Leafiara (prime)/Saraphenia/One Year Later

One year and one day ago was the last time I saw Phenia, at least for now, and since then everything's changed.

That includes first and foremost, of course, the personal aspects of a dear friend not being around. I don't have that little-yet-huge injection of joy to look forward to every day from the excited greeting of someone just so happy to see me and happy to be here. Phenia was like that even before close brushes with death, cherishing every moment, but only moreso afterward.

Another major shift is I don't need to make any effort to be available for Phenia's playtime or playstyle. That might sound like I mean it as a silver lining, but, truthfully, I don't know if that's good or bad. With Phenia went a lot of spontaneity in my GS routine, but I'm also not the type who would go actively seeking it out now that it's missing. Phenia came to me; that was always the beauty of it.

On the brighter side, after a year, obviously it's not as crushing that she's not here. It still weighs on me, but it's a weight I can handle. I suppose that most anyone who's lost someone close understands what I mean and most anyone who hasn't doesn't. Such is the incommunicability of subjective human experience: if not impossible to express, then at least impossible to adequately express.

When I said everything's changed, that goes beyond the personal; the game as a whole has become very different over the past year. And I'm always thinking of Phenia at those times, subconsciously running everything through two filters instead of one: not just what it means to me, but what it would have meant to her.

Some game changes that make me think of Phenia are relatively minor. Mystic Tattoos no longer losing charges for the monks themselves would have gotten a quick "Yay!", but not materially changed much. Resilience would have been much the same; Phenia the player hated dying, but Phenia the character never did anymore as a bandit-only hunter at cap. Her other characters might have found resilience at least a little more relevant, though. Making every buff spell a base duration of two hours is a QoL change she would have liked at least a little.

Other game changes were bigger. Seven sorcerer spells got updated--and one of Phenia's sorcs was the character she wanted to cap next. In fact, she would have been capped by the time those spell updates happened. If I remember correctly, we'd gotten her 1842 exp short of level 62. I'm very sure Phenia would have loved the new 716, 717, and 720 and fairly sure she would have loved the new 706, 710, and 718.

I'm much less sure how she would have reacted to Transcend Destiny. I suspect a mixed reaction, though, of sharing pride and joy when I maxed Leafi out and a tinge of disappointment of Phenia never expecting to do the same. She wasn't really the target audience for Transcend Destiny, but instead the type of player for whom capping was a crowning achievement.

On the other hand, Phenia wouldn't have even needed Transcend Destiny to excel at the final versions of the wyrm and sybil; monks are among the best at both. I'd like to imagine that Leafi and Phenia would have made a fantastic dynamic duo of helping a lot of friends through those bosses. I can just picture Phenia as an organizer coordinating schedules for RYSK Vs. The Sybil hunts.

And then there are Gemstones, but I'll save those for a little later.

On the story side of GS, Kenstrom is no longer on staff and all towns are eliminating player elections.

It's remarkable how short that sentence is considering how much I have to say about it.

It was always nonsensical from an in-universe view how little power the player mayors had due to the out-of-universe structure of GS' pre-approved story beats, so that particular position was destined to erasure. However, I hadn't expected that even scaling back to town councils and envoys wouldn't be enough to make it coherent. Before player elections were gone, Phenia and I talked fairly often about what the right future move was: Phenia to run again, both of us to run next time, or neither of us to run next time. With the inevitability of the encroaching Empire that neither of us nor our characters wanted anything to do with, the Landing and its elections didn't seem to have any relevance anymore.

What's one to do? Pile another two anti-Imperial council wins onto the Landing's history of ten other anti-Imperial council wins only to look impotent anyway as the characters fight a losing battle against an inexorable tide? Read the writing on the wall and leave the Landing for anywhere else without a barony next door influencing every facet of its lives?

I can't express how truly unfortunate I find it that Phenia left our world and Kenstrom left our game during this down note, this singular ill-conceived storyline coming after all his masterpieces before it. The existence of a player town council in the face of this setting was a no-win, an endless source of frustration, and I don't believe there was ever a chance that player elections could have survived that story.

At the same time, putting aside happenstance, the elections represented inroads for players who either were outsiders or felt like outsiders to step up and establish that they made a difference. I say "made" because, as I always told Phenia in the lead-up to the campaign, the "campaign season" has never been about that two-week or three-week period; the real "campaign season" was everything they'd been and done for as long as they'd been around.

