[@tsukune]

Good to know the exams are almost over, and yeah, you've mentioned the job to me before. [s]I'm totally not jealous of people who get payed to write. Considering how much work I do each day without payment, yeah... Lol.[/s]

Honestly, a long collaboration like that one's inevitable. This is an advanced role-play, meaning that really long posts are to be expected, and anyone who's got complaints about having a lot to read shouldn't be in advanced role-plays to begin with -- 'TL;DR' mentality doesn't exist for advanced writers, and I made this very clear in the interest check. Not saying you're complaining about it, but just pointing out that it's not surprising to get long posts. The biggest problem was the delays getting it started, which largely came down to my technology issues. Also, this collaboration evolved from just some group post until the post that closes a chapter, and the additional stuff that got added into it due to our discussion over Discord made it significantly longer too. Anyway, if you think this is long, just imagine how many pages a collaboration will be when a good portion of our group's part of it.

With the voting system:

You've pretty much just confirmed what I said. When you get technical about it, the murder mystery system involving freely deducing and investigating the culprit are actually far more classic than the idea of a voting system. What people don't seem to realize is that both systems would be happening at the same time, if the voting system was used at all.

Anyway, like you, I personally prefer real time deduction/investigation over using a voting system, but my attitude towards whether this system is used or not is pretty much exactly what I brought up with [@aviendha] already. We don't need to worry about people mixing IC drama with OOC drama, because this group's mostly civil and the rules have already stated I'll kill people who behave like this (and unlike people who die due to IC development, those who die for breaking OOC rules won't have the luxury of staying in play after death). While I can't see what goes on behind the scenes, so I don't know if there's bickering in our group OOC, any indicating that a character is attacking another character in the IC without IC development justifying it will be punished.

Really, my only concern for allowing the punishment of culprits - after a successful murder, since there's ways the murderer can die during their attempts - to be left entirely in the hands of the players is the concern that it makes things too easy for the protagonists. I've made no secret of the fact that Bonaparte brought you all here to have you die, so why would he create a scenario that he can't possibly win? All it'd take is for the whole cast to decide not to use initiative in dealing with the murderer(s) in their group, and the amount of people dying would be massively reduced or at least largely slowed down. The only thing that the voting system added was ensuring that the game actually moved forward without it being easy to survive. Thankfully, I've been developing plenty of other ways that the players could die, so the system isn't too important, but I still think this has been a concern we needed to all discuss.

Anyway, it's seeming pretty apparent that my opinion that we should remove this system (it's why I brought it up) is being validated by people's responses. You two (Tsu and aviendha) are both people who expressed preferring we not use this system to me either in PM or over Skype, but - like I mentioned in my last post - I wanted people to give their thoughts here directly so the whole group could see everything on the table. I didn't want to just post 'hey guys, I'm removing the voting system after it's been an established feature for months now', so having a discussion made more sense to me. It's meaningless if people don't contribute though.

[@Ailyn Evensen]

Don't beat yourself up, Amanda. At least you're contributing, and even if you didn't realize it you've actually made a rather good point. There's plenty of reasons to [i]remove[/i] the voting system, but so far no one's chosen to - or been able to - provide a reason why it's a good idea to [i]keep[/i] it. The closest thing to a good reason is my comments about not wanting it to be too easy for the players to survive, which I'm plotting multiple solutions for and I'm open to people's comments regarding. So, actually, you've contributed more than you think. Honestly, there's only so many things people can contribute anyway, and I'm mostly just looking for everyone's feelings about the system. My mind's been inclined to remove it for months now, and I'm just waiting for people's thoughts.