Play-By-Post Autopsy

General questions, debates, and rants about RPGs

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Shrapnel
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Post by Shrapnel »

Crypts was an absolute blast to read. It was more like a novel than a game (to me, at least).
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Post by Darth Rabbitt »

I still remember those damn gnomes. Gilles never did get to sacrifice one, did he (although I did imply that he would...)

Overall I had a blast in the Back to Basics game. The Myconid village and the Elixir of Cola Bros were especially fantastic. Did you come up with those on the fly, or was it planned from the beginning?

Also if you ever do a Return to the Crypts of Chaos game I totally want in.
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Post by Ancient History »

The Elixir of Bros and the Myconids were pre-planned, in that I already had the joke in mind and wanted to lay the groundwork for it early; but I ad-libbed all the scenery, fluff, and dialogue, as is my wont.
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Post by Ancient History »

I guess that was one thing I liked about SoS and BtB, in that as they were smaller and more focused than CoC, there was at least the skein of an overarching narrative. PbP sandbox narratives are entirely dependent on player action to drive the plot; while you can do mise-en-scene and try to have the NPCs interact around the players, if the PCs are at all to have any effect on things they sort of have to do stuff. I think this is why, in CoC, I went to such trouble to make the PCs important to the NPCs for different reasons. In the Princes of the City game, of course, I took this a step further in making the PCs critical by default.
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Post by Prak »

And then of course I walked in and said "Yeah, I'm going to play a several hundred year old millennial net-hermit, and take the hierarchy position that involves beating on people, but have next to no combat skill."
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Post by hyzmarca »

To be honest, I think that Princes of the City had insufficient coordination at Chargen. I would have build my character very, very differently, to be honest. With lots more minions.

In hindsight, I would have taken the Sheriff's department as a military force and the Sheriff as a retainer, for example.

Of course, I think that with all the extra freebie points, we could have gone totally overboard and locked down every aspect of the city's government and all of its businesses, with no weaknesses. Which might have been a bit boring to be completely honest.
Last edited by hyzmarca on Sun Aug 02, 2015 10:14 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by Ancient History »

You go to game with the PCs you have, not the PCs you want to have... :P
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Post by Whipstitch »

I think coordinating much more wouldn't have been terribly feasible without resorting to some skype meetups. I also think making things less fun is a real danger in Vampire, since White Wolf's got that goofy quadratic reward scheme which rewards dogpiling your freebies into as few Backgrounds as possible, which makes the opportunity cost of buying silly but fun shit pretty daunting.
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Post by radthemad4 »

All our sheets and stuff were out in the open all along. You could've spoken up before we started if you had some suggestions for modifying the team dynamic.
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Post by OgreBattle »

The danger/thrill of traps in dungeons is something I enjoyed in Back to Basics. Creating interesting hazards to navigate in a tabletop RPG are something I have trouble with, as the two pitfalls designers can run into are...

1) "Roll d20 to see if you win or die": You roll to find a trap, you roll to disable it/get killed by it, life goes on.

2) "Read the DM's mind": You describe your exact actions like poking tiles with an 11ft pole, looking under the bed.

I've played in some games where the environmental hazard element was just not interesting as it was too much an extreme one way or the other, but B2B blended both elements well, it felt good for my Dwarven Fighter/Thief to roll a d20 and find/disable a trap, it also felt fun to watch the wrecking ball smash the floor tile by tile.
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Post by Nebuchadnezzar »

PotC
hyzmarca wrote:In hindsight, I would have taken the Sheriff's department as a military force and the Sheriff as a retainer, for example.
The crap I stuck in group backgrounds was less focused on outlining a 50 point plan to control state government(which would be interesting) than on trying to not let pooled backgrounds overshadow individual backgrounds. The pool's Military Force 6 is currently described as being modified animals, church-funneled townies, and limited police, but since the priest has turned out rather more milquetoast than paramilitary that's not necessarily accurate. With Suzanne now an NPC, and considering her retainer and m. force in the local SWAT team, how about we just refluff the pool's description, and have Verge take point in dealing with the cops?
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Post by hyzmarca »

Ancient History wrote:You go to game with the PCs you have, not the PCs you want to have... :P
Indeed.
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Post by radthemad4 »

Princes of the City Autopsy?
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Post by Ancient History »

Sure, why not.

