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2014 Dual Scale Spring Event -- Ancient Rites -- WHW, May 3rd

Started by Koval, September 28, 2013, 10:35:23 PM

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Molotov

Quotewhich is, ironically, all i take away from any inq28 thread and alot of your posts (including that one)

Well, apologies. I am not the sort to litter my writing with emoticons, and I'm not given to riddling my posts with asterisks, appendices and the like. In that sense I can come across as blunt sometimes, and I'm sorry about that. I certainly have never tried to say INQ28 is better than INQ54 - without the latter, the former would never exist. My stated aim from the start of my blog was to show that the two could stand side-by-side. Hence why I always used PrecinctOmega's line - that INQ28, done properly, is at least the equal of its big brother.

That was why I bolded that particular part of your quote - because I'm all-too-aware that appearances can be deceptive, and that we can have preconceptions lumped upon us by others, often without being aware of them. Sometimes, the most important thing to do is to call those preconceptions to light so that they can be challenged and dismissed.

QuoteI personally find your organised events Molotov to more unwelcoming when you clearly stated that attendance was dependant contributions that would be deemed "worthy" of warranting an invitation

Yes, I have. I'm not especially that repentant about that - as I said in my previous post, I have very few gaming days available to me, and so I wanted to make sure that these days were of a high quality. Is there some moral obligation to make my events open to any Tom, Dick or Harry? My stated aim was to champion narrative integrity, and I think that's gone particularly well. The Helios Succession was a success, and given that we had a lot more people in 2013, I think that also went well. As for the "worth" of people? Well, that's actually nothing to do with the quality of models, but with people being willing to devote time to helping one another on the forum. It was simply that golden rule: be kind to one another. The people who contributed, and became part of that "family", were invited to attend. People who valued story over winning, and were of a like mind. That's how I can say that the INQ28 events have been some of my favourite times in my gaming life.

But that is also why I have always been careful to say that the INQvitationals (et al) are not Ammobunker events. The moderators over at the Ammobunker have very kindly hosted a sub-forum that is of incredible worth. But my views are my own - and I would expect all tournament organisers to be the same. For that reason, I would perhaps move away from lumping all INQ28 players together (there are some in America, for example, that I will likely never meet) and instead would use a term like "The Dalthan Group" or the like. My events may have seemed elitist, but the required barrier for entry isn't particularly arduous. Mark's Leeds events are obviously very different in ways - I wouldn't say his events are representative of mine, nor mine of his. But that is still his perogative. Even so, I am sorry you've had negative experiences with INQ28 players.

As Koval has said numerous times, we are all playing the same game. These differences are lamentable and, I hope, can be resolved. And as said previously, I hope that Koval's event works well.
INQ28 Thread | INQ28 Blog
INQ28, done properly, is at least the equal of its big brother - and Mol is one of the expert proponents of "done properly".
- precinctomega

MarcoSkoll

Quote from: Molotov on September 30, 2013, 09:41:14 AMI haven't had many pleasant experiences with 54mm players, however. The Conclave is an arrogant and elitist institution - or has a reputation as seeming so. Historically, it has done nothing but fleer and scorn INQ28 and Inquisimunda when it could have set up subforums to host the nascent community.
Historically, what some people have done with 28mm and Inquisitor in the past have however been fairly poor ways to play the game.

When "what was the worst GW game" threads show up on other forums, you'll usually get someone talking about Inquisitor with an example like their GM threw a Devastator squad with Razorback into a game and was basically railroading all the players into being thrashed. That's an actual example I recall, and while it was never stated to be 28mm, I'm betting it was - there aren't a lot of 54mm Rhino chassis out there.

Yes, people - myself included - dramatically overreacted by becoming unfairly cynical to all 28mm play, forgetting that these horror stories were a smaller fraction than was apparent (due to the inherent selection bias of people being more likely to complain than compliment), but even if the reasons were exaggerated, they weren't inexplicable.

