Regrets, I have a few....

[gwendolyngrace]

It was asked:

If you could go back and change anything, what would you change?

Discuss!

Comments

[synecdochic]

And copying my reply from there:

I feel like I had a lot of missed opportunities with my characters because I wasn't available at a particular time or because I didn't have the physical or mental capacity to deal at a particular moment, but really, that's inherent to the format. I think a lot of us had times when we wished we'd been there for something and weren't, but the strict 1:1 ratio between game time and realtime opened up as many opportunities as it closed off, really. The constraints really forced us to get creative -- sometimes a particular character was involved in a situation because that character's player was one of the only people around who could help move the plot!

(For instance, the battle at Fradswell was done at a time that very few of us could be there, due to Life. Some of the stuff was pre-written and posted when it needed to be, and some of it was "welp. we only have like four people here, how can we make this work?" Charlie being at Fradswell was because we had very few Order players available! And it opened up the chance for me to do one of the things I wanted to do with him, namely, make his worst fear come true -- I didn't think I'd get the chance to do it.)

[reenie]

IIRC correctly, everyone (players and characters alike) kind of regretted that they put Hermione under a UV when she joined the Order, right?

[elisem]

Mine's a technical thing: I wish the Yahoo mailing list had not broken early for me in such a way that left me completely unable to access any earlier conversations *and* unable to reregister in a way that would not break the list for everyone else.

This might not have been such a problem if not for the fact that while I love Alternity, I am neither in love with nor totally up to speed on HP canon. This situation (combined with coming in part-way through game and having to catch up on a lot of group dynamics and prior work) resulted in me asking a vast amount of annoying dumb questions that were about as much fun for me as they were for anyone else, which is not very much at all. Trying to catch up, and then continuing to miss various plotty emails.... aaargh.

(My thanks to those who answered my questions when I got totally confused and flummoxed!)

[gwendolyngrace]

Yeah, as I said on the other thread, too, there were always going to be missed opportunities, sometimes because of timing or availability, and sometimes because the perfect comment or conversational shift didn't occur to me until long after the moment had passed, and it was too late to go back. Sometimes, in those cases, I would tell the other player(s) about it and we would put a pin in the idea, and sometimes we got back to it in another way or at another point, and sometimes, it just never fit, and it fell away. And that's kind of life, right.

There were a few times where plots were stagnating and/or really not working, either tonally or because the action was creating discontinuity, or because of behind-the-scenes reasons, and moderation-speaking, I wish that I (and Flourish) had been able to course-correct sooner, or more helpfully - but eventually every one of those reached a breaking point. While it made us ALL wish we had come up with the solution earlier - whatever that solution turned out to be - I don't think there were many times when we did not agree that the solution was, in fact, a much better and more satisfying course than the original plot proposal.

That said, I sometimes wish we could have done more with characters like Dean or Teddy (as a PC, I mean), or some of the others who spent way too frickin' long sidelined, but at least we tried to handle them gracefully.

[jenett]

1) I wish we'd cast Cedric in Y4. (I remember we talked about it, and I think we didn't have anyone who was interested where the character/player relationships would have been easy to handle.)

2) I wish I'd started indexing much much sooner.

3) Somewhere in the last couple of years (I think Y5, when Siz was explaining How Hogwarts Works to Tosha), I came to the realisation that one of the reasons everyone has to take Astronomy is that a lot of first and second year astronomy is actually basic 'how do you write a report/essay/etc.' training, because where else are they going to get it in that curriculum (with someone commenting on the writing, not just the content at any length.) And I wish I'd realised that while we could have had some fun with it.

4) On a logistical level, there's a couple of plots where I wish we'd hammered out slightly more of the stupid detaily stuff in advance (the big one that sticks in my head was working out the entire order of fights for the Frost Faire in the aftermath, so we could reliably talk about who did what, and I could do alt-charlotte's litany of the dead, but I know there were a couple of others.) There are times I think not having the details really worked to our advantage in other cases, though, so not sure if that one's solveable.

[kiya]

The ending of Dean's arc made me so sad. I sort of parsed through it in terms of - Dean's entire story was very much about the fundamental arbitrary unfairness of his universe. Which meant that his death became, "Dean was never going to get a fair shake, even when people intervened on his behalf to try to get him closer to a better world, even when he had an internal narrative that was going somewhere."

He basically became my symbol of all the untold stories. Which is a powerful thing too.

[lucky_guess]

haaaaaaaaah yes.

[longstrider]

Apply a year earlier and play Cedric through the Tri-Wizard.

I'm disappointed that we needed to kill Raz when we did, he would have had some very tough moral choices coming up.

[queenbookwench.livejournal.com]

I sometimes regret that my own time management and anxiety issues sometimes kept me from developing my characters as fully as I would have liked, but in the end I think they most turned out fine.

But I thought about trying to do more with Lavender's Divination interests, y'know?

And Peg & I had planned to do more to set up a relationship between Susan & Neville, and the reasons we didn't were 95% me. But I ended up feeling like that worked story-wise, because there's just this sweet beginning & lots of potential, and Susan was left grieving for a friend but also for a what-might-have-been.

[gwendolyngrace]

I was thinking about this a little more, and I think one thing that may not be obvious to the readers is that many of the "innovations" that we built into the story, particularly where they related to the mechanics of the journals and other communications methods, were introduced as solutions to problems players had with framing character communication. For example, the whole first year, our Draco and Harry felt extremely about saying too much in public view, so we created the Private Messages to enable them to have some space where they could talk freely. But then only being able to PM 2 people became cumbersome, so we "broke" that part of the journals and opened it up....

There are other examples of times and circumstances where we as authors were having trouble finding the right "reason" someone might risk a message. In some ways, it might have been "better" to have those frames in place from the start... on the other hand, playing against the limitations challenged us and it also allowed for an eerily realistic tech creep throughout the course of the game. (Other times we played it for laughs, like Daphne's flowers, or the hex that made Percy insult everyone, etc.)

We talked about, but always decided against, inventing a Death Eater-only back channel. That happened, anyway, when we realized that you can tailor a PM to just the people who qualify... which is why when Lucius left England, he couldn't read Bella's posts anymore.

So that's another "mechanical" thing that I don't know if I'd change, but it certainly would have made Alternity different.

[elisem]

Yeah, I think the sweet beginning interrupted was another good and very real portrayal of the casualties of the war. And I got the feeling Sue didn't say much about it because there were so many other losses around her, and she's not one to show that, in such circumstances.

In other words, yeah, I think it worked out well.

[atheilen.livejournal.com]

I really loved the realistic tech creep. It was one of my favourite parts of the game, and the various ways people tried to get around it or didn't struck me as very apt for the totalitarian society in which they lived.

[atheilen.livejournal.com]

Not to mention that it was a heartbreaking parallel to Neville's 'It might have worked out that way, if we'd had more time,' re: Hannah.

[elisem]

Oh, good point.

[atheilen.livejournal.com]

On the fen side, I have to say that I regret not commenting more over the years, especially after seeing how many of you who post here have outed yourselves as players--you probably would have enjoyed more comments from people who were never players. I'm a writer myself so I know what it is to want an audience and feedback, and I really wish I hadn't let my depression/relative youth (Alternity was active when I was 19-26, aka, the years I was learning how to adult) convince me I didn't have much to add to the discussion. I really have loved all your work from the beginning, and it's been a privilege to get to watch. And of course, now that I am commenting, I'm having so much fun interacting with all of you!

<3,
Sarah