rpanons | Uhh

Uhh

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Thinking about apping here. Can anyone give me the run down? Mainly curious about pacing and plot, but anything else anyone wants to throw in is good too.

Sure. First of all, the usual Decollage play style involves short, rapid-fire tags, with emphasis on the "rapid fire" part -- nobody will take issue with you if you write longer tags, but the general rule is that a thread needs to be actually finished within a day or two. Anything longer than that is considered to be backtagging, and it's a hard game to backtag in. There are advantages and disadvantages to this. If you are a slow tagger, this game is going to be very hard to follow, but if you can keep up, it means that your threads will basically all end up getting finished, and you can play out a lot of interaction without having to handwave constantly.

Plotwise, Deco is basically a standard jamjar with an added amnesia element. If you dislike playing characters with memory-loss, you can have them lose their skills instead. In lieu of "events" as in most games, Deco has "games" which are scored competitions between teams. These range from light and fluffy (the kissing game! kiss the most people to get points and win) to incredibly traumatic (violence bingo! fill out a bingo card with spaces that include "taking out someone's eye" and "killing someone") and everything in between. Pretty much no matter what team you get placed on, at least one other team will want you dead, which means that at any given time you'll be playing in a game where at least six other characters viscerally loath yours. How much you want to play with this is up to you, but Deco is somewhat unique in that it is patently impossible, by design, to play without at least some negative CR. If you like this and have a character suited for it, Deco can be a lot of fun for you. There's been some drama about this in the past -- specifically, a group of players asked for there to be more of a push against violence/conflict. Nothing came of this, however, and the general sentiment is that for better or worse, Deco is going to stay as a horror-themed traumatic violence game. A game with a similar premise, Kyriakos, recently opened in response to this. If you like the premise of Deco but find high amounts of conflict off-putting, I would recommend taking a look there. It is in other respects incredibly similar, so which game you prefer mostly depends on where you fall on the spectrum of wanting to fuck up your characters.

Deco is a team-based game. When you app in, you are placed on a team with 5 other characters. Do not mistake this for being like assigned roommates in other games. It's possible to form relationships outside of teams, but there is honestly no way to play in Deco without having massive, significant CR with your teammates. This has benefits: you have pre-set CR with your team even if you don't have castmates, which makes for a good welcoming experience, in my opinion. On the other hand, this means that to some extent you're stuck with who you get -- changing teams is almost impossible, although you can request a certain team in your application. For this, you might want to ask a current player about what team would be best suited for your character, although if there is any team where you know a lot of people OOCly, that might be the best choice for you regardless.

If you have any other questions, feel free to ask them. I'll be watching this thread, so I'll answer as best as I can.

This was really helpful, thanks! One other question: how does regaining skills or memories work? Do the characters just work at them or do you have to win games to get them back?

They are rewarded for winning games, yes. Now, this does mean that depending on what team you end up on, you could be waiting a long time between memories and skills -- alternatively, you could be getting back memories at so rapid a pace that it's actually difficult to play it all out, which is what happened to me when I apped into the beginning of an insane winning streak. Now, in order to keep things somewhat even, Deco games are meant to include with the winners one "loser tier" winner -- basically, a team that participated and failed to win, but they haven't won in ages anyway, so they get a prize for showing up. Additionally, there is a player who keeps careful track of win and loss records, and when there are a number of teams who not been winning much, Deco will run a loser game, in which only losing teams can compete -- thus allowing these losing teams to win back memories/skills without strong competition.

Still, things are not even close to being perfectly even, so it's a good idea to have a game plan. One thing you can do in order to make this work a little better is to put thought into picking your memories. When you win a game, the person running will automatically assign you a memory or skill. However, it's fine to switch out for another that you prefer as much as you like. Letting game-runners pick for you allows for a cool random element, but picking yourself will let you carefully plan out your character's development. This is especially important if you're on a team that rarely wins or that wins very often.

Most Deco players (and players at Aather/Kyriakos as well) have a memory registry which divides memories into six categories. Three of these categories are significant memories: sig positive, sig neutral, and sig negative. A significant positive memory would be something like the happiest moment of a person's life, a significant negative would be the worst or one of the worst, neutral would be important but not strictly good or bad, like I FOUND OUT I WAS ACTUALLY ADOPTED I DON'T KNOW HOW I FEEL ABOUT IT or something. The last three are once again positive, neutral and negative, but this time they are labelled as "trivial." In other words, these are memories of small essentially unimportant events. This could be something like small talk with a friend (triv neu), a little fun moment (triv pos), a time when your character was late to school and felt crappy the whole day (you get the idea).