QuoteThis is a situation where the Conclave's owner wrote an article for Fanatic condemning the use of 40k models in Inquisitor.
Although the wording is not perhaps what Saussure meant, I don't exactly disagree with the statement. Inquisitor models can be 28mm, 54mm or anything above, below or between, but they generally shouldn't be straight out of the WH40K game.

Now, I could delete that article from the archives, but I'm not going to - the archive, or at least that part of it, isn't about what I do or don't agree with. There are a lot of things in there I think are wrong, but it's not the Inquisitor archive as censored by MarcoSkoll.

Quotebut there are still plenty of comments that showed people were contemptuous.
People here don't have to be united in their opinions, nor do people have to hold the same opinion all their life! There is of course that old saying: "Ask three people and you'll get given four opinions".

This desire to reunite the scales of Inquisitor may seem to be a bit "come crawling back", but if you're going to point fingers regarding where the motivations came from, you're probably pointing in my direction.
No, I'm not the only person trying to achieve it, but I'm one of the people who started trying to achieve it.

Am I driven by a desire to help stop or slow Inquisitor's death?
Yes, that is a strong part of my reasoning. However, I've been trying to do strengthen and support Inquisitor in various forms for the last five years, so it's not any marriage of convenience - I genuinely enjoy both scales and feel both would be strengthened by greater unity.

QuoteWhen I tried to help Kaled unite both scales, Conclavers outright refused to move Carthax - posters threw their toys out of the pram. Keravin attended a Conclave event and found it to be an event where he wasn't welcomed particularly.
It's not really any more practical to move Carthax than it would be to move Dalthus. Both sectors have people who've written things tying them to their galactic locations.

Admittedly, Carthax also has some anatopic oddities, like the Ultramarines having brought the sector into line, but the entirety of GW literature is scattered with such things. An example I've used previously is the 2nd war for Armageddon, where the three chapters that turn up to help are all First Legions with home worlds in the Ultima Segmentum, not Solar.

However, frankly, if we wanted to clear that up, it'd probably be a smaller retcon to change the Legion in question to the Death Guard or Raven Guard (both of whom are homed in the right Segmentum).

But one alternative for that that I've considered recently is that it was perhaps actually one of the Unknown Legions. One of those legions could plausibly have been based in Pacificus, and given the Astartes from those Legions have been implied to have been incorporated into the Ultramarines later on, their legion's official removal from the records would mean that present records would probably show them as Ultramarines and no-one 10 000 years on would be any the wiser.


And I am sorry that things weren't great for Keravin, but with a final turnout of six (plus myself), the Twin Arches event was never going to be a high for Inquisitor eventing.

QuoteIn an ideal world, united events would be the norm. But to suggest that it is all on the INQ28 community's truculence or refusal to cooperate is naive or dangerous. Mainly because it assumes yet again that we have to do things the Conclave's way.
On the note of "three people, four opinions", I'm not sure there is any big one "Conclave way" but, assuming such a universal agreement can exist, what would be the "Ammobunker way" of doing things?

Dual scale events are going to be at least somewhat reliant on players with active interest in both scales to really get put into gear, and I can't think of many such players on Ammobunker who don't also have a Conclave history.

QuoteWhat would it do if people on the Conclave admitted they have a bad reputation?
To be honest, I wrote up something like that to head my Ammobunker topic regarding a new 2nd edition effort (hoping that lessening my reputation for being something of a braggart might mean more people might contribute), but eventually cut almost the entirety of it because "I know I have a bad reputation, but I'd appreciate your feedback" had the potential to come across like "I have a bad reputation because you don't listen to me".

After all, I've had a few run-ins on Ammobunker already, with more than a few statements not being read quite how I intended.

However, I think the best answer can be summed up quite promptly:

Quote from: Keravin on September 30, 2013, 11:18:50 AMTo be honest both groups need to get past themselves and maybe stop dragging up the past quite as much.
S.Sgt Silva Birgen: "Good evening, we're here from the Adeptus Defenestratus."
Captain L. Rollin: "Nonsense. Never heard of it."
Birgen: "Pick a window. I'll demonstrate".

