Hope it's better now Elisai :(
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
Yes, feel better! I command it!
Gencon, anyone going? I'll be there!
Yep! I'll be there. Going to be doing Starfinder on Thursday morning and evening and Friday morning, probably be doing LSJ the rest of the con after that. If you have a free slot Shadow you should come give LSJ a try, we accept generics and have yet to turn a player away who wasn't an hour late yet.
Woot! Regardless of whether or not I get to play a game with you, I'll PM you so we can at least shake hands and say HI!
I'e never played LSJ, I'll look into it. I'm jealous you got into SF, all the sessions were full when I tried.
I'm back! Thanks for being patient! :D
It seems the resting was just a misunderstanding Shadowlord. Delendir was just intending to make sure we can retreat here to rest whenever needed. But he is moving to the southern tunnel, and I believe with the rest of the party.
I hope holidays have gone good for all of you :)
Whoops. My apologies, I thought you guys wanted to bed down for the night. It appears it was a 'catch our breath' statement instead! Off we go.
I've started having some serious computer problems the last couple of days and this may lead to spotty posting until I can replace it. Hopefully that won't be the case and I will keep you updated as best I can until then.
Dawned on me that it is getting close to fall/winter time. Means that there might be some more Reign of Winter games starting up. Been wanting to play that campaign for a long time now and every time I get in one it dies half way, or earlier, through the first book. Very aggravating.
I will be traveling for work the next two weeks. I'll do my best to checkin and keep things moving as best I can. If there are gaps, that's why!
About ROW, I'm still going strong with my campaign! We've been going for two years now and are in book three! I like the story so far, it's been intriguing and engaging for my group.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
A 5 foot step should keep you save from any AoO. Also you have cover from all but 1 ogre, so no AoO possibilities for all but the one in the door. He might be one of the blinded ones by Yavanee's spell (so no AoO and only 50% of normal attacks go in). And if that does not makes you feel save enough, Sunday boldly* charged in, so he probably already ate the doorway ogre AoO if he is not blind anyway xD
*shrugs*
Berserker.
Ragnhildr has withdrawn from the game. I will GMPC her through this battle and then she will be off to assist the other group.
:(
*hugs Ragnhildr*
Sorry to see you go. Take it easy.
:(
Will Miss you~
Whoops, sorry bout that guys, I kinda forgot the building was three stories and that there might be survivors in there. At least I didn't kill any of us, if only barely.
I missed that it was 3 stories as well. Oh well, you got rid of all the ogres.
The full Society ID number for the log sheet.
138480-2
Putting it on Indra which makes her level three now now I believe.
Whoopsie, meant to post that in the Giantslayer game, not here.
Hi there! I was updating the treasure sheet and it seems I am lacking a list on the items we found on the giant spider house, Mammy Graul and it's farm.
Would it be too late to have a list of what we could recover from the burned down house and its occupants? I fear we were too excited about the rescue and forgot about the minor details. But the scavenger Delendir perhaps did not.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
I'll take a look at the house and barn. If I remember correctly, you burned the place to the ground and left before the fire was even close to dying down due to the smoke and fear of further attacks.
Yeah I'm pretty sure we torched the joint. It was still burning bright when we left.
Yep, I were more wondering about whatever Mammy and the others took out of the farm, and what we found inside the side spider house.
So while we explore Fort Rannick, let's have a little discussion here in OOC.
Your game has evolved significantly since inception, numerous players have come and gone and you are what is left of the group tasked to save the sleepy town of Sandpoint. As a gaming group I'd like to take a step back from the game for a moment and chat about how we feel the game is progressing, play styles, adjustments, etc.
My goals here are to figure out what we think needs to be done to make this the thread that you can't wake up in the morning to check first and see what's happened. What can we try to do to get that 'new game magic' back?
