lindra @ December 6 2004, 08:36:14 UTC first post!

1. How were the times set?
2. How much planning was there for the game? Was it down to general 'indicate in this direction at some point' or was it 'say this in this post'? How detailed was it?
3. Were all the plots planned, or were there spontaneous plots?
4. (since I've modded myself) - what problems did you have with timezones - players and such?
5. What do you think made it such a good RPG in general?
6. Were there specific goals that you had for the game at the start or the finish, or did it just drift along generally? (not that that amount of activity could be called 'drifting', by any means)
7. Were there 'templates' for the characters, or were those developed by the players?
8. How did you select players?
9. What were the main features of the game that particularly interested you/were the most work? What was the most challenging plot for you?
10. Personally, how would you sum up your experience at N_A? What advice would you give to modders of RPGs, especially large ones like N_A?

intern_alley @ December 6 2004, 08:51:15 UTC first reply!

1. I'm not sure what you mean, like the times of the posts or what?

2. It really depended on individual plots and posts and players. Sometimes two players would plan out something specific, say, Remus and Sirius, and Remus's player would say, "Okay, I'm going to say this in this post." Most of the time, players were just updating on their own, randomly. I think the various directions were more decided between players.

3. A little bit of both, but things were almost always spontaneous. We only planned a few things out really heavily in advance (the end of the year stuff and the gaybashing). Usually it just came from us sitting around and deciding something would be hilarious.

4. The timezones were worse in the beginning, because it was really difficult to schedule chats for everyone to get together and stuff like that. Usually we could make it all acceptable for everyone but like, one person, who was left in the cold. As time went on I just usually said there would be two chats, and you should go to one but didn't have to go to both, so there would be a chat that people from each time zone could make.

As far as posting goes, some of the characters who would have liked to comment with each other heavily at the same time couldn't because the players just weren't online at the same time. So while you would see Harry and Draco commenting at the same time, that was easy because their players were online, but when the characters took forever to respond, timezones and the like were almost always responsible.

5. Um, well, I don't know, haha. This is such an awkward question to answer! Obviously I loved NA but I wouldn't know why other people did. The players were great, and I guess that's the best answer I can give.

6. There were specific goals at the start and at the finish, but in between the goals were less structured. Obviously there were a lot of things we wanted to accomplish at the end of the game, as the general panic set in that we would only have a few months to do anything we might have wanted to do.

7. Those were developed by the players, although with some of the more minor characters, eventually one of the other mods and I decided that we needed more Purebloods, or more straight characters, and would set that sort of limit on people joining. Meanwhile, some of the characters didn't join right away and had been mentioned by other characters previously, so whoever took them up sort of had to work with what had been previously mentioned of them.

8. In really various ways. Ron's player was initially supposed to be Ron until we found another player, but they were so wonderful that they had to stay. In a lot of ways we chose friends and writers we trusted, but many of the characters were also taken up by people who just wrote in asking about the role.

9. The most challenging plot was definitely the end of the game. I had originally planned it out a year earlier with a couple other players, and had the plot totally planned in my head for all that time. Then I decided I didn't like it, and a bunch of people told me they didn't want to do that either, so I had to scrabble everyone together to rewrite the ending.

The most work - um, from a mod's standpoint, will have a really boring answer. Doing that glossary was a lot of work. Just little administrative stuff like that - trying to sort out the memories (which, as you can see from their incompletion, I didn't succeed at). Doing stuff like that while trying to multitask all the other stuff in the game.

10. I have no idea how I'd sum it up! Wow. Hm.

Advice... well, everyone runs an RPG their own way. One trivial thing I would say is that you should try very hard to get your players to pass on the character's LJ if they quit. Switching a character's LJ not only makes it really obvious that the player has changed (something that, ideally, should be seamless), but makes it really confusing. Sometimes the players won't realise they need to add a new LJ, the old one won't get removed, and it just becomes really cluttered and hard to follow.

Make sure you can put your foot down without sticking it up someone's ass at the same time. Or in your mouth.

Not very sage advice, but there it is.

lindra @ December 6 2004, 09:00:59 UTC Re: first reply!