GW's =I= articles

Heroka Vendile

#32
My personal responses to Molotov: on the state of inter-forum relations, events and forum history

Quote from: Molotov on September 30, 2013, 09:41:14 AM
I have no problem with Inq54 modelling or gaming, and indeed I have 54mm models of my own that are half-completed. Equally, I have no problem with INQ54 (or dual-scale) events. I haven't had many pleasant experiences with 54mm players, however. The Conclave is an arrogant and elitist institution - or has a reputation as seeming so. Historically, it has done nothing but fleer and scorn INQ28 and Inquisimunda when it could have set up subforums to host the nascent community. And my worry, Kaled, is that your suggestions are a bit "too little, too late."

This attitude, I believe, stems from the defensive stance that slowly developed as GW steadily strangled Specialist Games. It became a matter of principle that the best way to ensure Inquisitor survived and stood out from the crowd was to encourage people to play it in the official scale. Just like the other SGs, the only way we could try and ensure GW would continue to give any form of official support was to make sales happened.

Although remember of course that (if not in the rulebook itself, certainly in one of the launch articles in White Dwarf) there was a clear statement by Gav Thorpe that the rules were fluid enough to be happily played at any scale. As indeed it has been, I remember reading that at one of USA Games Days a table was run with converted G.I.Joes as the Last Chancers using Inquisitor rules.

QuoteWhen I tried to help Kaled unite both scales, Conclavers outright refused to move Carthax - posters threw their toys out of the pram. Another attempt dashed. Keravin attended a Conclave event and found it to be an event where he wasn't welcomed particularly. Another attempt failed.
My stance was and remains "what does it matter?"
Like most Conclavers all my games in recent years come at the event weekends, self contained stories that, even if they have the same players as the previous event, half of them will probably have brought a different warband anyway because it's the only chance they get to try something different, so continuity is deliberately fast and loose.
Therefore in many ways an "ongoing saga" is irrellivant to players like myself, I don't really care if the scenario supposedly means my Inquisitor is half way across the galaxy from where he should be, I'm getting to player Inquisitor and that's all that matters to me. That's not to say I'm against Carthax or Dalthus, it's nice to have a defined place for the mess to happen, I just don't feel you should in any way be a slave to it if you just want to play a game.

Fundamentally, conclave events have always had a very "pick up and play" attitude – sometimes within a broad story framework for the day, but not always.

QuoteWith Dalthus, we have created a cohesive and integrated narrative that has been one of the highlights of my gaming life. There has been this insidious insinuation that INQ28 is somehow "lesser", that it "needs" the Conclave, but that's not true.
Again I suspect this comes from what is now ancient history, the fact that the Conclave is one of the surviving direct descendants of the original GW forums means that those who have been around since before GW handed the forums over to the fans will always view it as the "true home" online for Inquisitor. I guess one of the other things that will have perhaps resulted in a "haughty" appearance is that fact that as a game that often deals with the finer details of the setting – being accurate is held as important, resulting in the quick shooting down of the more "out-there" ideas that would appear quite regularily in the early years with the firm attitude of "no, that can't be done because X, Y & Z, also Abnett is rubbish". Charax inparticular had a personal reputation for this, being harsh but fundamentally correct in his assertions.

QuoteThe Conclave gets many new posters, and many yellow welcomes, but it doesn't ever manage to retain those posters. Why? On average, the Ammobunker forum gets more posts in a day than the Conclave does in a week. Why? 
To be fair, The Conclave deals exclusively in Inquisitor (and Witch Hunter), so if 'clavers want to post about their 40k/fantasy/infinity/etc. they have to go to an entirely separate forum, whereas Ammobunker has a larger all-inclusive ecosystem, but happens to have a significantly populated dedicated INQ28 sub-board. So ammobunker posters will likely go there and only there, whereas to come to the Conclave requires a further step, even if it's just a mental barrier rather than taking any longer to physically navigate to (and ensuring good communication and community online is all about ensuring the minimum number of experiential steps possible to get from A to B).


