Register a SA Forums Account here!
JOINING THE SA FORUMS WILL REMOVE THIS BIG AD, THE ANNOYING UNDERLINED ADS, AND STUPID INTERSTITIAL ADS!!!

You can: log in, read the tech support FAQ, or request your lost password. This dumb message (and those ads) will appear on every screen until you register! Get rid of this crap by registering your own SA Forums Account and joining roughly 150,000 Goons, for the one-time price of $9.95! We charge money because it costs us money per month for bills, and since we don't believe in showing ads to our users, we try to make the money back through forum registrations.
 
  • Post
  • Reply
Fuzz
Jun 2, 2003

Avatar brought to you by the TG Sanity fund
So for those unaware, like a decade ago some company came out with a Game of Thrones RPG game that is actually not halfway bad.




It has some interesting rules for houses, social combat, plotting, murder, etc etc. It's not a system that lends itself particularly well to, say, a group of plucky travelers, having adventures. It IS, however, quite good at things like having a House with several other players, having lots of NPCs in it, too, and then plotting and betraying and being dicks in a lovely world full of assholes. But... what if those assholes were... also other players?

This is more a recruiting post for other GMs that would be interested in helping me run it, because I am nowhere near stupid enough to try and take on such a crazy idea on my own. The problem with this system, in my opinion, is that it lends itself really well to a House, sure, but once people are in many Houses it no longer works. When you are all in one House it can be interesting, sure, but ultimately the GM is playing literally EVERYONE else and you're missing out on all the back end, side plots, crazy betrayals, etc without it basically feeling like the GM is being a dick and loving you. So... what if there were multiple GMs, multiple Houses, lots of players, and an underlying major plot to spark the intrigue and get the ball rolling? Now we're getting somewhere...



A prelim idea to how to get it working... it'd all run via Discord, with Houses having their own private areas and then new In-Character channels (and the roles to go with them) generated based on locations and the people in them wherein the actual poo poo would go down. Add a dice bot and a rolling channel and you get the idea.


I already have several ideas for what the spark to kick off the campaign would be as well as set win conditions to basically end the story because letting it just keep going forever is silly. At the moment I'm thinking:

- 2-3 Houses
- 4-5 players per House
- Option for "Free Men" who aren't necessarily in a House, but are positioned in a certain prominent position wherein they have leverage, think Varys. Littlefinger, the Hound, etc.
- Takes place in Westeros
- A small-ish scale in the sense that your Houses would all be in one or two regions which are in close proximity, geographically.
- Takes place well outside the timelines of the books/show, maybe hundreds of years in the past in some alternate history with the same basic layout or some future, again hundreds of years later. Basically, book/show grognards should chill, this is fresh lore.
- A set of win criteria, which could be somewhat specific to your House, but ultimately there's some sort of unifying win condition that all the Houses are competing for.
- Would take place on Discord, as a Play by Post format game within Discord. I've used that setup before, and the channels and whatnot make it basically a necessity for something of this scale, plus the real-time chatting options and possibility of coordinating to use voice for sessions, if people want. Flexibility and being able to constantly plot and wheel and deal are key.


This is still just an idea I'm tossing around. If you're interested in playing, great! Feel free to post here and discuss/ask questions. More importantly, if you're interested in helping out as a GM and this whole idea and layout intrigues you, let's talk. I have PMs, hit me up and we can all (as in GM people) get on Discord to discuss. I think we would need about 3-4 GMs.



EDIT: Also there's a fun House creator: http://www.jointherealm.com/

Fuzz fucked around with this message at 00:23 on Apr 19, 2019

Adbot
ADBOT LOVES YOU

NutritiousSnack
Jul 12, 2011
I'm game, but I think this is the wrong area!

Fuzz
Jun 2, 2003

Avatar brought to you by the TG Sanity fund

NutritiousSnack posted:

I'm game, but I think this is the wrong area!

Hmm, maybe I should ask a mod to move it to TGR. It's not a game thread or an actual recruitment, so I didn't want to post in there and get yelled at.

Fuzz
Jun 2, 2003

Avatar brought to you by the TG Sanity fund
So after some discussion with interested people and Nutritious, we're thinking something PRE Aegon the Conqueror, so during the period of the Seven Kingdoms as actual Kingdoms.

Discord link for those interested and want to discuss:
https://discord.gg/tt2w5zx


I think we need 1 more GM and we can solidify the overall plan and get the real recruitment thread out.

