OOC Chat

Hey @bowlofspinach @ThatTaoGuy @McButterpants @C1NDER @SenorDeebs @microtheMacroBear

I've started putting the the game together - you can see some of that in the Session Zero thread.

I'm on a work trip at the moment - with flights and all that stuff, and then full-on days - and I suspect I don't have the brain space to line up all the ducks in a row to get ready to start the game this week.

BUT wanted to let you know that I'm working on it, that I haven't forgotten, and that I'm looking forward to this. Sorry for the delay.

Sounds good! Thanks for the invite.

Thanks for setting it up! Looking forward to it.

Thanks for having me along!

Nice! Thanks for having me.

Thanks for including me!

Sorry I'm silent this weekend. I'm in an online con and ended up picking up quite a few games. I'll get something posted tonight or tomorrow at the latest.

Thanks for the heads-up - no problem :) Hope you're enjoying the con!

Con was great. I ended up playing in 7 games this weekend. I'm wiped. I will get my character sheet squared away tomorrow and start posting. Have a wonderful night!

Got it done. Character sheet has been submitted. Looking forward to getting started.

Nice - all characters approved, we're good to go!

Do we have a line on foul language, cursing? I'm writing Morgan dropping a few F-bombs without even thinking about it, but I don't want to be needlessly offensive if it bothers anyone.

Thanks for asking that, @ThatTaoGuy.

For curses I'm good with fuck, shit, asshole, bollocks, and milder ones (damn, crap, bullshit and more). Not the c-word, not bastard, not racist, sexist, anti-LGBTQIA+, anti-sex-work (whore, slut), abelist slurs.

It's not a problem for me if someone uses one of these as long as it's OK for you if I then just politely ask you to edit it out. Don't want to make y'all feel pressured to constantly worry about your language.

Thanks! The approved list covers 99.9% of what I might put in Morgan's speech.

I leave for a week of work travel today, will make me slower to reply. Wanted to give you a heads up on that.

Sounds good!

No worries. Busy week for me as well

Thank you for checking in! I hope one of us tried to save the cat. I'm not sure Hannah would given her character details, but I can work that in if needed.

The reception for the art show my mom and daughter have pieces in is today. Tomorrow is the Super Bowl and I’m hosting and cooking for the family who cares more about commercials and snacks than football. I may be sparse around here.

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!

I agree, Holroyd killing the Doctor was definitely my favorite part of the whole scenario. To "yes and" ThatTaoGuy further, I really enjoyed the interactions between players and GM. Every one of the characters felt real and everything felt like it could be in an Alien movie.

Hannah is a very different kind of character than I'm used to playing so it was fun and challenging for me to get into her head space.

As for wishes, I wish that Holroyd and McWhirr made it to the ship instead of Hannah and Hirsch. I feel like they were the least morally grey of the bunch, but the dice decide.

However, it was a crazy ending having the face hugger snag Hirsch and Holroyd appear out of nowhere!

I had a blast!

I particularly liked the secret agendas. Mine was that Holroyd knew about the aliens and why the Company was intent on having an operation here (but not the details, specific danger, etc) and that his loyalty was to the PCs in an effort to do everything possible to help them escape, even if it meant sacrificing his own life. That said, I kinda forgot or failed to consider that someone might have a secret agenda against me specifically, and that was one of the most exciting elements of the game for me. So my STAR goes to @microtheMacroBear for pulling that out of their hat and giving me a surprising and fun twist. After all - we as players already know the Alien threat, but I did NOT see that coming.

As for Wishes, I would have liked to have had opportunities to make more use of Holroyd's other skills. I think this is more a limitation of this being a one-shot adventure, but I was secretly hoping he'd find a loader to pilot in that last scene to make use of his amazing Heavy Machinery skill (10d6).

That's all I really have. Everyone brought their characters to life really well and I felt engaged and drawn into the setting and story the whole time through. Thank you BeardHare for running it - you did a great job and kept it flowing nicely, IMO.

Yay! Hannah is/was a sleeper agent. A loader fight would have been great

Haha so WY corporate? Probably is good Holroyd didn't learn that earlier on. I can certainly imagine Hannah's shock and reaction to Holroyd's actions with the doctor and his reasonings for doing what he did.

Chariot of the Gods is a three act scenario. Each act similar in length as the one you just played. Each of the pregens gets a secret agenda for each act. If the PC acts to forward the agenda st expense of other stuff you get a story point which is something like inspiration in dnd. Maybe a guaranteed success on one roll or something like that

That's pretty neat, I like that! So it relies on pregen characters as well then?

There are pre gens that come with it. I am sure there is space for players to build their own characters that are coherent with the setting and that we then transfer over the agenda from one of the pregens

Cool. :) I enjoy character creation, but I also really did like Holroyd.

I'll post the pregen overviews and players will be free to pick one or build their own. AND I agree, I think Free League in general does a really good job with fitting the pregens to the story and giving them space to be fun to rp

I'll post the pregen overviews and players will be free to pick one or build their own. AND I agree, I think Free League in general does a really good job with fitting the pregens to the story and giving them space to be fun to rp

Oh yeah! Hannah was on that rock specifically to watch Holroyd.

That's pretty cool

That makes me think of Burke in Aliens, when he locks Ripley and Newt in with the facehuggers.

Hi! @Beardhare My availability has cleared. If you were still thinking of running another Aliens game, I'd love to play.