QuoteI feel Marco has worked hard to battle peoples' preconceptions of him. But there is, I think, a lot of distrust towards the Conclave - or to Conclavers.
This is something I've actually heard quite a lot of, through our over two years of weekly Dark Heresy sessions Skype, about Marco getting negative responses to his presence or voicing an opinion on Ammobunker, so as you say, can't really pin it all on 'clavers.

QuoteThe Conclave has historically run games with scoring, rather than games for the fun of it - why not allow players to come and have no-strings attached fun?
Scoring has only ever really been a thing for the IGT. I suppose the contacts cards used recently have been a sort of scoring, but only to determine which table a player ends on up in the final games.
It's all fun and games until someone shoots their own guy with a Graviton gun instead of the MASSIVE SPIDER.
The Order of Krubal
Rewards Of The Enemy

Heroka Vendile

My thoughts on a dual-scale event

Absolutely go for it.

If you can get a pool of NPCs etc in both scales and appropriate scenarios written, then players with a personal preference for either scale can still GM in the other without any issue, as well as "forcing" interaction with each other as opposed to effectively running two separate events side by side.

This kind of thing, as a launchpad, can't be strongly tied to either Carthax or Dalthus IMHO, it should instead be "sold" as something akin to:
The Inquisitor 13th Anniversary Shindig
a day of casual pick-up and play games and perhaps showcase a couple collections such as Molotov and Kaleds to really celebrate the breadth, variety and vitality at the heart of Inquisitor even now.
It's all fun and games until someone shoots their own guy with a Graviton gun instead of the MASSIVE SPIDER.
The Order of Krubal
Rewards Of The Enemy

Kaled

I had planned to not respond in this thread to let other people discuss what they wanted to get out of an event, so I'm sorry that my desire to play at 54mm seems to have been the cause of yet another resurgence of this old debate.

As I've said, I have nothing against people playing at 28mm - Molotov set out to prove that it could work and has succeeded admirably. However 54mm is the scale I've invested heavily in and given how infrequently I get to play, I would prefer to focus on that scale.

In the past I did try to come up with ways to bring the Inquisitor community together to do something fun and interesting. I went into it with what I think/hope were good intentions but I couldn't find a way to make it work. Early on I thought there was a lot we could gain and learn from each other; in very oversimplified terms, the Conclave had a lot of experience with the game and the Ammobunker had a ton of enthusiasm. Nowadays the Ammobunker has plenty of experienced players, they've run several very successful events, have a great shared background in Dalthus and the enthusiasm shows no sign of waning; meanwhile the Conclave has generally just declined. I do worry it may well be too late to build a 28mm community here - to be honest I've wondered for some time if it's too late to even save the existing community - however I've made plenty of friends through this forum who I enjoy playing games with and I'd like that to continue.

Perhaps I was too quick to oppose Koval's suggestion...  When I mentioned running a 54mm 'event' I put it in quotes to try to make it clear that I was not intending to run a proper event in competition with his, just something for those few people who weren't interested in playing at 28mm but who still wanted to play a couple of games and meet up with friends in the bar. Even if he does decide to make it a dual-scale event,  I'm more than happy it to be predominantly 28mm with 54mm as a sideshow - but I also see no reason why he or anyone else should feel the need to pander to my desire to play 54mm when organising an event (though obviously I'd like it if they do!).
I like to remember things my own way... Not necessarily the way they happened.

Inquisitor - Blood Bowl - Malifaux - Fairy Meat

Koval

Please stop with the 28/54 debate, the Ammobunker/Conclave debate, all of that. This thread is about an event that I want to arrange and run. We should be looking at ways to make this work, rather than dredging up old arguments.

On such a note... Keravin and Cortez, at the moment, are arguably the ones talking the most sense.




