Now this might seem like a silly complaint, but we basically played this entire quest hampered by mental hangups we didn't properly know about until this arc. We knew little glimpses, a few broad strokes, but that's it. This entire quest has been us walking around with a ball and chain tied around our leg, except we are kept in the dark of the sheer size and weight of it. We try to drag ourselves with the little knowledge we gleaned, not knowing it was doomed from the start, because the weight is too heavy. And we naturally trip up, again and again. If we knew what we are dealing with from the start, I certainly would have voted much differently on several occasions.
In my opinion, you had an interesting story to tell with DPoC. But it was ill suited for a quest. You should have just made this an original work without player input.
I don't think that's a silly complaint at all. I've struggled a lot with what to reveal to you guys. I've tried to give you enough information to let you make reasonably informed decisions, but there's always going to be stuff I've missed, or stuff that I just don't have, because I didn't have the whole story planned out when I started DPoC. If that has significantly impacted your enjoyment of the quest then that's completely fair, and that's on me.
The only argument I'll make towards my defense on this point is this: I think you can place pretty much every quest on a sliding scale between two points, "game" and "interactive story." DPoC is definitely pretty far onto the "interactive story" end, and thus my focus isn't as much on providing you with resources you can leverage to win (knowledge of your past can sort of be looked at like that, if you squint) and more with providing you enough that you understand what's going on and can empathize with Mordred and what he's going through. Which is why your next few sentences seriously worry me.
Now we are being lectured at about how everyone is equally tied down and we should show more understanding. But that misses the point. We the players aren't Mordred. Mordred problem was that he didn't empathize enough with his mother and the knights. Ours was that we weren't able to empathize with Mordred, to understand him.
Are you guys really having trouble empathizing with Mordred? I ask because I seriously hadn't even considered this an issue - from my readings of the comments, people have rallied behind Mordred again and again, even when he might not necessarily deserve it. When you say you can't understand Mordred, do you mean you can't see where he's coming from, or are you saying you feel like you've lost control of him as a player character?
And the fact you keep bringing it back to Mordred's mistakes rather than the root problem of the fundamental miscommunication between you and the player base is problematic. We aren't lashing out at the Knights because we failed to understand them, we are lashing out because we have to sit through the Knights judgement for choices either made without vital knowledge or choices we never made at all.
This is the only part of your comment I seriously disagree with, because Mordred's big "mistake" that he is being hammered for this arc was his decision to overthrow Camelot, which was a reader choice. "A Rogue, Undecided" was one of the very first decisions made in the quest, and it very explicitly tells you that Mordred rebelled against his mother and also
wasn't a hero.
He wasn't a villain either, don't get me wrong. But right from the start there were a lot of anti-Artura, Anti-Camelot comments. I think it's fair to say that a lot of people assumed the worst about the Knights from the very beginning, because they liked Mordred and wanted to paint his actions in a favorable light. Which suited me just fine, because y'all were playing a character who assumed the worst about the Knights and wanted to paint his actions in a favorable light. But that doesn't mean those instincts were necessarily right.
I guess I just want to finish my piece here by saying I'm sorry you feel like you're "tripping up." I promise you're not being punished for making the wrong choices. Things aren't going well for Mordred right now, sure. His life's in danger, he's surrounded by people that either hate his guts or just mistrust him, and he's getting repeatedly hit in the face with some of his worst memories, but he's not doomed. And he doesn't have to come out of this decided that his mom was right and he was wrong and he should've just fallen in line like a good little soldier - but I do think he has to come out of this
changed, because ever since he woke up in the modern age he's been looking at the Breakfast Club and asking himself "who are these people and what do they mean to me" but only now is he actually seeking to answer that.
Thank you for responding like this, by the way - I really value the criticism, because I genuinely want to learn from writing DPoC. It's important to me that I understand what ya'll feel about the story and why.
Curious though how that works. Does that mean if Mordred remembers all the memories of Lorelei in the past while thinking about Lucy, he'll suffer the same block. I hadn't thought mechanically about how Mathew plans to break the spell, but maybe he intends to make Mordred remember the events they just experienced again, except force him to associate Lorelei as Lucy while remembering them.
The memory block affecting you is functionally very similar to the memory block you placed on the Breakfast Club. They could see Mordred, they could see Morgan, but they couldn't really connect the two in their heads. You can see Lorelei, you can see Lucy, but you can't figure out what they have to do with each other, even if the answer should be blindingly obvious at first glance.
