My assessment of player reactions, written after the fifteenth episode, or the next to the next to the last one.
-Sara: Sara's my wife, and some of the trickiness with GMing a game with her in it I've already talked about. I should also note that gaming on-line isn't her favorite form (she prefers live gaming), and she often has trouble keeping up with what's going on. As a result, she gets bored, and will (for example) play Civilization while the game's going on. Which perpetuates the cycle, of course. She likes fights, partly just because she likes fights, but also because she doesn't have to keep a bunch of context in her head while role-playing them: There's a bad guy: attack it. Mystery plots drive her bonkers (the Nobilis campaign was an example of that), though, again, she has less trouble with this in face-to-face gaming. She's less a text-interface type of person.
Er, this was supposed to be about reactions. So. Sara did indeed have trouble keeping up with stuff, though my beginning-of-the-session recaps helped a lot in this regard. I think she had fun during many of the fight scenes, and my favorite scene with her is still the one where I had put in a fight scene almost exclusively for her--and she didn't fight, for character reasons! Go Sara.
Overall: gets confused, likes fights. I tried to give lots of recaps and feedback for the first, and enough bad guys for the second. I think it worked OK, but there's room for improvement here if only I could find out where it was.
-Inky: Inky's a friend here in Seattle, and one who I've gamed with on-line many times in the past, both as co-players and with him as the GM. Inky's good at getting into character, and this time proved no exception, as he and Sargent played their fop personnas to the hilt, greatly amusing me and the other players. Inky happened to tell me in person once that he was enjoying the campaign, and gave the example of coming up with creative ways to attack things. This was very true. I'll give you an apropos quote:
Sebastien retreats back across the slippery patch of wall, trying to lure the wolf forward, then lunges to try and knock it off the wall.
[ussura] GM asks, "You bastard, what do I roll for that?"
I managed to think of something, and he said 'hooray' at the end, and that was his example of why he enjoyed the campaign, so I guess I did something right. I think this generally went with my modus operendi of:
Me: Here is a challenge.
Player: Uh, OK, I try this.
Me: You succeed with flying colors.
Player: Yay!
I probably get this from my improv background--there's little enough time in scenes, and you can't waste it with boring failures. *Interesting* failures, sure, but not boring ones. But successes are much easier to pull off as interesting. I hope, as I grow as a GM, I'll be able to use more interesting failures as part of my Bag O' Tricks.
Er, I'm sidetracked again. Inky: Good roleplayer, liked being creative, so I tried to let him roleplay a lot (to amuse the other players) and give him opportunities to be creative. In general, I think it worked pretty well.
-Jota: Jota's another perennial MUD role-player, though the only one in this group I've not met in real life. I'm less in tune with what it is Jota likes in roleplaying, though I do remember him mentioning he liked the 'little moments' in past games the most. Jota's character turned out to be the motivating force behind the plot, but I've struggled with the fact that he didn't really get to *do* much with this. He's going after Devoe. OK, there he goes. Yup, tromping thought the woods to get him. Uh-huh. Is he there yet? Nope. OK, then. As I write this, we have yet to actually play the final battle where the characters will actually meet Devoe and I have a feeling something will snap into place here. I'll have to be ready for it, since Jota's character choices are usually logical, but I've not been able to predict them reliably.
Charles did get one good 'solo' scene in fairy-tale land where he freed a rabbit from a hawk, and I think he enjoyed that. On the other side, he tried to escape from Louis's dream-Charouse, and I ended up thwarting him without giving him a consolation prize, which I'm now regretting. I used his attempt to more firmly establish that the characters were in a memory and not in real life, but his character was frustrated at the end of it, and I'm not sure as how Jota wasn't frustrated as well. If I had been a little more on my toes, I could have improvved something for him there to help him get more information on LaVache, but I wasn't thinking along those lines, and his actions surprised me. Have to keep this in mind for the final confrontation scene.
Upshot: Jota is another good roleplayer, but I don't think I gave him as many opportunities as I might have (and he got upstaged by the fops, some, too). Using his character as the plot driver is helpful, but again, could have been used to better effect. He likes 'the little moments', and I'm not too in touch with what that means, precisely, but I think I was able to give him some of those moments. I'll have to, like, ask him or something ;-)
-Sargent: And we have another of the traditional MUD roleplayers, and the third (along with Jota and inky) to have GMed an actual 7th Sea game in the past. Sargent was able to really throw himself into his fop personna in this game, and he and inky played off one another really well. As noted above, Sargent was not able to make a number of the later sessions, because real life interfered. Sarge seems to me to be particularly good at inhabiting characters--in the game he GMed, some of the more fun moments for me came when he had a couple NPCs bantering with each other, each with their own distinct personality. In this game, he inhabited Alixandre well as a fop, though I kept expecting other aspects of the character to show up--in particular, the fact that he was actually a native Ussuran. Both he and inky's character (Sebastien) were Montaignians-not-of-Montaigne, actually, and every so often I'd bounce something off of them about this, but never got much of a reaction. I had Dauntania recognize them as non-Montaignian, for example, and they both sort of shuffled their feet and shrugged. Alixandre's side-story was explicitly tied to his background, and I had partially envisioned it as a 'returning to your roots' kind of story, but, again, he didn't take it that way, and instead more wholly embraced his Montaignian-diplomat personna. Which is fine, of course, but not what I was expecting. And, perhaps, hoping for.