Nonetheless I'm making some fair progress with world-building. I would of course be very grateful for the input of someone that knows their way around Photoshop or GIMP, so that the star charts can be done properly... but beyond that, the basic ideas are genuinely starting to come together.

Holiad

Be fair-having proposed a 28mm event, it's hardly reasonable to expect subsequent discussion to leave out scale altogether.

For much the same reasons as Kaled, I'm also strongly against a 28mm event. While it's partly that I already have several 54mm characters ready to use, it's also the case that I enjoy modelling at the larger scale, and while I have several other games I play at 28mm, inquisitor is the only game I play that uses that particular scale. For me, the scale *is* important, and a 28mm event not only forces me to play at a different scale to the one I prefer, it's also forcing me to build a completely new warband specifically for that event. As a method of encouraging greater unity between the communities, it is quite simply far too one sided-you're demanding that 54mm players like me change scale, but there's no corresponding concession from the 28mm community.
A dual-scale event feels more reasonable, and I'd be willing to attend, but there's a big increase in the logistics involved.

As for the style of event, I've personally enjoyed events with a strong narrative like The Saint, the Kaede Mack conspiracy, and the succession of Lord Calleia. However, I also like that conclave events are very open about who can attend. It's a very big plus that even a new player can turn up on the day and still participate, and I feel too restrictive a narrative risks compromising that openness. I agree that a dual-scale event may well do best with a setting that was independant of Carthax or Dalthus-rewriting either setting to be compatable with the other is too big of a concession to ask either way, where a new setting would at least put the two communities on the same level.
Poor noble Marech
Noone 'till the end could see
Your brave heart of fire

Koval

Quote from: Holiad on September 30, 2013, 07:59:03 PM
Be fair-having proposed a 28mm event, it's hardly reasonable to expect subsequent discussion to leave out scale altogether.
True, and I'm not against constructive discussion, but the arguments I'm currently seeing have unfortunately led to a lot of past bitterness.

QuoteFor much the same reasons as Kaled, I'm also strongly against a 28mm event.
[...]
A dual-scale event feels more reasonable, and I'd be willing to attend, but there's a big increase in the logistics involved.
Hence why I'm favouring dual scale at the moment over my initial single scale proposal. And don't worry, I know the logistics will be a nightmare, but as I'm looking to avoid winter and the risk of snow (and am aware of the Ammobunker Openbash and the IGT both taking place in... probably March?), I've got plenty of time to make this work. :P

QuoteAs for the style of event, I've personally enjoyed events with a strong narrative like The Saint, the Kaede Mack conspiracy, and the succession of Lord Calleia.
None of which I attended, so I'll have to look them up. :P

QuoteI agree that a dual-scale event may well do best with a setting that was independant of Carthax or Dalthus
Hence the world building! And I think I've now found someone to help me with my maps ;D

greenstuff_gav

could always do what i planned for Eramus Affair; simply print 2 copies of the campaign and let people hop between scales as they like, but effectivley run 2 seperate copies of the same campaign :D
i make no apologies, i warned you my ability to roll ones was infectious...

Build Your Imagination

Heroka Vendile

The IGT isn't especially tied down to spring, that's just when it's been the past couple years, originally it was in early Dec till one year where hardly anyone could do the proposed date, so it got shunted back a couple months.

Also I wouldn't say any of the 28/54 discourse in this thread was irrelevant – in fact it brought me fully up to date on a couple things I had been unaware of – as it was all about past experiences of the community interactions and how each groups runs it's own events. The only way to make things work is to discus and understand what's "gone wrong" in the past.
It all has a very significant bearing on whether or not anyone would actually attend a dual scale event in the first place.

One of the fundamental decisions for the event's structure is playtime vs number of games. While I can see all the positives to the individual games being allowing this to play out at their own pace as Molotov's events do – I am not the only one who has to pay a lot of money to travel half the country and stay in a hotel overnight, doing so for only 2-3 games is no where near as appealing as knowing I will get 4 or 5 games with the rigid game schedule.
It's all fun and games until someone shoots their own guy with a Graviton gun instead of the MASSIVE SPIDER.
The Order of Krubal
Rewards Of The Enemy

Keravin

Point of correction: MY events run to their own schedule for games.  Molotov's used a timed element.

