OOC Discussion

Yo, Jabes. I was thinking about doing a fake post and really meta-gaming it full throttle with no excuses - sending Urban directly into the kitchen as quickly as possible, downstairs, and then without hesitation selecting the exact route that was described in Ybus' solo sidetrack.
"Oh wow! What luck! I'm also in the bisexual half-goat one-stop sex station! Oh wow, there's Ybus!"

What would you have said?

This is a scenario that DMs might have to face. I know that more often, players will ask if they can follow or "retcon" their actions to accompany Ybus, but in play-by-post the odds increase that someone might just try to take their actions a bit too far.

Ha! I have such a high opinion of you guys that I don't worry about metagaming (should I?). But for the sake of argument, if you HAD gone back into the Scum and Villainy any number of things could have happened. Top of the list would have been a little encounter with the city guard. :-D

Ya, bro, I know. I'm often in a debate about how to handle this sort of thing.

Fact is: I love solo sidetrack story lines. They seem extremely realistic to me. All characters might duck out for a second here and there. No guarantee that all 4 - 7 party members are going to be connected at the hip for all hours of every day.

But when that happens you have to decide:
1) openly publish the developments
2) manage in privately with only the sidetracker (in real life this is "Alright, ____. Come with me to the side room and we discuss this away from the crowd." In PBP it is the Note option.

As a fan of the game and for the hope of letting the players share in the fun of all story lines, I lean pretty strongly towards Option 1.

BUT... I know it is ABSOLUTELY IRRESISTIBLE for some players to read and use info that their characters 100% WOULD NOT HAVE, and start influencing decision-making. It seems to be almost impossible to stop with some people.

SO...sometimes I choose Option 2, just to make it more like it would be IRL for the characters: they have no freaking clue, zero input to and zero influence from the side track. It's the only way to guarantee that.

I've seen it in practice as both a Player and as a DM.

In another game I play in, I ran the character on a side track that turned quite meaningful. Pushed the issue to a huge and very interesting development. Privately with only one other NPC. But it was published and all players read it, even though their characters would have had no clue of it. Just about every one of them TOTALLY meta-gamed it out later as they decided what to think and how to act. They incorporated their knowledge about that private scene into their characters' choices, demeanor, viewpoint, etc. It was really annoying to me.

As a DM, I've done both and bounce back and forth. Jabes, you have definitely seen me ride the fence on this. Sometimes I just judge on how important the info is. If it is likely just fluff, I leave it open to the audience for entertainment. If it could go high influential or skew other PC choices, maybe I block it off to Note. But then sometimes you just can't tell in advance.

Here in First Foray, I LOVE the open publication of all story lines. To be completely clear: I think it works just fine without the slightest doubt. It is extremely entertaining. Seasoned players can enjoy scenes for their own sake without intention of angling for their character. No one here is going to exploit it or otherwise use it for unrealistic results. Sometimes I even decide to not read some entries so that I don't have the info unintentionally creep into choices, and I think that is a decent self-safeguard if someone wants to be absolutely sure - but it's not required because you can always read and enjoy, but then ignore as an influence.

The challenge though is elsewhere when you have either
1) a really serious games where the stakes are high and therefore the temptations to bend for advantage inevitably go up (and this is no fault of the players in many cases, it is very hard to ignore key data), or
2) you have players that you don't know as well or are less likely to police themselves.

I have ascended meta-gaming; my meta transcends games. I've played with Archelaus before, haven't I Jabes? That was a fun deja vu.

As a matter of fact you have, and Rysin, your halfling fighter had what I hope was a pleasurable evening at The Tumescent Faun!

Many of these NPC's are old PC's. I mean, I've already built an entire person with backstory and quirks, why waste 'em? And yeah because of the tongue-in-cheek tone of this game, cameos are fun. :-)

CancerMan played with Valrakas in the past, and though I'd never used the name Copperhorn before, he figured it out before I revealed he was a minotaur. If you go back through the thread, Ybus' crazy ramblings had numerous references to "seeing red" and so on. I got a real kick out of that! :-)

Ybus was drunk. I don't know what you're talking about. :)

In a way, I'm glad he was drunk, because if he had been sober during the brainstorming session of whether anybody had sailing experience, Ybus probably would have raised his hand. That might have led to a no-less-interesting chapter.

Thanks. I'm looking forward to having a long rest. Once Baracus is mechanically out of rages, I have been playing him as content and open to the possibilities of the world. But, when he recharges his rages, a shadow crosses over him again and he wakes up grumpy. I think he will recall the dark times in his history. Did we ever establish exactly what put us on the run from the army?

I love Baracus! Makes me want to learn more about his relationship with his father.

Nope, we never got into details of the crime you were wrongly accused of. I'd love it if you work that out OOC as a group, but it would also be perfectly fine to leave it unspecified.

Required homework for CancerMan: submit a hand-drawn illustration of the embellished Tumescent Faun sign! Haha just kidding! Actually no I'm not. Haha!