Princes of the City OOC/IC
Princes of the City was motivated by something suggested in the GURPS:VtM OSSR: the idea that the players would be the sole vampires operating in a smallish city and effectively were the major supernatural element in the city, running the Masquerade and so forth. This was very different from the other games I had run on the forums for a couple of reasons, not least of which is because it was set in modern-day Juneau, Alaska, which meant that I and the players could (and did!) use internet facts, maps, and lore to really flesh out the setting in a level of detail that would have been difficult for me to convey otherwise.

The system was Vampire 3rd edition, in the oWoD, ignoring some of the peskier elements of the setting and giving the PCs beau-coup extra points to buy backgrounds that would help them secure their personal power and position as elders in the city. I was hoping to attract 4-5 players, and ended up with seven. It ran from 11 Feb 2015 to 22 Aug 2015, and at five months was the shortest completed game I've run on this forum.

What Went Right
The players seemed to grok the concept fairly immediately, and were enthusiastic. They got into a lot of the details of self-sufficiency, the natural limitations of the Juneau setting, and needing to make a show of maintaining control to the Camarilla. The players generally responded well to the more subtle efforts to undermine or circumvent their control of the city, and there was a lot more talking and negotiation than fisticuffs - while guns and tactical teams did come out at one point or another, most of the actual action was resolved without combat.

I think, too, that they were generally intrigued by the details of the mystery laid out in front of them (even if the default Tremere technomancer response was "I google it!"), the little twists I made on the established setting (like the Змей)...and maybe it was imposter syndrome, but I think they were genuinely surprised at how readily the NPCs accepted their authority and/or they succeeded at various tasks.

There were some funny moments too, like when a slight slip-up on the part of the PCs sent one of their allies to the wrong place for a while, and I just rolled with it.

What Went Wrong
On the other hand, the game had a hard time finding its direction without an established leader. Like in Crypts, players started breaking off and doing their own thing almost immediately, and some of the players were posting more frequently than others, with Koumei eventually having to drop out as life intervened and she didn't have time for the game.

Player attrition combined with a general inability to really grapple with the main antagonist of the story was leading the game up to a pretty messy conclusion...until stopped by diplomacy, which sort of surprised me. I was getting ready for a big, nasty cinematic battle when the PCs offered the main NPC a way out without fighting...and t'be honest, at that point she had already achieved all of her main objectives with pretty much zero losses, so it would have been out of character for her not to accept. That led to a bit of an abrupt and anticlimactic ending, especially for players that might have been used to the rather lengthy combat sequences of some of my other Den games.

Why
I think I overplanned a lot of things that ended up never happening. That happens a lot in sandboxes, and you learn to live with the fact that players are going to go their own way. The main issue with Princes of the City, I think, is that the players did not, by and large, have a lot of ease working together as a team, something I noticed a bit during character generation, where they managed to pool a lot of background points but not really forge as cohesive a control over the setting as they maybe should have had. As a consequence, they spent a lot of time reacting rather than acting proactively, many players seemed not to know what to do (or not have anything to do). Unable or unwilling to act as a group and without any real leadership to move them, the PCs shifted uneasily from scene to scene, seldom really taking charge of the situation, their investigation almost always a step or three behind.

For me, it felt a bit kid gloves, in part because I could see that the players were new to this whole Princes of the City concept, and while they had thought through issues like keeping fed off the radar, they weren't terribly well-equipped to handle some of the nastier stuff I could have thrown at them, like a Sabbat-style mass embrace. This is tricky, because there are lots of "guerrilla vampire tactics" which are easily setting-breaking, even for relatively high-generation vampires, and I think one of my mistakes was making my PCs a bit too effective - a bad habit of mine, I have a really had time differentiating between "challenging, but not unfuckable" and "Oops, I just killed the party."

