The Alternity Re-Read: October, Year 1

[alt_moderator]

As with September, here is the October pdf file.

This post is spoiler-free, but there is no need to avoid spoilers in the comments.

Comments

[naomikritzer]

The Marie plot. Sigh. In retrospect, I kind of think we should have used that plot to hint at the coming horcrux stuff. (Marie seems almost like a horcrux gone wrong -- like, someone tried to make a horcrux, but didn't quite pull it off.)

[gwendolyngrace]

Yeah.

For readers, this is a good example of a plot that did not go as planned. In fact, it didn't really have any planning, it was a player flying by the seat of her pants. It's probably one of our biggest ret-con plotlines, as it will play out in December / January, when the player left and the character changed hands.

[lapin_agile]

I feel as if the game began with a cast that had one mode of playing and they almost all evacuated (I don't know all the reasons why because I wasn't there, but maybe just because By The Seat Of Our Pants with NO Thematic Planning was not a sustainable way to play??). After that, the game settled into a long-range plotting scheme and with pretty minor bumps along the way, we hit the road and carried on from there.

[reenie]

Yeah, I think that's partially accurate. I think the player who did Teddy and original-blend Narcissa understood the game dynamic pretty well, but she clashed with some of the other players (and when she left, she took some friends with her, like the people who played original-blend Crouch, Reg, and Michael).

I never really understood what original-blend Pansy was trying to do and had a very difficult time playing Draco opposite to her (they were supposed to have grown up as friends, but Pansy was always pretty combative with him at all times).

[gwendolyngrace]

I agree that Teddy's and Narcissa's original player had a great sense of the dynamic, and if you look on AO3 there's actually a piece of Teddy fanfic she wrote that is really quite good. I think she and I clashed on Lucius and Narcissa's dynamic rather a lot, though, or more than she wanted, and I know that she had issues with the "level of detail" and background worldbuilding that other players (like me) wanted to infuse into the story.

Which is ironic, considering how detailed we wound up getting on some plots. I did think that original Crouch, Reg, and Michael were also good voices to have had, and I never really felt like I did justice to Michael afterward.

Speaking only from my personal perspective, I think Pansy's player's difficulty was an over-reliance and over-indulgence for impulse play - that is, she may or may not have had a plan, she verbally committed to trying to fit her character into the lines better - but then in the moment of play she would impulsively 'improvise' in ways that were not necessarily consistent with what she'd agreed to before. It made play very frustrating, and we were often concerned that Pansy was bringing up what we thought of as "year 6 issues" right at the beginning of the game.

It also looks to me like these early posts were setting up Pansy/Ron - or at least that Pansy had a bit of a crush on him.

[flourish]

Well, part of the problem had to do with differing ideas about what made the game fun. About half the players initially (maybe more) didn't think of the game as a collaborative writing exercise; they thought of it as an RPG, intended for pure improv. So I think they tended to leave when they realized they'd need to consult with everyone about plots, negotiate what would happen, etc.

[flourish]

I do like the idea of the creepy doll. Certainly there are plenty of 11 year olds who still love their American Girl dolls or Madame Alexanders or whatever. And Pansy might have been a great person to have that kind of thing going on (much more interesting than making it Hannah or whoever, who's easy to despise as a "baby"). But it definitely had Issues as it was played out.