Ok, looks like we've wrangled everyone home. Take a Long Rest, and make sure your resources are at Level 3. What's the plan for the morning after? There's the return of the Golden Child to her home/temple, and possibly a trip to the subtly-named Smuggler's Cove (or not)? Feel free to bite or ignore other hooks that I tossed out there.

If we want to emulate the A-Team story, here's the dealyo that plays at the beginning of the show's opening:
This seems like a perfect fit. I'd go with this as a template.

So, not sure if there is a war that Cysegr was fighting where we could stage this. Could be covert ops against a country Cysegr was not officially at war with, I suppose. Jabes, what are our options here?

Original A-Team were accused of some kind of bank robbery in Hanoi. Seems fitting for our party. Given our party, we were probably actually robbing a bank, but likely believed we were acting under orders with the sanction of our government. We were double crossed by our handler / commanding officer, who secreted all the money away for himself and left us hanging out to dry. Or maybe we kept the location of the money a secret, used it as a bargaining chip to keep ourselves alive long enough to escape. It would give our former commander a good reason to be searching for us in addition to our government's desire to hang seditious soldiers.

Yep, I used that narration almost word for word in the Prologue with only small changes to fit the setting:
Cysegr has not been officially at war with anyone for the past 150 or so years unless you count the Q'Sulth mountain tribes, which Urban will be familiar with as per Character Creation.

Despite no open conflict, black ops could have been conducted in either Pradesh or Qinglai or any number of nations (see World Almanac) although those two mentioned are easiest owing to their proximity. just maybe not Camaxacal which is supposed to be shrouded in mystery.

Jabes, can you review what our job offer from the Aunts was? Was it just to go to the seedy tavern to provide protection against Valrakas that night, or was there some idea of us doing something more on the day(s) that follows? Were there suggestions that we might support the shipping efforts actively?

Sorry. Not trying to ask to be spoon fed, but I feel like I may have lost the ball a little bit on understanding some of the potential opportunities and what expectations were.

Since that game is no more, I vaguely remember Rysin having problems sleeping for one reason or another. He hired her services to essentially rock him asleep. Pleasurable to him, but probably not the pleasurable people would expect when talking about brothels.

No worries, J! I realize many details are vague.

The job, as Sunitha put it, was to be Ash's bodyguards for the meeting with Valrakas which was supposed to occur the next day, but by circumstance happened just after the midnight fireworks. So depending on who you ask, the job is essentially done. Of course, Valrakas has yet to physically sign the contract. Sunitha, being a shrewd businesswoman, is likely to try to talk you into heading out with Ash again. And by the way, exact figures for compensation after job completion was never specified. Is all tgis vagueness from Sunitha being crafty, or is it from your DM being a noob. The former, obviously! Yeah, that's definitely it.

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Hyp: Should've been Ryco then! :-D

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Hey, anybody interested in trying D&D Beyond? I've recently bought into the service with the full subscription, which allows me to share the digital books I've purchased with my players (Currently PHB and Xanathar's Guide). All you have to do is make a free twitch account and log into dndbeyond.com, you can connect to my account and read those books online, legally, for free.

Once you have your own account, use this link to hook up to my account

One of the most exciting features is the built-in character builder. Because I have the PHB and XGtE, you can make any kind of character that use those rules. The free accounts allow you to store up to 6 characters. Full disclosure, I think I can snoop in all of your character sheets.

I'm not planning on integrating this into any of our games that we play together at the moment. This is mostly just me sharing this thing so you guys can try it out if you're interested. In the future, I think I might use the dndbeyond character sheets for a GP game; they are super slick! Very easy to keep track of what items you're currently using, calculate encumbrance, keeping track of how many uses of an ability you have left, or spell slots. And it calculates everything. So, say you have dual wielder feat and you choose to wield two short swords - your AC automatically goes up by 1.

I heard an interview with one of the head guys on the project and it sounds legit. They are true D&D fans and seem to have full support from WoTC. There are many new features that are promised to be added in, and the price (they say) is not going to increase.

The price of buying all the books AGAIN in a digital format is pretty steep. I am able to do this because if you install the dndbeyond app on an iPad you can use iTunes GC's to buy D&D books, and I have hundreds of dollars of iTunes GCs because I taught a student whose parents worked for apple and every Christmas he gave me a huge iTunes GC. So, while I don't know if the pricing is worth it or not, it was basically free for me, so whatever. I'm only paying the master subscription with my own cash. I will likely be buying the rest of the core books, Volo's Guide, the SCAG, and maybe even the Tortle Package to use in D&D Beyond. After that, I might start buying new products digitally rather than pay for the hardcover books, since they're like 40% of the physical book price. So, you'll get access to that stuff too. Mordenkainen's Tome of Foes, I'm looking at you!

Just a heads up that at some point I might close up access to this to make room for some future game I run if I run out of space for them. In the meantime, enjoy!