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Yay, finished game. EDIT Awesome game. Thanks for letting me be in it. Its great for a game to come to a real finish. DocBubonic fucked around with this message at 04:30 on Feb 7, 2015 |
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Feb 7, 2015 03:59
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| # ? Apr 28, 2024 06:23 |
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Thanks again Foo for running this amazing game, I'm going to be cribbing you so incredibly hard the next time I get to run AW. I was sorta worried about this game, being the first game I was in that I actually got to play for a decent amount of time, but it turned out great! Everyone in it, departed and new included, has been a real joy to play with.
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Feb 9, 2015 08:13
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I think Foo sets the standard by which all AW games should be judged.
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Feb 9, 2015 18:17
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High praise, Doc. Not many people on these boards have been here as long as you, so I know how much that means. Again, you can't run a game like this without some great players, so I want to thank you all again. Bear Enthusiast, special thanks to you, man. PbP isn't always something that comes naturally to people. Imagine my surprise when reviewing the recruitment thread and realizing that this was essentially your first game. You did great. Dareon, I'm sorry that Toyman really didn't end up working out. Thanks for a great session, and i'm saddened that your character ended up becoming mostly a footnote. I guess I'll use this to transition to the Director's Cut section of this post. Warning: rambles ahead. First of all: I've never MC'd for a Hoarder before, and it became obvious to me that I didn't really know what to do with the playbook. I thought that trying to figure out how he interacted with the Hoard was interesting, and it was. The issue that I faced was that the way I engaged it took up too much posting bandwidth, if you will. In the amount of time it took the entire first session to go down, with all that entailed, Toyman had cut a single deal. That's not really the root of the problem, though. I needed to hook Toyman in with the rest of the game, and I failed to do that. I think that if I were to take a Hoarder again in the future, I'd need to start the Hoarder away from his Hoard. A takeaway from the game is the need to not dwell on tight timelines, and let the narrative take over. Things that are being posted about at the same time aren't necessarily happening in sync, but you can use cues to line things back up. Consider the fourth session, because it's the freshest in my mind. Ebbs was descending Wolf Mountain while Gyger and Jackson were driving to Stasis. Based on the map (this is is mentioned in the book, but loose maps are VERY HELPFUL), I knew their paths could be about crossing. It's a lot more interesting to do that, so had that happen. Also, if either Doc or Lemon had wanted to respond to it, they could have. Options > Less Options. Similarly, the lightning bolt that split a tree and illuminated Puck's face. I used that technique at a couple of other points in the story. The explosion that KO'd Sethro and drove Dick away from Miller's Hill. Along those lines, someone asked me in IRC (I believe it was someone GMing a different game) how to deal with explaining the same things to characters in the same area. My advice was to make sure each character sees something unique in the scene, even if it's the same thing being described. Every character is going to be getting different things out of the scenes. Sure, there are some things that will appear the same; at the least, give each character a different prompt to respond to. Speaking of prompts, I like to make sure that whenever I provide options for a character to do something, there's an explicit "or something else?" I'm sure sometimes that became implicit, but it's important. I can't think of everything a PC might do, and I never want to needlessly constrain. Sometimes things will require a roll, and that's fine. I suggest actions to characters because those are what I see as options, and I want to make sure the player knows that the character knows that those are options, but there's always options I didn't consider. Something that kills PbPs and that I wanted to avoid, is holding up the game on the responses of a single player. AW makes this easier than most systems to avoid, for a couple of reasons. One is the lack of emphasis on party play - each character is fiercely independent. Sometimes they are on-screen together, but each character still has their own agenda. The other thing is the inherent violence of the game. Player isn't posting? Something bad happens to their character and we move on. The obvious example of this game is Dick, who I was waiting on for about a week to make a decision about his