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This is a page for group discussion of the game, a place to comment OOCLY on scenes or what your character is getting out of their experiences here (you as a player too!). Have at! Also, if you've got side scenes you'd like to request working on with Hal or another player, feel free to enter them on here.
Story 8
There's plenty of room for blue books and side scenes !
Potential Scene or Blue-Book Bits:
Amrita and Linda - lots of stuff, whenever there's time.
Amrita/Joseph/Jack Carter - More woof politics
Ro and the White Plum House
Ro and the Hermetics (esp. Jerome Haller)
Ro and Linda (Ro demonstrating her new Adept-class Life talents to tie up one of the subplots with her and Lin) - also preparing Chiminage for the Uktena Grand Council.
Linda and Harmonious Banhammer - the Virtual Web and Linda's expanding Paradigm (Dual Tradition)
Contact with Wilt Jackson - Amrita's gonna reach out.
Further pursuit of PXP investigations, especially for Jeremy.
Other stuff? plenty of story ideas for everyone who's working on the Iliad/Pentex angle. Anyone who has an idea for a one-nighter should stop by that doc and say so in the comments or something. :)
Items for the Chronicle:
This current story arc runs according to what the PCs are setting out to do, but they have a number of different directions that they way want to start out with, and so I'm putting this here for us to discuss and post about. Here are some of the threads that have been identified that they may want to pursue out the gate of this story. The present assumption is that they've put at least some thought and work into at least several of these threads over the several days of down time, but we'll presumably want everybody on the same page for the next course of action. If we know going in, then I can work with you guys more easily to see what leads you folks have found over the past couple days as your characters prepared to jump into action. Discuss! :)
HSL & Miles Cortin -Those guys are still out there. Do we go after Cortin or focus on snooping on these guys right now?
Rat's Brood - What about these guys?
Chantries - If the group has specific business with The Fort Institute or The House of the Setting Sun, we could proceed with those known quantities, or we could go pay a call to one of the others. The group isn't yet established to have had any definitive recent contact with the Rolling Waves Chantry (a bit farther out, a mostly Celestial Chorus chantry in Malibu). We can have members of the Fort Institute or Setting Sun make introductions/give contacts etc going in.
Septs - Do we have any particular business with Glittering Dreams or the Shaking Hills Sept that needs to be addressed soon, or anything else along those lines?
Technocracy Related Goodness - The group knows the Technocracy recently had a pair of MiBs on their heels and then they clashed with part of a technocracy amalgam when they fought Stavros too: are they wanting to take a more active stance regarding the possibility (probability?) that they are being searched for or under surveillance by Black Hats right now? - Confirmed, as they were contacted by an amalgam between stories. Now What?
Krissy - the skinny little thing is out there somewhere. But where?
The Uktena Grand Council - The council itself will probably mostly happen off camera and in side scenes, but it's a few days from the present timeline, and most of the group's got a vested interest in what will be happening there either directly or indirectly.
We're going to introduce a series of codes and ratings for blue book and side scene postings, to help identify content and thus help readers prioritize. Going forward, each page (notably the history pages) that links to Blue Books will ideally have a set of codes posted, in the following format: Codes: (insert codes), Rating: (insert rating). Ratings will use the familiar movie ratings system. Any and all applicable codes will be posted, from the below list (and we welcome addition of any relevant codes).
NGI: New Game Information - This scene includes some new piece of new information that would be helpful for other players to know has been revealed. RO:Relationship Oriented - This scene is focused on interpersonal relationships, regardless of whether it is romantic, filial or the like. BS:Backstory - this scene reveals new elements of backstory.
Battle Resolution
We definitely need a way to streamline combat in this format. What do you folks think of cutting out the declarations stage as being entirely separate from resolution? IE: after inits are rolled, we get them in order and each player announces and then resolves their action on the spot rather than having us go round the whole group twice for every round of combat. The reverse declare then resolve thing works quite well for tabletop, but it might just be too clunky here. Weigh in in comments below, or put alternate solutions to streamline the process here.