Another digression: My very first 7th Sea character (for which I still hold a great deal of affection) was Francesco Cadiz, a half-Ussuran, half-Castillian monk, and his two heritages were the core of my character concept. On the one hand, he was very devout, as were many in Castille. On the other, it turned out his mother was a Ussuran sorceror, and thus he was a half-blooded sorceror himself. But the church preached against sorcery, so... what do you do? Is it possible to be a devout sorceror in the 7th Sea world? Can the Castillian church and Ussuran Matushka- worship be reconciled? I have since read the truth behind some of the church's beliefs and the truth behind Matushka and the First Prophet, so I basically know how Cadiz's story would have turned out, but I regret not being able to explore that issue in-character (the campaign he was in fizzled before much came of this line of inquiry). Analyzing things now, I think I was projecting a little of Cadiz onto the mixed heritage of Sebastien and Alixandre, and particularly on Alixandre--maybe a bit too much.
So, Sargent upshot: another good roleplayer who seemed to have fun with his character and had him do a number of things I didn't expect. I wish his time constraints hadn't prevented him from attending as much as he might have; perhaps some aspects of his character might have been explored more.
-Katre: Katre hasn't roleplayed on the MUD as much as some of the others, but he was part of the MUD's first 7th Sea campaign, and reprised that character (Pyotr) here. One of my biggest struggles in this campaign has been his use of his 'hot-headed' Hubris. Now, in the 7th Sea system, Hubris (Hubrises?) are supposed to be a character flaw-- they're the trait that gets you in trouble. You even get extra points to spend on your character by way of compensation. But something about the way we've been playing (and I'm including past campaigns, here) doesn't really make them much in the way of flaws, and it seems dreadfully easy to turn them into virtues. One of my own characters, (Wilson Mayhew, a scientist in Sargent's campaign), had the 'Overconfident' Hubris, and I was constantly using it to my advantage, simply as a character trait--I'd think of something to do, think, "Hey, Wilson would just do it: he's overconfident!" and go ahead and do it. And, usually, it'd all work out for the best in the end, because the secret to roleplaying (and improv) is action, not inaction. And the whole process gave me great joy as a player. But I'm not sure as how I might have annoyed the other players in the game, with less in-character excuses to steamroll the action in a manner condusive to their own character's expression. In other words, I think I pretty much used that line on my character sheet as an excuse to be a stage hog.
So I'm of two minds about these Hubris. On one hand, they spur action, which is great because it keeps things moving. On the other hand, they're supposed to be a flaw, not a virtue, and it seems unfair to be able to use it as a universal excuse to push play to your own playing style. All this to say that there have been several points during the campaign where Pyotr's barged in and turned scenes that could have been about diplomacy or subterfuge into brawls instead. And not knowing what else to do, and following my 'You succeed with flying colors' rule, I've figured out ways to make things work out in the end. But each time, I've struggled, thinking, "Grar, that's supposed to be a flaw, it's not fair that it suceeds all the time."
Now, katre isn't trying to monopolize things, and has even stated explicitly a time or two that he waits for people to stop him before going off the deep end. So probably all that needs to happen is for people to recognize the timing involved. And now that I've written this out, I feel better about allowing him to succeed all the time--it's not a 'problem' that needs to be 'fixed' inside the game by making him fail, get in trouble, or something else equally un-fun. As I mentioned earlier, I think I need to expand my responses to include 'you fail interestingly' in general, but at this point, I'm thinking that this is more of an interpersonal issue than an in-game issue, and one that's well on its way to a decent resolution without any drastic GM interventions. So that's good.
So, katre: enjoys playing his hot-headedness (and Toughness) a lot, and keeps things moving.
-Duchess: This was Duchess's first RPG with dice, and her second time playing an RPG at all (an on-MUD Nobilis game was her first). Duchess and katre are married, so he was able to help her with the rules and whatnot in real life as they gamed. In general, I've really appreciated what Duchess has brought to the game: she throws herself into her character with abandon, and often comes up with interesting responses to situations. There was a time or two when I think she got frustrated that she wasn't figuring things out fast enough (which was exacerbated by an observer making cryptic comments along the lines of, "Aha, I get it!"), but in general, she was right in the middle of things, and was an extremely competent addition to the team. I particularly appreciated her willingness to play Fleur at times, which really enhanced the sense of confusion for the rest of the group in just the right ways.
I'm not sure I could say what it is Duchess really likes the most about roleplaying, or what she likes to do, but my best guess is that it's being able to express her character. And she did that well.