OOC Chat

lol- you summarized my superbowl weekend precisely. Alton Brown’s wing recipe? A staple. Enjoy your weekend everyone.

Hi! I noticed that Hannah was a public character sheet and then accidentally deleted her trying to make her unpublic. I feel really foolish!

It was a complete accident. Sorry all! Hannah is still playing the game.

@Beardhare Thankfully, everything is in writing and I resubmitted the charater sheet. Sorry for the mess up!

ChatGPT is cool ... until it snaps your neck!!

I hope youre enjoying this as much as i am! Never had this happen in this scenario before!! or in any of the many APs ive listened to!

I hope it wasn't off-putting too badly :D I had this in mind for a hot minute. He would have done the same thing if he had gotten the door open lol

I'm leaving for vacation in 2 days on Wed 27 Mar. I'll have intermittent access. Hopefully I don't hold anything up too much.

Thanks for the heads-up @ThatTaoGuy - wishing you a great time on vacation!

Things might be over very soon in-game... (😬!!!) and anyway have no problem waiting for you to have space to make your posts.

Taking of things being over soon...

I've been pleased by how well Alien RPG has worked here via PbP - we've basically run combat (the part I was most concerned about) RAW, and it wasn't (for me) frustratingly slow (helped by you the players being able to respond quickly to posts).

If you were interested in it, I'd be very up for running some more Alien RPG after we're done with this scenario.

While I usually prefer homebrew settings/campaigns, I'd like to try out the pre-written ones by Free League a go, as I also enjoy learning from professional storytellers how they've chosen to put scenarios together. They have several published "cinematic" scenarios - that might run maybe three times longer than Hopes Last Day that we're currently finishing off. Could be either pregens, your own character builds (with some input from me about what would be fitting/consistent with the scenario's story - and giving out some of the pre-gen character goals), or a mix of those.

Let me know if you'd be interested in something like that.

Interested? Yes, definitely.

Have time? ...that's iffy. I'm already overextended on games. Maybe if I can wrap one or two more up after this one, I'll have more bandwidth.

That's great to know @ThatTaoGuy - if I do run one, I anyway would need time to set up all the assets, so could well be a few months before ready to kick off.

I'll ping you if/when I do that and see where you are with game load!

I'm interested to play this again, but I'm in the same boat as ThatTaoGuy. I committed to one too many games at the moment.

@microtheMacroBear I know that feeling - I'm myself trying to be SUPER choosy when I start new ones, trying to do a "only join a new game after two others stop" rule.

So, sounds like a bit of time between this and starting a new one, and then an interest check post pinging you who say you coiuld be interested here is a solid way to go.

Ping me when you start up. I enjoy horror games.

Let me know when you get going on anything new BeardHare. If I have capacity, I'll be happy to join :)

Yes! This is what I should have done, but I got over eager

Well, I quite enjoyed that :)

Ahhhh I am glad! The way the combat finally happened, with you facing off against things one-on-one, your chances weren't good :-/

But MAYBE Hannah makes it off the moon... although she'll need to do something about the acid hole in the shuttle before she does that...

I'll have some stars and wishes questions about the game once we're finally done with it - I feel I've learned a lot about the system and how it can work on PbP. In particular, I was pleased to see that a lot of the rolls can be taken by me, to leave players to focus on the narrative - and that results in combat being a lot faster-pasted than I was expecting.

I always struggle a bit with the randomness of the xenomorph attacks - but then remember that it brings in an element of uncertainty and risk and lethality that I do feel fits this world well.

Anyway, yeah, will be in touch again about this once we're finally done.

I like the randomness on the attacks, it makes them exciting! I am not so sure it's looking good for Hannah. Looking forward to the stars and wishes.

Hey everyone!

Thanks so much for being part of that game with me. I enjoyed you're creativity, and appreciated your patience and openness as I found my way through running this system, and this scenario, via PbP. I particularly appreciated how you dug into the backstories of your characters, and pushed to interact with each other - so that it wasn't just player - GM back-and-forth. Makes it more fun for me when I see that stuff emerging from your play.

Also, I hope you, like me, enjoy playing in the location that we know so well from watching Aliens. I find that really adds to my enjoyment of this scenario. Helps me imagine what's happening that bit better than when it's all new to the game.

You did an amazing job finding your way through the base. You kept making decisions that meant that, yes, you managed to avoid the beasts... All four of you against a xeno in the open with Hirsch's pulse rifle and so on, depending on how initiative went, would give you my guess a 50/50 chance of taking one out, with the expectation that it would have killed one of you (I'm pulling those numbers out of the back of my head and based on experience running the system).

One thing I found was that it started to get tricky to try and make things feel special, interesting, different, when you knew what you were up against - a lot of you creeping around trying not to be seen. But also, I felt that whenever it was getting a bit much, you'd do something (er like kill the Doctor heh) that would spice things up again.

I felt it went pretty well. I felt a bit stuck by the fact that everyone had their own secret agenda - it meant it was harder to ask questions like "How do you feel about that?" because the answer would have often given away some of the secret stuff.

Anyway, was curious about your take on the experience of playing this scenario and system.

For that I like using "Stars and Wishes".

So, I invite each of you to tell us about one (or more) moments in the game, things players or PCs did, or elements of the overall experience that stood out for you, that you enjoyed.

And then, I invite you to each share a wish - something you'd like to have seen if this game had gone on for a future session - mechanics, kinds of character interactions, bits of the rules that didn't get used, things like that.

I'm my own harshest critic, and find that asking "tell me what you didn't like about the game" doesn't actually help me improve, it just makes me feel bad. So I prefer Stars and Wishes as it helps me focus on doing more of the stuff that's working for people. (Reading research on delivering/receiving feedback - something I teach - suggests that some people benefit more from direct criticism, and others like me are helped more by this kind of positive feedback. Learning that has made me much more comfortable using this tool :) )

Holroyd killing the doctor was definitely a favorite moment. I liked out interactions in general, how we all talked to each other instead of just waiting for GM info. That made it feel more real.

The only thing I wish I'd done is fire that pulse rifle, but it didn't make sense in the situations we were in to do so. I don't think anything could have been done to change that, and I don't feel like it stifled me as a player or my character. It was just bad luck rolls, and honestly, everyone else getting to fight and shoot except the ex-marine is kind of funny, in its' own way.

This game was a lot of fun!