Because I framed it as a lifelong endeavor, Phenia sometimes worried there was no chance she'd win because she felt like she hadn't done enough and, in particular, had an Eastern time schedule that meant she had almost literally no KST visibility this side of Mayor Walkar. However, I said there was no chance she'd lose because everything she'd done would come back to her: the newbies helped, the ears lent, the laughter shared, the MHO recruitments made, the memories created. Phenia's win ultimately validated and proved the impact she'd had to herself more than to anyone else--because the rest of us already knew.

(Like I said, there's the incommunicability of subjective human experience. We know how much others mean to us, but we hope we mean as much to them as we want. We form our impressions based on their words and actions, but ultimately only they know what's in their own heads and hearts.)

I'm an RP purist, so, on balance, I'd like to say I'm relieved and glad to see player elections gone. I'd like to. I think Phenia would also probably have felt a burden lifted from not having to decide whether to run again or not. Still, it's bittersweet that there won't be more breakout moments like Phenia's--or at least not in that way. I think we both would have found it a mix of good and bad.

The Landing's been quiet in the six months since Kenstrom left, only progressing overarching story elements one night. I don't blame the GMs since I assume everyone's working hard and scrambling to attempt to pick up the pieces left behind while juggling everything else they normally do. However, part of me--in fact, a very big part of me--wishes they wouldn't. Maybe my feelings are only tangled up with timing and Phenia, but part of me wishes they'd just leave the memories alone, never touch any of Kenstrom's dozens of characters or dangling story elements for risk of getting wrong some seemingly small detail or personality quirk that's actually crucial to everything, and let the Landing be a player-driven town for a while or maybe forever.

Still, if it's possible to pick things back up, then maybe it's for the best that they do again at some point. Other players should be able to break out too, as I did or as Phenia did, and they should be able to do so even without a thirty-year history or knowing the right other people who have a thirty-year history. Stories haven't always been good at that, but that they've sometimes been good at it is enough. It was for me, at least. Whether it can be again, I don't know.

Some players break down GS demographics along the lines of those interested in RP and those interested in mechanics. I don't think that goes far enough, though. I'd say there are quite a number of varieties of GS. There's what I'll call Leafi GS or Numerical GS, which is the world of theorycrafting and the execution thereof--the exp gains, silver gains, other loot gains, and so on. Gemstones have been out for about two months and I've done little other than hunt for them since. I still make time for the Drakes Vanguard, RYSK, and Twilght Hall as I can, but Gemstones are the kind of major game change catering to Leafi GS like nothing else has.

On the other hand, there's what I'll call Phenia GS or Party GS, which is the world of spontaneous RP and community building--the world of (and I realize the irony of this coming from me) the chaos of relationships and interaction. Some other varieties of GS include (but aren't limited to) Creative GS that's really into fluff customization and crafting, Theatrical GS that's really into big and showy planned events, and Lore GS that's really into "tangible" world changes via GM-run storylines.

I lost Lore GS when Kenstrom left and, for the most part, I lost Party GS when Phenia passed--but sometimes I ask myself what things would be like if they were still here. Would I still be willing to go back and forth with KST NPCs for two to three hours instead of looking for the next shiny? Would I run back from the Hinterwilds to hang out with Phenia and hunt bandits for a few hours a day? Alternatively, would Phenia herself move up to the Hinterwilds now that it's hopping with people?

In a sense, I can't know. Those are just hypotheticals and all kinds of factors would have been at play. Fondness, emotional investment, routine, novelty, personal inclination, availability. I'm sort of glad I can't know. I can neither envy nor lament the hypothetical world; I don't know whether it would have better than anything I can experience at the moment, but I also don't know if there would have been a friction entirely my own fault.

I do know this: in the non-hypothetical real world, I take a little bit of time each night before I log off to stop by Phenia's premium home, reflect, and remember. Most days are routine and it's just a "good night" of sorts, a brief stop back at home base. Other days are more eventful and I spend more time wondering what Phenia would think of this or that. Littlemelody gave me a toy dragonfly, this Twilight Hall event went well, tons of people showed up to that RYSK event, one of Phenia's closest friends defeated the sybil, I made a custom loresong in Phenia's honor, another person said they found the monk guide really helpful--little things like that, not only the bigger game changes.

I can only imagine what I'll be like another year from now. Maybe I'll check back in here again with another update post or maybe not. We don't move on, but we do move forward. The future always arrives, but the past is always there too--for it's what's propelling us in the first place. And so I'm thankful for Phenia, forever backing me in life and beyond, her actions still and always rippling through our corner of the world and, through us, hopefully further outward into the future with love.