Wow, thank you! Some more... (because, obviously, I am obsessed)

11. Were the players you got the first time the ones you wanted, or did you have to do several casting calls?
12. What was the process applicants had to go through to play in N_A?
13. How loose/tight was the modding? Were there any specific concerns about how you would handle it all, especially when it became as popular as it did?

more later!
14.

intern_alley @ December 6 2004, 09:05:14 UTC Re: first reply!

11. That's a difficult question. Really, when NA started we were just like, "We're starting an RPG. Want to come? Who do you want to play?" And worked things out from there. Some players worked out, some didn't. We didn't really do casting calls, so much as people randomly applied at various times.

12. Well, as NA wore on, we took very few applicants because we had very few open parts. Occasionally someone would quit, but their part would be so large that I entrusted it to someone I knew, rather than seeking out someone who would suddenly become another player's person to interact with most. Uh, if that made sense.

Usually if people applied they would have to send a sample entry. When we cast Harry, we went through a huge mess of people and this great process of having them practise RPing with Draco's player, because of course Harry was the most important person to cast. But it wasn't like that with other characters at all, really.

13. I'm not sure. I can't really tell from this standpoint. When NA became as popular as it did... I'm not sure if there were specific concerns from anyone else, but I was worried about it. Not so much from a modding aspect though.

portkey @ December 6 2004, 09:08:23 UTC

Would you ever consider modding another game as large as NA? Or at least playing one?

intern_alley @ December 6 2004, 09:10:39 UTC

Well. No. Being the mod is somewhat of a crappy position. You're almost always going to be the bad guy to someone. If someone complains about someone else, you're going to have to wrong someone, somewhere. It's a stressful thing, and although I loved it, it did sometimes wear on me.

As far as playing, no.

comava @ December 6 2004, 11:45:59 UTC

Oooh, now I'm intruiged. What was that other ending that you planned and had to re-write?

Also, were there any other plot twists that didn't make the final cut?

And LYNW, for instance - can you tell us about how it all came together? Stuff like who came up with the idea, how did the players react, how were all the pairings chosen?, ect.

I'm sure you know this, but your hard work definitely paid off. N_A was brilliant and I miss it a lot.

intern_alley @ December 6 2004, 11:53:12 UTC

I don't think I should say. :D

I don't think so. We pretty much used everything.

Well, Narcissa's player came up with LYNW, while a lot of us were in chat looking for a plot that would include a great deal of people. We all contributed ideas to how it would work and the partners. Obviously we tried to come up with pairings that would be vaguely volatile - Seamus and Terry, for example.

Thanks! I miss it too.

comava @ December 6 2004, 12:33:51 UTC

Darn. Well, it was worth a try!

Good, because otherwise I'd be wanting to know what those were too!

Haha, Seamus and Terry was a great idea. Though I really liked Hermione and Ernie the best. ;)

intern_alley @ December 6 2004, 12:46:42 UTC

I must agree. I'm a big fan of Hermione/Ernie.

black_dog @ December 6 2004, 12:23:59 UTC

Yay! It was so great to see that fiery icon on my flist this morning. I miss you all so badly!

Um, first couple of questions, more to come later:

When you all first started the game: what really distinctive things were you trying to do, and what major rules or backstory characterizations or principles did you come up with that would really define NA for the players?

Did the original vision of the game change much as you went along? If so, what were the main surprises or new issues?

For those of us who have never played in an RPG, can you sort of give an overview of what the structure behind the scenes is like? You've mentioned group chats -- were they regularly scheduled? How much was done in group and how much was just one-on-one? If a couple of players had an idea, would they take it to the group or just do it and let other people figure out what was going on in real time?

If there's a way to meaningfully quantify this -- how much of the game did we, as spectators, really see? And how much of the role playing, the backstory development, the fun stuff for the players, was really behind the scenes?

Part of the really distinctive tone of NA (among other things) was the sense of mystery and incomplete information. Since you've said elsewhere that NA wasn't primarily a performance for the public, how much of this was intentional, and how much just an artifact of the journaling, that a lot of things couldn't or wouldn't be said in public? Were other players in on most of the individual character mysteries (like the exact development of JH and PS' relationship, or the schemes of Lucius and Narcissa) or did they confront them as outsiders, too?

