Scene 1: What are you waiting for?

This scenario is written to begin as you arrive at the colony, so I'm currently throwing together some content and ideas to deal with the tractor and what you do next. May take me a bit of time before I'm ready to respond to your posts. Just a heads up. Not a complaint! Excited to see where this takes us!

Oh, and, also, as an aside - as an android, Holroyd/@C1NDER can't push rolls. He also doesn't take stress and has higher stats than humans.

@C1NDER are you playing Holroyd such that all PCs know he's an android? If not then IIRC you DO get stress and push options as you mimic human responses.

I put together a random table to see what Sonny finds on the tractor - let's see where this roll takes us. I'd usually as the player to make the roll, but to speed up here on PbP I'll do it

EDIT OMG you got snake eyes...?!

@C1NDER and others - I plan to post, and respond to your questions, tomorrow. Feeling unwell rn and can't concentrate enough to do a decent post.

Would help me if you wait to post until I've caught up. Sorry for the delay.

Ah, @C1NDER, what I'd meant to convey with my message was "my understanding is the default is that people know Holroyd's an android, but if you want to run it with that not known, then go for it and just let me know." Sorry for the confusion.

I think we're still at a place where you can change to him being a 'sleeper' android if you want. Just let us know here if that's the case.

Catching up on your posts at the moment, I'll make a post saying explicitly when I'm ready for more in-character posts.

Re: Help rolls - I asked for advice about this for Year Zero Engine games on the GP Discord.

Consensus seems to be that, yes, running it like you would in synchronous play i.e. always waiting briefly for anyone to offer to help out on any roll, i.e. giving everyone time to offer to help, slows down PbP in a bad way.

The pre-roll thing I was trying I feel isn't a good solution - it's OK here outside combat, where there isn't a cost to helping out. But once things start moving, helping out costs you your action (fast or slow, depending on the action you're helping out on). So then, already knowing what's been rolled, will be difficult to avoid bias when making the decisions whether to help or not (as you'll already know whether it'll make a difference or not).

So I'm going to go with the Bowl's description of what's worked for her i.e.

In most cases, I'll offer you the roll. Then, anyone who wants to help can offer it, but will need to make that offer before the player gets around to making the post in which they roll the dice. So depending on how quickly the rolling player posts, you'll have different amounts of time to offer help.

In cases where the roll is VERY important/risky/dangerous I might decide to offer you all a full day, maybe two, to make offers to help. I'll be explicit about those situations.

Sorry for the time it's taking me here to decide how to run this PbP, and the space taken up explaining rules/rolls. I'm hoping that going forward I'll write shorter OOC posts as we get used to the rules.

In response to your first question, @C1NDER, and to the others who want to know about trying to fix the tractor:

My call is that this will require a HEAVY MACHINERY roll.

The conditions outside are the normal bleak very windy rainy LV-426 weather, and you don't have the a full set of good tools to do it - you'd have more luck back at the base. Thus, this roll will be difficulty "Hard" which means you'll roll two fewer dice than otherwise.

So if Holryod makes the roll, and is playing as an 'out' android this will be a dice pool of

7 (Atribute STR) + 3 (Skill Heavy Machinery) -2 (Hard difficulty) + potentially three extra dice if three others offer to help before @C1NDER posts their roll.

No option to push the roll if it fails, if they are an out android. And if he fails, then no one else can try the same action again unless the situation changes a lot.

In response to your second question:

There isn't a supply problem for walking on to either Processor 9 or back to Hadley's Hope main base. You can walk around outside OK, breathe the air (even though it's filthy). It would take 8 hours to walk back to Hadley's Hope main base, 20 hours (so you'd be exhausted when you got there) to get to Processor 9. But you can survive both walks with very little food and water - it just will be unpleasant.

Although if you do walk, and take Jenny the cat with you, you'll need to fashion some kind of sling or carrying box to bring her along.

Alright, I think that's me caught up now - please go ahead and do in-character posts again.

@C1NDER I see a few options in this situation:

1. You could say "I'll help anyone who wants to try and repair the tractor" - then when/if someone does try and repair it, they get and extra die. You get to add the die as you would be posting the offer of help before they make the roll.

2. You could decide to make the roll now, without any help (you have a reasonable chance of success here, 8 dice looking for at least one 6).

Those are the options I was expecting when I described the 'helping out' plan in the post above.

And then there's what you've gone for here i.e.

3. Choosing to set your own time-frame to wait for offers of help i.e. waiting a day.

These three options have different effects on how quickly the game moves forward. I feel that, currently, none of them make things problematically slow, so am good with your choice here i.e. 3. So that's what I assume we're going with unless you post to say you change your mind and go for either 1. or 2.

Concerning distances to Processor 9 and Hadley's Hope main base - I'm imagining the walk is through very bleak, rocky, difficult terrain, such that you'll be going really slowly. Situation isn't as bad as in Alien when they have to also walk in their suits, but travel over the surface of LV-426 is really challenging. So my distance estimates here were assuming just 1km/hour i.e. distances are half of what you described 8km to base, 20 km to processor. I realise that in canon these are likely shorter but hey this is OUR Alien universe.