[OOC] General talk

Hi all! Here we can talking about everything out of game fiction. I encourage you to say hi for other's to see and write few words about yourself.

From here - if you are a new player - you should move to character creation Forum - there will be a new thread specially for your PC(s) creation process.

Hi. Avraham here, or Avi for short. Been playing TTRPGs since the late 1980s—exclusively D&D or one of its myriad offshoots. Played BattleTech, but only in CRPG/MMO (anyone remember EA's short-lived Battletech 3025?). In real life I work in a statistics-based STEM feel, so I know my way around a spreadsheet or some basic programming. My PbP style tends to longer posts; I often try to write as if I'm narrating a book. If I ever get on your nerves, please reach out to me and let me know!

Nice to meet everyone! I'm Quilltid and I'm pretty new to TTRPGs as I had never played them before joining here, but really enjoying it! I tend to check GP at least once a day, especially since I am GM'ing the Lego DnD game if you're following that. I tend to do long run-on sentences and use vocabulary from the latest books I'm reading so let me know if you need me to cut back on anything in the posts. Looking forward to checking out this game system with you all!

Howdy, I'm Spinningdice/Spinny from the UK. Been playing since the early 90s and love trying/playing new systems I generally check in at least once a day...

Hello everyone. I've been playing D&D since my high school days in 90s, but really started loving OSR right after the 5e fiascos and pandemic. I'm excited to play Tales of Argosa since I've played Low Fantasy Gaming quite a bit. I will do what I can to check in once per day but it might be difficult on the weekends because of my job. I would love to play ACKS on here sometime too if anyone is willing to DM that (or I suppose I could DM it once I've learned Gamers Plane systems.)

Really happy that we are getting close to begin this game! Thanks all for joining.

Shadowknight it's great you played LFG before! As I didn't and Argosa is quite new itself. So please, share any experience and comments with us about how this game works. And always willing to learn:)

Personally I don't play at weekends( as stated in R thread) so it won't be a problem from game advancement perspective:)

ACKS? What it is, and why it is so interesting to you?

Im also one of those persons that loves to explore new systems(mechanics in general).

Forgot to intro.
Call me gray. GrayWord was my pseudo at high school when I was writing poems (sorry, they are all in Latvian and I'm afraid lost them, was not worth it).

Due very light version of Dyslexia I hate to learn new systems (it is hard for me), but I do seldom. Use this opportunity to help Pedrop and the game to teach me the system without completely understanding the document.

ACKS stands for Adventurer Conqueror King System. The original book was mostly based on 1st edition D&D - one of the first OSR productions kickstarted by a large community. It has expanded a bit beyond the original book now. Supplements like Barbarians of Kanahu, Player's Companion and Heroic Fantasy Handbook (That one's my fave.) have expanded and redrafted many of the rules from Adventurer Conqueror King System. I have the primer on the official campaign setting, but have only skimmed over it for the most part, as I am mostly using the system to play my own game world.

There are quite a few other supplements out there (mostly available through DTRPG) but I mostly love how this game has captured the feeling of Sword & Sorcery (especially with the Heroic Fantasy supplement.) And the game comes with advanced rules on setting up keeps, strongholds, towers, and ruling one's own kingdom should the opportunity arise. There are also some pretty amazing battle and mass combat rules. One of the things the designer was very intent on implementing is a strong economic simulation in the game; so trade goods and other wares can be tracked studiously (supply, demand, etcetera) if that is how you want to play the game. There are even a few classes built around the economic/trading simulation. Trade goods are often found in treasure troves so it can behoove an interested party to take them to where demand is higher in the old scheme of mercantilism: Buy low (high supply/low demand); sell high (high demand/low supply).

The second edition was recently Kickstarted but its supposed to be completely reverse compatible with the other supplements, so we'll see. Fingers crossed. I definitely forked over the big bucks for the leather-bound editions, so something to look forward to at least.

About LFG.

So, I haven't bought the supplement for LFG but there were a lot of things I liked about the core book and some things I didn't like about it. I did like that they took the D&D spells and made them seem different by giving them different titles, so Knock became Sundering Sign and Magic Mouth became Timeless Envoy. One of the things I didn't like is how loose-fitting some of the rules were as though they were designed for GM adjudication rather than specifically administering a logical or rational rule. It felt a little bit too free-form, because of that. I'm happy to see that for the most part ToA seems to be pulling away from that.

Hi all! Thanks again for joining! I must say that I'm quite excited to GM this game, especially considering amounts of material I have chosen to use for it in advance(and will be able to explore with you!). I must admit that I hope to focus on this game mostly, and I don't plan to add any more games as player or GM. So hopping you all will be with me on this journey. Now... lets get back to play, and I think most PC are ready to play or are at 95% completion:)

As I communicated in Recruitment thread - I don't play at weekends. That means from Fri evening (Central Europe time) to Mon morning. So after next few post expect me to answer only at Monday.

BUT... I will leave you with 2 "tasks" that you will be able to do mostly without me:
1. Establish bonds between PCs
2. Write your introductory posts for your PCs - as we start RP thread today! :)

I will write setting up post for this in a moment.