Better questions after coffee. Hooray again, though, just on general principles. :)

intern_alley @ December 6 2004, 12:42:37 UTC

Well, when we first started NA, we weren't trying to do much. We were just fooling around, really, so I'm not sure if I can answer that. It was just in fun and we didn't think much about structure or anything like that. Honestly, I think you guys give us too much credit sometimes! The re-read makes me so nervous. "Oh no! They're going to see that we didn't have every comment planned two years in advance."

I think one of the major rules introduced early on was that the journals were just like regular journals, that you couldn't write private comments, and that if you wanted something filtered it would literally have to be filtered in the same way you or I would have to do that. That, I think, was a big way of defining how NA worked and was one of the ways that it differed from a lot of other RPGs.

Hm. Well, new issues certainly cropped up along the way but I can't pinpoint any one that would really be interesting or really worth talking about. I suppose there's the fact that we realised we needed to have plots. A big surprise!

The group chats weren't regularly scheduled, although for a time the Gryffindor boys in Harry's year did have a chat every week. We had a group mailing list that we used more often than chats, simply because it's a lot easier to email people and discuss so people can reply at their convenience.

It varied, really. Sometimes the whole group would discuss things, sometimes five or six people would draw something out, sometimes it was one-on-one. Sometimes a few people would have an idea and present it to the mailing list and ask for volunteers for participants, things like that. Sometimes two people would do something in the game itself and other people would be like, "What? What's this?"

Oh, a lot of the story was behind the scenes. Obviously it was different for different characters... Peeves, quite clearly, didn't have a lot going on behind the scenes. But definitely a lot of the posts were hinting at things that the players had either RPed out or planned, and so a great deal of the plot you never got to see.

It was definitely because of the journalling. When NA started, some of the players said, "Well, I'm not going to say anything that [Character] wouldn't say, so that might make things sort of hard to follow." But personally that's always been a problem I've had when I've glanced at other RPGs - I am always thinking, Would this character REALLY write this where everyone can read it?

It wasn't intentional, or to make it difficult for people to understand what was going on.

Other players were in on the mysteries as far as they inquired, things like that. Like, Harry's player wouldn't write to everyone and say, "Just so you know, here's what happened!" but if someone wanted to know, they could easily ask. Or else it might be discussed in chat, and so then everyone would indeed know. It's really a case by case situation.

kenboy @ December 6 2004, 15:08:50 UTC

I think the rule about treating the journals like actual journals, and not having any of that "Owl to Hermione Granger" or third person action taking place in posts & comments is the main thing (aside from the quality of the players, of course) that made NA feel so real.

That, and the fact that so much DID happen off-line, and that things would only be aluded to, and never fully explained. That it wasn't laid all out on the table for us all the time was definitely a big part of the appeal.

doubtful_salmon @ December 6 2004, 22:24:46 UTC

I agree with this, and have in fact discussed this format in great depth with a variety of people, including but not limited to you kenboy.

xnera @ January 5 2005, 04:10:34 UTC

Hi! I wanted to comment on this because I am going to be posting the next part of the re-read soon:

The re-read makes me so nervous. "Oh no! They're going to see that we didn't have every comment planned two years in advance."

Speaking purely as myself: of course you didn't have everything planned two years in advance! I've been studying writing for half my life now, and one thing I've learned is that things get better with time, or as they undergo revision. I've seen it with my own work. A good memoir piece became a really great one after a few dozen edits. :D

So no, I don't expect things to be perfect from the get-go. But I think this is partially what fascinates me about it. There's so much that was really good, right from the beginning. But it's also very interesting to see how the game evolved and changed as you figured out what worked and what didn't. I find the early drafts of Star Wars: A New Hope fascinating for the same reason, because it's very fun to see how George took his initial concept and rewrote it until it became the movie we all know and love. (Also, there's a lot of hints for the prequels in those early drafts!)

Finally, a comment on this:

Well, when we first started NA, we weren't trying to do much. We were just fooling around, really, so I'm not sure if I can answer that. It was just in fun and we didn't think much about structure or anything like that.

Sometimes really great things arise from "just fooling around". Most of my best work came from just writing rather than trying to write well. :)

devimelete @ December 6 2004, 12:24:45 UTC !!!!

1)What gave you the idea of making a role-playing game?

2)What was your favorite scene in N_A?

3)Did you collaborate with the other players on plot ideas, such as the final attack at Hogwarts? How does that go?