This division of categories makes it easier to deal with teams that are winning too often/not often enough. For instance, if your team rarely wins, you can strongly prioritize significant memories in order to drive character development. However, if you're like I was and you end up with the problem of winning a game once a week, you can load up on trivial memories so as not to get overwhelmed. You can do something similar for skills -- if your team is losing like crazy, nobody will look at you funny for loading up early on very useful abilities.

Incidentally, if you're interested in the win records of the current teams, there is an up to date gdoc that I'll link here:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0Ar9DQIRe-agAdGhPSzFSYzJMRDY2MTd3dUVib1ZDV0E&usp=drive_web

How is it decided who wins a game? I took a look earlier and it seems like the games are different each time, but do the mods decide or does it depend on something else like how many threads are completed by a team?

The person running the game decides. This is sometimes a mod, since mods play a lot of the more active portraits, but often it's just a regular player. There are rules for how games have to be run -- portraits aren't allowed to lie about the rules of games, you can't be rewarded for self-sacrifice, etc -- but the structure of games and how they are scored is decided by the portrait (these are just the deco NPCs basically) who is running it.

Games are scored in a number of different ways. Some games are essentially popularity contests in which you vote on which teams you want to protect from some gruesome fate -- the teams who survive are the winners. Other games simply tally up how many times you do a thing: the kissing game, for instance, was scored based on number of kisses that were threaded out. On the other hand, some games (there was recently a rock-papper-scissors type game) that are scored purely on luck. There are games whose winners are decided by who is ICly willing to do the most nasty shit as well: violence bingo was basically a contest of "who is willing to murder and maim people without cause."

In general, being more active (and having an active team) means you will win more games. This isn't always the case, especially when you get a lot of popularity contest type games. But they've been put on hold for a few months. I will add this: there is no handwaving allowed in games (for scoring purposes), period. In other words, even if you say, well, my character would be willing to kill X, and X's mun agreed, it doesn't matter if you don't actually finish threading it out. This is basically so that people can't win games without actually playing in them. Additionally, many games have an extremely short timeframe. Your average game will happen over the course of one evening, usually ending before morning. Sometimes you'll have 24 hour games, but really never longer than that. Games have a set starting time and usually a set end, and you're expected to show up on time (or within an hour or so) in order to play. These aren't like events in most games that last a few days. It's totally possible in deco to go to bed early one night, wake up the next morning and find out that your team has won a game that happened after you went to bed.

That is actually pretty cool. Thanks for all the information! I'm going to try sending in an app, it really sounds just like what I'm looking for.

No problem, and definitely looking forward to seeing you there. Deco is a different game in a lot of ways, but if you have any questions people are always happy to answer. If you have a plurk, stick it up in your OOC intro and I'll add you.

This is all super helpful, thank you! i have an additional question, what kind of availability do you need to have? when are games usually run?

No problem. There is a lot of late night stuff happening in Deco, particularly with the mods, who live on the surface of the moon. I've never once stayed awake past around 1:30 AM CST just for a game and I'm really, really active, but it's commonplace for games to start around 4-5 PST and go into the night, so if you work night shifts and can't tag during that time, it can be difficult. On the other hand, non-mod NPCs regularly run Earth time games for human beings, so it's not as if you won't be able to function at all. Furthermore, it's worth noting that even if your character doesn't personally attend a game, you'll be rewarded if your team wins. Which isn't to say it's good to avoid games -- they're fun! and if no one on the team attends you can't win -- but having to miss some won't necessarily cripple your character.

DA Unrelated but describing the other side of the world as being off the planet is kind of eyeroll-y.

"Moontimers" is a pretty commonly used term among Decollage players, including those who are actually in Australia/NZ, so it wasn't meant offensively. But fair enough.

okay but if it's someone asking about your game? pretty much implied that they're not in it yet/aware of your special terms for people on the other side of the world than you. just sayin

Is there a timetable for when games generally happen?

and, on average, how much does threadropping happen? assuming you boomerang

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Uhh

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above anon!