I'll go first and say that I've gone through periods of only posting here because it was my job to do that and I didn't really feel motivated to post anything. I don't feel that way now though, and I feel like I've been going at a pretty good pace (except GenCon) these last few months.
Difficulty. I had a player mention I make things rather challenging and difficult. I admit this, I tend to gravitate that way. If this is too challenging though, please tell me to dial it back. I'm not trying to take your fun away.
I have a bunch of other comments and thoughts, but I really wanted this to be an open discussion between everyone on where they are with this game. What they like. What they don't like. What they'd like to see change, etc.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
I happen to like the challenge/degree of difficulty. Whine no one wants a TPK, cakewalks are not that fun or exciting to me. I'm one f the more recent additions though so I'll defer to the people who were here longer for what they'd like to see in terms of direction.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
I’m... i don’t know. I think I’m getting okay about posting again.
There have been stretches where I've had issues keeping interested, especially the more recent sections that are far more dungeon crawly (something that eventually bores me on a consistent basis). The rate has increased enough that we're moving better than we were which helps my interest. The worst part for me is the turnover we've had of players. The only originals now, iirc, are Delendir and myself and I'm using a different PC (temporarily by request so no complaints there) and we've has some of the longer running PCs drop in and out or vanish completely which damages morale for me.
I think once we get through this section things will improve for me personally. My only other issue is time but that's something I have to work around.
Yeah dungeon crawl is murder on PBP's either taking forever to do anything due to deciding which door/lever/whatnot by committee, or the one person with the skills to do so posts and most of the other players tune out.
Agree, crawling is really hard, since it gets repetitive and drains resources, which in turn slows things down a bit more. Things might improve once we break this though.
Thanks for weighing in! We all go through up and down spells on the forums, that's normal for PBP. I'm bringing this up to see if we can find a way to kickstart the interest again. Any ideas on how to do that?
Dungeon crawls are hard on PBP and unfortunately the easiest way to resolve that is usually more frequent posts to get through them. We still have a bit more to go through this part, it's not quite over yet here at Rannick.
One of the problems I see is that when things get drawn out like they have been, you lose the momentum in the game and forget the details of what you are doing, why you are doing it and motivations for doing it.
Even since I've been here there has been significant change to the party makeup in the game. If you look in the characters section of this game, well, there are quite a TON since the game started. The comings and goings of that definitely affects the interests and chemistry of the party. If the interaction between the party isn't there, interests wane and posting dies.
Most relevant things have been already pointed out.
My own time is constrained as of late, so there are days I cannot post, whereas two years ago I could easily post 4 or 5 times a day. But I really feel from other campaigns 1 post a day is enough to make it work, provided the whole party collaborates on it.
I want to reinforce the argument about party consistency. It is difficult to build up on party interaction, and every character change affects this a lot. Even more so if the players who were usually moving most of the dialogues are intermittently going off. It is not always easy to adapt to the new group dynamics.
Crawls can be also quite fruitful, they just need a bit more of energy and a different approach. What I see in campaigns that work well on crawls is the party introduce social interactions between rooms and rounds of combat. It is not that difficult, it just requires having confidence on the others so you know they would feel fine by you making references to your characters, asking and offering things in-character. Delendir is the character that has the skills for Perceive and disable traps, and I do not mind taking the initiative on those scenes or even deciding alone where to go next. But it would work better, both for me and the GM, if you post afterwards reinforcing the decision or just adding some party interaction.
Difficulty: I do prefer when campaigns are not a continuous fight for your life battle. When always adjusting the challenge to the capacity of the party a lot of bad things happen: the campaign becomes much longer, the focus becomes combat, non optimized characters are difficult to shine and those optimized look to min-max even more entering into a vicious circle for survival, end combats are either not distinguishable in challenge to normal encounters or they are just impossible overkills. I find out Paizo balances quite well the difficulty, with some combats shinning over others on the level of challenge, but the campaign still doable with 4 players 15 point-buy. I do recognize the difficulty for setting the difficulty for this game, with varying sizes of the group and 20 point-buys.
