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Sep 16, 2012 -- 8:15AM, Cpttylorx wrote:

LG had some bad Triads, but not all of them. Over all I think that it was quite excellent as a campaign should go. Sure there is a level of crony-hood no matter where you go, but thats sometimes the breaks when you're doing a multiple region world.

Michigan for example, had some great triad members, many of them I feel I can call my close friends, but never once did I get any bonuses for knowing them.
To Date:
A Michigan triad member sent out a hit squad consisting of a Ancient Red Dragon, A Beholder Hive Queen, Two Beholders, Two Half Red Dragon Bargahsts. Which was just death on a magnificent level.
A Michigan Triad member put my character on public trial with people with multiple anti magic scrolls around, and the beefiest executioner they could get their mitts on.
A Michigan Triad member (Different person) had one of my guys impounded due to an evil artifact I had that was a core campaign item at the time.
The list I have can go on and on, and would you believe that the person doing that is someone I consider to be one of my very best friends?

With friends like this, who needs enemies.. HAH
Back to subject, LG was a fantastic campaign for what it offered, some people who were triad cheated the system, but a lot of triad members I believe just tried to do the right thing, no matter what others thought of them.

Now excuse me. These Rose colored glasses arent going to wear themselves.

You forgot to mention that in all those cases, we didn't do anything that we wouldn't have done to a character we didn't know, and you deserved it (and the trial rightfully acquitted you). You also forgot to mention the time we did actually put out a hit on you in an interactive - and you deserved that too

To address the cronyism/localism argument in LG as a whole, I think it made the campaign stronger in one very significant way - the players knew the admins, and vice versa. It was easier to write adventures that considered audience expectations when you had physically met a significant portion of your audience, and it's far less likely that you'd call an admin an "authoritarian control freak" when you've sat at tables with them, had a beer with them after the con, and know you're going to see them at a convention in a month or two.

Sep 16, 2012 -- 10:47AM, bgibbons wrote:

That's one of the reasons why I consider it a shame that the adventure writing/release process is so opaque.  The only conclusion I can draw from the results is that something is deeply dysfunctional about the process, and it would be valuable for future campaigns to know what mistakes not to make.  Unfortunately, the desire to not point fingers means that we have no idea where the problems actually are.

While I generally agree that transparency is a good thing, it can get in the way. You can quickly get into the "too many cooks spoil the broth territory". Likewise, what you consider dysfunctional could just be someone else's preference and discussing that in the open now might put some people off helping the campaign.

There's a lot of reasons to hope that lesson's learned (honestly shared and honestly discussed lessons) from LFR will help the next Living campaign improve. The iterations from LC, thru LG to LFR can't always be said be improvements but a lot of things -did- get better. Going into LX it would be nice know that anything that was/is going on behind the scenes that puts a damper on the campaign would be put forth as a "don't do this" for the next staff. However, it is also likely that that won't be broadcast/discussed until LFR is largely or wholly done so as to not cause issues in the current campaign.

As one suggestion, the next campaign really needs to embrace the web and digital tools. Waiting months for a ruling on X should just no longer be necessary. If discussing it takes weeks over email ... then ... I just ... can't. Create official channels, use them and get information out early, often and in detail. In the age of twitter, getting responses from people weeks or even months later is just simply no longer acceptable. Days is even pushing it.

Sep 16, 2012 -- 7:41PM, Zathris wrote:

Yeah ... the fact that a 'hit' was put out by the Triads in a Battle Interactive is pretty much exactly what I didn't like about LG. That's special treatment, and certainly not punishment. A Trial? Way to make one of your friends clearly more important than other players.

1. You're lacking context. I could go into depth, but instead I'm just going to say that in both cases, what we did was what we would have done (and, in some cases, did) with players we'd never met. Or a kid who randomly showed up from out of region. It may help to think of it as DME on a regional scale.
2. You're mixing up causation. The individual regional stories that players and admins were able to help craft in LG (like the trial and the "hit") weren't stories that were created by the Triads and their friends in some sort of mutual back-scratching arrangement - at least. not in our region. It was through the result of sharing in those game experiences that the players at the tables and their DMs became friends. This was especially true in my case as someone who walked in halfway into the campaign not knowing anyone and walking out of the campaign knowing every regular convention player in the region.
3. When a region's Triad decides that characters that have achieved high recognition as a result of their in-game actions (determined by story awards handed out in non-unique regional adventures) have attracted the attention of power NPCs in the region, those characters are typically played by players who play often, and as a result likely to be known to the Triad members. Is that cronyism, or a result of natural consequences in an actively living campaign with single-shot plot-affecting interactives?

I'm not saying it's a perfect model, and I'm not saying that opportunities for cronyism didn't exist. There are a number of ways to run a campaign, and one person's feature can easily be another person's bug. But making assumptions about how things came to be when you weren't there doesn't contribute to the discussion in a productive manner.

Sep 16, 2012 -- 11:25PM, Zathris wrote:

That's an impressive claim, I guess my region was just full of basement dwellers and yours was full of socialites. Even as active as I am in my new area, I still meet people at Cons that I've never met before, even though they've lived only 50 miles from me.

And Cliques rarely are able to identify themselves as such, but believe me, you guys were easy to spot at the 2011 gen-con without me having ever been introduced.

Then again, I was the first PC with a Pact Dragon, and the first Wizard to reach Epic, maybe I should support a system that supports nepotism and achievement recognition.

I'm not sure we're talking about the same thing, so I should take a step back and clarify.

When I refer to the regional convention culture in LG, I'm referring to the local conventions for your given Living Greyhawk region, which for me was the state of Michigan. Making a comparison between the social circles at these conventions and those at GenCon is difficult because of size and scale - at GenCon 2011, there were more LFR DMs than there were attendees (DMs and players) at our regional LG conventions. When your entire convention is seventy people, and those seventy pepole are in the same room the entire weekend, it's a lot easier to meet everyone than it is at a convention where you're running seventy *tables* a slot, and many people are only there for a slot or two. There was still the "GenCon DM" social group*, but there were also a bunch of smaller regional "cliques", and if you were interested in getting involved beyond your region, it was likely that you already knew someone in that "GenCon DM" group. That's part of the reason many people are nostalgic for the regional system of LG - right now, it's *really hard* to get to know everyone involved because there isn't that level of local organization hard-coded into the campaign. And part of the reason I'm nostalgic for it (and don't get me wrong - there are many other parts of LG that I'm glad are dead and gone) is that I don't think I'd have gotten involved in LFR the way I have if I hadn't gotten involved in LG first; I wouldn't have been comfortable volunteering if the nearest admin lived five hours away from me rather than fifteen miles - and five hours is darn close to live to the nearest LFR admin.

That said, we were incredibly blessed to have a single state as our LG region. I can imagine that it would have been significantly harder to build that level of connection if your region was as geographically spread  out as some of the ones in the US southwest or anywhere outside the US, or as populated as, to use a personally overwhelming example I saw near the end of the campaign, the Chicagoland area. 

*I should also note that the "GenCon DM" social group is incredibly welcoming and supportive as well; it can just feel intimidating approaching an established group of that size when you don't already know anyone in it, which I know is the case for an unfortunately large number of people. Volunteering to DM at the con helps!