...

I loved your game so much, I once had a dream that there is N_A 2: The Return of M.B.

I don't get it either, but hey, we all love M.B!

intern_alley @ December 6 2004, 12:46:04 UTC Re: !!!!

1. Well, I, personally, just wanted to make an LJ of a certain character and asked anyone else if they'd be interested. There wasn't any great organisation to it.

2. Goodness, I don't know if I could come up with one.

3. Definitely! For instance with the final attack on Hogwarts, I just gathered people in a chat and we threw things out with, "What if we did this?" and such. Then I'd write up a summary of what we puzzled out and send it off to the list so people who weren't in the chat could throw things out there and find out what was going on.

kenboy @ December 6 2004, 15:37:04 UTC

How much attention did you all pay to the watchers? I'm really intrigued by the "audience" interaction with an RPG, so I'm wondering kind of along these lines:

1) Was there a point, early on, when you would be F5-ing the NA info page like six times a day, and telling everyone "oh my god, 150! 175! We have 200 watchers!!!" Were you continually amazed that people were watching?

2) I know on one level, when you're in an RPG, you're really playing for yourself and for the other players. But on some level, you can't help but be aware of the watchers, and feel that you're in some respects, an actor, and they're the audience. Or, at least, I feel that way. To that end, was there ever any real frustration with the audience? That they wouldn't pick up on something that had been hinted at? Or that they would come up with theories that were just completely wrong? And similarly, was there ever a sense of mischief, of intentionally throwing out red herrings just to make the game more exciting for the audience?

3) On a mod level, were there ever any fan/player interaction problems? Players commenting on watcher journals and sort of breaking the fourth wall? Watchers "stalking" players? Watcher "outings" of players?

4) From a mod perspective, what was your single biggest player-related challenge?

intern_alley @ December 7 2004, 04:22:48 UTC

Well, I read nraged! There is a strange compulsion that requires you to read what people are saying you.

1. Yes, but that was when we had, like, 50 watchers. After that we didn't look so much until we had 100, and we were like, O_O.

2. Well, I think one of the things that makes NA different from other RPGs is that we were the first RPG to have a fan community. I don't mean that in a boastful way, but that now people have fan communities and know what they're going to do, what they're about, things like that. We didn't. It was just sort of there and we were like, "What is THIS? What are they going to do with us?"

So there was frustration, but I think that was mostly in the beginning as we all tried to figure out what a fan community would do, players and watchers alike. I think that was more, from our end, that it was really weird to have someone commenting on your spelling errors two minutes after you'd posted them.

But no red herrings, and I was strongly against that happening, because it would make the RPG no longer about playing a game but about playing to an audience.

3. Yes, yes, yes, yes. The last question is the only real reason this LJ was ever given mod access to nraged, but when Aja left we just sort of left it on rather than pick someone else to mod it.

4. I don't think I should really discuss that publicly. I'm of the mind that RPG problems should stay private. Sorry!

doubtful_salmon @ December 6 2004, 22:29:32 UTC

1. Is there more than one of you?

2. Did you play in the game yourself, or did you just moderate?

3. Did you become more self-conscious when people started to watch en masse? Did it freak you out for the good or for the bad? (For the good would be, say, whipping the players into sticking in character better and things like that.)

4. Did you ever include any homages to other fandoms or things you might really enjoy, or people you knew, or anything like that? Were there ever references that you thought were freakishly obvious that none of the watchers actually caught?

5. Uh, I'm just really interested in seeing the answer to kenboy's #2 (ha ha!) (shut up, self) so I'm reiterating that.

intern_alley @ December 7 2004, 04:30:13 UTC

1. On this post, there is just one of me. Sometimes there were three mods in NA, sometimes there were two, sometimes it was just me. I am the, uh, "main" mod, I guess.

2. I am almost not sure if I should answer this, because I think a lot of people somehow got the impression that the mods were like, this totally separate entity and I find it funny. But yes, I played in the game.

3. Oh, definitely. I tried to go through and clean out old comments from before we'd set the LJs so that only friends could comment, things like that. And then we all felt a bit more pressured to have real goals and plots.

