[SFS_Aerondor] 01-18 The Blackmoon Survey. (Outpost IV) (Inactive)

Game Master Aerondor

If a 27 on a Diplomacy check could not convince them, nothing will. Let's just kill them. We can tell the Eoxians anyway, about Fayetta too. I'll do it, happily.

Well, I'm summoning an air elemental on the other side of them to try to slow them down, at least. But my gun's nonlethal, so I'm trying to take them in alive.

Post away in gameplay.

I know that some scenarios have significantly higher DCs for diplomacy than bluff. If we would attack anyway, I vote for bluffing first. I will post, see what happens.

OK, follow-up: I know that some Society events let you reroll if you have a shirt or folio, or have GMed a few scenarios, or what-have-you. Is there anything like that here?

Sorry I had a lot of things come up this weekend, lol.

Yes, if you have a nova you can reroll using that. Or if you have a t-shirt slotted to your promotional boon slot - that can alternatively give you a reroll.

Speaking of rolling... boon time. Roll a d20, 19 or 20 and you will a boon.

GM: 1d20 ⇒ 4 No more luck than Mengian.

Chronicles for those of you who have made your choice have beenuploaded

Boon: 1d20 ⇒ 17

@Dytabail, I need your SFS character number to do the reporting.

Thanks for the game, GM! I know I can be a pain sometimes but it's only because I really get into these little adventures. I thought this was the most engaging one yet!

boooon!!: 1d20 ⇒ 7 or not

Thanks for running!

No worries at all. The whole point is that these are a role playing game after all. Things that get forgotten sometimes in short-term society play.

Yeah, Organized play can sometimes lack in the deep roleplaying so it refreshing for me to see people really get into the grit.

This is my 707 character.

1d20 ⇒ 20

It takes me some time to get into roleplaying with new characters, and getting used to PBP (this is one of my first ones), but it was fun. I would like to do it again when I have a bit more cash to spend on gear.

lyjct Dytabail: 1d4 ⇒ 3 I have no idea what the boon is

Can you send me your mail Dyabail, so I can arrange to get the boon sent to you. They often take a number of weeks :-(

Boontown?: 1d20 ⇒ 13

Apologies for going dark; visitors for the holiday weekend, followed by finishing getting ready for replacement floors in part of the house, followed by first COVID-19 shot, and wrapping up with the joy of a high-stakes ALARA review at work.

This was my first PbP game as well. :)

First time rolling for a boon - here goes!

No Whammies: 1d20 ⇒ 18

So close. On the plus side, I get to level up! Should I take multiclass with a level of Operative or Envoy?

I'm not a fan of multiclassing, but between the two, I would go with operative. The critical stats overlap more than with envoy.

But the nice skill bonus for envoy and operative don't stack as they are both insight bonuses.

Hopefully you enjoyed your new PBP experiences. I'll see about getting the reporting done.

Extra two chronicles have been uploaded to the chronicle link.

Please note, the two of you with bone sages respect also gained a point of infamy. Sorry, that is just the way the scenario plays it.

Thank you all very much for playing.

PbP can be (as Kharos noted) really good for RP, but it has some...let's say nuances that may not be obvious up front. Because it's an asynchronous medium, the pacing can get weird--skip a day or two over the weekend, or have something come up, and if the GM and another player or two were on a lot you might come back to 15+ unread posts, and the party committed to a path that you would have argued against but are now stuck with. We say RL has to come first (and it should), but we can easily end up inadvertently penalizing people for putting RL first.

Pacing is its own issue, too. A fast-paced group can knock off a typical OP scenario in a month, or even a little less. That's orders of magnitude slower than it would be F2F, so it's a medium that demands patience.

One of the other things to watch for is that *you have no control over how much of your post someone will read*. If I'm snatching a couple of minutes to check the boards on my phone between meetings, I may well miss a critical piece of information because I'm skimming a post. When I'm GMing, it bugs me more than it should when this happens, and a player misses something I thought I'd made clear. Sometimes it's my fault, though--PbP is also a low-bandwidth medium, and if I'm writing a post in a hurry (on my phone, between meetings...) I may elide some critical piece of information, or be excessively terse in ways that make it easy for my players to miss the point.

Finally, that low-bandwidth thing makes it easy to run afoul of Scalzi's Rule (stated by John Scalzi on Twitter, but generalizable to a wide range of online interactions): the failure mode of clever is <bad word elided b/c the boards will censor it, but Google will fill it in if you start to type "the failure mode of clever is">. When you're sitting across the table from someone, your chance of noticing when the bit of RP you're trying to do is tripping into that failure mode is much better than it is when you're writing a post. You have no easy way of knowing what sort of mood the other players are going to be in, either, and thus how receptive they're going to be to anything off-normal. For that matter, you won't generally have had F2F contact with your fellow players and GM (though over time you can get to know them somewhat despite that--e.g., the GM and I have played in several Core PFS games together, along with a few other regulars, and we've all learned to get along--even when Shredder thinks you have a treat for him).

The thing to remember is that we're all here to have fun--preferably in ways that don't ruin other people's fun. This is not always easy when there isn't really a good way to describe someone's play style, and thus a way to identify if/when someone's play style may not be compatible with yours. For example, there are people on the boards who are far more comfortable with intraparty conflict than I am--they're not playing wrong, and I'm not playing wrong, but if we're in a game together neither of us is going to have a good time. (Several years ago I ran into this the hard way, when I was running an AP on the boards and recruited a replacement player. They looked very good on paper, but as soon as they were introduced they started getting into huge arguments with the other players who'd been in the game for some time. Maybe another party would have been good with that approach; this one wasn't. I started getting a lot pickier about people after that.)

Anyway, not to try to scare you off PbP. Just keep in mind that there are accommodations to make if you want to make it work well, and you're better off considering them before they become an issue.

Also, chronicle sheet looks good. Thanks for running, GM A, and thanks to the other players!

Ouch on the point of infamy, considering the circumstances, but oh well.

There's a Society boon that lets you delete one infamy for... I think it's two fame? I will try to find the link somewhere.

I'll mark this inactive now. Any final questions, please send me a PM.

Thanks once more for playing, and see you all in another table