If I may be blunt, and I would say this as someone whose character was partially built by the War Council and has been changed as a result. I am going to be complaining and critiquing a lot, but I don't want people to take it personally.
The War Council is my key contention in this mess. It grew far too large and was monolithic in its approach, which resulted in characters who were invested in it as a method of engaging in military roleplay becoming marginalized in their own roleplay. It became frozen. The sheer amount of politicking in it meant that characters who were forwardly driven and who did want to engage in guerilla warfare or make moves perhaps once every day were unable to.
I know I had at least several different initiatives for small scale, small party, heavy RP battles scuppered by the general desire for EVERYONE to want to be onboard with EVERYTHING. I want to give an example, so I will.
Countering the Teleports
When I planned it, I envisaged it as a strike raid - Reine takes no more than 8 people she trusts into the camp, splits off the Lathanderites and the Fist to do some heavy damage, does damage, holds until everyone evacuates and get out. Nice, tense, fun event for a small number of heavily invested people.
At the same time, for the bulk of people involved, there was to be a siege event, where an interested number of parties would hold out a location with an 'artifact' involved. The enemy would rain hell down upon this location, having been properly taunted out of position, by another series of player manuevers.
Why did I want to do this? Well, as anyone who has RPed and adventured with Reine know, I -love- deeply invested, tactical roleplay where every door is treated as if a lethal threat lies beyond it. It also slows the pace down, so it allows DMs to build encounters organically and on the fly.
The intent was to give everyone something to do. I get my roleplay heavy strike event. The bulk of the playerbase gets a nice, big siege event that they can enjoy and roleplay as part of their character development. The War Council's whisperer types get to be information bearers and horders. The magic types got to find the artifact. We even got the Lathanderites involved through finding an artifact able to kill liches - something Eldarian and Alesea brought up within a few days of planning.
So that's a lot of events. I can see at least a few support events and then two actual attack events, one which is a siege. The other which is a story driven RP event for those who were deep into it. Bear in mind, the camp is supposed to be virtually 'empty' at this point.
Instead, because of War Council paralysis, it took several weeks to plan (instead of the few days it was supposed to take) and somehow we ended up with an army there. I mean, a genuine army. I acknowledge I made a mistake in and of myself which was gathering at the crossroads, but still. The participation list should have been tied up long before that event.
Which meant that it became yet another in a long line of events where the 'commander' shouts at people who aren't interested to do something which requires them to click on the next wave of enemies and spam Force Storm.
Which, brutally, was about as enjoyable as sticking my face in a photocopier and closing the lid. I died at least five times, which made my characters grand moment of strategic planning look like it could do without the very person that planned it, because in order to challenge the people who had somehow appeared out of nowhere, the DM had to balance the encounter to actually challenge THEM.
So how would I improve this? Well, the Dukes have complete control of the War Council and act more like Dukes rather than just people who kind of appear to keep the children from running around. Duke Eltan didn't get to his position by being nice, presumably. Have him act that way.
Secondly, as Asmo mentioned, I wouldn't make the War Council central to the plot. There were a lot of adventurey type things to do, but there were a few of us who genuinely wanted to do the military response to things. Let those of us who wanted to do that, do it, deal with the politics, deal with the money, deal with that side of the RP, but the rest? Let them do adventurey things. That way, the battles don't become so central to the plot.
I would love to see the power dynamic shifted some, for this last plot I felt often like the important PCs and Factions (My own included) were ring giving queens passing out involvement, influence and information to people as we can and want to. I'd rather have the 'power' and 'influence' in the plot resting in the hands of PCs who are -not- important and watch the Factions or movers and shakers on the server scrambling to keep up with and or entice said people to help them.
I also entirely agree with this statement. Further? Deception should be achievable. At the moment, it doesn't seem to be. At the moment, many of these plots appear monolithic and sadly railroaded to the first analysis. Allowing sociopaths and the generally Ferengish of the PC base to mess things up is ideal for preventing evil characters from becoming bored.
Characters Were Everywhere
DMs need to enforce this new characters can't be everywhere rule a lot heavier than they have been. More importantly, they need to be nastier to player decisions that go wrong, give themselves leeway to lose important events by not building them up to apocalyptic levels before hand and they need to be far harsher about who they allow to actually do things.
