On a Lounge thread, Rachel wrote:
(to which, yay!) but she also noted that staff discussions about the forum often end up being more about the headaches, problems, and cost than the benefits.
In response I suggested that some share of the runaway success of XoR should go in the benefits column, because forum engagement was key in making it a success–both in terms of providing good ideas and the sanding-off of bad ideas. So I hope Jason doesn’t still wonder if forum engagement was mostly a time sink for me.
To go into a little more detail than I have previously on the time-sinkiness: the two biggest blocks of time that went into the writing of Rebels were when I decided to add the Ch 2 tax collector raid in 2013 (which is longer than it may appear), and to rewrite Ch 2 as a week-by-week survival management game in 2015-16. Neither of those were a response to forum demand; for better or worse, those design choices and their length are both on me.
But the forum made them way better. In particular, I’d never have arrived at a tolerable version of the winter survival game without patient engagement from many forumgoers throughout 2016! Structurally, the “hard branch” at the beginning (aristo v helot), a design feature which used to be discouraged as a time sink, was also all me.
What things were written in response to forum feedback?
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Radmar, Elery, Yebben, and Pin. The story originally dropped you straight into the Fourth Harrowing, without any of the Ch 1 flashbacks that establish your history. Our much-missed friend @FairyGodfeather was instrumental in challenging me in April 2013 to make them care about Breden and the (then-nameless) helots more, feeding back on a draft shared over direct message.
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The chance to be a snobby noble rather than an inevitably bleeding-heart one.
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The Carles and Olynna prologues–kind of. Forum folk made the suggestion that the prologue ought to introduce nationalism and religion a little better, offering a greater breadth of reasons to rebel. The decision to do that by writing two alternate prologues (rather than integrating the stats into the Plektoi prologue) was, again, all me.
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The choice to delegate Ch 2 number-wrangling to a deputy, which has made a massive difference to many, many people’s enjoyment of the game.
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The choice to be a discreet Theurge rather than all up in your face about it from day one.
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The chance to run a protection racket in the Owlscap (thanks again, Will)
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Cousin Hector as potential love interest. (The ensuing encounter with Calea was so fun, it practically wrote itself, in a single day’s work.)
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A bunch of fun little worldbuilding items, as anyone reading through the WIP thread could see.
Those really weren’t the big time sinks that significantly delayed completion of Rebels. They did of course add to the writing time, but not all that much. And in ways big and small (which I did my best to credit), they made the game appreciably better. The forum community also kept me energized and engaged. In my own mind the cost-benefit tradeoff is clear.
tl;dr: The fact that I’m long-winded and gravitate toward the more elaborate/ambitious ways of doing something should continue to be held against me, not the forums. And it looks like more authors are being encouraged to engage with the forums, which is great.