Daughters of Necessity Post-Mortem

After three years of massive multiplayer asynchronous play-by-post domain gaming, I am ecstatic to declare DoN officially DEAD. *champagne pops* *cork crashes thru a window*

The Good

• Incredible players, one and all. The buy-in for Cath is annoyingly high, so I was very lucky to find a dozen freaks who love cultural anthropology and abstract mythopoeisis and time travel bullshit and so on.
• The PCs absolutely ransacked the setting. Soooooo much of Cath got explored, much more than I could have hoped to see with a smaller scoped game.
• Overjoyed the culture/tradition mechanics got so much play, huge win there.
• We almost avoided a peaceful supercoalition of PCs rolling the NPCs.
• The most intense possible stress test for the crucible wizard, and it worked (with a few tweaks)! Let none say my classes are imbalanced!
• A surplus of hype moments and aura. In no particular order:
• hunting a dragon with harpoon cannons
• public marriage to a goth war goddess
• freeing an apocalyptic anteater from the underworld
• dueling a skeleton warlord on horseback
• car bombing a fairy prince
• The vibes were really good. The sense of scale (spatial and temporal) was pretty close to what I hoped. (I think, idk, I didn't send out a google form or anything; I can only speak to how much fun I personally had)
• I got to draw a lot :> (see below) 

I can't stress enough, the highs of this game were VERY high. At the end of the day, DoN was probably my favorite game I've ever run.

The Ugly 

We started with ~12 players, which was the maximum I felt comfortable running for at the time. We ended up with ~8, which was more than enough. (I'll get into it.)

The TBDlike domain game format, as I ran it, has a few pain points. Read Archon's post first, my own experience mostly supports his--

• Adventure bandwidth. It takes a lot of time to write and run the crawls especially, including ease-in and ease-out time. A 10-person TBD is about as much work as 10 weekly solo games.
• Season rollovers (or, syncing up async gaming). When one adventure starts to go on for months, the other players end up waiting on them for time to move forward. I bridged the gap with time travel shenanigans (see below), but people hate missing out on domain actions almost as much as they hate missing out on dungeon loot, so it isn't a frictionless solution.
• Burnout. Never did figure out how to call a hiatus before burning out, but that's what I should have done. The game created too much social anxiety for me to acknowledge when I was tired or out of ideas. Skill issue i guess.
• Content exhaustion. Archon's description of "a sandbox stripped to the bones by a locust swarm" is just so true. And yet! I still don't have a procedure for generating random shrines, which show up when literally anyone goes literally anywhere by road! That's valuable bandwidth I could have used if I wasn't constantly rawdogging the creative process for no reason. Write a table and let the world build itself for once.
• The ending. This game really wanted a predefined endpoint to work towards and I didn't write one.

one day a gentler, more perfect breed of TBDlike will scrap these rules for parts

I tried to manage the bandwidth problem a few different ways. For each adventure, I had players ask me for an omen a season or two beforehand, to give myself time to write a proper dungeon. I also received multiple adventure site submissions from players, to be crawled by other players. My players were incredibly supportive throughout the whole process-- it takes a village.

Still, each adventure required a large dungeon (if you only get one adventure per season, why not go to a large one), hexes to traverse on the way there, and road encounters.

One thing I gained a greater appreciation for was when I got to reuse locations/encounters for multiple PCs. (Recurring merchants, half-looted dungeons, etc.) I wish I'd added a bit more funneling to the map to 1) shrink the workload; and 2) deliver on a looted-but-alive vibe for the whole City-- like one big megadungeon that keeps restocking itself.

[but that kind of defeats the point, right? would shrinking the sandbox damage the sense of scale? we've seen tbdlikes with high player-player interaction slow to a crawl in long standoffs; would a pvp race to first looting rights make the game even more unwieldy?]

As my real life responsibilities became more severe, the number and length of hiatuses increased. (About half of the game's runtime was on hiatus.)

 

The Epilogue

Purple came up with this. To officially close out the game, we finally took a week to freeform rp the events of the near, far, and distant future of the City. Some highlights:

• The sun went out.
• The City's electrical power grid came back online. Invention of the lightbulb.
• The Profundal River became the Glittering River. 
• Decades long campaign against the armies of Hell.
• God-tree launched into orbit via antigravity demon corpse.
• New god-tree installed.
• Wizard-catalyzed self-perpetuating agricultural Cambrian explosion.
• East-v-West culture divergence.
• Surface-v-Deep City culture divergence. 
• Wall between the High and Low City broken. 
• Children sired. 
• Marriage achieved. 
• Sainthood achieved. 
• Wizard-king status achieved.
• Massive lore dump via incomprehensible poem.
• Horticultural literature written. 
• Violent ends met. 

And other juicy shit I'll riff off of for the next era of cathgames. One last week of excellent play before turning the lights out, for which I cannot thank my delightful players enough.

* * *

In the end I did actually accomplish what I set out to do: the setting got richer, the tradition system got a lot of use, and i got to run some primo Dee En Dee for my friends. It sort of feels like I got away with something, considering how poorly I managed DoN in its twilight years. I'm also glad I ran it when I had the opportunity, because I'm not sure when I'll have the time or energy to do something of this scale again.

Okay! All done! Time to do something different!

some doodles from the game