And in part the issues were my own fault, because I haven't run a vampire game in years and this is the first time I was running it PbP. In a dungeon, you're running on dungeon-time, everything in the now, rest periods pretty much determined by when your spells and hit points start running low. Vampire works on a much different pacing schedule, since you're limited to the night-time hours, and that's tricky to get across in a play-by-post game; as it is I glossed over a lot of the usual feeding stuff as "you hit up your regular blood supply/herd/whatever" to skip straight to the action/investigation.
Last edited by Ancient History on Fri Sep 25, 2015 10:04 pm, edited 1 time in total.
hyzmarca
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Post by hyzmarca »

Ancient History wrote:Sure, why not.

Princes of the City OOC/IC
Princes of the City was motivated by something suggested in the GURPS:VtM OSSR: the idea that the players would be the sole vampires operating in a smallish city and effectively were the major supernatural element in the city, running the Masquerade and so forth. This was very different from the other games I had run on the forums for a couple of reasons, not least of which is because it was set in modern-day Juneau, Alaska, which meant that I and the players could (and did!) use internet facts, maps, and lore to really flesh out the setting in a level of detail that would have been difficult for me to convey otherwise.

The system was Vampire 3rd edition, in the oWoD, ignoring some of the peskier elements of the setting and giving the PCs beau-coup extra points to buy backgrounds that would help them secure their personal power and position as elders in the city. I was hoping to attract 4-5 players, and ended up with seven. It ran from 11 Feb 2015 to 22 Aug 2015, and at five months was the shortest completed game I've run on this forum.

What Went Right
The players seemed to grok the concept fairly immediately, and were enthusiastic. They got into a lot of the details of self-sufficiency, the natural limitations of the Juneau setting, and needing to make a show of maintaining control to the Camarilla. The players generally responded well to the more subtle efforts to undermine or circumvent their control of the city, and there was a lot more talking and negotiation than fisticuffs - while guns and tactical teams did come out at one point or another, most of the actual action was resolved without combat.

I think, too, that they were generally intrigued by the details of the mystery laid out in front of them (even if the default Tremere technomancer response was "I google it!"), the little twists I made on the established setting (like the Змей)...and maybe it was imposter syndrome, but I think they were genuinely surprised at how readily the NPCs accepted their authority and/or they succeeded at various tasks.

There were some funny moments too, like when a slight slip-up on the part of the PCs sent one of their allies to the wrong place for a while, and I just rolled with it.

What Went Wrong
On the other hand, the game had a hard time finding its direction without an established leader. Like in Crypts, players started breaking off and doing their own thing almost immediately, and some of the players were posting more frequently than others, with Koumei eventually having to drop out as life intervened and she didn't have time for the game.

Player attrition combined with a general inability to really grapple with the main antagonist of the story was leading the game up to a pretty messy conclusion...until stopped by diplomacy, which sort of surprised me. I was getting ready for a big, nasty cinematic battle when the PCs offered the main NPC a way out without fighting...and t'be honest, at that point she had already achieved all of her main objectives with pretty much zero losses, so it would have been out of character for her not to accept. That led to a bit of an abrupt and anticlimactic ending, especially for players that might have been used to the rather lengthy combat sequences of some of my other Den games.

Why
I think I overplanned a lot of things that ended up never happening. That happens a lot in sandboxes, and you learn to live with the fact that players are going to go their own way. The main issue with Princes of the City, I think, is that the players did not, by and large, have a lot of ease working together as a team, something I noticed a bit during character generation, where they managed to pool a lot of background points but not really forge as cohesive a control over the setting as they maybe should have had. As a consequence, they spent a lot of time reacting rather than acting proactively, many players seemed not to know what to do (or not have anything to do). Unable or unwilling to act as a group and without any real leadership to move them, the PCs shifted uneasily from scene to scene, seldom really taking charge of the situation, their investigation almost always a step or three behind.

For me, it felt a bit kid gloves, in part because I could see that the players were new to this whole Princes of the City concept, and while they had thought through issues like keeping fed off the radar, they weren't terribly well-equipped to handle some of the nastier stuff I could have thrown at them, like a Sabbat-style mass embrace. This is tricky, because there are lots of "guerrilla vampire tactics" which are easily setting-breaking, even for relatively high-generation vampires, and I think one of my mistakes was making my PCs a bit too effective - a bad habit of mine, I have a really had time differentiating between "challenging, but not unfuckable" and "Oops, I just killed the party."

