OOC Chat

Middle school or high school (Age 11-18ish) science. My undergrad was in biology, so I'm endorsed for that, and I can test to become endorsed for chemistry and physics, too. I'm probably better at math and english more than science, though, oddly enough. The need for math/science is pretty good around here, so that's probably what I'll end up doing.

Hey everyone, our party is starting to come together. To give you a better understanding of your geographical situation, I've sketched a map of your surroundings. Distances are roughly accurate but the features are not drawn to scale (such as the thickness of the beach or the size of the stone berms).The red x's show the landing spots of your characters. Elspa moved north to and is currently at Frick and Ygne's position. Jarveena and Ryte are running south and will converge with the rest of the party in an hour.

It is currently 10am.

Jabes and HypCo, if you see an opportunity for a good RP interaction between your characters and Elspa, Frick, and Ygne, feel free to appear in the scene and join in at the appropriate dramatic moment. It is more important that the game be be dramatic and interesting than for it to make perfect geographic sense; we can always retcon the distance between starting spots if it matters to anyone.

Oh, had no idea what a 'berm' is. If it isn't high enough, would there be some ship wreck?

Hmm, I might have used the term incorrectly. Maybe Jetty is the right term? I'm thinking of a raised piece of land that is perpendicular to the shorline, jutting out into the see. Something like this:

Great posts these last few days, everyone. Jabes, your post when Jarveena found Leatha, that was incredible.

And then HypCo, when you followed up with this post, I was blown away.

And then Naatkinson and CancerMan's exchange on the beach - two terse warriors rearing up for a fight. Honestly, I thought it was going to PvP and had half written a post about my personal rules around PvP! But, I remembered you guys are experienced players and decided to just trust your storytelling skills, and you guys delivered a great scene with tension and humour that moved the story forward.

Are there Academy Awards for Gamer's Plane? I would nominate these posts for sure. The least I can do is award your characters with inspiration!

It looks like all the characters are about to come together, so I'll just keep quite while you all finish the scene. Then I'll give you some info on how we will conduct the next steps and you can plot your course.

You've been a pretty stellar GM yourself there, GM, sir. :)

Well there's this thread.

All of you guys have been great! We've got a really good group here! To be honest I've seen plenty of just mind-blowing RP on this site! I've wanted to say something on that thread but have just had too hard a time picking which game to brag about!

Man, I love this community! :-D

This is a good group of experienced, active, and engaged players. I'm loving it so far, and the GM is stellar as well!

I can't really think of anything that hasn't been said already, other than I'm so glad to be apart of this game and to be considered experienced. I have to hand it to Jabes for Jarveena's reaction though, the beginning of Ryte's reaction wasn't too far off my own, I was personally left pretty speechless.

Hey I didn't mean to interrupt the Ryte-Ygne banter! Jarveena's the impatient one, not me! I think the banter is fun! :-)

Hey folks, now that the party has formed you may be wondering how to proceed. You can form a consensus among the group either in or out of character, or split into multiple groups to accomplish different tasks. We can move the game into a different time scale to resolve some of these tasks.

For example, here are two likely activities that we will resolve by the hour:

1. Search wreckage for supplies: Most of the wreckage is unusable junk, but there is a chance that precious things have washed up on shore. Any character can spend an hour or more of searching. First each hour, they roll a d100. There is a 40% they will find only copper pots and pans (the bulk of the Black Lotus's hold) or nothing at all, but there is also a 60% chance they will find a random piece of usable gear.

2. Explore the island: You can spend time exploring the perimeter of the island or moving into the jungle. We will conduct this as per the exploration rules thread. You don't have to travel for the whole day.

Searching the sun-scorched beach and exploring will both count towards exhaustion for the day.

You can of course do anything else you want and we will choose the most convenient time scale. For example, if you want to build a boat, we won't role play each plank being strapped together but you can put a certain number of hours into the task and we can narrate the result.

Feel free to inject RP scenes in whenever you like.

So, what do you want to do?

Elspa's first instinct is to look for shelter, such as one of the caves. She volunteers to scout it out if the others wish to scavenge for other supplies.

Ygne's gonna get her coin first, impatient or no! :) That's one coin less that she needs for the thieves' guild!

I'm fine to handle the planning in-character or out; whatever everyone else prefers. Ygne's instinct would probably be to search the wreckage and scavenge what she can.

MoMo: I did not read the note if that is important. I saw Naatkinson's response first and have resisted the urge to read it.

Haha feel free to read it! I was asking if you could see it as well or if I'd have to send you a separate message.

Man, I find coordinating group action to be one of the things that is much harder to do in PbP than if we were playing at the table. If we were at the table, I'd just say "so, what does everyone want to do?" and you could plan and coordinate in a minute of back-and-forth banter*. It seems like it could take multiple days for us to have everyone chime in on their preferred course of action and also have time to react to what other people want to do. I'm the least experienced PbPer in this group, so how do other groups handle this?

I am totally open to suggestions in both this regard and any other aspect of running this game more efficiently.

* actually, sometimes that turns into an hour of debating but it's still feels like actively playing the game.

Love it, Ygne is quite the character!

Haha, thanks. As far as how to coordinate group action, I think handling it in character is probably the best course. That way, even if it takes us some time to figure things out, it doesn't feel like the game is sitting on PAUSE mode while we coordinate what the characters do, and instead we're still playing it. Gives us time to show how our characters act and work together.

I'm probably the second most inexperienced PbPer, though, so... others might have better suggestions.