gang. StringOfLetters didn't post, and so Dick got shot and his gang disbanded. Narratively, this felt very natural, which I believe is a strength of the system and fundamental setting conceits. The other thing that I did in that situation, and that I'd advise anyone making a similar decision keep in mind as an option, is that I neveriexplicitly killed Dick. He was shot and went down and his gang went chaotic, but nobody ever produced a body. Had StringOfLetters re-emerged, it would have been very simple to write him back in, perhaps meeting back up with the Mario half of the gang. Alas, that never happened. Despite his disappearance, I do want to give a lot of credit to StringOfLetters. As emerged in this thread, at one point he was dissatisfied with the way the game was going with his character. He and I were able to privately work out the problems surrounding the way I was addressing his character, and we had a very productive discussion. In a hobby where that notoriously doesn't happen (c.f. catpiss thread), I was very pleased. Of course, it's ideal to not have problems in the first place, but that's not always realistic/ In that vein, I was concerned throughout the game about DocBubonic and Ebbs. Ebbs was a fantastic character, and yet, from my point of view, he was a terrible Operator. I think that's my fault, in the sense that the way things happened he never got much of an opportunity to use those skills that make an Operator so. For most of the game, it felt like Ebbs was a former Operator who was just getting around to realizing it. Possibly because of this, I felt many times that I wasn't leaving Ebbs with enough to do, or that he was getting a raw deal. And to his immense credit, Doc was willing to fill in my narrative gaps with excellent and flavorful posts about Ebbs and Dahlia and the Maelstrom, despite me basically never addressing it. Throughout the game I spoke to Doc to make sure that he was happy with the game was going, and he always was. So, I never really changed the way I dealt with Ebbs. I feel like we know the least about him of any PC - still - even Jackson. Jackson-52 Mark, the Quarantine. I did not end the game where I did because I didn't know what to with Jackson. That being said, I didn't know what to do with Jackson, though I think hooking him up with Sethro was going to be very productive. I was very interested to see what arcs did emerge from Jackson, and I think we were starting to see the hints of some. With Gyger and Sethro, for sure. Sethro really threw me for a loop early-ish in the game - I was out-and-out surprised that he didn't follow Puck's order to execute the prisoner, and I really enjoyed the mirror scene later, up in the Station. I also found the ability for Sethro to nearly arbitrarily get in touch with any character at any time through regular radio or Weird radio very interesting. I really liked the way Paris' story worked out. It felt a lot like a Battlebabe's story, weaving through everyone else's business without ever getting firmly entangled. I don't have much to say there, I think Alaicious did a great job with what ended up being a bit of a difficult character to play because of the lack of real hooks into any other PC. One thing that was definitely helpful in the whole story is that Paris provided a player's perspective into Puck's psyche and theory of war against Sansa, which up to that point had really appeared to be somewhat idiosyncratic and generically antagonistic. Sansa Merci, drat. I don't think either K Prime nor myself ever intended her to be the pivotal figure in the story, but that's what happened. A happy accident, because I think K Prime handled it beautifully. His character, as a Hardholder, tends to have a large amount of influence because of the nature of the playbook, controlling many lives instead of a single one. I also think Hardholders are probably the most ideologically driven playbook. I've been part of a PbP before where my character ended up being the main protagonist through the machinations of the game in a similar manner, and it's a very cool experience. This doesn't downplay the roles every other character played in the game, not at all. I'm about done here, but I do want to bring up one last point. Being consistently in touch with your players outside of the game is very helpful to making a game flow smoothly. Throughout the game, I was able to be in touch with K Prime, Doc, Aloicious, and Lemon in IRC. This thread was supposed to be for that sort of thing, but there were often quick questions that would come up only as I sat down to write posts. Now, as we can clearly see with Sethro and Bear, Dick and String, that sort of contact isn't necessary for a good character, but it is something that made things go very smoothly when I was able to leverage it. I found it helpful to clear up situations where characters might be fastforwarded along. Everyone, pat yourselves on the back. Hell of a game. I'd like to hear everyone else's thoughts and questions on the game, players and spectators alike.
