The Good:
-Excellent buy-in from players. Engagement through the roof. Not only was there 100% attendance over the couple sessions we ran it, but the everyone was early and the first part of the 2nd session was people wanting more sessions and trying to allign schedules.
-No GM prep required. Well, Sort of. There was a fair bit of front load setting up the town and important NPCs and setting schedules (inspired by Majora's Mask) and goals but after that it was just keeping up with play notes and managing times/locations.
Oh MS Paint and early desktop apache....
So basically "prep once, run many"
- Everyone had fun until they didn't
The Bad:
Now some of this might come down to my failings as GM, some might be to the group but
- Poor longevity. This flamed out after about three weeks. Its difficult to say exactly how many sessions we got because we moved from once a week to (sort of) three-four times a week; that is, "session 0.5" was Tuesday, all week my IMs were pinged with people wanting more and faster. next Tuesday we added a Saturday session and at the end of the session added a Thursday-Friday "Play-by-Post" sort of check in deal where people would say what they were doing. there was also lots of player back and forth I wasn't involved in.
But officially we had 6, 6 and a fraction sessions. Four tuesdays, two all-day saturdays (like noon to after midnight with meal breaks), and then an abortive attempt to continue that just turned into a slow "this isn't working" realization and just a IRC hang out. So its not like a flash in a pan thing, dozens of hours of entertainment were had, but you sort of do story and then its done.
It was also IRC play which goes slower than real life play, especially when my low DEX ass does the typing. This was helped somewhat with multi-threading based on locations so I could type referee stuff in one location while people at another location were reading and writing their own responses.
- "Strong personality capture" we had 5 players and one or two of them definitely dominated. Since this was player driven it was harder to step in and get the mike to be shared. Time ticks limited the ability to fully dominate a session (sort of, see the the ugly). One of these players was the necrotraitor At least of the players (not the traitor, oddly) was chatty to me in DMs but almost completely silent in group chat.
- Player dawdling/aimlessness. Everything was a little too unbounded and people would wait for things to happen. There was a good bit of dead air, and limited ability for me poke/suggest. This made Strong Personalty Capture even worse.
- Limited ability to have good, meaningful puzzles & traps set up. Players could make/set them, but those are less 'cinematic' and often lack the rewarding clever bypass.
The Ugly:
- We played with "time bubbles", basically nothing you could do could fuck with the time stream. If a player said they were meeting with the blacksmith and you wanted to have something happen near the blacksmith shop, it was going to end up on hold until the first player's interaction ended. (this made Strong Player Capture worse because they would do their bits and then those areas were time bubbled) This caused some issues with particularly the Necrotraitor because people would try to put in wards or detectors that conflicted with the Traitor already being passed them. And players realized they could "protect" NPCs or areas with their presence by just having a dinner or party and getting it RPed/locked in. Basically the more people you have the more realistic the play but the more difficult collating action.
- No guide rails when the players drive the action. They can miss things with no real way to inject GM hints.
- Wasted time. So much wasted time. If players hadn't spend to much time going down so many dry holes and dead ends, the game could have reached the same conclusion maybe twice as fast. Which I'm counted as wasted time because while they didn't HATE it, they were definitely trying to accomplish other goals.
- Longevity
Longevity Issues in detail
So the game basically unfolded like a game of Werewolf but with 3.5 character sheets. Which were nearly unncessary, there was actually very little combat but enough you couldn't exactly toss them out. Skills were used heavily. Basically Martial characters get fucking wrecked (per normal).
How things ended up going was the party believed they had dealt with the Necrotraitor, but was incorrect. The Necrotraitor murked the local hermit wizard in his sleep, turned him into an undead minion, and when the party discovered an undead man with magic powers who had been disguised so perfectly as a living person as to have passed all their wards and previous checks, so naturally assumed that was the Necromancer and killed him easy (they assumed the ease was due to their prep & planning).
The Necrotraitor, for his part, then was frozen to inaction by success. Everyone was the same level 10 so he was unlikely to be able to murder other players in one round in their sleep. He was disguised as a cleric - willing to take the XP hits for casting, and avoiding holy ground by basically saying "I already prayed enough in the church today, no I'll go here" and never getting called on it. - and also worried about Wizard's wards. But he had tossed off suspicion - in theory this accomplished his goal of staying undetected but the players were still alive and the players wanted to journey on and he had a catch 22 of "if the cleric stays without gaining suspicion, then when he rolls a new character he's surrendered a town to a necromancer and that is going to make his life harder; if he goes with the party (which is reasonable the Necromancer would want to try avoid the party suspicion, ) that goes against the necromancer wanting to control the town.
I also couldn't just tell the party they had failed or the necromancer was alive. The down side to player-driven action.
But the real issue was the game was a victim of its own success. Players were so invested in the town it made it hard to leave, but they had also fucked up the town so much there wasn't a lot to do if they stayed. Basically it was so cluttered you couldn't move without tripping so that inspired the "stick a pin it, move on".
Additionally, we sort of went too hard. I think a lot of players were a little burned out from so being so involved in sessions. Ironically I think MORE play might have helped that because I think a lot of the burn out was the game taking up so much head space between sessions. So when they got to the new location, there was a lot of aimless poking around and then "hey remember in the old town we did this?" and after a few pokes to get people back on track
I tried to see if people wanted to keep going in the old town, but they weren't really interested; they wanted to know how things had played out but no interest in getting involved again. All their off-the-wall shit in the hunt for the necromancer didn't have a very good shelf life. So I just accepted the magic was gone from the bottle, we had social time, and after dinner we all sort of agreed/made excuses for not continuing, the Necrotraitor revealed himself, and we had a good after-action report and after a break to get something dreamt up, most of players went along for my next traditional campaign which went for a little over a year and fizzled out one holiday break for the usual reasons.
tl;dr: You have a story and tell it, but it just doesn't work as a "campaign". It also seems very...."sometimes food", but I also tend to avoid Theater Majors so maybe just the wrong audience.
