It wasn't ONLY density. It was density AND a lot of effort was concentrated on a section of the tdm that also required me to handwave the actual RP. I want to RP in the setting not think about what my character was doing for 3 months. The first 3 months for me in a game is critical to setting the whole trajectory of what I want to do with a character because I'm engaging with the setting from the ground up and the CR around them drastically changes the experience for me. This is good! I didn't want to miss out on it. Unfortunately, a lot of the stuff for people on the other crew are maintenance task prompts or fighting pirates or exploring a dead space station (again, pirates and maintenance). It would've been better if they had axed the whole dead space station bit and let the crews all end up on the planet somehow and co-mingle that way or hold off on the planet and open in media res with the space station battle and have the pacifist crew have been trying to deal with it for 3 days or a week or something. That would've made things neat and tidy and you could add some aftermath prompts for chill "getting to know you while we fix the space station" threads.
Then there was a second tdm that was the POLL tdm. It's too much because it spreads a small group of potentially interested people out to the point that it's hard to keep interesting threads going. If you want people to explore and want lore and density, that's great! Test drives are more successful, imo, when there are fewer prompts or at least ones that encourage or force interactions instead of isolating small groups of characters doing menial tasks.
I really, really liked that the mods tried something different with this tdm. I think it was a great attempt but it could have been executed better.
Re: +1
I am literally in one of those games.
It wasn't ONLY density. It was density AND a lot of effort was concentrated on a section of the tdm that also required me to handwave the actual RP. I want to RP in the setting not think about what my character was doing for 3 months. The first 3 months for me in a game is critical to setting the whole trajectory of what I want to do with a character because I'm engaging with the setting from the ground up and the CR around them drastically changes the experience for me. This is good! I didn't want to miss out on it. Unfortunately, a lot of the stuff for people on the other crew are maintenance task prompts or fighting pirates or exploring a dead space station (again, pirates and maintenance). It would've been better if they had axed the whole dead space station bit and let the crews all end up on the planet somehow and co-mingle that way or hold off on the planet and open in media res with the space station battle and have the pacifist crew have been trying to deal with it for 3 days or a week or something. That would've made things neat and tidy and you could add some aftermath prompts for chill "getting to know you while we fix the space station" threads.
Then there was a second tdm that was the POLL tdm. It's too much because it spreads a small group of potentially interested people out to the point that it's hard to keep interesting threads going. If you want people to explore and want lore and density, that's great! Test drives are more successful, imo, when there are fewer prompts or at least ones that encourage or force interactions instead of isolating small groups of characters doing menial tasks.
I really, really liked that the mods tried something different with this tdm. I think it was a great attempt but it could have been executed better.