OOC Chat

Ah, I see. I think I misunderstood the spirit of the game a bit. I was under the impression that each boss was going to be more "boss as the stage" than puzzle-arena style. From our very early discussions I thought the investigation portions would be largely perfunctory, and from our first combat (which was solved with just "stab it") I thought that most bosses would employ interesting movement mechanics but not necessarily puzzle elements.

All that said, I'm down for puzzle time. In the future I'll be sure to encourage further investigation. I will say that my experience with sandbox pbp is pretty discouraging as well, in large part due to the slowness of character-character interaction, but let's see if we can make it work here!

Hahaha, fair enough

You're not wrong, Eskaton. I just think I would consider the boss-as-arena as a sub-type of puzzle boss, and some Titans would certainly be that type, but this Titan just isn't that large. You think of SotC, and there are lots of Titans if not most where you have to use the arena and indeed manipulate the Titan itself get to it's weak spots. So it's not an either or, it's all of the above.

And to have a wide range of PC-types that are viable/exciting to play, there has to be more to every Titan than just climbing and shooting and stabbing right? There has to be a place for Social-types and Intellect-types. And that's often in the legwork-phase and arena manipulation. It's just a part of the expansion of the SotC concept and gameplay into more traditional rpg gameplay.

Anyway, I'm excited to reveal the size of the boar... :D

Thanks for being understanding and pushing through to see if we can make this work guys. I really like the idea of it all if it's just not too cumbersome.

Also: f-yea, hypno-toad!

Part of the reason I asked about the difficulty upgrade is that the way I read the Genesys rules, on all but opposed checks (where you are using another character's skill to define difficulty) upgrading checks by the GM is one of the only ways that you have to keep GM story point economy flowing. If GM's don't spend SP on doing things like upgrading check difficulties, then they basically only have to use them to upgrade NPC checks since they already define narrative situations.

I personally enjoy games better when SP flow freely back and forth, but if you feel like they should be spent less liberally because you anticipate infrequent use from GM size, I will readjust the way that I spend them to be in keeping with your GM philosophy (which I would totally understand).

No that's a fair point, Eskaton.

This is a good opportunity to talk a little game theory, and to examine what I'm trying to do here.

It's just a weird situation with such a large enemy, and trying to use Skill challenges as the main interface for the encounter instead of traditional combat, right? Like, it's Brawn would be off the charts on the PC scale, right? And even if you figure it can't necessarily marshall that strength and size as effectively in a fight, just giving it a 4 or even 5 Brawn is a rather absurd reckoning that might work for combat but completely misrepresents it's strength in other Skills that could break the logic of the dice. And what would it's damage modifier be, +20? Is it relevant? Like if you ever gave titans a traditional attack, it would just destroy the target/PC under traditional rpg combat mechanics. So I can't use those traditional mechanics and approach to combat.

Like in SotC, if you get hit by the colossi, you just die. Reload from save point. Of course that doesn't work in an RPG. And really, what you see in looking at SotC's gameplay is that it's on the players Skill to avoid dying. The colossi don't really have much skill or ability. They're just giant environmental, area-effect style challenges for the player to navigate.

Which basically means, translated into an RPG, you're never gonna run into an opposed Skill check. And moving from there, the way I prefer to run standard Skill challenges in this system is to keep them 100% player-facing. So like, even if this thing charges you guys, the roll is that you're rolling a Coordination based on a flat Difficulty (+possible modifiers) to avoid it, it's not ever the Titan rolling a Brawn to hit you, or your Coordination vs. it's Brawn. Everything is an un-opposed Skill check from the player.

So that means my standard ways of endangering you guys are completely frame-shifted, right? I now have no way to endanger/deal damage to you guys, except by stipulating that damage of whatever sort (Strain, Wounds, or Crits) is a narrative result from the failure of a check, right? I don't attack you, so the only way I can endanger you guys and create that resource depletion gameplay drama is as consequences of failed unopposed Skill checks.

So when you combine all of this, what you have to do with Skill checks in some contexts is develop a tiered failure-result.

If appropriate to the narrative - let's take our charging Titan example, I can say the narrative result of failure is Wounds. If it charges you, you roll your Coordination and fail the check, you didn't fully get out of the way. Maybe it's body strikes a glancing blow on you, maybe you're stuck by flying debris, whatever. It's logical that for not adequately getting out of the way of a charging, semi-sized boar that you take Wounds... But how can I ever Crit you? How can I fairly adjudicate between a charge that should just cause Wounds and one that causes a Crit? Well, I can have the result of a Despair be a Crit. That's fair, right, that's how it works in combat. But since these are flat, unopposed Skill checks - the boar's Skill never factors into these rolls - I have no way to get a Despair. And thereby no way to create that lasting endangerment that is Crits.

Now, by RAW, you are correct. The rules say that for standard Skill checks, upgrades "usually" (or "most often", I forget what the exact language is) come from the GM flipping a Destiny Point.

