if I had one big lesson to learn, its to not have complicated mechanics. it sounds good on paper to do Texas hold em with balatro mechanics... while online.

but then you do it practice and realize "aw shit, this is super confusing for players"

so uh... yea. KISS. keep it simple stupid

another lesson I'm taking in is to not have two antagonistic NPC characters. you'd think I'd learn that the first year but nope!

what ends up happening is one gets the spotlight and then folks wonder who the hell this other villain is when he appears in the finale?

sooooo, yea, gonna try to keep that in mind whenever we start planning for next year

but still, it sounded like everyone had fun. even if we had bot issues halfway into the larp

I'll be brainstorming for next year once I get some rest in, and probably player feedback.

wait who was the one people didn't know?

I think peeps in ours were just laser focused on zeal. general vibe seemed to be everyone hated the jester.

FluridCube: I may be exaggerating there but I felt like Jester in the finale had a "tacked on" aspect to him considering how the majority of the plot was invested in Queen Zeal (as they should have been).

I guess you are right that everyone hated him

still i think if i just focused on having one villain npc, i could have fleshed them out more

at least a plot relevant villain NPC

I think i got what i wanted out of Geese and the Crow Mauler

I would say overlap was a small issue for all of us but I’d attribute that to getting a new GM partway into the process and the weird irl year we all had. I think everything you did was good, we’re just finding how we balance stuff still. I know I am still getting used to how that works on discord vs online.

For my part I heard people being really into the Lucky Feather and looking to get involved in that a bunch, so you were running cool stuff that stuck in people’s mind.

But I’ve definitely had that feeling after larps, it’s valid and if you need encouragement I’m here.

Personally I would have split that scene, mostly because combat time tends to scale non-linearly with number of players (though that also had the chance to have it had just be aisha beating on the jester alone) plus a big combat scene for a new gm is always a lot.

But having him there did set up the entire scene which let zeal go insane

Everything is a tradeoff no need to sweat too much ¯\_ (ツ)_/¯

qzzus: the overlap was intentional as I wasn't sure how to make a big villain reveal scene work. but when the finale came, I realized that maybe it was... TOO much stuff to throw at the players, especially when most of them were focused on the primary target.

I did like him "get transformed" by zeal after all his gloating that he was really in control of her

just stuff to remember for next time. I still had a good time. I just always get reflective on my performance

I mean as Sonic the Hedgehog said, gotta live and learn.

FluridCube: yea, I was just worried like... 8 players would go to Zeal and 2 would deal with Jester lol

maybe that says more about how confident I was in how things were looking but... oh well

yeah ultimate i think it was the right choice story/vibe wise even if it did lose out time management wise lol

I say again it was a really fun time and I'm just sad I couldn't be in every scene

Tazrael: thanks. It's all good. I'm feeling better about everything in retrospect.