TA Self-Nominations open 11/1 and close 11/7

[shad0wfax]

Self-nominations for TA begin today, 2015-11-01 and close on 2015-11-07.

Please respond to this thread to self-nominate. Feel free to create a platform thread if you wish.

[Zelknolf]

I would like to run on the same platform as always, but changing circumstances means I need to make changing claims.

A couple years back I came to the conclusion that rules changes aren't a very good use of time-- they probably were, a little bit, through 2011, but we stopped seeing extra activity around ACR releases and so it stopped seeming like that was a thing that convinced people to play. I shifted my attention largely toward content, and had initially pretty great results.

As a sample of five quests that are in fairly-similar circumstances (easy to find, no flagging or likely to be flagged incidentally, all inside of Ruqel so we don't get numbers skewing because some character won't enter Ruqel), we've had a pretty-dramatic dropoff in participation in the most recent.

Code: Select all

                         Play Time     Characters Playing    Total Hours of Play     Hours to Create    Content Efficiency
Centipede Infestation    ~2 hrs        88                    ~176                    ~20                8.8               
Finder of Lost Children  ~6 hrs        26                    ~156                    ~40                3.9               
The Kobolds' Elementals  ~9 hrs        17                    ~153                    ~70                2.2               
Hunter's Hunger          ~10 hrs       26                    ~260                    ~100               2.6               
The Bloody Maw           ~20 hrs       1                     ~20                     ~200               0.1               

This in the context that this measure of "content efficiency" (that is, effort expended vs. hours of play) is about 2 for a DM (it's higher for bigger groups and less out-of-session effort, but it's fairly difficult to do both of those things at the same time)-- to a point. After about a 1:8 DMs to players ratio, just piling more DMs on doesn't seem to result in more people getting DMed; this is sad, on account that more DMs doesn't mean we actually reach that 50% of ALFA that doesn't see a DM, but that's only a TA problem if DM tools would solve the problem (easy to check; they don't).

Some might point out that these quests went in at different times, which is fair, but they also have roughly the same effort to duration ratio (matching DM time's value means about 20 playthroughs), so a sort of 'playthrough velocity' is an interesting metric

Code: Select all

                         Release Date  Time in Play Playthroughs per Month
Centipede Infestation    2014-07-18    16 months    5.5
Finder of Lost Children  2014-07-25    16 months    1.6
The Kobolds' Elementals  2014-11-08    12 months    1.4
Hunter's Hunger          2015-02-01     9 months    2.8
The Bloody Maw           2015-09-05     2 months    0.5

And so I'm here looking at what I can reasonably run as. Three years to have my 200 hours of hard work and misery be matched by people playing the product of it is a pretty terrible deal. I don't think I can justify it.


Which leaves me at the only thing that seems to still have good returns for the effort, which is just keeping the servers up and watching for new platforms where content and rulesets might again be valuable work to do. So that's what I will run for TA as-- barring some significant change in population or play patterns, I'll probably just keep the servers running for the next six months, and continue to tiredly chip away at the Mund platform while realizing logically that its prospects are worse than SO's (which, of course, is still in pre-alpha) and hoping that the Paizo-Obsidian partnership produces something other than a CCG.

[shad0wfax]

Self Nominations are closed.