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Feb 9, 2015 20:54
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It's okay, I had no loving clue where I was going with Jackson-52 either. Really, when I made him, I had two goals: 1) make a Quarantine that wasn't just a boring "modern-day military dude in the post-apoc" but was something a bit more out there and more in keeping with the general Weirdness of AW. I think I didn't do too badly, although I ended up drifting more towards straight (non-Weird) scifi than I'd originally planned, in part because Jackson never got exposed to any real Weird stuff and was psychically null. 2) make a character that would light a fuse under the whole setting's rear end. Between the autodoc and armoury in Stasis, the VIP popsicles' pre-apoc knowledge and the threat of finding out what really happened in the Apocalypse, I figured Jackson's existence would precipitate conflict. I'm sad we never got to the point where Jackson and Stasis actually came properly into play, but it was definitely heading that way, even if the W&W/Respite going to outright war in a way completely unrelated to Jackson/Mathers/Stasis wasn't something I'd thought about. Lemon-Lime fucked around with this message at 21:17 on Feb 9, 2015 |
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Feb 9, 2015 21:14
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To me, it seemed that the entire game was Ebbs giving up being an operator. I didn't realize it at first. When he lost his leg, I kinda knew Ebbs was going to go into retirement. Going after Puck seemed like a nice way of ending his career as an Operator. Also I appreciated the chance to just do what I wanted to do. Its a kinda weird RP experience, but I enjoyed it immensely.
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Feb 9, 2015 21:33
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I'd take more credit for Sansa, but she sorta grew beyond anything of my original intentions or boundaries to become something greater than my original conceit. I'd been reading Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan for reference for an entirely unrelated thing while planning my app, and because of that I made a hardholder that was an ideological hardass around Hobbesian principles- someone who had seen the vicious brutality of the untamed Island and decided that she was damned well going to hold something together at all costs. This created the early, antagonistic, quick to judge, quicker to use force Sansa. Someone with noble intentions but with no other way to fulfill them except by intimidating, fighting, or killing enough people that they got out of the way. Because of that, she quickly defined who the big antagonist force was. Puck. I'm not sure how much of Puck's general reasons and demeanor Foo had planned, and it all started with a stupid fistfight in a market, but boy, did that one spiral out of control fast. To get Kojima, it became about ideals from Puck's end. Funnily, it never really did on a conscious level from Sansa's end - she defended her hold because it was right, and never really aggressed against Puck the way you would against a real, 100% ideological foe. But beneath that, it was about order versus chaos, about holding people together by loyalty to make something bigger. Puck needed to tear down what Sansa meant, and Sansa stood and said "No and also gently caress off." The other thing that gave Sansa a lot of push was that because of the nature of her role, she, and I, met and had more people on our docket than anyone else. Something like half of the NPCs that became relevant originally popped up or got fleshed out because Sansa crossed their path. They became her story. Anyway, Sansa quickly started changing- first by losing her touchstone in Gregor, leaving her starting to doubt her ability to fulfill her lofty goals. Everything after that was a gradual descent into accepting how much she'd hosed up to get here, and making a final stand for her life so she could either die doing "the right thing" or earn the chance to do something safer, quieter, and more satisfying with her life. Sansa was not a happy hardholder, and not because of the usual problems of the hold, but because somewhere in there was Merci, who was afraid of what she'd become and have to become in order to "win." At the end, Sansa didn't really survive the final clash of ideal against ideal, principle against principle- But Merci was able to retire in peace. The hard shell shattered destroying Puck, and the softer inside person was finally free to go be something else. Along the way were a series of meetings that in retrospect, were Sansa making up for her mistakes, bit by bit. Ceding the market to someone who cared about it as a market, not as a thing to own. Finding someone to respect as an equal after spending a long time standing sneering from above. Making apologies to an old friend, or maybe an old flame. And finally, fixing the stupid thing she started by ending it with another stupid fistfight in the mud. Full circle. A final, amusing note: post-game, I realized Bran was a Faceless once. Karlie has his mask now.
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Feb 9, 2015 21:57
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Thanks man, I worry a lot naturally so posting was a cause of a little anxiety at times so it's great to hear. As far as talking outside the game I gave it the bare minimum of effort (popping into IRC like twice for a minute or so and seeing if you specifically were on) so that would be something to work on mechanically for Play-By-Post in the future. I honestly was a little surprised Sethro got into the game, since I felt like my application was a little light compared to some of the great stuff the other people were writing. Maybe you got the reference in his name and word choice? It was pretty interesting as a game, at least for me, because Sethro mostly was on his own and didn't really get directly involved with any of the main conflicts. Definitely would have been weird in an in-person game but it was just fine over a longer timeframe and an easy split of MC attention. This was also another interesting first for me as a long-time roleplayer in that I've never really had romance at all be a plot point for any of my characters. Chalk it up to normal nerdy sensibilities of my gaming group. Also as a final note, the descriptions for "Things Speak" were the greatest. Should have had a weird polyamorous love triangle with Bean and Cury.