Martial Arts and other Ability Tweaks
One thing that's new to M20 that I don't think will make it in to our chronicle, for example, is dividing Martial Arts off into a separate ability from Brawl. These two abilities cost the same amount of points to buy, but one of them is simply and unequivocally just "mo' betta". As far as I'm concerned, that's outright bad game design from a philosophical standpoint, and it just annoys me even more now than it did when Kindred of the East did it fifteen years ago (it's worth noting that both Vampire revised and V20, which both came out after KoE and enfolds its setting, abandoned this rules innovation). If you want your character to be better at kicking butt, just buy more dots. For one thing, I don't want the game to focus so much on wuxia, for another none of the existing characters in our chronicle were designed with that design philosophy in mind even though several of them over the course of the chronicle were explicitly stated to be martial artists... and also, Werewolf 20th anniversary doesn't use this division, and I'd rather keep something as fundamental as unarmed combat more internally consistent than that in our game. I'm not leaving Akashics out in the cold, though: every edition of Mage has already had a "mo' betta" unarmed combat ability explicitly set aside for Akashics that's part of their paradigm, costs a lot to buy and comes with prerequisites to improve: Do. I don't see a valid reason to change the "Brawl < Do" dynamic into one that goes "Brawl < Martial Arts < Do".
Roll20!
Hal sometimes uses this tool for session when we need a battle map. To access our chronicle's workspace in Roll20, just go ahead and click here.
Twitter Feed
There's a twitter feed. Be afraid. Be very afraid. Several of the characters in the group (i.e. most of the characters whose names are not Steve) are technologically savvy and send digital messages of various sorts to one another, and the game twitter feed helps represent some of that, and gives us a quick outlet for commentary and discussion between sessions or about the events that took place during them.
This seemed like the best place to put this one. Hal made a funny about Odysseus and Linda. And yes, He deliberately derailed Ody's vocal patterns for the purpose of the gag.
I hope that Ody Claus brought a very Ether Christmas to you and yours wherever you are, and drew this on Christmas day so that I could tell you so:
This little doodle commemorates the holiday season with Professor Odysseus Onassis filling in for Kris Kringle with a few labor-saving devices to make the holiday a little brighter: behold the Yule-inator 2011, which is equipped with fog lamps, wheeled running gear and turbine jet engines as well as a snazzy Jack antenna ball, though of course its most important feature is the Nicholean Present Matter Relocator, which eliminates the fuss, muss and hassle of all that climbing down chimneys by simply transferring presents and toys direct from the staging areas in Santa's toyshop to the targeted households. According to Ody's calculations, Christmas will be 127% more festive if this equipment passes from experimental to fully implemented status. The effect of the rather sluttily-dressed "elf" Linda on the efficiency of Professor Onassis' deliveries has yet to be scientifically evaluated.
A sign that our group might have wished were in place when they first showed up in Lassen...
Funnier in Hindsight
The following is a screenshot from an old New Bremen conversation, long prior to Overwatch or ACWOD's start, that I stumbled over recently and couldn't help but share here:
And then of course, there's this gem:
Cosplay!?!
That's right, there is documented ACWOD cosplay. Gaia help us all. Posted here in memory of the late and beloved Professor Odysseus Onassis.
Pictured: Patrick snazzily dressed up as his in-game alter ego, accompanied on his left (our right) by Hal dressed up as Baron Samedi, the most stylish of all psychopomps. Taken Halloween 2012, but finally posted to this wiki in May 2014. Still, this might have been an ill omen.
Motivational Poster
I made this poster with reference to a recent scene, showing a major motivation that I've seen in the past for players in choosing to play a particular Auspice...
And also because there have been three four relatively major named male Galliards that have shown up in play... and only one of them hasn't gotten any action with the ladies thus far. *Guillermo sadface* Hal made a full set covering all five Auspices and all nine Traditions. Maybe he'll do tribes next...
Memorable Quotes
A space for players to share lines from the game that they found memorable. Maybe the line was really funny. Maybe the line was really touching, or just plain awesome.
"Why would you eat a pig in a blanket?" - Alexis, prompting Amrita to spew her sangria all over the counter. Story 3 chapter 1.
"Perhaps now might be a good time to consider less dangerous hobbies, like BASE jumping from orbit?" - Odysseus, to Steve during the healing scene.
"Dude it's your reality. Work it." -Daniel (Ashton's player) encouraging Patrick re: his Paradigm.
