee good knowledge transfer is to ask questions, and keeping those questions public is the best way to keep the flow going. Answering questions in a 'Q&A' format is a good way to both sort through potential gaps in knowledge. It is also less intimidating for newer engineers or those less comfortable publicly asking for some of this information to contribute to the process in a meaningful way. You should periodically sort these questions into sections based on topic so that the end result isn't an unwieldy wall of text, but on the whole even a less sorted list can be helpful.

4. Immediately schedule knowledge shares for missing knowledge

It's most important to rapidly move the person leaving from doing work to moving knowledge to other people. One of the ways you can guarantee a big loss to your company is letting an engineer that is already leaving take all the knowledge they have accumulated, all the bugs they know exist and the tricks they have mastered to get around in your system, and leave without giving any of it away. While there may be important outstanding projects that need to be finished in the timeframe of this person moving on, a focus on getting down what can never be replaced is usually more important than knocking out a few extra tickets.

This is a tip that is also most likely to change as circumstances on the ground change. If there are major feature planning sessions or really important pieces of functionality that are due immediately, it may be more important for this person to finish these tasks than to immediately start writing notes and docs. That said, it's still often the right move to eat the producitivity hit and understand that some things will come in late. It also easier to account for a guaranteed miss on some deliverable than try to eke out a last few hours of work from someone whose productivity may already be on the downswing.

5. Assign a 'point person' for offboarding

The quickest way to get traction on any project is to assign someone to be the main shepherd of that work. Assigning a point person to be the go-to for the off-boarding process is useful for making sure nothing gets missed. It ensures that the teams remaining stay focused on their work and are minimally impacted by the transition process. It also means that the person being offboarded has a consistent line of communication to go through; any questions, issues that arise, or help this person needs to get things in order before leaving can be addressed to a single responsibly party.

Keeping these lines of communications clear is important from both sides. It may be that management has many questions for the person leaving, as do other team leads. Having a dozen interrupting meetings with a variety of concerned workers will make it difficult for the person to focus on sharing their knowledge in a consise and consistent way. They may be distracted and miss important information, or say something verbally that is not written down, but missed later because it was 'already said'.

These tips are only the starting point of making your offboarding process a clean and enjoyable one. They serve to help you keep your relationship with the former employee intact, as well as make sure the company continues chugging along without losing a ton of productive time whenever someone decides to leave. With the tech industry hitting an average attrition rate of 23%, it's important to plan for this inevitability. I hope this leaves you with a good starting point, and gives you some ideas on how to better your own processses.

#offboarding #documentation #tech

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syrune · 7 years

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Avalarian Post Mortem

Wow... I can't believe it's over. Before I hurt myself patting my own back I just want to thank all of you. I literally could not have done it without the dedication of my players. You all rock. You stood by me and my story through the best and worst of it all. We broke many D&D conventions with this story, episodic plots, mid-game rework, sci-fi themes peppered with eldritch horror and world building That Reshaped The Very Core Of The Races Chosen.

WHAT WENT RIGHT. Well, I had to be doing something right to earn the loyalty I got. These are the beats that I think were hit well over the last year plus of work.