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Feb 9, 2015 23:52
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Bear Enthusiast posted:Thanks man, I worry a lot naturally so posting was a cause of a little anxiety at times so it's great to hear. As far as talking outside the game I gave it the bare minimum of effort (popping into IRC like twice for a minute or so and seeing if you specifically were on) so that would be something to work on mechanically for Play-By-Post in the future. Light but flavorful applications are the key to AW, in my opinion. If there was a reference about 'Sethro' I never really got it, other than sounding like 'Jethro'. And I'm glad you liked Things Speak. Some of the most fun parts of the game to write are the ones that have no basis in reality - Things Speak, Open your Mind, that sort of thing.
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Feb 10, 2015 00:16
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Special thanks to Axe-Man, who created a lot of the major NPCs in application and followup.
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Feb 10, 2015 00:23
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Sethro is a joke from "Uhh Yeah Dude", the greatest podcast. One of the hosts is named Seth Romatelli, and at least one time they called him Sethro Matelli. I also tried to ape his unique flavor of Californian speech for something interesting.
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Feb 10, 2015 00:44
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Captain Foo posted:First of all: I've never MC'd for a Hoarder before, and it became obvious to me that I didn't really know what to do with the playbook. I thought that trying to figure out how he interacted with the Hoard was interesting, and it was. The issue that I faced was that the way I engaged it took up too much posting bandwidth, if you will. In the amount of time it took the entire first session to go down, with all that entailed, Toyman had cut a single deal. That's not really the root of the problem, though. I needed to hook Toyman in with the rest of the game, and I failed to do that. I think that if I were to take a Hoarder again in the future, I'd need to start the Hoarder away from his Hoard. There was that, but I came into the game operating on a couple decades of little else but Dungeons & Dragons and the expectation that the PCs were all meant to be a group, plus I was in a period of going really really far out with my characters and thus not having a great handle on how they'd act. I had a great time writing Toyman as far as that went, but I didn't have a solid grasp of the concepts behind either my character or AW in general, which just set me up for failure. On the plus side, this and the other PBTA games I've been in have taught me that I can riff for days on setting detail if people let me.
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Feb 12, 2015 00:34
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Dareon posted:There was that, but I came into the game operating on a couple decades of little else but Dungeons & Dragons and the expectation that the PCs were all meant to be a group, plus I was in a period of going really really far out with my characters and thus not having a great handle on how they'd act. I had a great time writing Toyman as far as that went, but I didn't have a solid grasp of the concepts behind either my character or AW in general, which just set me up for failure. On the plus side, this and the other PBTA games I've been in have taught me that I can riff for days on setting detail if people let me. I'm glad it was a good experience, even if it wasn't the best it could have been!
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Feb 12, 2015 00:41
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Just in case any of you fine nerds still have this bookmarked, I wanted to ask earlier but forgot. I've done very little written role playing so I wanted to know what people thought of my writing. "It was good / It sucked / Nothing" is fine!
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Feb 17, 2015 22:34
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It was good! It was enjoyable to read, and more importantly, you had a consistent and unique tone that helped give Sethro his own personality.
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Feb 17, 2015 22:55
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Bear Enthusiast posted:Just in case any of you fine nerds still have this bookmarked, I wanted to ask earlier but forgot. I've done very little written role playing so I wanted to know what people thought of my writing. "It was good / It sucked / Nothing" is fine! It was real good, I felt like Sethro really came alive in a wide variety of situations.
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Feb 17, 2015 23:13
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| # ? Apr 28, 2024 06:23 |
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I read the whole gamethread because I wanted to see how a successful AW game would run. I liked Sethro quite a lot! Good stuff.
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Feb 17, 2015 23:18
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