Fuzz
Jun 2, 2003

Avatar brought to you by the TG Sanity fund
We've got 2 more GMs now, maybe hopefully one more willing to help run this poo poo? Otherwise we can probably proceed, depends on player interest, which actually, if people are interested in playing, feel free to post. Need to get a rough idea on number of players.

kordansk
Sep 12, 2011
Sure I'll play the game of thrones.

Tricky
Jun 12, 2007

after a great meal i like to lie on the ground and feel like garbage


I'd be interested in playing.

thatbastardken
Apr 23, 2010

A contract signed by a minor is not binding!
please confirm if i would need to win or worry about dying

WereGoat
Apr 28, 2017

Hey, I'd be interested, but has a few questions.

How often are you looking for posts?

How much do you expect people to be on the discord?

Fuzz
Jun 2, 2003

Avatar brought to you by the TG Sanity fund

thatbastardken posted:

please confirm if i would need to win or worry about dying

It's Game of Thrones, so of course people will probably end up getting killed. The nice thing about the system and the way we're gonna run it is that you can always take over another NPC character in your house. When you guys will first create your house, heirs and whatnot are part of what you get, and if you have extras it's a simple enough task to have them conveniently traveling or whatever until someone takes over their slot.

One of the ways your House can lose is actually having people die out. As you start running out of viable PC positions (this is all very much IFs), you will still be able to stay in the game but you'll be rolling up freelance mercenaries or other independent types. Whether you hire your character out to your old house or go free agent is up to you. If and when the last inheritable member of your house is killed/dies, your House dissolves and whoever is leftover, be it a meister or master of arms or spymaster or whatever, will be on their own and have to figure out how to survive/what to do. If this means sabotaging the enemy house that killed your lords, that's totally fine. If it means cutting your losses and joining them, that's fine too.

All this stuff is part of the appeal of the game, the only golden rule is to OOCly be chill and not be a total rear end in a top hat or lose your poo poo and start sending death threats to other players because your Joffrey wannabe who you were super unhealthily attached to ended up dying or something. We're all playing to have fun and tell a good story, that's more important than winning.

WereGoat posted:

Hey, I'd be interested, but has a few questions.

How often are you looking for posts?

How much do you expect people to be on the discord?

Discord is basically always running... If you're in a discord chat, you know that pretty much any time of day people can be on and chatting, it's not unlike IRC. The benefit of doing it this way is that we can really easily compartmentalize groups of players into channels, most importantly, but also that Discord is super easy to use and has great phone clients on whatever platform your phone is, so you can always easily see what's going on in the game while taking a poo poo or waiting for the bus or whatever.

In terms of frequency of posting, our goal would be to have people checking in at least daily... The game isn't going to be some crazy real-time "give up your job and sell your children if you wanna play" type thing, not even close, but we'd like players to at least be keeping track of what's going on in their house on a roughly daily/bidaily basis. You snooze, you lose, as it were.

Because this is Game of Thrones, yes there will be an overall narrative plot hook to get the ball rolling, but ultimately the bulk of the story will be told by you guys, the players, in what actions you pursue, what plots you hatch, who you pick fights with, etc. This will very much be a game that rewards the proactive player who goes looking for things to do or creates the storyline to pursue on their own, rather than the player that sits around passively waiting for the GM to hand them another scene to respond to.

If your style is the latter, you probably will have a bad time in this game unless you're okay with just following along with whatever your house Lord is doing (please don't roll the Lord If that's your style, it will ruin the fun a and frustrate everyone else in your House). If you're down for carving your own path through Westeros with several others by your side, this game is 100% for you. There is no rule that says you HAVE to get along with your own House, and even within a House there could be betrayals or plots or the younger heir killing the older one or whatever. It's entirely up to you guys what ultimately goes down in the story, all of us GMs (there's 3 of us now, but I'd like to get a fourth to make sure we have regular coverage) are there to facilitate the story and cook up stuff in the background.

Fuzz fucked around with this message at 15:18 on Apr 21, 2019

Skyl3lazer
Aug 27, 2007

[Dooting Stealthily]



I'm down to participate in this (not as a GM)

Adbot
ADBOT LOVES YOU

Fuzz
Jun 2, 2003

Avatar brought to you by the TG Sanity fund
I think we'll proceed with Recruiting soon with the 3GMs we have... dunno if we'll even have enough players to warrant 4 GMs, so yeah, keep your eyes peeled for the Recruitment!

  • 1
  • 2
  • 3
  • 4
  • 5
  • Post
  • Reply