Permissions/HMD

[rev13_3]

CHARACTER NAME: Jay (aka Farfarello, aka Berserker of Schwarz)
CHARACTER SERIES: Weiß Kreuz

[OOC]


Backtagging: Absolutely
Threadhopping: On the network, always okay. In logs, please ask OOC first (but the answer will almost always be yes).
Fourthwalling: No.
Offensive subjects (elaborate): n/a

[IC]


Hugging this character: Welcome to try - violence may result.
Kissing this character: See above.
Flirting with this character: See above.
Fighting with this character: Absolutely.
Injuring this character (include limits and severity): Sure, so long as we're communicating OOC during the fight.
Killing this character: Possible. Talk to me first.
Using telepathy/mind reading abilities on this character: Yes -- I will provide any information your character can pick up in my tags.



Warnings: This character is violent and extremely amoral, and is being played as an internet troll/redpiller. At any time if you want to discontinue a thread, or if you would prefer that Farf not interact with your characters, please just let me know and I'll be happy to oblige.




Anon is on/IP logging is off/screening is off if you'd like to use this space to offer any feedback on the way I'm playing Farf.

Comments

[subtract]

Hey! I just wanted to talk to you a bit about the murder plot you're currently running at TFS. I'm going to admit right off the bat that I haven't been paying too much attention to it since I've been on and off hiatus and it didn't concern my character (until recently, anyway), so I may have missed some things if there's been plotting on plurk or the like. If I did miss something important please let me know!

That said, this plot has been going on since mid April, and it is now the end of June. ICly it's been almost an entire month (July 5th-28th) with eight killings, mostly of dropped characters. On the public OOC posts there's only been one player asking about possible clues, but very little usable information has been given that I can find. This as well as your comment on the CR meme (asking for more investigators, victims, and a possible copycat, but no specific mentions of stopping Jay or otherwise putting an end to the killings) gives me the impression that you don't really have a planned resolution for this plot.

Running a murder/investigation plot can be really fun! However, a state of constant serial murders isn't really the tone that many players signed up for, and at this stage it's becoming very difficult to ignore the murder plot for those who aren't interested in it. TFS is advertised as a balance of slice of life and darker tones based on the Noragami setting, not a horror or murdergame where this sort of tone would be expected. If it was just a contained murder plot with a small number of victims or a planned ending to it then that would be fine, but if the current plan is to continue with the murders indefinitely that's kind of a problem. I'm not saying you shouldn't be allowed to have fun with your plot, but it's starting to overwhelm the game a little and it's affecting the fun of other players.

I also have some concerns about the lack of evidence provided for the characters investigating the murders. When someone asked for possible clues in Rei's murder, your reply could be summed up as "there were no witnesses, no cameras, and all evidence was cleaned up". It may just be that I'm missing out on lots of private investigation plotting, but from an outside perspective it feels like the investigators aren't being given anything to work with, which is very unfair to those characters. For Ekko's murder you also had your other character, Gojyo, clean up the crime scene, which further destroyed clues that investigators might otherwise find. Even if your character is an amazing assassin who's never been caught in his canon, this is a panfandom game where many different characters from varied settings have to be considered. OOCly stating that no evidence can be found or using your other characters to further Jay's goals is very uncomfortably close to godmoding/infomodding. It's like saying a superpowered character can beat up everyone in the game and never lose because they're the most powerful in their canon, and then having them beat up their player's other character to prove it. It's your plot to run, but if you want people to investigate it then you have to actually give them something to work with and be fair to the characters that do have experience with detective work or forensics.

I think the best idea right now would be figuring out a resolution to this plot (working with the characters who would be investigating it to solve/end the murders in a way that's satisfying for both sides) rather than looking for more victims or things like possible copycats. If you're looking to run a long-term serial murder plot of this scale there are other games out there that would be more appropriate for that, but a game that's supposed to be 50% SoL and 50% darker tones really isn't the right place.

Thank you for reading through all of this! If there's anything I can clarify or do to help you out please let me know. I'd really like to see this plot reach a satisfying conclusion for everyone involved in it, and that includes Jay as well. I'll likely be having Add get involved on an IC level as well, so if there's anything a bit of clairvoyance/timespace powers might help with in regards to getting clues out I'd be happy to provide.

