Maids in Abyss AAR

Most /aicg/ botmaking events have some kind of stipulation. Make a card based on this theme, make a card based on that request... you get it. However, for this event, the stipulation was something unique. Something... terrifying.

TEAMWORK!

Horrifying, yeah? Me, disrespectful_dud and HeartoftheCards were assigned with the team name "Maids in Abyss", signifying the theme which we were to be working with. Namely, “Dark fantasy maid”, of which we were supposed to create an “RPG Party” of characters based on it, with me making the DPS our of the trio. We had three weeks until the deadline; the game was on, and the ball was in our court.

A History

Things started with an email, detailing our teammates and what we were supposed to do. This is also how we began contacting each other, but emails could only get you so far. Luckily, one of us suggested Miro, a website for digital cork boards. On one of these boards, we began our work proper. Planning, discussing ideas, writing things down, the works!

Here's some pictures of that Miro board:


The first week was mostly spent here, sketching out our cards and making most, if not all of the major decisions. The rules and backstory of the world, the level of interconnectivity our cards would have, and that we'd do a group card as a bonus. It was a good place to jot down ideas, but some issues became readily apparent:

First: The issue of organization. Sure, you could see the entire board, but opening it up and having to determine what was new ended up being difficult. Being able to miss small text, having to remember everything that was and wasn't there when you last checked, it became a hassle.

Second: Communicating through notes, while unique and a little silly, was not at all effective. As in the previous point, there was no way to track new posts/messages, and if you had a question for someone else you'd have to dump a text box in their space, hoping they'd see it, or send them an email. Disastrous for a group project where you'd need coordination.

Third: Handling files and sharing them was difficult due to the aforementioned lack of tracking.

For all the reasons above and a little more, I made the executive suggestion to move us to Slack almost halfway into the event, a website that would suit our purposes better. There we could chat in realtime, and organizing files/text was much easier. The discussion part of our work was mostly done at that point, so people were mostly stuck in working on their cards or the lorebook. However, it was a real help in communicating and being able to receive updates.

Surprisingly, that's the entire story of our efforts! No grand drama, no massive hardships, things went fairly orderly and I think we did well considering this was our first botmaking group event.

But a retelling is probably not why you opened this. No, it's the thoughts and conclusions you came for!

Theme/Character

Let's start with the theme. For this event, I had suggested Renaissance Fantasy, and if there was one theme I wish had won, it'd be Monster Girl Pizzeria. Check out the strawpoll with all the would-be themeshere. What could have been...

The theme we were assigned, Dark fantasy maid, was... not my preferred choice, to say the least. Not the worst, mind you, but still. To me, maids are quite boring. It's either gonna be "Your maid who obeys you" or "Your maid who disobeys you". Ruan is the former, as long as you're his superior.

I also felt somewhat held back by the stipulations of this event. His role as the DPS forced me to change him from muscular to slender, which may make him more unnerving in a creepy sense, but I also never capitalized on it enough. If I'd had another pass on his appearance and description, I'd made him even more gangly, less badger-wolf and more wendigo. The DPS role also forced me to remove a lot of the self-hate aspect, where he'd tank damage because he was "just a beast". Making him work together in a group also required adjustment, making him more "shut up and let me do my job" instead of "I'm going to kill you if you stand in my way".

In the end, Ruan is a card I never would've made if it wasn't for this event. Which is exactly what events should do, make you try something new and maybe outside of what you usually make!

Also, for some reason nobody questioned or even noted that I was making a male maid, both during writing and after release. We have a very tolerant community! Or maybe everyone was so scared of his appearance that they didn't dare comment.

The Group Card

The group card was a tricky thing to get going. Before we could even begin on it, we had to have everything locked in, no more major alterations for characters, locations or the setting. We also had to coordinate so that people wouldn't start writing similar greetings for it. Or rather, that was the plan. Instead, what actually happened is that I did all the work on the group card.