"Oh, dear Gods, please protect these foolish -- but UTTERLY LOVEABLE -- people..." Alesia (Amrita's player) cheering on Ody, Ash and Ro as they were in combat
"...sometimes, truth's way stupider'n fiction." - Linda, in response to Ody's incredulity at her suggestion that they might be about to face mushroom zombies. (Story 1-3)
"The blonde one's just depeleted our bank account, and the tracking sensors only detect Garou now. And the other one is demanding more coal." "Coal? What does he need coal for? We have cold fusion generators!" "Yes, but he's using the cold fusion generators to turn the coal into diamonds. Apparently, his technology runs on diamonds!" Ryan (Wil's player) describing a hypothetical encounter between Linda and Odysseus and a pack of Glasswalkers.
"turn there!" "No!" "Park there!" "okay" "These aren't the mages you're looking for!" "I think they are" "earpiece feedback LOL!" "Hey!" - Hal's extremely brief summary of the jedi mind war between Ashton, Ody and the MiB operative in story 4 chapter II.
And can't you just see this poster at the local supermarket in Chester?
Off-Topic Stuff
This little video is one I first saw years ago, back about the time nMage was released, but Mike shared it with me again recently, and it feels so very, very Mage (either old or new). I dig this guy's paradigm.
A rather interesting modern "ghost story", shared by Ryan:
Here's something Am's player made, mostly as an exercise to see if it could be done. (Answer was, yes, but not easily) Obviously, takes place after the Hangar Fight.
Awakening Around the Web!
Our very own Alesia has posted this nifty article about how collaborative storytelling and roleplaying have changed in recent years alongside technological advances. She talks about our game there, and her article is altogether very much worth the read. So go read it, already!
For those of you with Android smartphones, Google recently released a major update of the Docs for Android app that allows you to get in and edit any Gdoc, real time, collaboratively, just like you do from your desktop or laptop. It includes easy access to most of the rich text formatting tools like boldfacing, italics, indents, &c. I sat down with my phone and a document that Hal & I were working on and his edits appeared only a second or two slower than I might have seen them on my computer monitor. Slick, fast, and a fairly small footprint, size-wise, for those of us who have to be concerned about such things.
I have been a Gdocs hater for a long time, and I do still have some issues with it, but I have to say that so long as Google is willing to help me get my game on like this, anytime, anywhere, I'm down.
Just passing on the love. :) If you try it, let me know what you think.
They call it "yoga music," but I'd call it "world music." 30 tracks, from some of the biggest names in the world music industry, all for free. You may not like 'em all, but at least you don't have to pay to find that out. :)
They ask for your name, email, and zip code in return. But you knew they would, didn't you?
I'll be expanding Am's soundtrack/playlist, for sure. ;)
Okay, to facilitate the planning of blue books, here's a timeline for the folks that are at Casa del Ody & Linda: The group probably got there around 6:30-7pm on the 17th. Linda remains comatose throughout that night. She finally awakens just as the sun cracks the horizon the next morning.
Hey folks! I've got a question regarding the schedule of our next game. We're currently set for this weekend, but I was wondering if it might not be a better idea to push it back a week to give us a little more time to get some stuff squared away... and because I'm not available either of the following two weekends, so it might be better to do it this way so we don't have a four week gap between sessions. Thoughts?
I've got no problem with it. If things work out on another track for me, pushing back a week will likely work out better over here, too. :) So instead of the 18th, then the 25th?
As all of you that read these are aware, Our troupe has suffered some recent losses: Wil and Alexis' players have departed from the game, and as such at the end of Story 3 (Unfinished Business) chapter III, I am in process of writing them out. With a heavy heart, I am sending them along with the Castanedas. The moot log is still being edited and corrected, and will be up, reflecting these facts, within the next couple of days now that I'm back on the planet Los Angeles. Watch this space.
Oh, and as of the currently in-process stuff, Joseph's moving in to the troupe. Hence having his own character sheet page now. I'll have the updated log up before Saturday, or at least that's what I'm shooting for anyways.
I was originally shooting for chapter 3-3 to be the last one in the lassen area, but after how that one went down, I think I'd like chapter 3-4 to be not only the concluding session for the story but a sort of fun, character interaction-heavy epilogue rather than a big investigation/puncheminnaface thing to help get the joy and happy play flowing again.
Do you folks have any particular preferences/requests/thoughts? Sue/Ro has suggested a going away get-together to say soem goodbyes to folks that have been important but that you lot won't be seeing for a while (not the old pack, because they're gone on the morning after the moot).