Take for example the War Council itself. The War Council should have been a minor aspect to the war and in a way it was. As Reine herself mentioned in a journal post, there was a whole other game being played here, to which she honestly knew nothing.
Except that it wasn't. There were people in that Council who had their fingers in other pies. They were doing things, running around hunting down enemies, spawning demons and angels, hunting down prophecies and who knew what else. Which is fine, but they wanted to be and were in everything. They had become hyper competent and were then hyper present. They then came into the one aspect of the game the War Council could have been dealing with (the nitty gritty of battle, strategic concerns, tactical movements) and then started throwing around gems and grand spells and floods and everything else to make everything as big and apocalyptic as possible.
Now this is a design choice and it sort of worked, but the result was that armies then became effectively meaningless. There was no time to plot those armies, no time to build them as entities and so on. Key to this was the Reaching Woods 'campaign' which started off billed as a tightly scripted, six player affair. I spent a week trying to build a force able to do this, roleplaying with as many people as I could. Instead, a lot of characters were taken and the so called 'Tenth' were formed out of the rag tag crowd. It was already a mess by that point, but then, inexplicably, the renamed Phoenix Company appeared and got involved.
No one knows how this happened. I remember reacting with genuine surprise, OOC, to Sveta at the time.
It honestly got to the point I hated those events because there was no room for roleplay at all. It was just people shouting at each other, followed by a wave of enemies.
How to improve this? Be much nastier about playing character sheets and previous roleplay. Be nastier about losses. Keep NPCs in character and make sure they stand for no BS that they don't need to. Work with PC planners so they actually get the event they have roleplayed and planned for.
Loss Felt Meaningless Due To The Size Of The Threat
The plot got too big. It was one apocalyptic battle after another. Which meant that the strategies used were increasingly apocalyptic. The Blight was walking through Baldurs Gate and inexplicably vanished at the last moment. That should have been the mother of all failure states right there. Instead, it just felt like the natural progression.
This is not a critique of the DMs. I know how well from my own experience how screwed up player politics can get and how far it can warp a plots progression. However, at no point did the War Council in particular ever feel like it was losing due to its own particular brand of internal politics or crap decision making. I felt like the DMs had written themselves into a corner - things had to work because the sheer scale of the threat had grown beyond the point where a loss state actually felt meaningful. Every time we 'won', we lost. Every time we lost, the situation etched inevitably towards a confrontation we would 'win'.
The loss state was genuinely the destruction of Baldurs Gate and the end of the server. While that's a good failure state for a tabletop game, it's not a good one for a permanent world server.
My theory is that the DMs had heard the critique about the metaplot through other channels (probably through a number of my complaints to BL, who has been incredibly patient with my brand of complaining) and that they just wanted to end the metaplot with a memorable event. That's perfectly fine and rational - you cut your losses and finish strong, which I think it did.
Given the circumstances, I don't -have- a fix for this because this was also a weakness of my DMing.
An Aside
Much of my frustration with the metaplot came from feeling as if characters simply would not give each other space. Instead of being a place where I could foster an expansion of roleplay and a 'scene', the War Council became a place with intense politics where everyone's OOC 'solutions' to the problem were clashing. As a result, more interesting, more roleplay dense, time buying methods of dealing with minor threats were eschewed in favour of vast battles which made no sense even in the scheme of things during which Characters X Y and Z did their thing A B and C and everyone else was there to make up the numbers.
That situation needs to be avoided in the future. I make it clear that my own frustrations with the metaplot are mine alone and that others might have a different view. I am also someone who was involved in it until the end, but I felt like a lot of my characters effort was effectively meaningless.
) What will the Red Wizards do with their new notoriety as providers of magic which helped defeat the undead?
) Cranston was able to make copies which he shared with various factions he trusted. Later in the year I was happy to have found out that many factions I did not share my work with made it to the hands of certain other guilds Cranston has no affiliation with. Therefore, in his own small part I get to feel that my character had an impact in the overall plot, even though I can't be in game nearly as much as many of the "big players." This defines inclusive RP in my opinion since, when I was able to play and take the time to be involved, it was rewarded by receiving a puzzle piece, then, by spreading the information to a few larger groups it was spread so that those who could put the details to use were able to do so by connecting my puzzle piece to others they had acquired by various means.