The lightsome atmosphere played a part, but it was more than that. After thinking about it, I’d say it was a combination of these things:
+ The games had several really friendly players from the get-go; it was easy to mingle in the Intro meme. Member lists stayed under 70 characters, so I was able to get to know everyone.
+ When there was a hat-sorting system, it facilitated a lot of new CR. Like you’d be doing a quest and get stuck because you couldn’t progress by yourself, so you’d need to team up with a character who was another house/class to complete it. There was a lot of ‘Hey, come over I need you at (thread link)!’ Events encouraged characters to band together to make things happen.
+ The biggest thing that helped was the mods were really flexible in adjusting to our shenanigans. So you know how in most games, the monthly event is pretty much set no matter what the characters do? Pre-written like 'you go here, you save these dudes, the peasants rejoice, and this area is unlocked'. Here, characters had more initiative. There were events that were partially set – if a giant monster tried to trample the village, we'd have a boss fight to fend it off. But it might make a difference how we defeated it, like what it thought of us and if it'd come back. And other things were very fluid, like if someone tried a quest earlier that month and failed which caused the river to flood, maybe we’d find out the monster is sensitive to water and can't cross it.
I can’t express how tremendously encouraging it was towards tagging to know that what we did actually had an impact on things! It was so fulfilling to see what came of characters' efforts in real game landscape and plot results. And funny part is all this was done with no Discord and little Plurk chatter, we mostly just winged it in the OOC and IC comms!
Re: RP WOES
+ The games had several really friendly players from the get-go; it was easy to mingle in the Intro meme. Member lists stayed under 70 characters, so I was able to get to know everyone.
+ When there was a hat-sorting system, it facilitated a lot of new CR. Like you’d be doing a quest and get stuck because you couldn’t progress by yourself, so you’d need to team up with a character who was another house/class to complete it. There was a lot of ‘Hey, come over I need you at (thread link)!’ Events encouraged characters to band together to make things happen.
+ The biggest thing that helped was the mods were really flexible in adjusting to our shenanigans. So you know how in most games, the monthly event is pretty much set no matter what the characters do? Pre-written like 'you go here, you save these dudes, the peasants rejoice, and this area is unlocked'. Here, characters had more initiative. There were events that were partially set – if a giant monster tried to trample the village, we'd have a boss fight to fend it off. But it might make a difference how we defeated it, like what it thought of us and if it'd come back. And other things were very fluid, like if someone tried a quest earlier that month and failed which caused the river to flood, maybe we’d find out the monster is sensitive to water and can't cross it.
I can’t express how tremendously encouraging it was towards tagging to know that what we did actually had an impact on things! It was so fulfilling to see what came of characters' efforts in real game landscape and plot results. And funny part is all this was done with no Discord and little Plurk chatter, we mostly just winged it in the OOC and IC comms!