4. No, I didn't include references to other fandoms. I was not really a fan of that. However, I had a list of every student in Hogwarts (which you saw some of during the sixth year attack - the list of injured/missing students - but I never got to use totally) and a lot of the names on there were the names of people I knew personally who I thought had HPish names, or first names and surnames of people I knew mixed up. It's really hard to come up with like 200 names! A lot of the Quidditch player names were people we knew, too.

5. Now I'm wondering if I should come up with another answer. Well, I would say it was frustrating when people didn't realise what was going on, but that was more in a, "COME ON!" sort of way, not out of any true frustration. It was more funny, to see people saying Millicent might be pregnant, because we were just like, "Where the hell did that come from?" So not really that frustrating.

doubtful_salmon @ December 7 2004, 05:58:39 UTC

Main mod for life, yo.

Party!

Thanks for answering my questions!

oconel @ December 7 2004, 08:27:11 UTC

1. Were there plots some players knew about and others didn't?
2. Did you informed everybody weekly or monthly of what was going to happen?
3. I guess you try to involve everybody in the game, how did you do that?

intern_alley @ December 8 2004, 06:57:14 UTC

1. Yup. It wasn't really out of a subterfuge, though - people tended to plot in pairs or small groups that involved their characters, and so it wasn't really necessary to fill Lisa in on what was going on with Narcissa and Lucius.

2. Well, we would send things off to the mailing list and discuss there, so there wasn't really an announcement kind of thing.

3. We would have group chats or use the group mailing list to try to come up with plots that involved the majority of characters (like LYNW).

yamapea @ December 7 2004, 19:40:15 UTC

Oh, wow. I feel like there are all sorts of things I want to ask you, as I loved n_a and I'm currently co-modding two very different HP RPGs, but I can never seem to think of all of my questions when I go to comment. Which is why I've already put it off a day.

Let's see..

1. Did you ever have moments where you were convinced the game was falling apart around you? Or where you worried that it wouldn't last?
2. I read your response on the plotting front, and I know there are a few different methods of modding and varying degrees of mod involvement, but did you ever have problems with giving players enough direction?
3. Do you think that being a player as well helped you as a mod, on the player front, or did it make things more overwhelming at times?
4. Have you written any fanfiction you'd care to pimp? :P
5. I have always wanted to tell you that the flaming bag icon is the most amazing thing I have ever seen. Would you mind terribly if I made an n_a-related icon of it?

Urg, I can't think of the other things I was going to ask. So.. I'll return later to bug you some more. :)

<3

intern_alley @ December 8 2004, 07:01:34 UTC

1. Oh, of course! It is the best part of being a mod. :D Especially during periods where people would slow in posting. Occasionally I vowed to myself that I'd play every character if I had to to make sure the game got to the end.

2. Well, in the beginning of the game, people seemed often to be waiting for direction, i.e. to be handed plots, until we worked out how people would come up with plots and things like that.

3. Probably more overwhelming, because I was trying to deal with mod stuff and update at the same time. And when you're a mod and a player, there's always the fear that you're involving your own character in too many plots, so sometimes I would purposely keep my character uninvolved from bigger plots.

4. Nope! :D

5. Not at all! :)) I've had that picture for like six years.

yamapea @ December 8 2004, 07:39:17 UTC

Ah, yes! I worry sometimes that I am headed down the playing every character road sometimes, with the amount of character adoption I talk myself into. It's sort of comforting to know that it happened in N_A too ;).

And thank you for all of your answers! :)

I have one other question, I think. And it's sort of technical, so if it's something you don't really want to elaborate on, I understand. But I was one of the inquisitive ones on the matter of npcs, like Nott, and I remember MB's player saying something about specialists for npcs. It sounded like a really good idea, actually,as a way to avoid an excessive amount of posting characters and to keep from having players godmod an npc in too many different ways, or make him or her OOC...Anyway! I was wondering if there's any part of the npc specialist bit you'd care to elaborate on? Or perhaps I am being far too obtuse?

I am really horrid with this question thing.

intern_alley @ December 8 2004, 08:32:56 UTC

Well, during LYNW, we just didn't have enough characters for every single player to have a partner who was either frequently updated or not an NPC, so some of them (like Parvati) got NPCs. The NPCs were mostly mentioned by specific players over and over, so we sort of turned them into that character's "player", so that the players partnered with them would have something to work with. Like with Nott, you saw him make all that stuff for Parvati during LYNW - well, someone had to make it.