It's something of a puzzle, for sure. We're pretty much done at Lassen. And as much as I love my SueSweet, I'd have to differ with her on this. Goodbyes aren't often "joy and happy play." :(
Maybe we could use an in-character group planning session? Most of the characters have sub-plots going. It might be cool if we could harness those together during a discussion so that we're all making as much progress on them as we can?
Once we know the actual direction we're supposed to be going, I mean. ;)
I like it. :) The idea of a 'going away' party was brought up in a scene to be posted, for other reasons. =heh= And we weren't entirely sure it would fly, then. So the idea of the planning session works on all sorts of levels.
Regarding next session's scheduling, normally it would be this coming Sunday. We're in the gap between stories however, and I'm starting to think it might be good to give us another week to take care of the transitional between-stories stuff, and to give me a little more time to prep chapter 1 of story 4. So what do you folks think of swapping out an April 29th next session date for May 6th?
I have a thought that I've talked to a couple of folks about and wanted to share with the group at large for your input. While I will in general try to keep the group together most of the time in this chronicle, there will unavoidably be some times like right now where not everybody's in the same place during the ongoing scene. While running things concurrently for both parts of the group can work, it won't always be viable, for instance during the thing this coming Sunday where I'm running the werewolves-only side of the chapter that we ran as mages-only this past Sunday since every WtA character other than Sean didn't have a player available.
What I'm thinking of doing is setting up a SOP such that in situations like that, a player can, at their option, be permitted to take over an NPC that is present or can be easily made present for the scene at hand. That way anybody that wants to take part in a scene can do so. We had some success with a similar tactic back during story 2 with Mary, Marco and White Feather for a side scene and I'm thinking I'd like to open up a similar tactic to group sessions where somebody's character is unavailable, incapacitated or dead and hasn't been replaced yet.
What do you think? Also, do you think it would be appropriate or is a good idea to grant 1 XP to folks that do this as a meta-reward for their helping take some work off my shoulders?
Oh, as a reminder: this coming Sunday would normally be a game session, but it's Father's day and soem folks have requested a postponement. That's perfectly reasonable, and I'll push it back to the Sunday following. :)
Okay, Alesia and Sue have submitted a request for an actual tabletop session on the 23rd of October. I've submitted a request to get that day off work entirely for the purposes of lunching and hanging out even if there's no session, but D and Pat, what do you guys think of doing something, and if so where and at what time?
I've terminated my premium subscription to Chatzy. The chat room still exists as a free room, but we can only access one page worth of its log now. I decided that for the volume of use we got on it, it wasn't a cost effective solution. Also, the ongoing subscription fees were annoying the missus. ;)
We can still use it, but I'll have to be super careful re: logging, which is the reason we switched to a premium room in the first place. I'm looking for an alternate solution at this point. One good option would be group chats via an IM client like Yahoo messenger, or we could go the google hangouts angle, or use google docs for our actual game sessions too like we do for a lot of our bluebooking. Roll20's an option, but isn't really optimized for the type of play we're doing. It's mostly for when you need tactical battlemaps and things, as the chat side of that tool isn't as robust due to the annoying bouncing notifications and its reverse-order logging. I'll poke my head back in there again to see if that stuff has been corrected, but I don't think it's the answer for this particular game. Thoughts? Suggestions? Rants?
The more I think about this, the more I'm persuaded that a move to Gdocs is probably the best. Instant log of all interactions, and they don't have to be linear. There's the side chat bar for table talk, and a "comments" function that allows for extra information to be inserted that may not need to be part of the narrative. So that's my vote, if I get one. :)
I thought about this on and off all after noon since it was first posted and I've come to the same conclusion Alesia has. GDocs and it's various tools will allow us to even expand our functionality, too. It won't necessarily be as quick as the chatroom format, but we can sort of tweak that, too with using colored text to denote who said what or something like that and keep the same format. I know Pat's not hot on the Google-thing but we do have limited options.
The more I think about it, the more I think this is the way for our group to go.there's just so much more functionality, and it's fully and easily loggable. Perhaps a little slower, but folks can work on things at the same time, and if somebody wanted to put a comment in but missed the spot, they can slot it in as long as everybody's cool.
Any dissenting opinions?
Now, we could theoretically use the ajax chat Ryan built too, but I seem to remember that lagging if we had a full group there.
