General Chat

A place for general chatting, about the game or other topics.

Outsiders can also post to this thread (so long as the game remains Public).

@soises, maybe you need to give @Adrasthea another shout to let them know we have started. I am assuming they are not checking the site because they are not in any games at the moment, and therefore don't know about this one?

But, if they won't be able to manage the daily post rate, we should maybe sub in another player.

I already did. Adrastheia has peak workload atm. Hope she will answer tonight. :)

I as well realisticly will only be able to post 4-5 times a week. Hope that is okay.

OK. Hopefully that is temporary and they will be able to keep up during normal play.
This game expects a post per day, as stated from the start. 'Most days' means that, on any given day, we expect a post, and not receiving a post and having to wait longer would be unexpected.

I explicitly asked again at the end of recruitment that people who could not keep up not join and slow that pace down.

If you think you can manage 5 post per week that could still fit the definition of 'post most days', but 4 will be too slow (I have always found people to be a little slower than their promises).

I enjoyed your enthusiasm and contribution in the recruitment thread, and wanted to play with you, but US2 can be simultaneously a slow and a busy game, and that gets even worse if we have to wait between posts.

Think about what you can manage and let us know.

Hi, guys!

Due to an unforseeable development in RL I cannot guarantee the daily postings anymore. This is why I will not take part in the game at this time.

I wish you all the best and an exciting adventure!
xoxo

You are correct - you stated this from the start.
Just in my experience DMs like to set high targets, so that an acceptable amount of posts and play tempo can be kept.
Well, 4-5 are realistic for me. But I want to do this game for fun and it shouldn't fell like I am bugging someone with my (lack of) quick responses. :-/
I enjoy posts that are more than a decision within two lines. This - sometimes - needs an extra day before I can come up with something that I am happy with. :)

Long story short & with a heavy heart: you'll have to get this started without me.

There are some family, business and other trips planed this year, so this wouldn't help either.

If you vagueGM - maybe later on - should come to the conclusion, that an average of 4.5 posts a week is good enough and you're a player short - please let me know. :)

Sorry to hear that. In you PM your implied that this was a temporary situation and that you may be able to keep up after a few weeks away?

I think I will add one other player and then you can let us know in the future if you are available. We will assess at that time how fitting another player and character into the story would work, but we won't plan around that till it happens.

All the best.

That's a pity, but thanks for addressing this now and not after we have spent time making a word around your character, that really is appreciated.

Maybe some other time, but all my games are 1/day and have been for decades. I don't see that changing.

The loss of your enthusiasm is a blow to the game. All the best.

Hi everyone, and thanks for having me! :-)

Regarding this:
I can keep the 1 post/day during weekdays, but in weekends sometimes I may miss one day, or perhaps be able to post something shorter from mobile. Let me know if this would fit with the game expectations.

Weekends are often a bit slower for many, so that should be fine.

Submitted my Wizard character. One thing I don't understand, do you take a corruption move or are all corruption move available to you?

Corruption is a second Advancement mechanic, you earn Corruption though play just like XP in other games, you Spend that earned Corruption to buy the Corruption Advances on your sheet. If you ever run out of Corruption Advances you have to take the one that Retires your Character as a Threat: they become a 'bad guy' NPC and the GM may use them —and their intimate knowledge— to thwart the other characters.

You start with only a way to earn Corruption, this is called your Trigger, and is listed at the top of that section in your sheet. The more Corruption Advances your gain the more ways to earn Corruption you have, it is a slippery slope (but you don't have to use any of them, it is always up to the player).

I added a note in the Resources page about it. See Corruption.

Okay, another question. Do we have to do the debts with other players or can it be other npcs

Debts can be with NPCs but players are more interesting and more able to engage with that mechanic, so most should be with PCs.

I have a fever with sore throat. My posting will be slow. Am sorry for the inconvenience.

Sorry to hear that. Get well soon.

I think the characters and relationships are shaping up nicely. I would like to start thinking about beginning play early next week. If there is anything you still need to do or define or know about the world let's try get that sufficiently nailed down to be able to start playing, we can always learn more as we play.

@Stalker05: Let us know if that you think you will struggle with that timeframe, we can wait for you to feel better, but we can also start and bring you into the action when you are ready.

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I am not a fan of the slow-start with separated characters, the book also advises against it for this ruleset as each character can run on their own for sessions on end. I would like to do an in media res start where everyone is involved, even if they are not 'together' or on the same page. Based on what we have, I can see a few ways to link the characters together. This is not a fighty game, but we may start with a 'fight'.

