OOC Chat

Hah, "lampshading" I like it. At my IRL table - where our week to week attendance is pretty variable, so we'll just "background" the missing people - we say the Character goes "into/out of the bottle". Not sure how it started exactly... I think it's as in how like a genie might go into or come out of a bottle when you need them...

"Oh, Bob's not here? Guess his PC goes in the bottle. Bill you're back! Guess Spike gets to come out of the bottle."

Anyway...

Ok, let's just forget about him.

Oops, Sass, I totally took that advantage as a boost for my roll (sorry!). On the plus side I'm passing two boosts to pagoni, but I won't assume a spend based on GM suggestion in the future.

Ah that’s fine, it doesn’t sound like Pagoni needs it for his action anyway

Oh, shoot! I forgot that gamersplane doesn't count triumphs as success, I thought I missed dealing any damage. Doh!. Yes, it would have been 7 damage and now I wish I would have spent my triumph as a crit. Oh well vOv.

Ah, I should have called that out. Sorry!

For reference, all, Triumphs count as a Success AND as the Narrative Symbol Triumph. But Gamesome just shows it as a Triumph without noting the Success separately so you have to "hand calculate" the room result when you see a Triumph or Despair too (which it doesn't note the Fail portion of).

wow, good to know, thanks!

Ah I tried to put in 3 but the input box doesn't show past a certain number and I guess it didn't register. My bad!

Just wanted to check, did everyone notice the micro-XP award?

Please note in your character sheets how you spend your XP.

I did, but I have to finish/fine tune my characters talent sheet. I'll probably end up grabbing a couple of tier 1 talents. Tentatively Knack For It (charm) and Clever Retort.

I noted it down, still need to look at what I ought to use it for

I spent my XP ( Clever Retort & Proper Upbringing), Do you want to see out full Talent pyramid or just add talents as we buy them?

Nah, just didn't look like anyone was spending anything so I wanted to bring it up :P

No strong preference re: the temple. Only benefit I see is if they can give us some insight into a weakness, but that seems unlikely based on the info we've gotten so far.

Hey all, wanted to check in. Seems like maybe this is too broad of an approach to an encounter for pbp to handle? Or are ppl losing/lost interest/busy with life? Or maybe your characters are feeling lost, or defeated, or like you don't have enough to go on?

No, it's fine, I was just waiting for other characters to post. If you'd like, in the future I can continue if I don't hear anything from the other players, just to keep things moving?

I do appreciate that considerate approach, birdman.

And yes, I mean I would prefer that there was an active and lively group discussion about how to approach the situation, and what to do. Everyone voicing what they're thinking? What opportunities or difficulties is everyone seeing? What questions arise for each of you? That kind of active back and forth would give me insight into what is working for this kind of open-ended, highly player-driven encounter, and how I can improve it as a process. But I also can't justify keeping a game going that is moving at this pace. There's too many things I want to do :P

Too many games I want to run, or play in.

One person driving things would be fine, but that can sometimes lead to the disenfranchisement of the less active players, in my experience. Leading to less activity from them than before :P vicious circle type thing.

As mentioned when I started this, it's an experiment, and if the experiment isn't working that's fine. It won't hurt my feelings. But I just need more activity from everyone, if we're gonna keep going.

As a player and GM, I'll try to give ppl 24 hrs from my/the last post, and if there's nothing in that time, I think it's generally fine to post again. So if you want to post again, see if we can keep this going, birdman, that's more than fine. But again, I'm not sure this experiment is working, and so I would still like to hear everyones ooc thoughts on it.

I am interested to see how the SotC inspiration plays out with the first "titan" enemy. To that end, I built my last post to try and move the action forward to the encounter, or at least the pursuit. My approach to this game, and Capaneus's general approach to most problems the way I built him, is to tackle the problem head on. If you foresaw more investigation or banter, then I can readjust my approach, but as it stands it seems like most investigation we've come to has had limited or unreliable information, so the only solution was to go and see for ourselves.

I’ll readily admit that I’ve been using more time in other games, partially down to the bout of inactivity a little while back and partially down to me really having a hard time getting my head around the Genesys system. Although this time I think I was just thinking that we were going to approach the boar to see what exactly we were dealing with and was maybe mistakenly waiting for you to post. I think the first fight worked alright, although the arena had very little effect thanks to our/my shitty rolls, so I’m still interested in seeing how this fight will go. But yeah, we have very limited information to plan from (not in terms of the arena, you did a hell of a job with that, just more in terms of the boar itself), and maybe we could’ve done more investigating I don’t know, but yeah with what we have I reckon we just need to go and see it...okay, rambling over. I’ll do better at posting more, I promise

Yea, I guess there just weren't any specifics about how anyone was proceeding, no discussion or concensus about the multiple thoughts ppl voiced, and no one evoking the mechanics, either by asking for checks or taking a definitive/direct action that I could trigger the mechanics off of. Which leaves me with nothing to work with.

Which made me think things are just too unclear, and generally not working.

If you're feeling like your PCs are helpless or in the dark, it's because they are, because you didnt gather any more info :P

You guys only talked to one group of ppl: soldiers.

They gave you the minimum info needed for the plot to proceed, right? You learned where the thing was, and the single most overt thing that could be known about it: it's invulnerable. Is it surprising that the rest wasn't of much value? You didn't have to play the game/roll the dice or do anything special to get it.

For a glimpse into how I GM: nothing worth doing is ever gonna be free or easy. There's always gonna be Skill checks in between you guys and your goals. That's why we have the dice and call it a "game", right? So I apologise if I didn't make it clear that more info could be found, but it could have, you guys just looked at those options and decided against pursuing them.

Anyway, we're here now.

For the encounter at large, I just don't know how to approach a "puzzle boss" type encounter like this in a leading fashion. I don't want to lead you to the "answer", again were here to play a game. And so like the videogame, I figure if I lay out the "arena" before you - loosely - but with specifics, and encourage you to use it like a playground, that's about all I can do. From there I need you guys to really drive the action. To be explicit about your ideas and actions. To engage with the arena as an entity. To talk back and forth, in character and out of character, to each other and to me, about what you think or see that could be done.

It demands a high level of engagement from you guys, it's very sandboxy, and I'm not certain that it works. I haven't had good luck with sandboxes in pbp in the past. And I'm thinking it's not working, but if you guys want to keep going, let's do it.

Give me interaction with each other. Interact with the arena. Be specific. Evoke the mechanics.

And, Sass, for the love of Cthulhu, get a user-account avatar! ;D

HAHAHA

I will try to post daily, and lean more into the narrative spirit of the game. No matter what becomes of this game, I'm having a blast!