Similar to Pedrop, I am off-line part of the weekends, from Friday evening through Saturday night. There will be some days in October where I will be out a few days in a row, but it shouldn't be more than 2.5 days, so I expect to be able to post at least 3x a week.

@Pedrop, what is your policy on waiting between IC posts? Some DMs have an n-post rule (n commonly being 3) where the same player cannot make an IC post unless n other players (including the DM) post in between. Do you have anything similar?

If anyone is interested there is final version of Tales of Argosa available to buy on DriveThru: link

Of course I don't expect anyone to buy the game, but the publisher is very small and the product is interesting -> worth to support in my opinion:) Disclaimer: My only connection to the authors is that I'm backer of ToA kickstarter:)

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@Avraham I was going to ask you all about this, as I have different idea for that. I was thinking about something like this:
- waiting about 48h between GM current RP post and next one and then continue with story if the time is up, not waiting for missing players - in normal cures of action (when fiction allows to just assume that absent player's PC is just fallowing). It only counts Mon-Fri. So it should "ensure" game moving forward about 3 times per week. The purpose here is to: have a game moving forward, but give most players time to post. I have been in few game as player, where GM (apparently) tried almost always to wait for all players... and games turned into slog... and most players lost their interest. Of course: if all players posted in shorter time then 48h I would continue earlier:)

- optionally: I was thinking about introducing "meta-currency" I called Presence Points(PP) -> you got 5-10 at the start of a chapter. If you don't post within mentioned 48h (even something like 'OOC: Busy, please continue. My PC is following') you loose 1 PP. If you have 0 or less PP at the end of Chapter you DON'T get 1 XP for being present(and others do). But I don't know if it is too harsh? Of course no minus points if you announced your absence in advance or something like that:)

What you all think about those ideas?

You're the boss :)

Personally, I'm fine with either option. The only benefit of the n-intervening rule is to prevent a case where two on-line characters have a long discussion and someone comes back 24 hours later to 15 posts and a story that diverged quite a bit. That being said, that chaos is part of what makes this fun.

So long as the expectations and guardrails are clearly delineated, I'm good.

I think that discussion between players is not bad - usually - and me waiting for others for 48h will naturally prevent "action" to move further, not waiting for more busy players, so it should also do this aspect of addressing differences between more and less active/busy players.

But - for now: it's only what I was thinking about. Let's see how this game will go naturally, and when I will notice some problems - I will try to address them as they will come up:)

My comment to current situation and post currently in the making:
- What happens with the Object was planned by me, I'm not trying to protect Sadur[was Princess]! :) But I must say dice have generated us a really cinematic situation :D

- quilltid: the object is "rectangular, of size of horse or bigger" - so bedroll wouldn't help! But... I love the image of this in my head! A little, hobbit girl is throwing her bedroll under heavy container to make its fall weaker, while others try to protect the princess or duck away - could be a perfect fantasy art pice!

"WHAT!?! You could never know... maybe there was some good food inside!" ;) ;) ;)

Maybe anyone have some more time to play with AI image generators and try to generate art for current situation? Would be amazing! :))

I have added thread where I have written how I'm planing to use perception rolls. Any feedback is always welcome:)

I'm not sure I understand. Do you encourage us roll perception as often as possible or tell us it will happen passively?

Or maybe you try to say it requires no perception check to spot which of 10 trees are bigger or easier to climb on. A perception check on those 10 trees could nevertheless allow PC to feel something is off about one of the branches, spot a trap or something else. i.e. player only pick an object or direction when rolling a perception never the goal of that roll. If you have a goal in mind - that's an investigation instead.

Ehhh... sorry again. Apparently sometimes I'm in too much of a hurry with my descriptions (busy past and coming weeks me...). What I mainly wanted to say is very well written in Forbidden Lands players handbook:
"DON’T USE SCOUTING TO FIND HIDDEN THINGS"

The SCOUTING skill is not used to find hidden things like secret doors or hidden clues. If you describe how your PC searches the right place, the GM should simply let you discover what you are looking for if it is possible to find.
so for Argosa it would be:
"DON’T USE DETECTION(PER) ROLLS TO FIND HIDDEN THINGS"

The DETECTION(PER) skill is not used to find hidden things like secret doors or hidden clues. If you describe how your PC searches the right place, the GM should simply let you discover what you are looking for if it is possible to find.

and I think it is quite well in line with OSR philosophy (or at least how I understand parts of it): you can't do investigation just by PC rolls, there should be player agency and discovery in it.

So I treat Perception rolls more as "visual intuition" (perceptivity? :) ), not your PC ability to know where to look. And that's what I wanted to state by this, as I think it's not obvious for every system:)

Ah, I generally use Perception to just look around for general things, especially if one is not certain what exactly they are looking for.

So, for example, a Perception check to see if anyone around me is injured, but an Investigation or Apothecary check to examine a known injury.

A Perception check to see if I can find a generic something or other in the area, an Investigation check to determine if a something is ideal for the task at hand.

So, if I understand correctly, we should just verbalize that in text and @Pedrop will roll/let us know to roll if necessary.