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The Imp needs to roll their Business as Usual, and that may affect how they are involved, but could also be orthogonal to the events we find ourselves enmeshed in, depends how the roll goes.

• Does anyone else have any 'start of session' or 'when time passes' Moves that I have missed?

• Does anyone need anything before we start?

I’ve got this move:
"When time passes —or at the start of the game— choose someone in your web and learn a secret about them that they'd rather keep buried. Mark corruption to ask a followup question about the answer; their player must answer you honestly."
Rhiannon and possibly Mark (provided Stalker05 is okay with taking that betrayal debt we were talking about) are the only people in my Web to begin with so I’d like to learn a secret about Rhiannon, if that’s alright with @Ysolde

Other than that, there are a few last things I’ve got to take care of (finalising debts, answering the Intro Questions, finding an image I like for Benji’s portrait) but I should be able to get all that done over the weekend!

Good to hear you are feeling better.

Happy to start early next week! :)

Should I roll for Business as Usual here in this thread, or do you prefer that I do that in the game thread once it's open?

Happy to start next week

I prefer to keep game rolls in RP threads.

However, if you think you might need time to work out the results before we start you can roll now, probably in the Character Creation thread so all the non-RP character stuff is in one place.

I am generally not much of a fan of secret notes, I usually expect players to be able to keep what their characters know and don't know separate from what the players know.

Benji's ability also seems like something that should be roleplayed when you meet and he learns this secret. I am not sure how well that will fit into a general RP, though, maybe we will need to make a place for it in the first few scenes you have together or we can flash back to a recent scene you just had as it becomes appropriate.

This is a 'when time passes' Move, so a flashback or a scene where all the hints come together may be the way to do it? We can play it by ear when it happens in the RP.

It's okay, I'm fine with rolling in the RP thread once it's ready. I just wasn't sure if you wanted to know the details of the scheme before spinning that thread up.

If you know anything about what you want for your first Scheme (a bit hard without knowing if it is a 6-:), then you can share it in the Character Creation thread, maybe something you and your partner in crime, Rhiannon, are concocting together?

Else we can pick it up when the RP starts. Waiting for the RP does mean you will be dealing with the (probably unrelated) RP when your Scheme starts, but does also mean you could, sometimes, tailor your Scheme to fit the current events.

Your Schemes do seem like something you are trying to do despite whatever is happening in the rest of the fiction. But they may sometimes form the basis of the main events that draw everyone else in. We will have to see how they work in play.

No problem
A secret about Rhiannon: Sometimes she's not sure how much she really believes she's actually chosen for anything. Sometimes she thinks that maybe her birthmark is just a mole that looks a bit like a Raven when you squint right...

In case it is helpful. The sheets allow you to 'easily' roll your Moves.

Click on your character name below the 'Add new roll' block below the text area, then you can click on the bubble containing the number and it will fill in the dice roller with the Reason and the dice code. You can edit either part of the dice roller if you need to.


For instance: Jacob can roll Business and Usual by clicking here:



Or Put a Name to a Face (or any Move) with Wild by clicking here:

Wow, this is so cool, thanks! Happy that we have a GP power user as our GM!

I have removed the Test Sheet. With only one sheet in each of your lists it does not add the 'Jacob: ...' part to the roll, so it is less messy. :)

Getting information from NPCs

We should decide as a group how we want to handle this sort of thing. The nature of the NPC will affect the answers, but the game will be affected by the general answer you decide on.

There are currently a few —maybe interconnected— 'mysteries' that you are aware of. There seems to be a general move to offload these to NPCs by just asking for answers. Some are simple to deal with, Slippery Jim will not risk his own skin going against wizards and demons [ref], so there are no easy and direct answers there [ref], but other are more complex.

Jena [ref] and Charles Whittier [ref] are part of the players' sheet and a feature of the Playbook, they are tools you are meant to use to solve your problems. But they are also still people with individual needs that should to be taken into account, and they have limitations. Such resources should be available to you most of the time, and only very rarely should you be denied access (other than when the fiction makes such denial obvious), if we roll the dice they would mainly dictate timeframes rather than outright 'failures' and should produce some sort of answer, even if that answer sends you to another person for more. They might not be able to give the sort of answers you are looking for in the timeframes you are needing them, (GM Move: Activate their stuff's Downside), but they should not make your life harder.

Absent a more specific Move, Hit the Streets is probably the Move to use for such things. In the case of Playbook NPCs the most common consequences would be 'that it will take time for them to come up with answers', but they may sometimes have their own problems they need you to help them deal with (if it does not complicate the current story too much). Other NPCs (Jim, Kenedi, anyone not part of the character sheets) will add a lot more complication on a Miss or a Partial Success, the sheet NPCs should be safer for more frequent use.