It wasn't really a big, elaborate thing, though, and was mostly Nott and Queenie. They definitely had people behind them who had their characterisations all planned out in their head and worked with Nott and Queenie's partners during LYNW to plot things out.

I think it was in part, though, because those players also really liked the characters. Aside from Nott and Queenie, mostly the NPCs fell into the care of the players who used them most by default. We didn't have anyone for Dennis Creevey, but obviously Colin's player would be the one who could plan out whatever they wanted for Dennis. Likewise, the Slytherin girls sort of fell into the Slytherin players' domain, especially Pansy and Draco.

yamapea @ December 9 2004, 18:12:56 UTC

Ah, I see. That makes sense. :) And incidentally, I loved LYNW.

Thank you for answering all my questions! I'm sure I'll think of something later that I'll wish I had asked but I can't think of anything else right now. :P

So thanks again!

tabiji @ December 8 2004, 11:36:58 UTC

Hello!

1. What were the official start dates of NA (both on LJ and deadjournal), and what do you consider to be the official start date?

2. When the game moved to LJ, was it a continuation of the original game, or did you start fresh? (I can't tell, since so much was deleted.)

3. In hindsight, is there anything you would have done differently as far as how the game was run?

4. What was your single biggest frustration as a mod? Time zones? LJ outages? Players with computer problems? Overall player communication? Hiring players? Getting people to update? Or something else?

5. To maintain consistancy and eliminate duplication, did players have to get mod approval before proceeding with subplots in the game?

6. Roughly how much time did you have to spend doing mod stuff each week?

7. Did you have a list of player rules that you can share? (Things like "no *action* posts", etc.)

8. What's your favorite behind-the-scenes NA story?

intern_alley @ December 8 2004, 12:07:03 UTC

1. On deadjournal, 20 February, 2002. On livejournal, 25 April, 2002. I consider 20 February to be the official start date, because many of the characters and players carried over from then for great periods of time.

2. It was a continuation of the original game, though it was vaguely re-vamped. The main reason for moving it was that deadjournal's servers sucked. But we took the opportunity to replace some players, let people quit if they wanted, change LJ names, things like that.

3. Hum. Well, I would have preferred to come up with longer arching plots for Voldemort, but I am not sure my feeble brain could have. :)

4. Player communication, I think. Sometimes the mod has to act as a go-between, and that is always frustrating, because it can turn you into the bad guy to both people.

5. No, only from players who were involved.

6. I have no idea! It's hard to separate it from what I did as a player, because I multitask pretty constantly.

7. Well, there are some on the site. I never formally said "no *action* posts" - it just sort of smoothed out that way.

8. Boy howdy. Hum. Um. I don't know if it counts as a story, but a lot of the players sent each other Christmas cards last year. Not from each other, but from characters to other characters. We made up addresses and sent them in separate envelopes, addressed to the characters. It was fun, especially shopping for Christmas cards that you thought the character might use.

ghost_lingering @ December 12 2004, 01:10:52 UTC

Hey, I know this is a few days since this was posted (light-years in computer time) but I only just saw this, and after reading your answers, I still have a few questions.

First, there were alot of characters in NA. As such, did you ever have trouble finding players and, as a result, have to have one person play multiple characters? If so, how well did it work? If someone did double (or triple) up, were the characters they played major ones, or were they minor out of nessesity? (That is, would it have been too much work to play more than one really important character?)

Second, you said above that many of the plots were decided by the players themselves. Were you (as a mod) aware of all the plots? Did you have to keep track of everything going on in order that everything worked out in the end and plots didn't end up interfering with each other?

Finally, during the busiest times of NA, how much time did you spend doing NA type things (say, per week...)? How much time did most people spend? Did it ever become this overwhelming task?