• Episodic story telling ○ Lots Of DMs Like To Cover everything in their story. Multiple sessions of just ocean would bore us all to tears. Every moment counts when you are on a time limit and worrying about if Gromgar ate before raging would have done nothing to serve the goal of making this fun. It also means that I got to fill time with a lot of fun and engaging subplots that did nothing to further your goals, but still turned out fun. That being said, expect to see this point again. • Boss hooks ○ Boss mechanisms and power have so much that could have been improved with proper management, but I am proud of the fact that all the major bosses had at least one player wanting to kill them. Your desire to kill these fuckers made playing them so fun. • NPCs ○ There were a lot of them! One of the problems story tellers of all kinds have is character voice, how they talk and what about their mannerisms is them. Lots of novice writers make amazing characters, but they are often hard to distinguish because they behave the same. My voices may have sounded the same at times, but I was sooooo happy when players could still guess them based on how they used that same voice. • The story ○ This will show up a LOT. This story was the biggest I ever tackled and it's only half done. I feel like the blight was the Brest thing I did, it had the most time dedicated to it (5 years) and I think it's safe to say that it did a good job keeping you all invested in the plot. • The ships ○ The look on your faces when you lost the shooting star was to kill for. The fact that Jacqueline bitched about it for a week is a testament to the connection you all had. The same could be said every time the Nivastus returned • The Subplots ○ Watching You All Grow As Characters Was A Treat. I don't think a single character ended that game without some major growth. You all owned this world and its stories so well. It would not be wrong to Say you all wrote At least half the story. WHAT WENT WRONG. Short answer, a lot. A lot of great ideas went discarded, a lot of poor ideas were put in. I feel a lot of these things got fixed later on, but it is still important to point those things out, especially those things. The last thing Starfinder needs is a repeat of these mistakes. • Episodic story telling ○ If there is one thing I wish I had done more of, it's fun pirate adventures. I gave you a ship, a captain, and very little government oversight and never once gave you a fucking treasure map to gold and jewels. The point of doing the game this way was to ensure that I could provide creature-of-the-week stories where you get to do little side gigs. I hope to provide more of those in the future, and making them something you stumble onto. • The Trade Guild ○ God that was a good concept… This would have been the perfect way to spur on that idea of little adventures, there were a lot of things that lead to the Trade Guild failing in action, but I think the quest givers were the big thing. All of them felt like just busy work and you never interfaced with the actual citizens for these quests. Moving forward, the trade guild will be just that. Trade, Banking, occasional drop-off job. • Granting levels ○ While it is easier to just say "level up" at the end of a session rather than manage EXP distribution, EXP distribution is soooo much more rewarding. Characters growing based on their individual efforts and being rewarded for creativity with faster leveling could have made gold something of ACTUAL VALUE. 50 XP for doing something impressive is a much easier reward to dish out than another 400 gold that you won't spend because you are loaded down with gold and bling already. • "Hub" settings ○ This is the concept that just about sunk this ship in the harbor. Moving forward, returning home will be more of a reward and an opportunity for down time rather than the first part of every session, mucking up the time allotments and hindering the exploration. • The Story ○ The journey home, arguably the driving force of the campaign, really fell to the wayside like three sessions in. Voyager did a good job of reminding the characters and the audience that, as cool as the settings are, home was always the goal, and I did a poor job of conveying that. • The rules ○ Let's make this short and sweet, I sucked at the rules, there were lots of things I shot down that I could have tried to work on. Time management is literally the next bullet point so I will kick myself more there. Know that in Starfinder, I will try to understand the rules better sooner. • Time management ○ With everything I wanted to do, so much could never get done. There were a lot of plots that I just cut down or discarded because of time (there was a gang of murderers following you THIS ENTIRE TIME that I never got around to) I think if this was an ordered list, this would be the first bullet point. Hands down. In and out of game, I managed my time poorly. I gave myself little time to write the sessions, I gave myself little time to run the sessions, and the time I spent I could have spent better. Part of this plays into the problems of episodic story telling, it's easier to say "we can finish later" than "this has to get done tonight". • Bosses ○ I could write a decent villain, but I could not build a difficult encounter to save my life. Moving forward, I will try to just kill you all, rather than just "make it a challenge". Killing everything is fun, but I feel there was a lack of stakes when the bosses are stupid easy. • Dungeons ○ Next time, I will just make a fucking dungeon. Even if it's just one, I gotta just make the fucking dungeon and make it make sense. Generators are cool and save so much time, but the things that engaged you most seemed to be the places with logical floor plans and rooms that made sense. Moving forward I will try to do as much as I can by hand, and generate the small stuff. Obviously, there is a LOT I missed as far as good and bad things. These were just the points I felt needed to be addressed before I begin writing "Terrok: Next Generation". Before this finishes, I have a few things I want to point out as stories I never got to tell, either time was wasted, ideas were abandoned part way through thinking them, and some ideas make better television than small-time story telling.

The riptide gang -At one point, the party decided not to deliver weapons to a place and instead sold them to a gripli nation. The gang that you stole from was going to attack you. Idea was scrapped due to time

The ancient treasure -The party finds a treasure map to find a piece of the old world! They follow the map and discover a curious prize, an ancient battery that seems semi functional. Content was thought of AFTER I had already clumsily added the warp core to the campaign.

What is love? This one I went back and forth on. I really wanted to do this story, but I knew you guys were not the ones I wanted to tell it to. -Bravo finds an algorithm that emulates the experience of falling in love. Bravo tests it on Echo, and after it is successful, Echo does the same for Bravo, but in a moment of weakness, erases Bravo's knowledge of Enforcer class warforged, making him oblivious to the fact that he is physically different from Echo. This is a story that, with a larger audience, could have been thought provoking, but ultimately was unnecessary. We all get it, messing with someone's head is wrong and the elimination of gender does not fix gender nothing would have been added with this story

Drow war -The drow was meant from the get-go to be the sworn enemy of Avalar. The war would have made the eventual team up to attack the blight even more entertaining. Cut due to rewrites

The Shadow invasion -The shadow plane was going to be a more constant and oppressive foe. forcing Avalar to fight two different wars at once. Cut due to rewrites

Stranded

-Mellorea falls into a portal that lands her in Avalar at the beginning of a war between Avalar and the Drow Empire. Mellorea needs to find a way back home as the party looks for ways to bring her back. Cut because obvious issues, 1) if you find a way to get her back, you can just use that way to go home, 2) convince Gromgar to try and help her 3) a uniform "I jump in after her" from the party 4) this idea later became the rebellion session

The Death Of Ignis I hated that character, he was a one off joke that only stuck around because I said him instead of Gaarda on accident. That’s my secret folks, you could have had Captian Gaarda if I had not fucked up on Ignis. Anyway, I was going to have the engine blow up and kill him, forcing Meero to use what Lelvi taught her to build a new one. On that note… WHAT WENT WRONG: PART 2 • Ignis ○ Fuck Ignis So there you have it, folks. The Post Mortem of my campaign. All my thoughts since last night about what we made.

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