The Glade 4.0

I post this here for two reasons. First, I actually want it to get read, and second I'm interested in feedback. This is an excerpt from a conversation Darksiege and I were having earlier:

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Buckle your pants or they might fall down.

I agree. Player commitment is highly mixed. I long to have a real table-top rpg group again, but this is what I'm left with.

my input to this:

If you know someone is an active board member and does not seem to be posting in the PbP thread.. and their attention is needed: maybe sending a quick PM (or IM if you have their IM info) just to let them know that they are up is a good idea.

I would see this in conjunction to being used with the 24 hour rule, not instead of. That way the GM can look to the other players and say "hey, I gave xxx notice. They have 24 hours from (timestamp of IM)"

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Darksiege
Traveller, Calé, Whisperer
Lead me not into temptation; for I know a shortcut

We used to have thread subscriptions. is that still an option?

I don't think it's an issue of people not noticing new posts. I really don't. We see the new posts, and then we just sort of let them ride out.

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Buckle your pants or they might fall down.

I know as a player I sometimes hold back from posting for fear of being seen as trying to monopolize the game.

As a GM, I tried to keep players engaged by mentioning characters by name as often as possible. (or seeking their response) Somtimes players tune out when events are not circling around their characters..

Its also sometimes harder when you have differing authority levels within a PC group. To truly play in-character you just have to accept that the guy-in-charge is going to do the talking, so not everyone can contribute.

Not being able to have a real time notification system is just a limit of the phpbb system. It's unfortunate but we can't change people's behaviors either.

Honestly that very issue has kept me from participating in those games. I was all set then I sat down and actually read through some of the campaigns out there and seeing 2 days, a week, sometimes almost a month between posts just turned me off.

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I recall you asking about Kobolds Ate My Baby! I was going to try to run that much in the manner that one might run a game of Monopoly, due to the game being rather organized with a turn order going counter clockwise around the table. Unfortunately, I only got kobolds from Kaffis and Rane.

I have come to suspect that the size of a game may have an adverse effect as well.

Generally, 4-6 (including the GM) is the size you're looking for in a gaming group. Unfortunately, players seem to flake more often in play by post games, leading you to want a larger group. In addition, it's generally not a great hurdle to gather a lot of interest from the outset. Those details conspire to make play by post groups start off rather large. The sheer size of the group then encourages some of the players to flake out. Or, if you prefer, it may be more accurate to say that the size of the group discourages some of the less vocal players from participating. Rather than hitting a stable equilibrium with the number of people you're generally looking for, a play by post game instead winds up with two active players, and half a dozen who don't follow too closely.

It's a similar phenomenon to tabletop groups that have one or two active players, and another pair of guys who are there primarily to roll dice and assist with combat. However, I think a tabletop environment is more conducive to dealing with that situation. It feels more natural, face to face, to ask, "Hey Joe, what about you? What are you doing?" compared to asking the same question in a play by post. We are more aware of Joe's presence when he's physically present. In a thread, we tend to forget about him as soon as the thread hits a new page and we're no longer scrolling past his latest post.

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Buckle your pants or they might fall down.

I agree a week or a month between posts are a turn off. In the history of PBP here though, those are generally last ditch efforts to get a game resurrected. Most of the active games don't have this issue.

Maybe we should see if Coro will kick off his L5R game and have you get a character ready.

On Coro's topic, a PM or an poke on IM often produces a result I have found. Even from Taly.

I really don't know anything about PnP RPGs, so this may be a totally ridiculous suggestion, but...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Relay_Chat

See also: http://gladerebooted.org/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=6

You can easily create channels specifically for your RPG sessions.

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Sail forth! steer for the deep waters only!
Reckless, O soul, exploring, I with thee, and thou with me;
For we are bound where mariner has not yet dared to go,
And we will risk the ship, ourselves and all.

I have done something similar with OpenRPG - essentially an internet chat client with built-in whiteboard functionality. They run a little more like your typical Friday night gaming group. The reason the play by post format became popular is that it doesn't have the same scheduling issues.

To illustrate, I was originally planning on trying to run an L5R campaign via a combination of OpenRPG and webcams. The idea being we would set up a camera or two in my brother's basement focused on the table. That way people could roll actual dice, and we could use a regular battle map, miniatures, and other gaming supplements that you just can't use over IRC or a message board. Basically, it would've been playing D&D over video conferencing. That idea fell through on account of Rane being on the Pacific coast.

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Buckle your pants or they might fall down.

Sad panda.

Often times I will drop out of a group because I don't like the other characters involved. I like all of the players, but most recently, I've had to drop out of Rori's DnD game because I made a character that just doesn't fit with the rest of the group. At all. It would have lead to PvP.

As for other games, 90% of the time, my character is just a background character anyway, so there's generally less chances for me to interact. And sometimes the forums don't tell me there are new posts and I can go days(sometimes weeks) before the posts actually show up as new.

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Los Angeles Kings 2014 Stanley Cup Champions

"I love this **** team right here."
-Jonathan Quick

PVP occasionally happens. The players themselves need to be able to be adult enough not to get but hurt with each other over the situation though.

Some times you just need to kill a mofo.

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Darksiege
Traveller, Calé, Whisperer
Lead me not into temptation; for I know a shortcut

I am of the opinion that unless your campaign is centered around it, pvp should never happen in DnD.

_________________
Los Angeles Kings 2014 Stanley Cup Champions

"I love this **** team right here."
-Jonathan Quick

The monk grabbed her ***. He had it comin' to him.

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Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █

Moose and I used to feel that way. We got broken of it.

I am never one to shy away from killing a PC if it is (in character) a necessary thing. It also really depends on alignment.

As a good aligned character I am inclined to try and work things out, but it could come to blows. As an evil character... I will do what needs to be done, and I will try to make it look like a natural phenomenon, or like you were incompetent and brought it about on your own.

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Darksiege
Traveller, Calé, Whisperer
Lead me not into temptation; for I know a shortcut

I also don't feel good and evil characters should be in the same party. Ultimately, the players that are evil in the good party are just trying to cause problems. It's different when the campaign is set up to be evil, of course.

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Los Angeles Kings 2014 Stanley Cup Champions

"I love this **** team right here."
-Jonathan Quick

The ironic part is the evil party seems to have the best group cohesion.

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Buckle your pants or they might fall down.

Yeah, it does. But I think it's mostly because everyone is trying to get along so the others don't kill them.

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Los Angeles Kings 2014 Stanley Cup Champions

"I love this **** team right here."
-Jonathan Quick

You guys only pulled a weapon on each other once during my campaign, and I had 2 imperials, 2 rebels and 1 neutral in the party.

I admit it's a bad medium. However it seems to work best for our community. I don't know of any way to fix it's flaws. We cant twist anyone's arms and make them post.

Coro had good success with the irc based thing for three years. We had our problems and our sitters around and our no shows but no more or less than anything else.

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I prefer to think of them as "Fighting evil in another dimension"

Strangely that is why evil characters usually work fairly well together.

Ex- Quothorn is NE. I will do whatever serves my interests, but I am not going to pretend to be nice about it. Evil for the sake of evil...

Had I still been a follower of the Zhentarim: I probably would have been killed by now. A knight of Bane would be bad, I would be devoted to Tyranny, and trying to exert my will over others. I feel that probably would have resulted in Johnny Thunder being asked to nuke me from orbit.

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Darksiege
Traveller, Calé, Whisperer
Lead me not into temptation; for I know a shortcut

And after the last exchange it seems that Johnny Thunder can indeed lay a nuke from orbit.