But look at my situation. If I can only create the possibility of Despair by flipping a Story Point, that means the most I can ever have is just 1 red die in a Difficulty pool. That means I can every only have a 1 in 12 chance of really endangering you guys in the way that Despairs can. That doesn't seem to me to accurately represent the danger that Titans should represent.

So given the special nature of Titans as an enemy and challenge, and how their Skills generally won't ever come into play, and how Despair is integral to creating danger and drama in this system, my thought in how to approach Titans was to have them fall in that gap of RAW, between upgrading checks and "usually" linking that to Story Points only.

Titans aren't your usual type of challenge.

Now. All that said, I just wanted to provide my thought process on all this, so you can judge those thoughts on their merits, and to show that I wasn't just ignoring rules or hadn't thought about this. I thought about this specific aspect a lot.

However, I probably should have started from a place of RAW in this testing of the whole premise, to see whether or not my assumptions were correct, in that the limited ability to generate Despair presented by the Skill challenges-only approach was truly too limiting to the narrative and drama.

One effect I'd like to point out in this Story Point-only approach, is that as a gameplay strategy you guys could hoard your Story Points, and choose to never use them so that I could never crit or have the ability to do other Despair stuff...

I flipped two of my Story Points to the Player pool, to reflect the otherwise "automatic" upgrades I had previously done.

Let's strive for that lively flow back and forth.

Can't advantage be used for a critical? Or threat? (depending on the weapon) Does the boar not have a standard attack?

Also some things are inherently dangerous right? For example, defusing a bomb, would have a Challenge die just due to the possibility of something really bad happening.

On standard attacks, yes. Weapons have Crit ratings, though. They have a fair, built-in way that says how much Advantage you have to spend to crit. No other checks have that, as that's not a standard result of most other checks.

As discussed above, it's not really practical to approach the actions of Titans like standard attacks, for all of the reasons I enumerated above.
Again, what would such an attack look like? I can't stat such a thing in a balanced fashion that doesn't break other dice-logic OR that doesn't just automatically kill you. Does that make sense?

Say I give it a "balanced" 4 or 5 Brawn and 2 Brawl. That would put up a good fight using standard combat mechanics.

Ok, well, next thing that happens is a PC with 4 or 5 Brawn and ranks in Athletics wants to take an Action to push the boar over a cliff, or just wants to hold it down so it can't go anywhere. i.e. they take a non-Attack opposed Skill check against it. Well, we've established the boar only has a functional 4 or 5 Brawn, and so all of the sudden this completely impossible narrative thing has been made possible by this need to for the combat mechanics to be balanced against a PC scale.

I've broken dice-logic.

Or, the alternative to that is I give it stats that it should have, like10 Brawn and 4 Melee, +10 damage, or whatever, and it auto-kills someone every turn. That's not a good way to do it either.

I can't appropriately stat it's attack, because it either breaks the mechanics in other places, or there becomes no way for me to keep you alive.

So, the other way is to do things is as I'm doing them - Narrative Play, focusing on Skill challenges, with narratively appropriate consequences of failure.
Yes. But as Eskaton correctly pointed out, the rules as written generally only allow you to assign the Difficulty of the roll based on the narrative challenge. You generally are supposed to only upgrade or modify such checks using Story Points and Setbacks.

But, again, the RAW says upgrades USUALLY only come from Story Points, which does leave the GM latitude to assign upgrades based on the inherent narrative danger, but it just isn't standard practice.

To which, my point of, Titans are not standard challenges, and so may require a little non-standard (but still within RAW) application of the rules.

I see what you're saying now. That is tough decision.
I know Genesys caps characteristics, but it still has the nemesis ability right? Granted, a large titan would have like, Adversary 10, haha.

Totally get where you're coming from and understand the approach you were taking. In my mind it's just a question of where you want to modify RAW. If you stat out the beasts' effective attack etc and have low enough brawn that it's not insta kills, then you have to adjust the way you handle opposed checks against the beast to modify their effective brawn (if you were publishing a setting for this it would probably be a mechanic of multiplication or division to either buff effective brawn or reduce effective damage) so that you don't break dice mechanics elsewhere, but if you just auto-upgrade checks then you break story point flow. In my mind it's easier to make a modifier to "combat" brawn vs "skill" brawn than it is to try and hack in a new mechanism for story point flow, unless you have a totally novel idea for flipping story points back (a la action points from pathfinder or inspiration from D&D 5e). This is a test so however you want to run it is cool with me! We'll just see how things play out and use it as a basis for the future!

So I was hoping that the kind of open, more loose conceptualization and approach to this type of encounter would work well with pbp, but I don't feel like it is... I may be trying to hold onto too much of the control, I'm not sure. I'll have to think on it. But I ran a one-shot, Titan Battle-only session last week with a couple ppl from my IRL group, using a couple pre-gens I there together, and it just flowed much better than this has.

