The volume also left much to be desired, but unfortunately,
part of that was just the problem with the audio-visual equipment. You can click THIS LINK to see more about
what I've learned thus far about audio-visual equipment from earlier Cassandra
sessions. Trust me, if you're planning
to use it in a LARP you will want to know what to worry about. Three sessions and I still haven't gotten it
quite right!
My text slides were just fine (slightly long time-wise for
me but fine for others) and adding sub-titles to the video clips worked out
great. Unfortunately they were all too
quiet (the last more than most) compared to the surrounding music so although
Nurse Cassandra was meant to arrive before or after them to dispense the
Emotion Cards and otherwise be creepy, I had to instead crouch OOC by the
volume controls and turn it up once the video clips were going, then let the
following song be loud as I did my Cassandra thing post-clip. Then I had to remember to go over and turn it
down. Now my video editing program does
allow me to turn up the volume on certain clips but sitting at home in front of
the computer they didn't seem to be all that different. Always road test your clips at the volume
they'll be playing at during the game.
The clips also weren't quite spaced far enough apart, but
since we started half an hour late because of a last minute Windows Update that
took forever (remember to switch off auto-updates) and the player with the backup
laptop had already said they would be late, I was already skipping through some
of the blank spaces to condense the recordings to fit. There were basically five sets of text slides
followed by video clips, which was a bit much (I know!) but in truth the number
of them seemed a bit fine. Their
duration was okay, too, it was more of a spacing thing.
Of course out of the few players I've polled so far, one
player thought the timing was perfect as they'd keep flicking up just as she'd
run out of stuff to do, another player thought they were too tightly packed at the
beginning and another too tightly packed at the end. Since they were all roughly as separate as
each other, I'd have to say that it's simply a matter of when you have the most
to do. If you're busier at the start,
they're intrusive. If you're busier at
the end, they're intrusive.
Thankfully as it's a campaign LARP, it's not a deal breaker,
but if this were a one shot I'd really either use fewer or have it something
the characters can trigger in small groups as they please, such as if they have
access to a laptop that plays it small and they can just turn them on and off
as they please. Probably the latter, so
it's not intrusive and people can interact with them at their leisure whenever
they've got some downtime or run out of stuff to do.
Anyway, the other problem I had as a GM is that since the
players are so spread out, I can only catch snippets of their roleplay and seem
to spend so much time simply moving across the space that I just never can pull
together a meaningful storyline of any of the characters. Since I was only called on as a GM about a
dozen times in the space of three and a half hours, you'd think I would have
witnessed far more than I did. Luckily
my players have made a big point of telling me anecdotes.
So as you'll notice over in the write up at THIS LINK, many
of the points are briefly described because I didn't really see them.
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