OOC Chat

Hello, and welcome!

Let's chat.

Would siege engines be possible? Granted we are not actually doing a siege but the heavy firepower might be useful

Do the PCs have to be human? No satyrs, centaurs or harpies as starting characters right?

The ancient Greeks had siege engines, I believe, sure. But you guys will be playing heroes roving about the countryside slaying monsters, not commanders of armies or city states.

And the Archetypes provided in the Character Creation thread are the only playable options. They are all human by design. Though I suppose it wouldn't be a big deal if you wanted to "skin" yourself as something else. You just won't receive any mechanical differentiation for it.

Please note, this is not a fully fleshed out hack of Genesys, or even a fully fleshed out game world, really. This is just meant to be simple. Let's battle "titans". Test out the system for this application.

Right but some war machines were fairly simple and could be towed by an animal and fired while on the move such as the Carroballista (an ancient, Greek cart-mounted ballista, a type of mobile field artillery) also smaller catapults were also viable although they could not be fired as easily while moving. There were even smaller ballista units as well.

Like I stated I was looking at playing a field engineer someone versed in the construction, maintenance, and usage of such weapons as well as perhaps other techniques when it comes to fighting these huge mobile fortifications that are capable of mass destruction. Such as things like the famous Hoth Maneuver ;)

If the current playable list of options is not enough to maintain your interest, DeJoker, you're welcome to leave the game.

This is something I'm doing for quick, easy fun. Not to try to construct a complete and accurate world with all options that "should" be possible, available.

?? I was sharing information ?? And a simple no I do not plan to allow war machines in the game would have been sufficient.

I fully understand the fun part -- however you just never know what is and is not possible until you have established the base for it.

I was only sharing the information because I had to look it up myself, I am aware of a lot of the ancient war machines but was not sure what was being used in that time period so I assumed others might not know as well. Nothing more than that.

So to clarify are you then stating -- no war machines for this venture?

One of the titan batlles potentially involves a mounted scorpion, but there is no player transportable siege machine options. No.

Okay good enough -- will change the concept then to something more suitable

hey, I will most likely check the forums at least once every day, but I may not post unless there is something for my character to do or say.
Also, I was kind of thinking that my character would get caught up in this because he mistakes the epic quest for an epic play. but if it doesn't work out that way it's fine.

Quick question. Would I be able to use the bow while wearing battle gloves or how do they work?

Technically, no... You will be required to spend 2 Maneuvers to switch from Cestus (or any weapon) to Bow (or any other weapon), or Bow to Cestus. 1 to "sheath" the "active" weapon, 1 to "draw" the "inactive".

I need to figure out how to note that... But a bow (same for the crossbow) is a two handed weapon (it would be "Ranged (Heavy)" if this setting used the Ranged (Heavy) Skill, but since Melee is more important I lumped all Ranged into one Skill). And you cannot wield another weapon while wielding any "Heavy" weapon.

While the Cestus seems like narratively it could be worn while using other weapons, the spent Maneuver requirements would still be there mechanically and then the narrative could just be considered as the additional effort you must make while wearing the bulky battle glove and using another weapon...

Make sense?

Yeah that's fine. Just good to know before we eventually go into battle :)

Actually the Greek period Cestus would not only prevent you from using most other weapons it would definitely take more than 1 Action to remove but yea you could make them a bit more modern I suppose for game play purposes

Bad day here.

Can't get my work VPN to function.

Kids were supposed to start online classes today, and that's not working well...

Stand by for IC, GM reply.

Seems like I’ll have to invent velcro :D

Well I think a more glove like item with buckle might be sufficient -- I mean once that velcro gets dirty it does not hold very well and being that they are cestus I would imagine they'd get dirty real fast

Maybe this doesn't needed to be said, but I do apologize. I don't usually have my games so firmly on the rails as this one will be, but as mentioned at the beginning of it all, this is just a venue for some quick dirty fun and to test out the Titan Battle premise...

I only have a couple of these titan battles planned out, so there will not be much (any) choice of where you're going nor of course even really what you're doing 😖

But I will try to make the characters and the rp as fun and interesting as possible.

Enjoying your characterizations, thanks for playing, all!

I'm 100% on board for it! I want to try my hand at a custom-ish Genesys setting, so I am learning the setting and taking copious notes!

If we're doing assist checks we should coordinate so we're not wasting rolls (e.g. I have 1 survival skill but only 2 cunning so pagoni's check could have been ygg with a boost from Charisteas). This is a game that really flourishes with a little extra communication between players (e.g. initiative order, assists)

Good points, Eskaton.