As loose as it is, it still requires a common and consistent understanding of what's going on between everyone, and I think it's just very difficult to try to maintain that due to the inherently limited flow of information in this medium. The simple, but consequential, questions and back-and-further that is necessary to maintain a common understanding can just happen in seconds in IRL (well, online/Roll20), but just creates halting starts and stops here, and things get lost.

I feel like there's constant miscommunication, and you guys are getting rightfully frustrated, but in turn that really just saps my energy and desire to try to struggle against the interrent difficulties and try to make this work.

I'm inclined to end this experiment.

That said, I've been wanting to run a Shadow of the Beanstalk/cyberpunk game for awhile now... and, while I don't have a story in mind at the moment, that would probably be my next project of I dropped this.

Would you guys be interested in something a little more straightforward in the cyberpunk genre? You'd each be at the top of the invite list once I can put together a story.

Or, I guess, if you're not getting frustrated, let me know. But the tone of posts leads me to believe virtually everyone is, on some level or another, or has been recently.

I'd be interested to hear more about that, as I'm thinking of running a custom Genesys game soon also.
I like your GM style, and would be happy to play if there's room, although I am not familiar with Android
Not getting frustrated at all, although I can see how I may give off that vibe. If you want to end the campaign I understand, but I'm doubly interested as i love playing the unique theme, and am learning about GMing online in the Genesys setting.

I'll admit to a bit of frustration, but not so much directed at a person as it is at the limitations of PbP (which I think em dileneated very nicely tbh). In a situation like this, a live game would normally have so much fine tuning clarification that is limited by the PbP style, things like "what exactly did you mean by...?" "What are you hoping to make happen specifically?" "Where is the boar coming from if we do...?" are totally limited in this format.

That being said, I'm more than happy to try and continue, I think the setting is cool, I like the character I've developed and the group as a whole, and the situations being thrown at us are really neat and novel. Part of me wonders if I'd feel less frustrated if we'd done more legwork in the beginning to have good plan B's and C's, so I think a lot of it is on us as players who've left less options for ourselves.

I do want to say that I think everybody here has been a pleasure to play with thus far and is putting a solid good-faith effort into making a fun game for all of us, so please don't take any of this critique personally.

As far as SotB goes, I LOVE cyberpunk more than any other genre (generally speaking) and would be 100% down to join your game if you'd like to have me should you shutter this one. :D

I agree with what Eskaton said. I think a lot of it comes down to us being a little bit too gung-ho about charging into battle without a solid understanding of our opponent. For me personally most of the frustration is still trying to come to grips with how Genesys works, it’s taken me a bit longer than I’d hoped to understand it.

I’m good with pressing on, I like the setting and the puzzle aspect of it, but I also understand if you’d prefer to shutter the game.

Thanks for checking in all.

I would like to continue on with this campaign IF I thought there was a good way to overcome the inherent information-demand/exchange issues.

And I'm just not sure I see a way to do it.

Like, we could just have more back and forth to work out the details when there's a lack of clarity, but I already feel like we have stepped that up some and it's already A LOT/a distracting amount of OOC, and so stepping that up even more sounds just... very cumbersome and like it will result in something more like a boardgame (which admittedly would probably be a good way to approach this concept 😅), or more work than play.

I'm totally open to input and thoughts on how to improve the process, or thoughts on that stance. But that's kinda of where I'm at...

It probably doesn't help that I certifiably have RPG ADHD, so the second something begins to lose my interest, I'm looking at the next shiny thing. But...

Well, that's all 💯% really where I'm at.

Yeah, I think in this case, there's probably no solid workaround. It's an awesome RPG concept but probably has an added layer of difficulty in PbP. I will say I appreciate your creativity and GM work, em, it's been a pleasure playing.

No it is a concept that I reckon needs quite a lot of OOC planning to work, especially if you’re in the situation we found ourselves in. Thank you for giving it a go, I still think it’s a concept that could work somehow. I’ve had a lot of fun playing too

Sure thing guys, sorry it didn't work out better...

I'm gonna start brainstorming something for Shadows of the Beanstalk, so keep an eye out for a PM! I'm not too familiar with Android though and need to do some studying up. Thanks for tuning in while it lasted!

Thanks, this was awesome. :)

Hey guys, if you happen to still be following this thread/game, I'd like to poke your brains about a cyberpunk/Shadow of the Beanstalk campaign.

If you know much about the world of Android - or just cyberpunk as a genre - what kind of game would you want to play? What kind of characters would interest you?

The world of Android is pretty basic cyberpunk - environmental disasters, super-corporations, large swathes of humanity are massively disenfranchised/life outside the "normal" society, with the notable exception perhaps of a significant space-travel/early planetary colonization presence (the Moon and Mars).

Professional operatives of some type? Folk Heroes? Anti-heroes? Outright criminals?

I suppose any of those would work, a long as the players all agree to be on the same 'team'. Maybe someone takes up the mantle of a folk hero, Dread Pirate Roberts style? Maybe playing a team that a big company tasked with stopping the hackers, they could even be double agents if that's not tooo complicated.