Season of Tyranny Feedback

[Grug]

Obviously do feel free to give feedback now that it's over, but I might as well add my own thoughts.

Things that went well:
-I'm broadly happy with how the demesne management system worked, though I feel that some things such as the military stat's relation to units recruited while also having the farming limitations at the same time left some confused - could probably do with some simplification (or at least better labelling).
-The flexibility of the above demesne system was also something I'm happy with, as it let players do things I never expected without having to rewrite the rules or anything.

Things that didn't go well or I could've done better:
-While I think the base mechanics of the battle system were fine, battle scale and the limitations of google spreadsheets made them far more tedious and clunky than otherwise necessary - making it so 1mil=1000 men but units were about 100 men meant that I ran into problems with unit (and stat) bloat very quickly for example.
-I probably didn't say no enough to things in the apps stage - I gave myself ample opportunity to make sure players wouldn't be going into the game expecting to do something they wouldn't be able to do, but failed to actually get that across to people by being too 'permissive' early on.
-The ending was in my opinion pretty shoddy, although I'm not entirely sure if I could've done any better writing an ending that wasn't supposed to happen.
-Response times (and freetime frequency) weren't great, though I could arguably pin that (and a lot of other issues) on first time hosting.

The thing I really didn't like:
-I think the number one thing that, at least in my opinion, killed this game was that it was too open ended - while there was a generic goal of "beat the orcs" I both didn't really make this a central enough goal to force some degree of player cohesion, and that to some extent I didn't advertise this properly, which meant that the players who went in expecting a big overarching focus like you'd get in Tower, in addition to pre-written sideplot, were left floundering with a feeling of not really having anything to do. I probably could blame this partly on those players for having unrealistic expectations of a first time host, but I realistically brought it on myself by being a bit too ambitious in terms of scope (and this is a feedback thread, not a rant thread.)

Most other things I didn't mention here were probably mediocre or I felt so indifferent about I didn't even think to mention. Some things like gold economy tweaks and the like are worth mentioning, but are also fairly apparent in my opinion.

So that's that, hope you guys weren't as miserable playing it as I was hosting it, and see you all whenever Freezy talks me into hosting Putrefaction or when I get a brain bug idea in like 2 months and convince myself it'll be better next time.

[King V]

I'll start with some things I like first because I feel like some aspects of Tyranny are very underrated.

The systems introduced in Tyranny all work extremely well, and it's hard to understate that. The out of combat stats are very good for roleplaying purposes and create very interesting scenarios where the context of the situation can change depending on your stats, or the stats of your team members, which encourages players to interact with each other. Territory management is definitely the biggest success of the game, you can do lots of things with a territory and it opens up lots of different avenues to play the game. The plot was also interesting, the setting was interesting, most of the game was very interesting, if players engaged with it the right way.

I do believe the main issue was a lack of direction for the game, but this was compounded by some smaller issues. Travel time being the main culprit. It's hard to justify assembling an army to fight the orcs and leaving your territory when there's such a huge time investing of 2-3 sessions of traveling just to get there. This is where a bit of time skipping could have been extremely beneficial, even if it's only something small like time skipping your first trip into orc territory.

Tower also seems to have set some unrealistic expectations from people for side plots and personal plotlines. When a player is interested or highly invested in something in Tower, I write up a plot thread and create enemies for that thing in between sessions. This is a lot of work, and is not a level of commitment or flexibility that most masterminds can or should be expected to replicate. When players are expecting high quality subplots and don't want to engage with the main plot, I think it's ok to be a bit more forceful in railroading them back onto the main plot.

Overall, I think Tyranny suffered mostly from behind the scenes issues and issues in execution, although on paper all of the systems worked perfectly fine. But for a first game, I think it's hard to understate how well everything was made.