But for Initiative at least, we'll probably just be doing Initiative as "normal" for D&D - people go in the spot they roll. It's just too much hassle to manage coordinating the optimal order in PbP otherwise. That communication factor is just too big of a pinch point.

And for Assists to "work", all we need is everyone to share their character sheets/make them readable by anyone. If you go to your "Characters" tab, and click on the folder looking icon next to your PC's name, everyone can see your Skills and anyone can then formulate the optimal group pool.

We're still learning so no biggie, we'll take the lumps as they come.

https://gamersplane.com/characters/starwarsffg/14841/

D'oh, sorry about that. We'll just role-play it as a
our characters aren't used to working together yet, haha

Alright, so this combat is in-part a dry run at aspects of the titan battles.

Specifically, I want to highlight and test out the interactivity of the "arena".

For titan battles, and any others too really, I want to encourage an active Story Point "economy"/back and forth with both sides, GM and Players, spending them pretty actively. I would suggest reading again the different ways you guys can use Story Points, and specifically highlighting the narrative ways to spend then, with things I had in mind being like using them to "create" terrain that you can use to get some sort of advantage over or access to the creature, things to create special attack opportunities, and to generally just get creative with the narrative "space" that I really just can't possibly display or describe to the level needed in big, puzzle-boss type battles in the pbp medium.

Does that all make sense? If not, ask questions...

Interesting. So could I use a story point to say there is a stalactite directly over the creature? I'm thinking my sling isn't enough to break it, but maybe a javelin or arrow?

Yes, precisely. And for something like that, I would probably use "Sunder" rules as a guide for what it takes to bring it down.

Sorry, just realized I rolled an upgraded difficulty instead of adding a setback. That's my bad

Yes, that "Brawl" roll was the serpent's attack.

The serpent has 4 Brawn and 1 rank in Brawl. The base Difficulty of any melee attack is 2 purples, I didn't see where you had anything that would modify that. It "netted" 2 success on it's attack, which adds to the damage it deals.

Ageis took 4 Wounds.

Okay so other than maybe missing 1 Green Die (because I misunderstood page 19?? and something else that occurred earlier -- maybe not because I am misunderstanding page 19 still) and the 1 Purple Die (that everyone seemed to have missed and you made no mention of for them) and the 1 Black Die both of which were something new I had everything else correct -- yes/no? All of which would have added 2 or 3 more die to that roll -- so not sure how I rolled too many dice??

So please clarify -- because somewhere I got the idea that Attribute Dice was the Attribute - 1 but upon reading it once more it appears it is the attribute straight up which would have made my first roll correct?? So yes I am confused so would you please specify the value I am supposed to used associated with the Attribute is it the Attribute or the (Attribute - 1) as that currently is the only thing I am not fully understanding at this point.

Oh wait -- re-reading page 19 yet a 4th time (which could have been explained way back on that first roll which would have helped me immensely) -- I seemed to have missed the maximum dice pool caveat somehow -- okay so the maximum dice pool is the larger of the two dice pools -- so Brawn of 4 means a maximum of 4 Dice in the Pool (which start off being Green Dice) then you replace these green dice (which they do not say clearly) with the lesser valued ability (my Melee Skill of 2) in yellow dice so the Full Dice Pool becomes 2 Green and 2 Yellow, 3 Purple and 1 Black --- would that have been correct??

If the blue above is correct than I understand what is wrong in the below
3 Purple from Brawn 4-1 (because that is what I thought you did with an Attribute and because its the greater) -- 2 Yellow from Melee Skill 2 (because its lesser) -- 2 Purple from Base Difficulty (per your instructions) +1 Purple Die for Adversary 1 -- +1 Black Die from Defense 1 (which I missed because these were new and I forgot to look them up before making the roll -- which was my bad (still learning) but also everyone seemed to have missed Adversary one unless I misunderstood your initial statement about the Base Difficulty of a Melee Attack and the verbiage explaining Adversary 1) -- oh also Defense is on page 92 and Adversary is on page 131 and neither of these is covered on page 19 which I had read twice (now 3 times) --- so was there something else within that I should have added or adjusted or does that cover all the elements now?