Koval

Quote from: Heroka Vendile on October 01, 2013, 11:45:29 AM
The IGT isn't especially tied down to spring, that's just when it's been the past couple years, originally it was in early Dec till one year where hardly anyone could do the proposed date, so it got shunted back a couple months.
Fair enough.

QuoteAlso I wouldn't say any of the 28/54 discourse in this thread was irrelevant – in fact it brought me fully up to date on a couple things I had been unaware of – as it was all about past experiences of the community interactions and how each groups runs it's own events. The only way to make things work is to discus and understand what's "gone wrong" in the past.
It all has a very significant bearing on whether or not anyone would actually attend a dual scale event in the first place.
This is very true. Again, however, the problem here is with the discussions themselves turning sour (and doing so only too quickly). I have no issues with constructive discourse, but we have a problem when "what's gone wrong in the past" turns into "what's wrong at the moment / this is wrong" kinds of arguments.

QuoteOne of the fundamental decisions for the event's structure is playtime vs number of games. While I can see all the positives to the individual games being allowing this to play out at their own pace as Molotov's Keravin's events do – I am not the only one who has to pay a lot of money to travel half the country and stay in a hotel overnight, doing so for only 2-3 games is no where near as appealing as knowing I will get 4 or 5 games with the rigid game schedule.
Correction my own as Keravin ninja'd me :P

I'm working on a four-game structure at the moment -- I'm aiming for somewhere between the pace and (nominal) game length of the Eramus Affair, and the time to catch your breath offered by IGT'13. I'd have to try not to compromise on narrative, though. Still, plenty of time to work this all out :)

TheNephew

#42
Just to chip in my underinformed two cents about the prospective event (which is the prime subject, rather than the scale beef):

I thought the .only. weakness of the Eramus Affair was the necessarily time-limited games. All my games had to be chopped off before their natural conclusion, but we had a schedule, and in order for the day to work, it had to be adhered to.

Plot cards, contacts, information points and the like were all an excellent idea, and nobody (as far as I could tell) was playing a win-at-all-costs game, nobody was more interested in the points than the story, but the campaign gimmicks really did add a nice level of strategy to the encounters and made it far easier to build a sensible narrative around warbands that might otherwise have been tricky to shoehorn into the same story.

I think if you can duck the stigma of having a 'points' system, it's something that should definitely be a part of it - perhaps book time for a minimum of two two-hour games, Round 1 collecting contacts or info, and a finale at the end of the day based on what/who you got, with enough room in the middle for players to work out among themselves who wants to be where in the last game, and play a game or two to solidify that.
And if people wind up playing to win instead of playing to play, call 'em out and try and get them into the spirit of things.

Rambling a bit, apologies.

Molotov

Heroka - thank you for your interesting posts.

The Helios Succession ran a four-game day, with four 75-minute games. The Sins of the Master event ran with three 105-minute games. The Requiem day had the mega-battle in the morning, and then players were free to do their own games.

I have always tried to ensure in my events that all players are included in all games - as you mention, many players invest a great deal of time and effort in getting to the day, making their figures and the like, that I want the day to be worth the effort they've put in.

INQ28 Thread | INQ28 Blog
INQ28, done properly, is at least the equal of its big brother - and Mol is one of the expert proponents of "done properly".
- precinctomega

MarcoSkoll

#44
Quote from: TheNephew on October 01, 2013, 12:59:11 PMI thought the .only. weakness of the Eramus Affair was the necessarily time-limited games. We had a schedule, and in order for the day to work, it had to be adhered to.
90 minute timeslots (including shuffling about, briefing, etc) are tough.

