Stalkers Season 3 Post-Game Discussion and Feedback

[Neo Emolga]

Right then. My thoughts on a few subjects:

First of all, First Aid. In the last game it seemed kinda underpowered. There were pretty much no times to use it on NPCs, demonic skitty aside, it's main use seems to be on allies. But since it only cures HP and not Sanity, and both HP and Sanity are cured by resting, it kinda felt redundant. Like I was at a disadvantage for picking it. And if you introduce money as another way of healing, then it will be even worse.

Definitely a fair point. I realized pretty late in the game that I had WAY more Sanity-related traps and hazards than Health-damaging ones. And I feel bad for you in particular because you landed right in that trap at the worst time!

I think First Aid does need work or needs to be replaced entirely. A +2 to Health and +2 to Sanity at the same time seems almost too powerful, but then again, it does mean giving up your whole turn for someone else's benefit. I'll look into this because yeah, I can see where this got so little usage compared to many other things like Science and Lockpick.

Second, Tashy. After she was interviewed, it kinda felt like the emisarries were taking a back seat, like it doesn't matter if we don't find the stalkers, cause after a set time has passed we win anyway. It was just, oh look, and item for this NPC to use to win for us, unlike previous games where the ritual needed to be discovered and decoded by the players. Tashy felt like those times a DM has a PC and railroads them into being the main character, wiith the players just kinda along to watch how awesome they are.

Aside from that, the only hint at how important she was was that she was a returning character, which locked out anyone who didn't know the significance of a past stalker now being an NPC. If no-one from the first game had been playing, then Tashy could have easily gone unoticed for the whole game. It just seems kinda biased towards older players, like, you're new to this so you can't help with the big discoveries.

Hmm, that's a fair point too. I kind of wanted her to be more as a messenger and guide and more as a backup in case there were Stalkers that slid by and were just way too darn hard for people to figure out. It was also done in a way that said "you can use Tashy to purge out as many Stalkers as you want once you have all the materials ready, if you even want to use her help at all" So she could have been used to wipe out seven of them, or if you weren't really interested in having her help out, zero. And she was also there to provide a few hints if it seemed like people were getting stuck or something didn't entirely make sense (like that thing about the jewelry repair machine). I feel like she had a interesting background character to work with and I wanted to develop it a little more, but maybe I got a little carried away.

I didn't think that she would give a "backseat feeling" to the players, though, but looking at it now, I can kind of see why someone might feel that way. She was meant more to be like a small link and homage to the first game, but not so that it would give the veteran players a distinct advantage over anything significant. This whole RPG does have an ongoing, everything is lightly-linked together storyline and I do want to keep its continuity, but I don't want newer players to feel like they don't have any idea what's going on.

So if you were to have Mercs, then maybe make them slightly weaker that players, or having sills the players can't use, so they add to the group instead of taking the place of an emmisary. For instance, instead of just the same interview that an emmisary would get, them could have something like an stealth skill to overhear what others are saying without interviewing them, getting different info than the players would, making them an addition instead of a replacement.

Oh for sure, I totally agree with you on that one. They will be limited in what they can do and they definitely won't be as valuable to have as more players. I also don't foresee having all that many, either. Maybe one or two. Other Mercs may do something else, but can still be wiped out one way or another.

Third, Mission disclosure. It going up when you lose all your sanity is fine, it's a reason not to just go in gung ho and gives a consequence to running out of sanity. But having it go up from interviewing as well discorages players from talking to NPCs, especially if they don't have a perfect type matchup. Since this isn't a hardcore competative MOBA, the players most likely won't have a perfect type combination to get a good rapport with every NPC. But if you don't have one, then it's rarely worth interviewing anyone, as if you hit a stalker, you'll get a penalty. So in the end everyone stays inside for fear of raising mission disclosure by talking to the wrong pokemon, and I kinda felt like this missed the point of the game.

I second the mission disclosure--having it happen because of sanity is understandable, but when you're afraid of interviewing because you might talk to the wrong character and therefore compromise the mission, I agree that misses the point of the game.

That was really only tied to RttnCrps/Kanja. Each time you talked to her, it knocked it a bit up to 10%. I meant it to be a bit of a curveball and that it got the players to say "hey, something's fishy here, let's take a step back and look at the root causes as to what might have caused this." Looking back, maybe it going up by 5% would have been a bit more fair. Still, you guys didn't lose to Mission Disclosure anyway and there was still some wiggle room even at the end.

I don't want to make the game too easy, either. Season 1 was laughably easy to the extreme and you guys didn't even come close to losing. Here, sure, there were a few close calls. Eric protected Tashy in what would have been complete disaster if he hadn't. But even though you guys had 60% for mission disclosure, it wasn't teetering on the verge of death. Meanwhile, remaining kills still wasn't a concern as it didn't even get halfway there, though if there were fewer people playing, that would have been more of a factor considering more days would go by with less actions being taken, and thus, more Night Cycle murders.

I don't want to shut down the idea that it could still be possible to lose if there's cases of bad luck or poor decision making. What would happen in that case? A not-so-hot ending, but there would be another season, a bit of an alteration in storyline, and things still go on with a new edition!

Other than those points, everything was great. It lasted the right amount of time, and up until Tashy blasted everything into dust it felt like we were making real progress with the stalkers.
So yeah, just thought I'd put these out there.

Glad you enjoyed it and you definitely did bring up some really good points I'll look into and adjust so things are better next time!