Interest again plan:
- post reinforcing other player actions and interacting with others
- post things in-character and improve narrative (if you are writing more ooc than in-character, that's a sign you probably need to post in Discussion instead or ask the question in-character)
- pace to maintain momentum, try for most of the group and the GM post at least 1/day. I think Shadowlord is currently doing much better work and it is our fault if we are not posting more and better.
- maintain party consistency: trying to maintain the character core so party dynamics are not affected (although Krysta is an interesting character and she should be free of deciding what to play I personally think the soonest Jessica comes back the better, she was a major pillar for the party)
There are some other interesting points to discuss and some extra advices to improve the game, but that is the most relevant in my opinion.
All good points Delendir, and I think they follow a lot of what we all have already said. As for Jess, she'll be back, count on it.
Holly crap, it seems Paizo servers are run on MS-DOS.
LMAO
I really can’t believe how terrible they are. Add in the fact that their website was designed for 2002 and they get an overall rating of F in IT. They really could do with investing in that area.
They’ve been updating them bit by bit.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
I'm headed to PAX Unplugged in Philly for the weekend. I'll probably be offline until early next week!
That sounds real fun! Enjoy! :)
Have fun!
Enjoy yourself, have a great time~
Have fun!
I did have a fantastic time, thank you all for your comments.
I have returned, but my mind is in a different place from when I left. I did some thinking while I was away and have come to the conclusion that I have gotten a little burned out from all of the PbP I've been doing these last years. I need a break from it all so it doesn't feel like I have to do something rather than I want to do something. When I first started I was checking the forums 15 times a day, anxious for new posts and eagerly looking at new games to join. Now I find myself purposefully avoiding logging onto to the forums to even look at the games I'm in. Simply put, I'm not having as much fun as I once did.
To this end I have started closing down all my other games that I run and asked the GM's of the ones I participate in to remove my character. But this game is the furthest along of all of them at halfway through book three and I don't want to leave you all hanging once more without a GM.
Rather than just up and quit or disappear I wanted to chat with you all about it first.
I do feel similarly about PbP. At first you see how easy is to finally get to play all those adventures you could not over the years. I found myself imagining on how all the plots would evolve and enjoying how my character was responding to all that, surprising at the answers by the other players.
Overtime, you find out the adventures take much more than you thought to move along, and it requires some responsibility to keep up coming back every day for things moving on. Most days that is a pleasure but some days is a kick in my ass. Over the years, there are particular weeks or even months where these days seem to accumulate together...
I do perfectly understand what you are talking about.
I would love to play the whole adventure, even if it is at a 1 post/3 days, but I do understand this requires all the group, or at least most, to have the desire and time available to make it happen.
I do not think we can find a better GM, or even a passable substitution able to carry the game with energy along the coming years.
I would like to see what others think, but I would at least ask for a closure to our characters. If that is possible I would want to see the fort thing completed or our characters died in the attempt to retake the fort.
I agree with delendir, I'm willing to stick with this for the long haul even if it slows down. I think finding a gm at this point would be difficult and you've done an amazing job with all that's been thrown at the last few years. If you need a bit of a break I'm good with that, If you need to drop it then some kind of resolution would be prefferble to a dead stop.
I 100% agree with Krysta and Delendir. Fine sticking with this through the long haul, you ShadowLord, have done an amazing job, and that if it has to end, some closure for characters would be a lovely way to finish it off.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
Thank you for the kind words from you all, that means a lot to me.
Let me take off through the end of the year and I promise to come back in January to keep you going one way or another. I believe you all have my email address for reassurance, I won't disappear on you.
I'd just like to say I agree with the sentiments above, and am here as long as you're willing.
Happy new year!
I hope everyone enjoyed their holiday break and is ready to get back into the thick of it. Before the delving begins I wanted to make sure we are all here. Check in and sound off please.