Anyway, thank you very much. Some friends and I are going to begin a rpg and I've been elected a mod...which is very very scary considering I've never done anything like this before. Your answers in this thread have alleviated many of my fears...while creating new ones. *g* But, I think that everything you've said so far will be pretty much invaluable as I work my way around this whole weird and new (to me) rpg thing. Thanks much!

intern_alley @ December 12 2004, 17:04:38 UTC

There wasn't trouble finding players. However, sometimes players would quit, and that often put me in a difficult position as far as re-casting went. While I knew that there were players outside of NA who would have easily taken up the character, if it was someone who interacted heavily with one other person, I generally asked that player who they would like to work with. As this happened later and later in the game, they were sometimes re-casted within the players NA already had, for a couple of reasons. For one thing, it was very hard to bring new players in without having them feel left out or overwhelmed. For another, it was even more difficult if the character was part of a pairing, because the other player in the pairing was so used to working with one other person that I didn't want to shove someone they didn't know at all on them. I think the pairings, at least in NA, worked well because the players were very close. So, in a long-winded fashion, yes, there was double casting. Sometimes someone played two major players, sometimes someone played major and minor. It all really depended on the situation and who the character I needed to re-cast was.

Plots interfered with each other often and I would have to step in and untangle them. I didn't always know everyone's plots, but I would generally realise if a problem was about to occur.

I honestly have no idea. I worked on NA from work, and after work, and frequently before work. Then sometimes I would go two days without touching NA at all, but that was rare. I was pretty constantly working on NA throughout the day and doing other things. It was sometimes very overwhelming.

If you have any other questions from one mod to another, you can feel free to email me, as well - sometimes other mods do that and I never mind. pince (at) nocturnealley (dot) net.

ghost_lingering @ December 13 2004, 14:30:34 UTC

Hey, thank you so much for the answers and for the offering modding...guidence? is that the word? Anyway, thank you. Once the actual playing starts on my game, I probably will e-mail you with a few panicked questions, and even if I don't, it's still nice to know I have someone I can ask.

One last thing, as a follow up of sorts to one of your answers, but when you had to untangle plot lines, how did that work? Which plotline got to stay and which had to go?

Anyway, thank you again!

intern_alley @ December 16 2004, 04:47:58 UTC

That was pretty much always compromise. A lot of these questions are difficult to answer because I did not really have big plans on some things, I just did them as they came along and didn't think about it.

Anonymous @ December 12 2004, 19:42:19 UTC

Did you want to kick LJ's Brad and all of his staff in the arse as hard as I did when LJ was sucking wind during the last few weeks of June?

moocow1985 @ December 13 2004, 19:50:25 UTC

That certainly was the worst timing EVER as lj outages went.

I guess a related question would be did trouble with livejournal cause many problems? What would the characters do when threads and such got interupted by lj going down?

intern_alley @ December 16 2004, 04:45:33 UTC

LJ caused problems sometimes. Sometimes we had to stop threads because we just couldn't keep going. The characters just ignored it. The players made angry emoticons at each other.

intern_alley @ December 16 2004, 04:44:43 UTC

:O I would never condone such violence!

It seemed like every time we got involved in a huge thread, though, LJ started acting up.

BUT, the worse time, no doubt, was 29 June/early 30 June. We knew the game was ending, and suddenly LJ was not letting people log in. For like, twelve straight hours. I am not sure that the other players were as freaked out as I was, but I was seriously ready to blow something up in horror.

a_player @ December 16 2004, 04:08:45 UTC

Hello my mod,

I wanted to say... I thought you were absolutely brilliant as a mod throughout. The most organized, well-thought out, creative, and passionate one that I've had the pleasure of working with (and that includes myself. You far surpass my skills). Really, all the mods, with your ability to keep the game going even when in a slump impressed me because it's incredibly hard to get people to write sometimes. But I just wanted to say how fabulous I really thought you were. (Brilliant!) It was such a pleasure to be able to be part of this group and I honestly miss it so much. I know you said above that it is a crappy position to be a mod, and I know it's true, but I wanted to let you know there were players who appreciated, respected, and loved you in your position. I just was constantly impressed by those who were in charge of the game. So much love. Thanks for everything.

intern_alley @ December 16 2004, 04:47:17 UTC

:O Who is this?

Well thank you! :D I miss it so much, too, and although I would never mod another game again, I would mod NA again anyday. I loved modding NA.

bookofjude @ December 31 2004, 14:30:02 UTC

Happy New Year, you hot thing.

intern_alley @ January 4 2005, 08:42:50 UTC

Why thank you.

bookofjude @ February 9 2005, 06:07:42 UTC

Hello!

1. Do you know how much I still love you and that icon? I thought you should know.