The differing levels in host quality should be pretty obvious
on the hosting side:
making sure that each chapter is basically a new scenario is generally the best play
having some method of breaking up time so that the host can get sleep is a good idea
preplanning chapters is a great idea and you should do it
mix up your game with a lot of reasons for players to do somewhat anti-EV things for character reasons
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you have a good point about player interest and activity dying down as the game continues which creates some sort of problem but also I dont know what this is about so shrug
alternatively just have the escaped players have limited periods of interaction with alive players
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wait are you saying people dont preplan their chapters??
I mean
I’ve heavily considered making spec hosts so people that think they don’t have time could make it a bit easier but
It causes a lot of problems like that too, the best is to just have more hosts at the start who know somewhat what they’re doing
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hahahahahaha
when I say preplan I mean ‘before the game starts you know what is happening each chapter and the main ideas’
and the answer to that question is they don’t
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alright gotta bounce
The problem is that that still gives people flawless alibis for the time when it’s open (and also essentially protects everyone in the public zone while it’s open from kill attempts, since it’s not like someone is going to walk into the room where all actions are public and shoot someone)
Examples that worked reasonably well for this:
- Complicated puzzles that required several steps in different locations.
- Puzzles that required gathering items from elsewhere in the map to solve, or areas that required some amount of ‘using things from other places on the map’ to get into
- Mysterious Devices where you had to figure out how they worked through experimentation. Ideally they need to be Mysterious enough that you can’t just be like ‘oh this is an [x]’ but produce clear enough feedback that you can still figure it out somewhat.
- Just … having a lot of interesting and varied things in rooms, some of which are not immediately obvious when you walk in?
Examples that we tried but didn’t super work:
- The library – people just weren’t sufficiently interested in ‘RNG a random book’ for this to be all that interesting for them
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re:hosting
I think there are a few things that can generally make hosting easier, or otherwise help with it. To be absolutely clear, none of this is intended to shade or criticize Geyde or Ici, I’m just trying to be honest about what does and doesn’t work.
- Plan as much as you can before the game. If you’re like, ‘oh, I’ll just plan the first chapter, and I can plan the rest of the chapters during the investigation/class trial period’ then you may end up scrambling to keep up as the game goes on. If you have as much planned out as possible then you can avoid that (obviously assuming some amount of flexibility like ‘no one ever found x puzzle last chapter, I’ll move it to the next one’ or ‘someone figured out an incredibly gamebreaking thing to do with y item, perhaps I should get rid of the Hall Of Y, which is full of Ys.’)
- Hosts should be really clear on expectations/commitment/etc. In DR5 I think Ici and Geyde both came in with the (normal and healthy) philosophy of ‘yeah, this is important, but obviously real life comes first’ and I came in with the philosophy of ‘I will make this work no matter what it takes’ and this was, uh, not great. Figure this out in advance.
- Everyone needs to be able to eat/sleep/etc. If your hosts cannot do that Something Has Gone Wrong.
- If you’re doing full timezone coverage, figure out in advance how you’re covering odd hours. In Danganronpa 5 we were just like ‘we have a European and an American, we’ll be fine’ and that turned into ‘well, I’ve been staying up until 2, if I just stay up until 3 it’ll be fine, 7 hours of sleep is Close Enough and that’s when Ici gets up’ to ‘well it’s 3 AM and Ici isn’t up yet so I guess I’ll just wait until she’s here’ to ‘well I guess I’m staying up until 6 every night! thisisfine.jpg’ and – to be clear, I don’t think that any of Ici’s decisions here were unreasonable, this was a problem that could have been avoided if we had just, you know, talked about expectations there and had a plan for how we were going to cover the hours from ‘about 2 AM CST’ to ‘morning in Britain.’
- Host communication during the game is also really important. Every host needs to have enough information that they can solohost for a couple hours if needed, because sometimes it will be needed. This means that everyone hosting who designs a thing needs to write down all the relevant information about the thing.
- Also, there needs to be some way of tracking what items are in what room that people actually use. I have tried both ‘spreadsheets’ and ‘wikis in the design PM’ and neither really worked? I don’t have a solution here.
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/shoot Arete @host
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/default dance @host
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I feel called out
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this is the main reason i qualified DR5 as an unmitigated disaster even though almost everyone who played enjoyed it- the main problem with DR is how hard it is to host, and quite frankly I don’t like hurting my friends so I would prefer to do… anything but that?
do we have an idea when sign-ups will be posted or is it still a work in progress?
Waiting on alices internet to not be god awful, that and like her giving her cohost the documentation
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Wait it isn’t Aussie internet?
Aussie internet isn”t that bad.
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