Ghost wrote: ↑Fri Sep 29, 2023 12:58 am
How and when was your guild co-opted by DMs?
I don't know the details of his scenario, but I can share an experience that feels similar to what he describes (though I wouldn't go as far as to say the guild was co-opted by DMs, so much as our schedule got derailed by their activities).
Back in the early stages of Selmiyeritar's plot to reconstruct Undrek Naudal, Lin would make a point of organizing monthly events in their courtyard. Trade fairs, tournaments, pretty much anything she could think of that might draw trade and potential recruits into our little corner of the Upperdark. (You brought a balor to the last fair, so I figure
you, at least, know what I'm talking about.
) In between those events, we'd train, we'd periodically go recruit and negotiate under Winter's supervision, we'd collect rare items to auction off at the fairs and raise funds in case we needed to fork out a mountain of gold to get everything done. One month, we skipped the event because we weren't ready for another fair and didn't want to run a second tournament immediately after the last... but we instead got to make a grand announcement about the results of our recruitment effort in Sshamath.
So far, so good. For a UD guild, I'd even say we were more successful than the average. Go, us! So we got to a point where it seemed realistic that our event "next month" might take place on a rebuilt Naudal map, so we decided to delay it until the map went in, make it a grand opening sort of thing with
both a trade fair and a tournament. Seemed reasonable at the time, right? (For the same reason, we chose not to make an announcement about that next event until Winter was ready to greenlight the new map, because we'd have so much egg on our face if we announced a grand opening before the NPCs were able to actually finish their work.
)
Two things happened then, the combination of which sapped us of as much momentum as the DM team could possibly have sapped us of:
The Deathless One
Ink kicked off the alhoon plot in late June, lasting until late August. At first, this did not interfere with our other efforts, as we perceived no possible threat to Naudal or our operations there. We just had to be careful while traveling around Vallanar, hand the bulk of the investigation off to Bregan and tag along to pursue Lin's vendetta against the creatures that nearly ate her brain.
However, once the full extent of the danger became apparent, we felt it necessary to try to put all troops (whether under our direct control or not) in Naudal on alert. Whether this was assessed as a source of delays on the construction work or not, I do not know: I certainly thought it probable that such a delay would occur, as the guards had previously been assigned to exterminating the local vermin with no indication that their task had yet been completed. Warning letters were also sent to the Blue Lantern, copied over from Lin's message to the Naudal council.
Nothing actually happened in the Upperdark, but for the next two months or so, our only focuses were ensuring nothing
does happen, and ensuring nothing ever
will happen. (To Lin's dismay, Bregan proved either unwilling or unable to alert the Conclave to the full scale of the threat, which nearly got the whole party slaughtered due to no reinforcements from Sshamath. Joke's on them, we got all the loot.
) All we did for those two months was complete our prior commitment to the June trade fair, and wait for an opportunity to strike at the alhoon. (Okay, no, my records do show a trip to Soubar spent arranging teleportation circles with the Crimson Watch... but nothing useful came of that, and Lin's notes didn't specify
why she saw fit to visit the surface at such a critical period, only what she tried to achieve once she was up there.)
Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed Ink's plot and would have gladly done it all over again. But I'd be lying if I said he hadn't replaced our schedule with his own for the duration, or that we didn't consequently spend 99% of our time waiting for him.
Whether by coincidence or as a direct result of our reactions to Ink's plot, Winter sort of... stopped keeping us updated, on what was going on with Naudal. Neither of the two DMs ever acknowledged the letters Lin sent at the start or the end of the alhoon plot, and there was no other discussion of the construction work. The map never materialized, either.
Now that Winter's retired, I'm also not sure how to go about requesting a replacement to pick up where he left off... and with how long it's been, I'm not sure we're even entitled to such. (I want to say yes, because we set it all in motion and the NPCs have enough IC agency and resources to see it through to the end, but...)
This was a problem primarily because we'd planned our event schedule around the notion that the map was about to get a big update. Between a communication blackout and no secondary indicators of the map coming in, it was no longer possible to assess whether there was time to run a lesser event before the grand opening, which meant there was nothing to prepare for. Thus, we could safely assume the house and its affairs were in stasis - with no visible indication of either progressing or regressing - until further notice. This is never a good assumption to let me make, because if I'm given a choice between puttering along on a stuck character or making a big push on another active character, I'll never choose the stuck character, and may even opt to activate a new one if the opportunity arises.
Now, neither of these things went wrong enough to necessarily
kill a guild. (Nor do I know how it could, barring deliberate intervention to that effect.) But both of them, both individually and in tandem, hobbled the guild to the point of unsustainability. At this moment, I don't know how we could do anything besides the same sort of shallow grinding loop Metaquad described in his opening paragraph, except adjusted for life in the Underdark. (So Oghrann and Forgotten City instead of the Graypeaks.) We can't abort what we started earlier and reorient towards other projects (if we even had an idea of what those projects might be), but neither do we see a path towards its completion, nor any reason to leave our estate besides idly grinding to meet our active member quota for the bureaucracy.