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The question is: Do you want to have NPCs just give you answers to the 'mysteries' proposed by the story? That is fine, but it takes away that part of the game and could make it more action-orientated as you jump from resolution to resolution while the NPCs do the legwork. It makes sense for you to ask for help —it gets frustrating when 'silly PCs' assume they are the protagonist and try to do it all themselves— but the players need to decide how effective this help will be and what that does to the story. I don't want to constantly shut down such enquiries.

A middle-ground is that we rely on Moves like Hit the Streets and deal with the consequences of the dice rolls. This will range from 'some answers' on a 10+; to 'answers later' or 'answers that will cost you' on a 7-9 or 'no answers' if you are unwilling to pay the cost (you choice); to 'bad things' or 'additional complications' on a 6-.

How do we want to handle these things? Everyone should answer.

They don't need to ask for a favour. If they help you you will owe them a Debt by the mechanics, either you reward them then and there —Cash in a Debt, or some in-fiction reward that they agree to— or you end up owing them a Debt that they can call in later to suit their needs.

Mine is not an action oriented character, so my answer to this would be no. NPCs can give us clues to point us to the good direction, but shouldn't give us the answers to mysteries. It's more fun to find out by ourselves. :)

That's my general opinion. But then I am not 'playing'. :)

I agree that NPCs should be able to give us clues or ‘pieces of the puzzle’, but shouldn’t be able to solve the whole mystery for us

How are we feeling about the game?
Any feedback? Questions?

With the loss of Ysolde and Rhiannon, do we want to add another player? Let me know.

All good here! I don’t mind either way about adding another player

Ah! Sure, we can have another player.

Ah, sorry, I missed this. I'm okay with adding another player, although we're also doing fine with just the three of us, so whatever you see fit works for me!

I am liking the three we have, and agree it works well. Three is a very good number for PbP RPGs, my only concern is that it can leave us with two if something goes wrong, and two is the hardest number to run a game for.

I have had a player express interest, which is why I asked now. We will see what they bring.

Hi everyone; thanks for accepting me to your game.

I'm pitching Emma Harper for your consideration (the Aware playbook); a dark fantasy/gothic horror novelist that had a brush with the supernatural world while researching people, locals, and urban legends for her next book. She spends more and more of her time following leads and interviewing denizens of the night, documenting her investigations in her novels, which are becoming 'living journals' of sort.

Welcome Delirium.

That looks great. Head over to the Character and World Creation thread and we can talk about your character idea. If you settle on that, you can grab The Aware template from the Playbooks thread.

Welcome, Delirium! Your character concept looks really interesting. :)

Welcome, Delirium! That is a very interesting character concept.

Hello, everyone. I would like to say, that I am leaving the game. I have some problems in adjusting with this narrative style of play. However, I thoroughly enjoyed the experience with you all. Maybe in future we can again come together and play.

Sorry to see you go. We understand how a game like this might not be for everyone. All the best with your other games, and thanks for playing with us, I really liked Mark and his cadre of women. :)

How are the rest of you feeling about continuing the game? We still have three players.

Also, how are you feeling about the 'something messing with the weather' storyline? It was created on Stalker05's request [ref], and was sorta relying on someone wizard-like to 'sort it out'.

We can adjust to accommodate the loss of our wizard. I can see an easy way to task Jacob with finding a solution, but it may be best to leave it as backdrop and have those events unspool around the characters without their needing to be directly involved in any sort of solution. We could also scrap it and turn it into an incidental patch of bad weather that resolves itself.

I sorta need to know where we are at because I was about to start a new Thread (I like to keep them not much more than 10 pages, as people have complained that longer threads can be very slow to load) and the new thread was going to be called 'Talking About the Weather', or somesuch. :)

I agree, right now Jacob has enough threads open:

- Demon squad sent after him by some wizard, to try to steal the magic cross, and ended up suckig one of his precious tomes in the portal.
- Scheme with M.Shelley's book
- Artifact possibly found by Lizabeth and related to the Nigh Sisters

... so I think we can leave the weather issue in the background for now. Who knows, we might find it is related to some other thread when we play to find out.
I guess after my previous paragraph, this is needless to say, but I'm okay with going on!

PD: Sorry to see you go, @Stalker05, it's been a pleasure!

Sorry to hear that, Stalker05! It’s been fun playing with you
Benji’s certainly in no hurry to fix the weather. The rain has been very convenient for him :)