Still as a side note could you not have just outlined the adjusting dice in the post denoting that information -- for instance Adversary 1 (+1 Difficulty) and Defense 1 (+1 Set Back) then everyone would have been in the know up front no mystery and no needing to look up these rather scattered guidelines

Also I thought the whole purpose of this battle was to learn better how the system works and because we are all learning we are prone to make mistakes (which most of us did). On that point did I perhaps maybe miss something I could have done, that would have improved by base situation (not that any extra dice would have helped me much or at all) but if you have suggestions in how I might improve what I do that would be greatly appreciated and would help all of use learn faster I would imagine -- I was mainly keeping it simple to make sure I had the basics understood -- which we can all see was not the case and thus it did help clarify what I was missing without adding any extra items to the mix

Lastly so far I have made 2 mistakes in this game, neither of which was an actual repeat per-sae, so I am not sure why you chose to single me out for this kind of statement as just about everyone has made 1 or 2 mistakes thus far.

I apologize for singling you out Joker.

I had a stressful day of work yesterday, and was feeling demoralized about this game as a result of a larger frustration of having to work through the mechanics more than I would have liked, that boiled over on you. It's a little soul-crushing to have to slog through trying to teach a game over pbp. Don't know if you've ever tried it.

But I simply don't have the time or energy to explain every step of gameplay to anyone. That should have been the point of my post. It was wrong to focus on you. So I'm sorry for that.

Upon reflection, my main desire for this game was to have active players. And you all have done great at that. So thank you.

But I need to re-evaluate whether I should be trying to run this game.

It's been more stressful/just another task rather than the fast and easy fun I was envisioning.

Maybe there's a video people can watch with a quick explanation of the dice? (I know they exist for Star Wars, the system is the same, only the symbols are different) Or I can step in and help when I see someone male a mistake, and help them fix it?

Hey gang,

Wanted to let you all know, upon reflection, I determined that the only thing that has actually been stressing me out about this game was DeJoker's demeanor. And I decided to remove him from the game.

I want to say that it is very regretfully that I feel I had to do this, as he was an active player and rper, and I bare him no ill will, and I told him as much. But we seemingly have not had a very healthy dynamic between he and I from the start.

Where I was looking for something easy and fun in this game, he was making it difficult.

He seemed to have trouble accepting the choices that I feel I had to make to keep things easy and dynamic, and I was just dumb-struck when he asked if the snake just hits automatically... Like, I felt as though he either had absolutely no clue what was going on with the mechanics, or didn't trust me as GM to be fair or follow the rules, or both. And it was stressing me out when I just wanted this to be fun and easy...

I apologise to you guys too. This is not how I would prefer to represent myself, and taking on this game may yet prove to be too much but for now I'd like to try to carry on with the game, if you guys want to. And if not, I understand.

I for sure would like to continue, because so far this has been genuinely enjoyable. Also because I am learning a lot about RPGing online.

Yeah, I’m up for trying to continue as well

I'm down to help going! Sometimes personalities clash, I've run into it myself in pbp.

Oops, I wanted to use 1 advantage to pass a boost. Think it just got mixed up in my ooc spew. Good point on the double soak, first time playing with dual wielding!

Wanted to get your input, gang, on how to handle Ageis as an in-character entity.

I would prefer to just retcon that the PC was never here.

But I've also had Players request that we reconcile a characters "exit" in-character, so as not to mess with any prior narrative and immersion.

1) pretend he was never there
2) have him eaten by the snake (might seam mean and passive-aggressive)
3) In character he decides this is too much and flees. He can return later as an ally or rival

No preference. Personally I've never really gotten the "immersion" thing since we're all typing on a forum, so whatever is most convenient to you emsquared sounds good to me. I'm totally cool with lampshading him out.

I’m also okay with him just disappearing, it might’ve been different if we’d RPd for months and months, but since we’re still relatively early on in the game, I think that’s fine

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!

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.

Word. Yea, I really don't play a game of any other sort, particularly in pbp and never unless that's really part of the design of the rpg system at hand, which it's not for Genesys.

So, yes, we could talk about if, or how well, or the exact nature of how your PCs would all know each other in advance of the first scene. But part of the "social contract" of the game would be that it's cooperative.
Interesting idea. Any thoughts on what a cyberpunk folk hero like that might look like? Basically just a modern-day Robin Hood? Or maybe an underground guild-like organization that does things to lift up the disenfranchised? Some internet-personality that web-casts exploits?

That said, I wouldn't want the social justice tones to hit too close to reality with the world as it is these days and in that way potentially not be much if an "escape", or even politically inflammatory...
Right, so this is kind of the cyberpunk RPG campaign default I think? And I'm fine with that, but also wanted to see if anything else or more specific interested you guys.

My main thought was, whatever it is, I just want it all to feel cyberpunky/bring out the setting and genre.