Pace of court

[Kitsu Sayomi]

First I just wanna say that I took the crazy decision of moving this from GM Questions and to its own thread.

Second, I also wanna say that I am enjoying the court system (even if it needs some kinks worked out) as it helps us avoid the "no you"-back and forth arguing or just one roll to dominate them all. Thank you!

And thirdly...

So, posting schedules and court threads being as they are...

If you have an agreement to present to the Court, but are always waiting on existing business to be cleared due to being asleep the last time there was an opening, when do you slap it up?

It's proving more difficult than I anticipated to balance giving players an opportunity to participate in debate and moving things along. We've had a situation where a person has rolled for a debate position but we've posted an NPC and wrapped things up on a debate before she got a chance to post it. That's not great. And we've got this larger problem where deals are experiencing a bottleneck, and that's not great either.

We've tended to err on the side of letting things marinate a bit. We do have 10 more court dates over the course of court. Realistically, 8 of those are days for general business. We will almost certainly get to everybody over the course of that time. On the other hand, I can certainly start stepping things up if there's a consensus that it's better to be more efficient than to allow for possibly greater participation.

We could also consider ghosting a presentation as an option, if you wish. It doesn't strike me as ideal, but I'm not sure that there is a way to do this that's going to work ideally for everybody.

One thought I have for going forward is maybe, after making a roll, I'll post a placeholder with the roll and then work in my actual response. So I don't "lose my spot" so to speak as I formulate my post after having rolled?

[Cearnach]

Shinnosuke has suggested the following: Totally spitballing here, but is there a workable way to run multiple court issues in parallel rather than one at a time? Either by having more than one thing on the floor at once, or breaking out into sub-threads, or something?

This could solve some issues, but I have a queasy feeling that we'd be out of things to do in court by Day 9.

Ryusei advocates ghosting by writing out a full post with roll in a private forum and having gms transfer across to the court thread as an opening happens.

This could also solve some issues. For a moment, I was nervous because which deal do you post first if there are several in the queue, but the answer seems to me to be timestamps on the private forum post.

[Asahina Hoshiko]

I have a half written proposal I started on when D2 demonstrated that later court was likely to bottleneck horribly. As one of the folks with limited posting time, I have some vested interest in the process too, I'll admit.

iirc, When we ran Kyuden Agasha, we required trade deal presentations to be scheduled ahead of time. With the very regular day change time you all have been sticking to, it should be pretty easy to set a cutoff for 'items on the agenda' from PCs. At which point I note that ghosting isn't just for combat.

If something is set up in advance, the opening post can be tucked into a ghosting instructions PF so GMs can drop it into court. Most such things can even be rolled for ahead of time, but...like combat, sometimes that isn't as feasible and there'd need to be instructions left for a GM roll.

This also lets people get their supporters organized ahead of time (which feels very court appropriate). And if GMs have a general decision-tree of "this is getting enough support and the NPC will close out and carry on," Might need a system for randomly picking 3 of the 5 supporters and telling the other 2 to use their actions elsewhere. Fine tuning.

Refuting, however, kind of ends up as an in-the-moment thing. This feels 'realistic' in that refuting is generally reactive. Might also allow for some side-chatter that isn't part of the court action system to allow for more of the spontaneous ebb and flow of court, if you're worried about that. (I'm not, particularly, that's what the Gallery is for) Possibly an agenda of topics could be posted that lets people go "I am likely to refute this one!"

The kind of adding additional points that happened with the push for the Seppun wind to resign would also likely remain rather in-the-moment.

Offerings are even easier and could honestly get their own side thread, or be dropped in at the end of the court session. I suppose there might be controversial offerings at some point. But again, having to queue up backstage lets GMs review them and say "that one goes in main court."

If you don't want pre-day setup, a 'raise your hand' system the day of could work. Either an ooc thread for folks to drop in, or an ic post of queuing up/waiting for attention.

And finally, but not my fave. Subthreads off to the side would allow each topic its own space to run concurrent with the rest. It breaks up the feel of court in a way I'm not fond of, requires a lot more GM attention to watch 7 threads vs. one, but is pretty pragmatic.

Hope this all makes sense. Writing kind of fast as I finish dinner and try to catch up on a pile of posts!

[Asahina Hoshiko]

Shinnosuke has suggested the following: Totally spitballing here, but is there a workable way to run multiple court issues in parallel rather than one at a time? Either by having more than one thing on the floor at once, or breaking out into sub-threads, or something?

This could solve some issues, but I have a queasy feeling that we'd be out of things to do in court by Day 9.

Ryusei advocates ghosting by writing out a full post with roll in a private forum and having gms transfer across to the court thread as an opening happens.

This could also solve some issues. For a moment, I was nervous because which deal do you post first if there are several in the queue, but the answer seems to me to be timestamps on the private forum post.

And I wasn't writing fast enough so most of this is a repeat. XD But yes timestamps for deals. Plus, you don't get to be in the deal queue until all the pre-court prereqs are met. This saves dealing with folks who want to present on dayX but couldn't get some piece finished in time and now the schedule is a bit messed up.

And I sort of doubt we'll run out by Day 9. But you could set a limit of deals per day? With the non-deal stuff filling in the remainder.

[Yasuki Ryoichi]

You could, I dunno, have everyone who wants to bring something up in court "file with the Imperial Herald" ahead of time, then when court begins make everyone roll Initiative - rolling Influence, keeping Status. Then resolve issues in Initiative order.