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Sylvester Archipelago

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#2140
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First of all: yesterday's event was the action of only one player, so please, do not perceive it as the mood of everyone else and do not let it become an obstacle to the rest of the game.
Now, having woken up in the morning, I admit that I could have acted like a complete jerk, so I think it is necessary to explain myself. It is important to note that my assessment is primarily the opinion of a player, not the game master: I myself have had both good and definitely bad games, it is not about comparison and certainly not about the fact that I think "it should have been done differently." Everything below is just the result of my impressions and thoughts as a person who was a player.
First, I will be honest when I say that, in my opinion, on a mechanical level (the absence of chaos in the character generation system, beautiful descriptions, timely responses, a clear system of actions, etc.), "Sylvester's Archipelago" is, dare I say, the best of all expeditions conducted on this forum. After Sarael's death, I was upset, but I was still going to continue playing, because I love expeditions with a burning passion, and I also wanted to help Neb in developing the plot. However, yesterday, when it was confirmed that Lutiel was a member of the order, and he was actually hanging out in the arena, it made me think about things I didn't want to think about. Megerson once wrote a post that the players' characters did not complete a single quest; I think this was in response to a discussion about the game being "too easy." But I had a different impression, which reached its peak in the dungeons of Cornut and was reinforced a few days later. It seemed to me that the story was not about the players' characters. It's not that the actions of our players are insignificant, but that the plot is not centered on them. If you take some fisherman, you can make a whole film about him, it will be a boring story about the life of an insignificant person, but it will be about him.
What I'm actually saying. For me, the two best moments in this game are the robbery of the shop by the adventurers and the rescue of the elf Sarael. Question: why? Because these were small stories about the players' characters. We ourselves shaped our destiny, chose options, thought about actions, worried in our own way during moments of anticipation, and rejoiced when we succeeded. In comparison, the dungeon of Cornut: Sarael and Tiberius were NOT NEEDED there. Their presence or absence did not affect anything at all. To make my thought clearer: I could complain a million times about the reason for our deaths, say that, in theory, seeing a crowd of enemies, I should have been able to grab Tiberius and jump into the shadows before they shot (because they clearly weren't sitting there in ambush), but I didn't do it. Why? For example, because their initiative is higher than ours, and that's the result. Well, and we really didn't ask for a magic shield, or get drunk on potions. In any case, the death was FAIR, and I have no complaints about it as such, besides, I do not think that a player should argue with the game master, because the game master makes the game for the players, and not vice versa. So why was I so unhappy with the process? This brings us back to what I wrote a little earlier: our characters were not needed. Lucia could have done everything herself, and regardless of our presence, the result would have been the same, we could only choose the tunnels, where we were unlucky enough to choose the fateful number eight. And now a deeper and more unpleasant thought: if I, say, had not been online that day, or had simply not appeared in the topic: my character would have remained alive. That is, he died because of activity. It can be said that the player is to blame for going to such a dangerous place, he could have refused, but here's the catch: Tiberius and Sarael were given a task by their employer: to find Zalatov and Bruttius. And he gave this task specifically to them, even though he has three people on his ship who are a hundred times stronger than these two losers. Having found information about the missing, they returned to the ship, and, if I'm not mistaken (I didn't reread the topic), Lucia said to Tiberius in such a way, "let's go save them." He didn't have much choice (in terms of RP), because that's his task, and his employer disappeared somewhere, and no one said that he just went to watch the fights in the arena (after saying that he would join us later). My character, accordingly, could not just stay on the ship, so he went to look for Tiberius. Lucia could have simply told us not to interfere, for example, because, objectively, as I already said, we were not needed in this dungeon, either mechanically or in terms of the plot. We had the opportunity to choose a room number, but this only played a role in whether we would survive or not, because even if we fail, the result will be exactly the same as if we were not there: Lucia will do everything herself (this can also be understood by the fact that Lutiel was calmly entertaining himself, which means he was sure that Zalatov would be saved). We were not needed there, everything would have happened anyway.
My head is spinning, but I hope I was able to express my thoughts in a clear form. To put it briefly, everything written above: in this film, I feel like a viewer, not an actor.
Yesterday, when I thought about all this, I decided that I didn't want to continue playing in this way (again, I want to emphasize that this is exclusively my unwillingness at the moment, and not the entire gaming party), at the same time, I didn't want to make my character an NPC (I may not have had time to play him, but I still made this person, at some point thinking about the details of the role-playing, I started to get close to him during the writing of the quest), and I didn't want to go and drown myself for no reason, so I did what I did, even if it had only minimal justification. I will always play my character until he breathes his last, his story is completed (let's say, if Sarael decides to swim home), he becomes unplayable (let's say, he is mind-controlled or turned into a zombie), or if the GM doesn't want to lead me.
And one last thing: this is not a complaint of the type "it should have been done differently/better," it is just an explanation of my own actions, impressions, and thoughts.

tl;dr: Continue the game as if nothing happened, don't pay attention to me; Neb Revan does not have any negative emotions towards me and does not want to quarrel with him in any way.