Heist the Colours (OOC)

Ok, with me:)
I think right now I'm equally for:
- Firefly themes of "western in space, focused on characters relations leaving in ONE ship, sometimes struggling with much bigger powers that they are" (simplification, I know... ) AND
- Space Exploration themes of "we move in vast space, exploring new planets and worlds, discovering some anomalies, life forms and maybe even ancient artifacts(are they really left by humans? ;) ), freedom, fresh 'air' on every new planet and the amazement of discovery". This Space Exploration could go sometimes in the direction of Interstellar movie feel, if that excellent movie had fallowing parts/chapters. Still science, but amazing new worlds.

This is what excites me the most about Traveller "approach" right now, what I think it can provide us.

But if "Firefly" was the initial aim for this game - let's keep it this way. Maybe those exploration themes will come naturally, maybe not, we will see. I think it should come first, as it will be eventually much more fun to explore universe with the band of friends that is almost like a family(Firefly) and I'm as interested in social "conflicts" and frictions as in science and what technology can bring to us:)

About AI: I think my main reason was the desire to explore together this subject... as AI is apparently knocking to our door in our real world right now.... :) And the questions of that where "sentient" starts and ends could be not answered for some time going forward. And I'm interested in our relation to technology, what is to be human... RPG is one of those medium that could allow us to do that. And IMHO good sci-fi books(Stanisław Lem, Asimov, many others) where always fundamentally about those questions(what it mean to be a human?), only using the advanced technology to provide the right context for the discussion, thought processes.

Not forgetting the simple subjects of: what is the meaning of life and what is consciousness... ;) Just kidding, that would be probably to heavy and personal for the PbP RPG game :-)

So to make it more concrete: I envisioned introducing AI into "mostly Firefly themed world" as one of those anomalies. Something extraordinary, strange. And as it is always with AI in books and movies - it can provide us with different opportunities for directions in which the story could go then another (mere? ;) ) human on board. But we don't need it from the beginning. That's why I proposed for it to slowly develop with time.

Hope I managed to describe what were my reasons.

Yeah, @Airshark we are waiting to see how you will handle the situation.

You gave us so good RP, that we demand more! :)

Raf could take your character to the table, to have all of us finally in one palce, but I think it will be much better to leave you with setting the mood for this as informing us about the situation is important moment.

I presume we will answer the very important questions stated by GM in RP?

Tx for the poke.

Sorry for the delay

Raf can interact if you like.
Lio will tell what happened to him this night leaving out the military secrets.
Maybe we can skip to the part right after Lio told everyone at the booth what happened?

If you have time right now, lead the way please! As I would only be able to post at few or more hours from now.

thought I already did :-/ Do you mean something else?

I thought you will narrate the skipping the walk to the booth and that we are already there, at the booth - as you proposed. But it's not a problem. I will try to bring us there in a moment.

I left an open question in RP thread to allow everyone construct our plan on the fly together, and say what they will be responsible for. Or what we still need. Hope it is ok and no one was expecting anything more precise from me?

Cool. Everyone can fill in their bit.

And what is Raf's part in this or his next step? Making contact with 'Bob' to see if he is still available on your new timetable? Something else?

I intentionally made Raf part "not so significant" so far, to have room to engage/support with what other will say/introduce in the story. Or add another thing later - probably something connected to the ship codes. I think when the plan will be confirmed, he will call Bob to say it is "this evening". Raf made an agreement with him about week ago, to keep a free (time?) slot for them until 1 p.m. (13) each day. Let's hope he will be reliable enough... and there won't be a need to "explain" to him that this slot is indeed VERY needed... ;) ;) ;) Raf don't think so it will. But we are getting close to the moment when this will be only in our GM hands :))

Also I think it would be good to establish time table. This is how I see it now:
- it is a late evening right now, maybe not so late as I described it earlier, but more in the vain what Lio said: much after most ordinary people work time,
- Raf thinks that we should start all the action not later then next evening. So if others agree we have 24h before putting things in motion and departure.

Is this ok? How other see it?

Ah, I see. So kinda like TARS in interstellar? Who is basically a machine being talked to as a human.

The timeline seems good to me. Better than doing it 'right now'. That would make things extra difficult.

@vagueGM, do we need to do any rolls for the prep of this mission or is everything up to the point where we are about to get the ship successful by default? I'm not sure where the setup-up posts end and the 'game' begins ;)

VERY good example. But there are many others too:)

If you say so. The dice may have their own options. But your characters will find out about that as and when it becomes relevant to them. They may find they have less time if their dice are not on their side. But you will be able to deal with that if it happens.
We know you will get the ship in the end (or a ship). But everything up to that point is real play and will need rolls, where appropriate. These rolls will mainly dictate what it will cost you --and not necessarily money, it could cost (or build) reputations and such too-- rather than if you succeed or survive.

We can treat this as a sort of 'tutorial mission' since we already know you make it through and get a ship. Gives us a chance to exercise the mechanics as much as we want to.

I don't know how easy it is to accidentally die in Traveller, but I assume that the Characteristics being your Hit Points means you have quite a lot of warning before you go down. Guns do do a lot of damage though, and healing takes a long time, so avoiding injury is definitely best, but I don't see 'unexpected sudden death' being a thing, so we could, probably, assume you all also live long enough to make it to your assumed ship. At least that is how I prefer to run games, players should have a fair amount of control over when their characters die, it should seldom be a 'surprise'.

I indicated that you would change the ident codes on the ship after you get away from here. So, if you make a mess, you need not be stuck with 'wanted levels' from the start. We can do a clean slate after the 'tutorial', keeping only what we want.
The Game began as soon as Raf sat down at the bar. Don't all games begin with the characters meeting in a bar?

"Prep is play."

They always do... Those bastards! 😡
Alrighty :) Let the games... already have begun!

I hope I didn't create any anomalies in the story with my post.

As a side note, I really like the RP so far :) really feels like it could be the script of a movie.

It seemed spot on to me. No anomalies. :)

It is good stuff. We probably won't be able to keep up the same quality if we try to do too much 'planning and background' in RP. Include as much of the details you want in the RPs, but then we can always drop back to OOC to work out the nitty-gritty --your characters will already know a lot of them and merely have to adjust to the sped-up time-frame.

I don't know how much detail we want to go into --or see on-screen-- about what you do before you get together again tomorrow evening. You are free to play out as much of your action as you want, but a lot of that might boil down to a 'montage roll'. Let me know.

If I want to take some medical gear 'drugs/ stimm packs' with me. Should I buy them now, or when we need them?

That depends on where you are when you 'need them'. It seems wise to stock a 'basic first aid kit' that you have on-hand. Your character would have done so.

But, if you --the player-- don't want to have to look through the shopping lists right now (and prefer to do that in an emergency), you know that I am generous about your claiming "My character would have known to pick up < appropriate 'vaccine' > when we were passing through the Starport gift-shop", and we can just 'spend the money' and say we did it if it is reasonable, or roll in a flashback scene if there is doubt.

If there are things that you 'always have on-hand', then we can decide to not bother tracking them and just spend the money when you use them. PbtA-style consequences for 'bad rolls' could be that you 'run out'.