It's not impossible for me to run to 90 minutes, but I'm a mega nerd who could probably run a 100% rules accurate game without the reference sheets, and even then, inexperienced players or those that prefer to play at a more sedate pace can affect this pace quite a lot. (Although if I ever turned up at a day fully rested, Emperor knows).

The issue is that 'Clave events tend to focus on intra-narrative (internal, self contained narrative), which is a struggle to grow across only three games, else 120 minute timeslots would be more ideal.

This is something that the Dalthan or Loidis focus on inter-narrative (narratives running between events) get to benefit from, but these events tend to have the same overseers every time - not something everyone wants to do!
As such, the 'Clave event organisation is mostly down to who has ideas and willingness to run the next event.

This means one of the common criticisms of the Carthaxian approach is a perceived absence of inter-narrative - and, with the greatest of respect, I have to say this view is almost invariably held by people who've been to no or almost no 'Clave events!

The plots frequently have any number of tie-ins to past (or, in plenty of cases, future) events, and that's to say nothing of the characters' own histories - and depending on the author, the tie-ins can often extend to the forum RPGs, and more than a few cross-overs and details are forged with the VoiP RPs that go on in the background.

Now, both the intra- and inter- narrative weighted approaches have their merits - Dalthus' weighting will probably be more rewarding for long term contributors and Carthax's weighting will probably be more open to people who can't reliably contribute on a long term basis - but the core difference in making is the presence or absence of a consistent head honcho.
Presently, the 'Clave events don't have such a thing, and due to the nature of Carthax having been created with no core author, probably never will (at least long term).

The best thing for an intra-narrative would probably be a big two day event with five or six games overall. However, it's also highly impracticable - considerably more exhausting and expensive to attend, as well as being very difficult for some of our further flung attendees to make timely travel arrangements for.

So, the structure as is largely the compromise to allow Conclave events to work on a single day without tying one person down as an author.

That said, it could be nice to have one person (or a unified team) run several linked events, but that'll need a lot of work. I do have an idea that might work for such a thing - building off the backbones set in place by "the Saint" event to have the Inquisition attempt to retake the fallen Alykia sector, using each event for different parts of that colossal task. However, only a very crude suggestion, and probably a long way off, if I have the stomach for that much work at all!

While I'm on the subject of event structures, I do have to admit that I agree with some of the previous posters, in that an overly strict inter-narrative approach can sometimes make it quite the effort to actually arrange games.

This year's OpenBash demanded that I had to be really quite forceful to sort out the one game I did actually manage to arrange in advance.
And, knowing that players sometimes have last minute commitments or illnesses, there's always the fear that something will render all that effort moot; To be fair, such an absence is yet to happen, but I have instead been presented with a couple of cases where I've had to contrive scenarios at about five minutes notice instead!

I stress, I don't mind being called upon to wing things, but it does become a little bit less tolerable (and has a certain comedic irony to it) when I'm doing it almost because of a resistance to on the fly match-ups.

So, to an extent, I think there's things to be learnt both ways.
'Clave events should probably experiment with more extended narratives, and 'Bunker events (using the Ammobunker as just a very loose grouping of events) could benefit from more realising the difficulty of producing only games that have tie-ins to previous narrative.
If nothing else, a few "random" games every now and again will be the seed for new and previously unenvisioned plot lines.

~~~~~

Anywho, I guess I'm rambling here.

I suppose the grand point is that as one of the few people who has been to a significant number of events of each approach, I can say that both ways have their flaws as they are currently presented.
My stinger is that I can't honestly believe that people's preferences for either intra-event or inter-event narratives should actually be quite such an exact correlation with the forum that person most affiliates with or the scale they most often model or play (people may claim they prefer things despite having really never fully experienced it both ways*).

*And the same can be said about the size of models, in truth.
S.Sgt Silva Birgen: "Good evening, we're here from the Adeptus Defenestratus."
Captain L. Rollin: "Nonsense. Never heard of it."
Birgen: "Pick a window. I'll demonstrate".

GW's =I= articles