In the last two weeks, we Angelenos have had two very interesting earthquakes that those group members that aren't in LA might not know about. One was 3.5 and centered in the Baldwin Hills neighborhood of LA, two weeks ago. The other, this morning, was 3.9 and centered in Ladera Heights... which is immediately south of Baldwin Hills, and both are in the actual Baldwin Hills themselves... know what else runs through the Baldwin Hills? One of LA's scariest faults, the Newport-Inglewood Fault... know what sits directly on top of the Ladera Heights neighborhood, and borders the Baldwin Hills Neighborhood? The Inglewood Oilfield, whose management (the real world version of PXP, who are based out of Texas) continue to insist that their ongoing fracking operation is completely harmless. An interesting correspondence with our game.
Whoah, new content for the wiki! I added Chasing the Dreamy, a little tidbit set way back in Story 2 but only just completed after languishing for well over a year in half-written form.
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Comments (Show all 75)
Sue said
at 6:23 pm on Feb 16, 2012
I'll definitely let you know. If nothing else, I'll let you look it over before posting to see if you want to add anything for Ozy or something. :-)
Hal! said
at 8:03 pm on Feb 16, 2012
Hee!
Alesia said
at 8:55 pm on Feb 16, 2012
I'm always interested. :)
And always willing to write up a scene with anyone, so hit me up!
Alesia said
at 6:01 pm on Feb 23, 2012
For those of you with Android smartphones, Google recently released a major update of the Docs for Android app that allows you to get in and edit any Gdoc, real time, collaboratively, just like you do from your desktop or laptop. It includes easy access to most of the rich text formatting tools like boldfacing, italics, indents, &c. I sat down with my phone and a document that Hal & I were working on and his edits appeared only a second or two slower than I might have seen them on my computer monitor. Slick, fast, and a fairly small footprint, size-wise, for those of us who have to be concerned about such things.
I have been a Gdocs hater for a long time, and I do still have some issues with it, but I have to say that so long as Google is willing to help me get my game on like this, anytime, anywhere, I'm down.
Just passing on the love. :) If you try it, let me know what you think.
Hal! said
at 5:37 am on Feb 24, 2012
That app is much of the good.
Alesia said
at 3:43 pm on Mar 7, 2012
If you enjoy getting free music -- as opposed to pirating music you should be paying for -- or, wth, either-or -- go here:
http://community.yogitunes.com/tadasana/
They call it "yoga music," but I'd call it "world music." 30 tracks, from some of the biggest names in the world music industry, all for free. You may not like 'em all, but at least you don't have to pay to find that out. :)
They ask for your name, email, and zip code in return. But you knew they would, didn't you?
I'll be expanding Am's soundtrack/playlist, for sure. ;)
Hal! said
at 12:10 am on Mar 8, 2012
thank you!
there's some good stuff in there
Hal! said
at 8:24 am on Mar 8, 2012
Okay, to facilitate the planning of blue books, here's a timeline for the folks that are at Casa del Ody & Linda: The group probably got there around 6:30-7pm on the 17th. Linda remains comatose throughout that night. She finally awakens just as the sun cracks the horizon the next morning.
Ryan said
at 10:15 am on Mar 8, 2012
I assume the pack is there, so I'll participate in what ever but I don't have anything specific in mind.
Hal! said
at 10:21 am on Mar 8, 2012
Sure thing. She woke right at the crack of dawn. We can have Wil and the otehrs check on her whenever.
Ryan said
at 9:47 am on Mar 9, 2012
I don't know if the whole pack is heading back to the Sept, but I think Wil will be going back late on the 18th.
Sue said
at 2:42 pm on Mar 8, 2012
Assume Ro spent a good portion of the night on watch, as it were. Probably went to bed in the wee hours to get some sleep, herself.
Hal! said
at 8:26 pm on Mar 8, 2012
Do you want to have a talk with Joseph, since he was there all night in the room?
Alesia said
at 10:40 am on Mar 8, 2012
After the Falling Awake scene, I can haz scene request?
To wit, Ro and Ody working on a cure for Linda's cancer. Life + SCIENCE! = WIN!!
Sue said
at 2:43 pm on Mar 8, 2012
Ha! That should be an interesting scene, in truth! :) Will have to see when I can hog-tie Pat into doing it. ;-)
Hal! said
at 9:24 am on Mar 16, 2012
Hey folks! I've got a question regarding the schedule of our next game. We're currently set for this weekend, but I was wondering if it might not be a better idea to push it back a week to give us a little more time to get some stuff squared away... and because I'm not available either of the following two weekends, so it might be better to do it this way so we don't have a four week gap between sessions. Thoughts?