And in part the issues were my own fault, because I haven't run a vampire game in years and this is the first time I was running it PbP. In a dungeon, you're running on dungeon-time, everything in the now, rest periods pretty much determined by when your spells and hit points start running low. Vampire works on a much different pacing schedule, since you're limited to the night-time hours, and that's tricky to get across in a play-by-post game; as it is I glossed over a lot of the usual feeding stuff as "you hit up your regular blood supply/herd/whatever" to skip straight to the action/investigation.
I think that Erris was a poor choice for a first antagonist for a great many reasons.

First, because we really were set up more for social and information gathering than for combat. Thus we were expecting social challenges rather than physical.

Second, because she wasn't particularly interesting. Tibru and Memphis were interesting. We didn't really get enough interaction with Erris to see her as anything but a Boss character.

Third, because we did need some warm up time to figure out how to work together, and how to play our characters. A slow-building mystery over in-game weeks or months would have been more conducive to that.

Fourth, because her evil plan really wasn't something that we absolutely had to stop. The only reason we tried to stop her is that she went out of our way to get our attention. If she hadn't left a corpse, and a demon-possessed woman, we would have been a even further behind and she would have gotten away. And, more importantly, if we knew what she actually wanted we wouldn't have cared. If she had asked we probably would have given it to her. An extra point of potence is nice, but isn't terribly beneficial to any of us.


That's also one of the reasons we went for diplomacy. We gained absolutely nothing by fighting her, so really, there was no reason to if she could be reasoned with. It was all risk, no reward. Centuries old people with little to no combat skills just don't jump into battle when they don't need to, if they did they wouldn't be centuries old.
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Post by Ancient History »

It was definitely a different sort of challenge, both for Mister Cavern and for players - I tried to emphasize the "keep the Masquerade" aspect, but I might have rushed it a bit. The problem with slow builds in play-by-post is that the pacing is already so slow, trying to string out a mystery will just see the campaign stutter and die. Definitely a case of trying to figure out how many breadcrumbs to leave for the goose without force-feeding.
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Post by Ancient History »

(Oh, and it wasn't "a" extra dot of Potence; she basically maxed out all the variant powers for Potence 6 when she downed the giant's blood. So it would have been an interesting final fight.)
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Post by radthemad4 »

I later figured that throwing SWAT teams at everything would probably raise too many questions (and we found out later on that they might not have actually been able to do anything to Eris). I think we might have been better off if we had taken more supernatural allies that could operate within the masquerade.
Last edited by radthemad4 on Sat Sep 26, 2015 3:29 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by Ancient History »

It was definitely a learning experience for everybody. I wonder how it would work in a D&D setting, where the PCs are, for example, in charge of a dungeon or small city.
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Post by Avoraciopoctules »

If I was playing somebody in charge of a dungeon, I'd spend basically all my time setting up outrageously flawed deathtraps and puzzles. Then I'd gasp in awe when the heroes somehow think to just climb over the waist-high fences trapping them in the Doom Room.
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Post by hyzmarca »

Ancient History wrote:It was definitely a learning experience for everybody. I wonder how it would work in a D&D setting, where the PCs are, for example, in charge of a dungeon or small city.
Sort of like this, I suspect.
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Post by Prak »

The D&D version would be a lot different in that mid-high level casters have a lot less reason to specialize. If you did Princes in D&D with 10th level characters everyone, or nearly everyone, is walking in the door with 5th level spells and their own thematically appropriate Leadership feat, and the two don't rely on the same resources.
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Post by Ancient History »

I'd probably start smaller - Stronghold Builder's Guidebook and Level 6, say, with the expected adventurers being level 1-3.
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Post by hyzmarca »

Stronghold would probably benefit from structure. Having a monster guy, a trap guy, and a toilets guy would probably produce something more cohesive than just giving a pool of points to every character.
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Post by JigokuBosatsu »

I'd love to play in a stronghold-type game where the PCs were dungeon keepers. That's basically where Chip was from in Crypts.
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