(Also, jsyk you still have anon off/IP logging on for this post, so you might want to fix that!)

[rev13_3]

I appreciate you taking the time to offer this feedback! I'll address the easiest bit first, which is the anon/IP logging. You're right: for some reason they were set incorrectly, so now IP logging is off and anon commenting is on.

Secondly, I'd like to say that you raise a very good point about how popular this plot has become, and I recognize that it may be getting more difficult for uninterested characters to ignore what's going on. I had attempted to address this by having the most recent two murders happen either outside of TFS or appear as an accident. If you (or any of the other players in the game) have suggestions for ways to keep any future murders even further out of the limelight, I'd love to hear them.

As far as the availability of clues is concerned, I'd like to point out that every single player who has asked for clues has been given clues. I've tried to make it clear that further clues will be made available if requested, but from what you're saying, I need to be even more upfront with that. So thank you for that, and I'll amend the plot tracking post to clarify how to get clues. You're completely correct that clues aren't just being handed out in the initial murder announcement: if your character isn't one who would go see what the police have on this murder, then I don't want to just hand you the police report, you know? Different characters are investigating in different ways, and they'll all find different clues.

For example, nobody has asked about examining the body. Nobody has asked about the duffle bag Rei had with him in the changing room, and whether there's anything that's been removed, added, or modified there. Nobody has asked what the Near Shore police have been doing. This murder doesn't follow the pattern of the previous ones -- no stab to the back of the neck and committed in the Near Shore, for instance. How do you know this was the same killer? If it was the same killer, why did they change up their M.O.? Why are they killing? Is it only one killer, or is it a team? Are they gods or shinki? Are any gods concealing blight? ...There's a lot of directions this investigation could go, even with the very small about of evidence I provided, you see? And I'd be happy to provide more clues -- players just have to ask! For example, the last murder's investigation team was given clues about the size (foot size, height, hand size) of Johan's killer.

For Ekko's murder, there's still plenty of opportunity for your character (or anyone else's) to investigate the undisturbed scene. There's somebody at the murder scene in Ekko's death announcement post right now, several hours before it was cleaned up. Add is also welcome to show back up at the scene if he wants to, or to send his floating eye thing, or to investigate any other way that he chooses. I intentionally had Gojyo (who wouldn't have been involved at all, had the victim not been his god) clear it up several hours after the initial announcement to allow players to come in before that and snoop for clues.

As to whether this is an appropriate plot for TFS at all, I'd like to point out that I've been in contact with the mods throughout this entire process, getting their approval initially back before the first murder happened. I very much appreciate you coming to me with your concerns about this and I will do what I can to make any future murders easier for players to ignore, but if this plot wasn't appropriate for the game, I trust that the mods would have said something, either at the beginning or at any time in the last two months.

And finally, with regards to the end game... just because I'm not asking for volunteers to catch him in this month's CR meme doesn't mean I don't have an end game planned! I have no intention of leaving this plot open-ended, but I also don't want to declare the end game while there are ongoing investigations. Nobody's character is close enough yet for me to reach out to them and talk about the end game, but once one or more characters starts closing in, rest assured that I will be more than happy to discuss the end game with them. I originally envisioned this plot as taking three IRL months, which means July into August would be the final arc. With the number of active investigation teams working on the various murders, I'm pretty sure that I'll be able to stick to that schedule.

I hope this answered some of your questions!

[subtract]

I'm really glad to hear that there's been more investigation work done off the OOC comms! I think making it more clear that clues are available on request and that others have been doing so would be really appreciated by a lot of players, since it would help those who are interested know to get involved as well as let those who aren't know that there is progress being made. Maybe an OOC post could be put up for the investigating players to collaborate as well? There's at least one IC post up right now that I know of directly addressing the murders, but an OOC place to discuss what different characters could be doing would also be handy for getting everyone on the same page.

Regarding what you said in your second paragraph, though, I feel like there's a conflict between what you're saying you want to do (namely, making it easier to ignore and not putting it in the limelight) versus what you've stated your character's intentions are. In your CR meme post, you wrote this about Jay's goals: "Jay initially had the idea to kill a couple of gods and shinki to foment chaos, get the residents here pointing fingers at each other and at Amaterasu and her lot, with the ideal end result being a war that would kill off most of the more powerful 'fake' gods (Tot's the only real god here, naturally)."