Sue said
at 10:05 am on Mar 16, 2012
I've got no problem with it. If things work out on another track for me, pushing back a week will likely work out better over here, too. :) So instead of the 18th, then the 25th?
Hal! said
at 1:18 am on Apr 2, 2012
As all of you that read these are aware, Our troupe has suffered some recent losses: Wil and Alexis' players have departed from the game, and as such at the end of Story 3 (Unfinished Business) chapter III, I am in process of writing them out. With a heavy heart, I am sending them along with the Castanedas. The moot log is still being edited and corrected, and will be up, reflecting these facts, within the next couple of days now that I'm back on the planet Los Angeles. Watch this space.
Hal! said
at 11:14 am on Apr 4, 2012
Oh, and as of the currently in-process stuff, Joseph's moving in to the troupe. Hence having his own character sheet page now. I'll have the updated log up before Saturday, or at least that's what I'm shooting for anyways.
I was originally shooting for chapter 3-3 to be the last one in the lassen area, but after how that one went down, I think I'd like chapter 3-4 to be not only the concluding session for the story but a sort of fun, character interaction-heavy epilogue rather than a big investigation/puncheminnaface thing to help get the joy and happy play flowing again.
Do you folks have any particular preferences/requests/thoughts? Sue/Ro has suggested a going away get-together to say soem goodbyes to folks that have been important but that you lot won't be seeing for a while (not the old pack, because they're gone on the morning after the moot).
Alesia said
at 11:55 am on Apr 4, 2012
It's something of a puzzle, for sure. We're pretty much done at Lassen. And as much as I love my SueSweet, I'd have to differ with her on this. Goodbyes aren't often "joy and happy play." :(
Maybe we could use an in-character group planning session? Most of the characters have sub-plots going. It might be cool if we could harness those together during a discussion so that we're all making as much progress on them as we can?
Once we know the actual direction we're supposed to be going, I mean. ;)
Sue said
at 4:03 pm on Apr 4, 2012
I like it. :) The idea of a 'going away' party was brought up in a scene to be posted, for other reasons. =heh= And we weren't entirely sure it would fly, then. So the idea of the planning session works on all sorts of levels.
Hal! said
at 8:32 am on Apr 5, 2012
Now we just need input from other folks. What do you lot think of the next session being a "let's hash out where to go from here" bit?
Hal! said
at 7:04 am on Apr 11, 2012
from what folks have said to me in other areas, this looks like the plan going forward.
Hal! said
at 1:12 pm on Apr 23, 2012
Regarding next session's scheduling, normally it would be this coming Sunday. We're in the gap between stories however, and I'm starting to think it might be good to give us another week to take care of the transitional between-stories stuff, and to give me a little more time to prep chapter 1 of story 4. So what do you folks think of swapping out an April 29th next session date for May 6th?
Sue said
at 1:38 pm on Apr 23, 2012
I'm good with that. :) Works to also gives us all Mother's Day off to do as we need/want to. :)
Hal! said
at 2:46 pm on Apr 23, 2012
Oh, I had not thought of it that way.
Hal! said
at 10:17 am on Jun 5, 2012
Anybody have any thoughts on which character I should pair with Kijika in my sketch?
Sue said
at 6:30 am on Jun 6, 2012
=heh= Ozy? LOL
Hal! said
at 7:35 am on Jun 6, 2012
LOL
Hal! said
at 11:26 am on Jun 6, 2012
I have a thought that I've talked to a couple of folks about and wanted to share with the group at large for your input. While I will in general try to keep the group together most of the time in this chronicle, there will unavoidably be some times like right now where not everybody's in the same place during the ongoing scene. While running things concurrently for both parts of the group can work, it won't always be viable, for instance during the thing this coming Sunday where I'm running the werewolves-only side of the chapter that we ran as mages-only this past Sunday since every WtA character other than Sean didn't have a player available.
What I'm thinking of doing is setting up a SOP such that in situations like that, a player can, at their option, be permitted to take over an NPC that is present or can be easily made present for the scene at hand. That way anybody that wants to take part in a scene can do so. We had some success with a similar tactic back during story 2 with Mary, Marco and White Feather for a side scene and I'm thinking I'd like to open up a similar tactic to group sessions where somebody's character is unavailable, incapacitated or dead and hasn't been replaced yet.
