OOC thread

Based on your higher athletics you get to fire first :).

A surprise I guess, it’s the end of the adventure. King wants to know whether you figured out what was going on. He does have a couple of things to tell you, too. (One of which involves the crypt and explains why there’s (now) nothing to see there.)

Well, since Emma discovered the alien, I am happy to let someone else have the convo with King to bring it to an end

I guess i could have ended it more organically, but didn’t think further events could top the monster and alien ship reveal.

final meeting with King really intended to give players an opportunity to ask about (or explain themselves) anything that happened in the adventure.

I thought it was great! Very surprising. No complaint here.

Oh i see! phew. i was worried that i’d wound things up too quickly. i realised once Emma went up the stairs that the investigators had come to the end of the breadcrumb trail.

since we’re here in the OOC thread, I was also going to discuss whether this had the makings of a longer ‘campaign’ with a further adventure or two? or whether this worked better as a one-off? genuinely not hurt if the answer is the latter.

Oh that’s cool! Definitely the spirit of the game..

Thanks for running this! A very interesting experiment.

My impression is that this play style feels a little rushed, and the choices available made me think more of a 'choose your own adventure' book than a PbP rpg game. For the sake of speed, maybe roleplay and atmosphere suffer a little? Not a bad thing per se, just a very different style of play. I felt I was playing the boardgame 'Arkham Horror' rather than Call of Cthulhu, with a set list of possible actions.

ToC impressions after seeing it in play: it feels a bit like a boardgame, with the pools of points used like a currency. The non investigative abilities, with the rolls + bonuses made more sense to me than the investigation interactions, that become a negotiation between GM and players to 'buy' clues. It affects a lot the sense of mystery, for me? Knowing that there is definitely something hidden is not as intriguing as not knowing. But that's the pillar of the whole R. Laws / K. Hite premise...
I will give the rules another read, maybe I am not yet seeing the nuances.

For now, Melody bows with a flourish, and thanks you all!

Thanks for running, it was refreshing to have a quick adventure that never lost pace. I'm a big fan of ToC so I enjoyed the mechanics and feel they work pretty well in PbP. I think you did a great job with descriptions and period appropriate dialogue! I wouldn't mind continuing or ending it here, both fine with me.

So I’ll wind things up. I wanted to offer a further opportunity to play in case folks were keen to go on and get more gameplay from their invested effort.

I do get @Dr_B ‘s comments. Regarding ToC, it puzzles me a little that characters don’t really need to work out what is going on to ‘solve’ a case. The breadcrumb trail opens up regardless. I’ve attended an irl game where it became even more mechanical, as in, ‘I have art history, does that get me the clue?’. It is a kind of anti-mystery system in the strange sense that a mystery doesn’t really need to be solved through actual brainwork.

But I think the rushed feel was a result of my use of turns. I made the game fast , but made players squeeze their actions inc,using role-playing into a single post.

I’d like to make it clear that I appreciated players’ characterisations and role playing throughout the game. I really like the 1920s and for me the role-playing element was the best part of the experience.

Further aside—there was supposed to be an actual mystery here. What did Harrington see that others couldn’t? Why were the ghouls so active? Are these things not really of interest to most players?

I think that's a common misunderstanding of the system. I remember what made me understand how the game is designed is actually stated by the designers in the book: ToC isn't a game about finding clues and solving mysteries, its a game about what characters do with that information. Not all players have logical minds or enjoy trying to put together clues and it can be frustrating if progress halts because no one can solve the mystery. Instead the game is more interested in seeing the characters actions and choices.

To me, it wasn't clear that Harrington saw something others couldn't. I figured he just had a different view because he was in an airplane lol. Ghouls be ghouls and are dangerous, so any research into that would probably be suicide and tbh ghouls aren't that interesting of enemies because they are (at least usually) depicted as just undead cannibals.

that’s very directly stated there! A lot of online discussion claims that Trail takes the emphasis off finding clues and more on interpreting them to put the evidence together. But it seems from that statement that it’s not about ‘solving mysteries’ either. I think i need to adjust my expectations concerning how much players are interested in the interpretation element. I guess I like those things as a player—the ‘wow, so the deep ones are running the bootlegging operation’ moment. where I feel we figured it out from the clues we recovered. But I’ll adjust if I ever get to play/Gm again.

Thanks for the game all!

I think it did feel a bit rushed, at the end there especially, but it was fun. I'd have liked to continue to try to discover what caused the pilot to see what he did - I presume it was the alien thingies and their ray guns that turned him green and made him crash - but why did they do so?

Ah great! i’m really pleased someone is interested in the explanation.

The idea was that the vampire martians arrived and were moored, hovering next to the abandoned church steeple which they used as a secret entrance/exit to the streets below. They hid their ship with a primitive cloaking device that made their craft invisible from ground level, but partly visible from those above the ship. Sharp-eyed Harrington kept seeing something amiss there and determined to photograph the anomaly. But the vamps shot him down when his plane got too close.

The vamps were preying on locals but the ghouls sensed their prowling. The ghouls considered the vamps as rivals and/or had some protective instinct to defend their native Merchant District since many were linked to local families. The ghouls became more active, vigilant for the vamp attacks. They caught and killed one of vamps and carried it off—this is what Potts saw. They also guessed that the vamps were using the church as their base.

There were more details but that was the gist of it. I guess the problem is that these facts didn’t really matter in game/system terms since Trail is designed to provide a breadcrumb trail that progresses reliably from scene to scene. Also, (plot?) is not everyone’s focus of interest in gaming.

I also enjoyed the game thanks to players’ investment and role playing but I’ll need to rethink before using Trail again.

So what was in the crypt?

A couple more ghouls waiting to ambush the vamps, since this the way they went in and out of the church. The ghouls would have attacked the characters unless Emma had parlayed with them. (Also, an aside, the tomb of the magician mentioned in the church lore, carved with symbols that hinted why the church might be a favoured visiting spot for the vamps).

anyway—thanks too for asking the question! I feel my plotting was not in vain if the story raised interest.

Some of that is interesting for sure. I find it strange a cloaking device only works well on one half though and never would have figured out that connection at all. Nor ghouls feeding on vampire martians. I think horror games work a bit like magic where once you know the answer it loses some of its appeal lol.