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So... what made you decide to handle the Moriarty situation the way you did?

Dana wrote:For example, I had had that Morgan reficcing Moriarty script written for months. MONTHS. But events in the game were changing so that she wouldn't necessarily be so angry with him to do it...until Qara came up with the Sherlock Holmes gambit. I was 10000000 happy.

From this, I gather that Holmes' plan would never have worked and you intended it to fail all along. Were you also intending to introduce the alternate refic at that point? What made you decide to pace out the revelations like you did, instead of just letting us know how Moriarty had been reficced all at once? Did our reaction to what was going on change how you handled it at all?

We paced it according to how long it would have taken in real time.

We decided to handle the refic the way we did - with switching out the fics - because it would have been Morgan's biggest beef with doing it after already agreeing to refic him for the good of humanity.

I'll leave the rest to Tom.

This story was incredibly difficult to orchestrate, since we had so many options. Do we pick a joint refic? If we don't, do we do both single-shot refics? What happens if the refic implies communication between stories and Le Fey isn't back yet? What happens if the refics contradict each other?

The latter seemed especially pressing to me. In my personal opinion, the Moriarty refic story was the strongest refic we ever received. I could not have justified not using it.

All those questions had to be answered, and the refics made public, in an order that would allow the gambits to take place. If LJS had posted "it is done" before Holmes's refic went up, that would have been a disaster. The timing of each of the reveals was crucial to the telling of the story.

Every story has a crisis before the resolution. The thing I was proudest of with the nested gambit Moriarty refic storyline was that its darkest hour came immediately before its brightest. The plan looked surest to fail when, in fact, total success was minutes away.

I did not anticipate the reaction the refic got, because I thought players would be genre savvy enough to know it wasn't over, and to know we weren't going to just asspull a Diabolus Ex Machina. Holmes going back and Moriarty getting off scott-free? Nothing that severe would ever happen to you guys without you getting a chance to prevent it. I am surprised no one realized more was coming.

We wouldn't change a story element based on threats about quitting if the story goes a direction players don't like. The one thing that did give me pause was your post, Dil, where you expressed concern. Dana and I talked about that for a little bit, because if you, the fic's author, had reservations, then perhaps it was worth rereading the material we had lined up for the end.

We did end up tweaking some of the presentation of the final reveal, but the substance of it was not different. The consequences were basically the same.

Tom wrote:I did not anticipate the reaction the refic got, because I thought players would be genre savvy enough to know it wasn't over, and to know we weren't going to just asspull a Diabolus Ex Machina. Holmes going back and Moriarty getting off scott-free? Nothing that severe would ever happen to you guys without you getting a chance to prevent it. I am surprised no one realized more was coming.

I fully anticipated the reaction it got. People got plenty freaked and upset when all I'd done was said that I planned to kill Holmes. At that point I didn't even have a real concept for the story yet, and people were already pissed off at me for it. By the time I finished writing the story it was much darker and more cruel than I had originally intended. When I opened up the forum and saw that my Moriarty refic had been posted... I just said "Oh shit" to an empty room.

Tom wrote:We did end up tweaking some of the presentation of the final reveal, but the substance of it was not different. The consequences were basically the same.

So, a specific clarification: The Owl Creek element was already part of your plans before the fallout started?

If there is actually something I regret about the refictionalization process, it's that we didn't find a way to justify our players writing a tragic stories more often, as Mr. A's line about happy endings was taken as a requirement. I personally think well-executed tragic stories can be super interesting, but in the context of our game there was quite a bit of fridge horror tied to it.

So I'm really happy we got a few that pulled it off, even if I wish the reaction had been more pleasant.

narrativedilettante wrote:

Tom wrote:We did end up tweaking some of the presentation of the final reveal, but the substance of it was not different. The consequences were basically the same.

So, a specific clarification: The Owl Creek element was already part of your plans before the fallout started?

We actually discussed this before any of the 'fics came in. It was always a possibility that we foresaw. In fact, Morgan alluded to it well before anyone had been refictionalized.