To put it simply, I doubt anyone else in my group wanted to do a group card. Either that, or they didn't have the energy. No matter their reasons, they were actually right in not working on it. Making a group card of these three was stupid! It made no sense and I only wrote it out of sheer force of will, putting unnecessary stress on me and pointless expectations on the others. I should've stopped to consider whether I should've done it, instead of just jumping in because I could do it.

If I had to do this kind of event again, with a group card, I'd make sure that we all had characters that could play off one another. We'd make our cards with the other characters in mind in the planning phase. When we were writing up our characters this time, the group card was still a question mark, and because of the limited communication methods we had at the beginning it was difficult to discuss minute details.

Timezones

Which brings us to... timezones!
Like the host mentioned in his ownAAR, timezones were an issue. How in the world was I supposed to communicate effectively when I went to bed when my teammates came home? There's not much else for me to say, others have also said the same and it seems like the common consensus is that the next time an event like this comes, people will be posting their timezones/regions when they apply, which would be for the best.

The Good

So, what went well for us, exactly?

• Communication/Planning: Everyone kept in touch, we understood what we were doing, everyone was informed of what was going on and nobody misunderstood the task or failed to understand the world we were building. Also, very polite!
• Completion: We actually made it! Without any huge hiccups. It's not always that happens in group projects.
• Participation: Everyone participated. People didn't just run off to work on their own cards, ignoring the rest of the group.

The Bad

And what went less so well for us?

• Platform: Communicating through email and Miro was very unwieldy. Next time, start off with a service like Slack or Discord where you can instantly chat with others and share files. This is especially important if you want to do something that's more convoluted than just individual cards.
• Planning: I think we all were excited to start working on the world and cards, so we spent very little time discussing how we wanted the cards to interact with each other, how much interconnectivity, so on. We established rules, sure, but the world itself ended up feeling more like MMO regions than an actual place.

Final Notes

Here's some thoughts and notes to finish this off:

Understanding what you want to have in your group project, and the knock-on effects changes may have is highly important. If you want to have a shared world, it'll be very important for you to define this world before creating characters in it, as if the world is still undefined or you make major changes, you might have to go back and edit characters. I think this is one of the things we did well, we established a world and rules early so that any and all edits that needed to be made were caught quickly. Same thing with the character cards, the characters were locked in when I went over to make the group card.

Character synergy would be neat to have, our three ended up being very separate. I mainly blame this on us using Miro at the start, it really wasn't the place where you could have detailed discussions. This caused us all to just drop a blurb of what we wanted our characters to be, and then to get to work! And meanwhile, voting on stuff for the world. It was pretty jumbled at first, but we managed to get it to work. On a new project, I'd like to see a small part of the planning process where everyone in the group presents their ideas, and then people can discuss, ask questions and provide feedback.

Specialization! Right at the start of the event, my thoughts were not on the character card I was going to make, actually. It was on the group card, I thought it would be something interesting to have. One of my first thoughts was to create some kind of expansion pack toBYOTTRPG, but any and all fun ideas fell to the wayside as the reality of organizing the project and making sure we got everything done set in.
My point with this is that we were three people, tasked with creating an RPG party with a specific theme. But does that mean we have to make three characters? Or that each member has to make a card? No! We can specialize! Imagine a world where two of the creators make characters, and one makes an RPG card with mechanics, CSS and more fitting those characters? Or, you could just delegate. Someone likes to worldbuild? Let them write the lorebook! Someone likes to draw? Congratulations, you have a designated card artist! One person just likes to beat their meat to bots? Put them on playtest duty! ...On second thought, maybe don't do that last one. But you get what I mean!

The End!

Last but not least, I want to thank my team and, the host and everyone who participated. I've only tried out a few of the cards myself so far, but some of them look great! You can find all the submissions (and a little more)here.

As we hadn't done an event like this before, I think it's a fair assumption to say that people were holding back. But next time, I think we'll see a much crazier cards, concepts, mechanics and so on. And I'll be here for it!
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