Open Chat

By the way, I should tell you all this: I wasn't pleased by the pacing I made on the first day (with almost went for half a year of real time!), thus I scrapped my initial of I had of making a very open-ended and 'purposeful-less' game, and decided to put in some structure on it. This actually greatly rekindled my desire to keep this game up, honestly.

I made an overarching plot that will be divided into 4 'seasons', the stakes raising with them. Each will have 3 main chapters (with extra 'fillers' or side-stories between them). This mystery you guys just found yourselves in, is the first chapter of the first season. With this you can have an overall idea of game length and pacing (the later main chapters of each season will be longer than the first ones, probably).

I'm still studying a way to include in-between adventure interactions.

Now that I have all this set up, I'll also try (and be more successful at) posting more frequently, at least once a day.

I, however, think you letting us mingle for a while, you only posting more rarely, and watching the chaos unfold, was a highly successful choice for the genre. You may have gone a bit far with it, but I think the game just wouldn't be the same without this kind of first-day shenanigans happening again between the more serious action.
It is important to have a big plot in addition to the day-in-life stuff, yes.

Balance and alternation are keys to success, I think.
Parallel threads seem to enable a lot.

Thanks, I indeed had fun with those first sections of the game. But yeah, I reckon it needs something more substantial to keep being engaged (people will post much more often on a game that just started, which helps with that amount of back and fourth), and we also had a considerable higher number of players too, which may have been a bit too much for me to handle as a GM, but I digress (even though I'm working on recruiting another player.)

I agree that parallel threads are a good idea (at least seems so), though I may ask what you guys would prefer:

a) These threads to follow the natural course of the days (just like we did for the first day)

b) Be a specific and hand-tailored scene or situation that I'd come up with for you to interact? Like a side-story of sorts, though with low stakes (of course, with stuff carrying over to the main story, like character relationships that would be build up from that)

It's probably easier to relax the timing of those threads to an 'at some point throughout the week' (and eventually month) scale. That way the real-timescale-to-ingame-timescale ratio doesn't look so stressfully zoomed in all the time, scenes can be sprinkled pretty freely (there's plenty of time slots to have something happen and to have dialogues/interactions), and it doesn't feel like meaningful events/progression are too tightly packed together.
Side-stories or at least scene themes and prompts sure look like good to have, even if after that the PCs scatter into the chaotic interactions we've seen on day one. E.g. we should probably eventually have a rehearsal of the play with dragons and princes and dark knights.

Bringing this conversation here, as it seems more adequate.

Well, I'm sorry if my pitch at the time mislead you into limiting you out of any idea you had...

If you want to change anything at this point, well, feel free to.

Also, the "<-- You are here -->" Is highly unfair of your part, as at least 50% of the inappropriate stuff in this game was perpetrated by the players themselves, lol

"We are here" would be much more correct.

All is fine. I did start out Lín Jìng as something of a placeholder/typecast of mine, but I think by now I figured out the unique things I like playing about her, the inner conflicts, aspirations &c. I couldn't really do a 180° at this point even if I wanted to, especially since I deliberately conceptualised her as something of an opposite of that other concept. But I don't want to anyway. (And besides, Sumeryu already covers many of the directions I went for in that other campaign.)

I'm so busy. ><

It's the busiest time of year and I'm taking care of my mother and grandmother. Sorry for the holdups.

Greetings, everyone!

@Eltesla,@vicky_molokh - good to be in another game with you both!

@Moyreau - thanks for the invite! I made a rough sketch of the character. The final one will end up looking way different, but at the very least I have a name:Her name is Hinoka. It means "fire flower." I am interested in learning about option A. I *was* leaning toward B, but I think it’s because that one fit my original expectation. A has piqued my interest… I suppose that create-a-creature post is something I should look at.

Oh, very cool stuff!

After further research into standard Japanese girls’ names, Hibana is the better name. It means fire flower or spark—which best fits my vision.

Question on ability/weakness:

Is the cost:
+/-1 (1)
+/-2 (2)
+/-3 (4)
+4 (8)
+5 (15)

Weaknesses seem to be limited to -3.

Perks and flaws have listed costs, like Self-Only (-5).

I'm not the GM, but I think I should be familiar enough with the base of the system to explain. The ability/weakness and the perk/flaw subsystems are almost unrelated.

The Abilities and Weaknesses come out of a single budget in character creation, and have flat costs during character creation (but cost an ascending amount of XP in advancement). You have some number of points (check the thread, IIRC it was five, but please don't take my word for it) to buy Abilities. If you take Weaknesses, they grant you points instead. I don't think there is a cap on the number of weakness points on the character. You are capped at +5 in a single Ability, and check with the GM before a typical pairing of Abilities (i.e. the sort that is always rolled together) exceeds +5.

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Perks and Flaws are things that are applied to the different ways you can use an ability. You can have many such combinations, and there is n not a strict cap on the number of such 'suites' per ability (it mostly only makes sense for supernatural abilities though). If a suite has more Perks than Flaws, it has an increased ENDURANCE cost per use, if it has a 0 or fewer net Perk/Flaw cost, it less END to use (minimum 0).

E.g. if you have Attack representing fire magic, you can have such an array of power suites:
- Ranged +0, Multiple Targets +10, and now you can hit several enemies but must pay 10 END when you do so,
- Ranged +0, which you can just use every turn for free,
+ Ranged, Accurate I (+5), Ineffective I (-5), which rolls more dice to hit but deals less damange, but does not cost END to use.

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I tried to share my PC, let's see if you can read the example builds:

https://gamersplane.com/characters/custom/30819/

Hello new person! how kind of you to join us, so funny story i was actually just about to respond to your post with something similar to what Vicky said... but my internet literally cut out as i was posting causing my post to vanish into the ether. I got ninjaed by the internet

Vicky is right. At character creation, ability costs are flat, and the sum of all your abilities minus your weaknesses shouldn't surpass 5.

Perks & Flaws have no costs, but instead, whenever you use them with an ability, you spend Endurance equal to the number next to them (flaws decrease the Endurance spend). I don't really know what Vicky meant by they only making sense for supernatural abilities though.


Abilities are capped at +5 and you can't have any possible roll that would have a bonus greater than +5 at character creation (combining 2 abilities, like Smart and Knowledge).

I mean it probably wouldn't make sense to put e.g. 'Multiple Targets' or 'Paralysing' onto Beauty (you'd probably want some sort of mental attack instead). Though maybe you could put Focus on it if it's supernatural beauty bestowed by a magic amulet.

I see. Well, paralyzing specifies that it must be an attack, and I would really demand the multiple targets for someone to charm their way through a crowd.

I sit corrected. (I did not expect you to handle crowd interactions like attacks.)

Oh…! Flat +2 is 2 and -3 is -3 is way easier than what the OVA book said!

Okay… gonna slowly chip away at character creation!

The book is ambiguous, suggesting several ways to price/budget Abilities for the GM to choose from, IIRC. Understandably that can be confusing on a quick skim.