So on an IC level, Jay's original goal was to basically make as much of a mess as possible solely to cause mass chaos. That's literally the opposite of keeping the plot out of the limelight and making it easy for uninterested characters to stay out of it, and those intentions do reflect in how Jay has gone about with his killings and how they've affected the game. All of the killings so far have had their corpses left out in the open to be discovered, and a few have also included mutilation of the bodies, which is the kind of thing you'd expect from someone wanting to cause panic. Even if your intentions on an OOC level are to make the plot easily avoidable for other players, the actions taken on the IC level don't reflect that due to the character's attitude and personal goals. It'd be like if I wanted to run a plot where Add gets a ton of other people involved in one of his science projects, but chose a project that he's incredibly private about and would never want to share with others—I'd either have to change how my character acts about it and risk being OOC, or put the onus on the other players to force their characters to get involved when that could make them act OOC. Neither solution is necessarily the right one, but if the discrepancy isn't addressed right away then I'd be giving players mixed messages.

The other problem is that all these characters are clearly connected due to all of them being gods/shinki, and the deaths have all occurred within the span of a month in quick succession. Unless the murders are taken completely out of the public, the deaths are still going to be highly suspicious and associated with the previous murders, and so it'll only become increasingly difficult for uninvolved characters to stay out of it when more and more people they know are falling victim to the serial killer. Close CR is still going to find out about a death and be affected by it even if it doesn't occur on the Far Shore side, and an "accidental" death occurring both after and around the same time as many graphic murders is incredibly suspicious. You also have to keep in mind that most of these victims are dropped characters, which means they don't come back after their deaths and there's no way for their CR to find closure or an explanation for what happened without getting wrapped up in the murder plot.

As for the mod's approving the event, I certainly don't think they've done anything wrong or misjudged the situation. There are plenty of ways the event could've been run to make it easy for players to get involved or stay out of it if they wanted, and TFS is a game that welcomes darker tones as well as lighthearted ones. However, when it comes to matters of player discomfort like this the mods generally don't (and shouldn't) intervene until someone speaks up and asks them to, and in most cases it's much simpler to just talk to the person directly—which is why I decided to bring this up with you and get everything sorted out! I also want to be clear that I'm not the only person that's had these concerns. A lack of communication on both sides has definitely been part of the problem, but the general consensus from the people I've spoken with has been that no one wanted to tell you to stop having fun even if it was starting to affect their own ability to play. Since the plot had already been running for awhile by the time people started to realize it would be a long-term thing, it also made it much more difficult to suggest a solution that wasn't ending the plot for you in some way.

I'm glad to hear that you do have a timeframe in mind for the final arc, but I do feel it's important to note that three IRL months is a very long time for people to have to ignore an ongoing murder plot. Normally the answer to events popping up that you're not interested in would be to take a hiatus or step back from the game until it's over, but obviously you can't hiatus for three months straight. I do get that the game is a 3:1 ratio so one IRL month might be too short of a timeframe to run this sort of thing, but that's why I feel a more subtle approach would've been a lot better for an extended plot, such as framing all the murders as "accidents" so that only those investigating would notice the truth behind it, or the bodies being hidden and left out of public sight to keep knowledge of it more quiet. If TFS was a 1:1 ratio game I don't think anyone would have a problem even with highly publicized and graphic murders since it would only be a month, but the core issue here is that it's been three months of murders going on without any OOC warning that it would take this long to resolve. I think if you were clear about that from the start someone would've spoken up a lot sooner, and a lot of these problems could've been avoided by working out the kinks ahead of time.

At this point it's a bit too late to change a lot of things, and with the plot coming to a close soon that should ease most of the issues uninterested players might have. If you end up running a similar plot in the future, though, a bit of extra communication would go a long way to prevent this sort of thing from happening again. I think that covers everything I wanted to discuss, but I'll still be around if there's anything that needs further clarification at all. And thank you again for reading my textwall and for giving such an organized reply back!