What do you think? Also, do you think it would be appropriate or is a good idea to grant 1 XP to folks that do this as a meta-reward for their helping take some work off my shoulders?
Hal! said
at 12:07 am on Jun 13, 2012
Oh, as a reminder: this coming Sunday would normally be a game session, but it's Father's day and soem folks have requested a postponement. That's perfectly reasonable, and I'll push it back to the Sunday following. :)
Hal! said
at 2:00 pm on Oct 9, 2012
Okay, Alesia and Sue have submitted a request for an actual tabletop session on the 23rd of October. I've submitted a request to get that day off work entirely for the purposes of lunching and hanging out even if there's no session, but D and Pat, what do you guys think of doing something, and if so where and at what time?
Hal! said
at 2:42 pm on Nov 15, 2012
I've terminated my premium subscription to Chatzy. The chat room still exists as a free room, but we can only access one page worth of its log now. I decided that for the volume of use we got on it, it wasn't a cost effective solution. Also, the ongoing subscription fees were annoying the missus. ;)
We can still use it, but I'll have to be super careful re: logging, which is the reason we switched to a premium room in the first place. I'm looking for an alternate solution at this point. One good option would be group chats via an IM client like Yahoo messenger, or we could go the google hangouts angle, or use google docs for our actual game sessions too like we do for a lot of our bluebooking. Roll20's an option, but isn't really optimized for the type of play we're doing. It's mostly for when you need tactical battlemaps and things, as the chat side of that tool isn't as robust due to the annoying bouncing notifications and its reverse-order logging. I'll poke my head back in there again to see if that stuff has been corrected, but I don't think it's the answer for this particular game. Thoughts? Suggestions? Rants?
Alesia said
at 7:23 pm on Nov 15, 2012
The more I think about this, the more I'm persuaded that a move to Gdocs is probably the best. Instant log of all interactions, and they don't have to be linear. There's the side chat bar for table talk, and a "comments" function that allows for extra information to be inserted that may not need to be part of the narrative. So that's my vote, if I get one. :)
Sue said
at 8:47 pm on Nov 15, 2012
I thought about this on and off all after noon since it was first posted and I've come to the same conclusion Alesia has. GDocs and it's various tools will allow us to even expand our functionality, too. It won't necessarily be as quick as the chatroom format, but we can sort of tweak that, too with using colored text to denote who said what or something like that and keep the same format. I know Pat's not hot on the Google-thing but we do have limited options.
Hal! said
at 11:11 am on Nov 16, 2012
The more I think about it, the more I think this is the way for our group to go.there's just so much more functionality, and it's fully and easily loggable. Perhaps a little slower, but folks can work on things at the same time, and if somebody wanted to put a comment in but missed the spot, they can slot it in as long as everybody's cool.
Any dissenting opinions?
Now, we could theoretically use the ajax chat Ryan built too, but I seem to remember that lagging if we had a full group there.
Hal! said
at 11:12 am on Nov 16, 2012
I especially like that we can put the mechanical stuff in comments or in the chat area.
Hal! said
at 8:15 am on Jan 26, 2014
Alesia, I still love that little comic you made. It's very cute.
Hal! said
at 6:22 pm on May 3, 2015
In the last two weeks, we Angelenos have had two very interesting earthquakes that those group members that aren't in LA might not know about. One was 3.5 and centered in the Baldwin Hills neighborhood of LA, two weeks ago. The other, this morning, was 3.9 and centered in Ladera Heights... which is immediately south of Baldwin Hills, and both are in the actual Baldwin Hills themselves... know what else runs through the Baldwin Hills? One of LA's scariest faults, the Newport-Inglewood Fault... know what sits directly on top of the Ladera Heights neighborhood, and borders the Baldwin Hills Neighborhood? The Inglewood Oilfield, whose management (the real world version of PXP, who are based out of Texas) continue to insist that their ongoing fracking operation is completely harmless. An interesting correspondence with our game.
Hal! said
at 9:21 am on Oct 20, 2016
Whoah, new content for the wiki! I added Chasing the Dreamy, a little tidbit set way back in Story 2 but only just completed after languishing for well over a year in half-written form.
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