TRPG General Chat

kyoryu

12:43 AM

@BESW: Hi!

DuckTapeAl

1:27 AM

Congratulations, @Wibbs, you've successfully convinced me to buy my first non-D&D roleplaying book.

That is to say, the first one that I've actually bought, and not just been given.

BESW

3:08 AM

Reflecting on our 13th Age game last night, one of the big things which stands out is how my brain had forgotten the tactical patterns of thought which were second nature when I was immersed in the d20 System landscape.

trogdor

@BESW I am slightly disappoint, they don't mention the Protoss Carrier, it isn't exactly an obscure ship.

not to say they needed to or anything, but they seem to mostly just have Halo and Star Wars ships as examples

some Star Trek and, Mass effect too though I guess

and a 40 k ship

those are always sweet to look at

Shalvenay

yeah, the thing is that EVE isn't a great example for that discussion -- the notion of ship classes in EVE is a bit different

for instance, battleships are actually subcapital in the EVE 'verse

trogdor

what is the largest ship type they have?

is it called a,.. Titan? or am I mistaken on that?

Shalvenay

yep

trogdor

ah ok

Shalvenay

3:18 AM

capitals in EVE are carriers, dreadnoughts, motherships/supercarriers, and titans

DuckTapeAl

I actually had a little shudder the first time I saw that size chart that showed just how big the biggest EVE ships are.

trogdor

I only know cause I heard a couple stories about fleets getting into fights with each other where both sides had at least one Titan

Shalvenay

@DuckTapeAl -- they're big alright

@trogdor -- been on grid with supercarriers, but never a titan

trogdor

as in you never ran into one or you never had one?

Shalvenay

@trogdor -- never ran into one

trogdor

3:19 AM

ah ok

as I understand it, they are pretty rare

you have to grind big time for em and someone could always blow it up

Shalvenay

@trogdor -- they are fairly rare. it's not terribly uncommon for 0.0 alliances to have at least one though

trogdor

I would imagine

Shalvenay

@trogdor -- what's weirder is that in EVE -- size isn't close to everything

trogdor

cause if you have people working together on it, I would assume they could help obtain one a bit faster than one person on his own

Shalvenay

@trogdor -- quite!

trogdor

3:23 AM

it is interesting when spaceship battles have that element to them

in real naval battles, that was an issue for some big fleets

some battles ended up going to the "little guy" as it were just cause that country had smaller faster ships

Shalvenay

@trogdor -- EVE has some of that going on, especially in smaller-scale battles. it doesn't scale quite as much to a 1000v1000 though

Shalvenay

3:41 AM

@trogdor -- I don't get into the 1000v1000 stuff though -- it's insane, but not always in a good way

trogdor

I can imagine that

just doing a raid in WoW, when I used to play that, was intimidating

Shalvenay

they actually had to add a feature to the game that slows down the game's tick timer with respect to real time in order to support supersized fights

trogdor

being expected to make a difference when there are a lot of people around you doing the same thing, in a different way

then add to that the fact that you can have a huge battle with 2 sides and there are tons of people on both sides

Shalvenay

sometimes, the end to a fight is "we blew up the node, try again tomorrow"

(EVE's server is really a supercluster, with each node handling one or more solar systems)

Magician

4:00 AM

@BESW Would you care to elaborate on this a bit?

BESW

The games I've been playing for the last two years haven't been big on meta-tactics.

What the character would do narratively is enough.

trogdor

yeah, that was a little weird, I gotta say

BESW

In 13th Age, like other d20 System games, there's a bit more "exactly what to do when" meta-tactics involved: choices made based on the player's understanding of the mechanics which the PC isn't capable of being aware of.

trogdor

it wasn't a bad thing, I could just feel this part of my brain waking up and being like, "wtf? I thought I was retired, you can't do this man"

Magician

Hahaha

BESW

4:03 AM

Yes, exactly.

I often wasn't sure which of two options which Fen would be equally likely to take was "better" or "worse" from a mechanical viewpoint--part of that is system mastery, obviously.

But part of it is just having forgotten that that's actually a thing in a lot of games.

This is, I think, why after going along pretty smoothly for most of the session, we suddenly balked at the door to the final boss and spent ten minutes arguing about strategy for entering the room.

Our tactical brains were finally waking up enough to start talking to us, but not yet enough to make much sense.

Magician

Hm. But even Fate has mechanical choices: to Create Advantage or to just attack, to let that one-stress hit land or spend a fate point and avoid it.

BESW

Aye.

trogdor

true

BESW

I can't quite put my finger on how to describe the difference yet, but it was palpable.

trogdor

but I have found less,... punishment when I have made a bad tactical choice

in Fate

Magician

4:07 AM

I haven't fallen out of d20 habit as you have, so I'd be very interested to see the eventual description.

trogdor

I remember one of our recent sessions, I made an attack against a flying dinosaur

I really should have used create advantage, cause I knew it had a high defence against mental stress dealing attacks

but I did it anyway, and nothing horrible happened to me for making this "mistake"

BESW

Mm, that may be it. Consequences: the d20 System is founded on cost attrition.

trogdor

in 4E, for example, if you are THE guy with healing and someone needs heals, you can't just not do it

if you have all your encounter powers, you can't just not use any of them

BESW

Limited resources, with the potential for important resources to go fizzle at the bad roll of a die.

Awesomeness is budgeted.

trogdor

they just do more than your at wills

if you only spam at wills, you will drag your party down

if none of your party uses encounter powers, you will at least take tons more damage than you should need to

if you even move the wrong way, you could take unnecessary damage, or let some mob past you to hit your squishier team mates

the way I see it, in a general sense, is that these tactical systems want you to be able to figure out the optimal thing to do in a battle

if you don't figure out what that is, you lose some resource, usually hp

it is fun, don't get me wrong

I still like that, but I think I do still like Fate's way of doing things better

you can get rewarded for acting like your character when that action gets them in serious trouble

BESW

4:14 AM

I used my 1/battle "roll a d20 and force someone else to use it for their attack" feature... the round just BEFORE Brian would have been able to potentially end the fight if I'd used it then.

trogdor

yeah

sometimes it isn't even reasonable to know the most optimal play

BESW

And my feature didn't do any good because everyone rolled really well that round anyway, so both Brian and I had a limited-use awesome go fizzle because we weren't coordinating tactically.

trogdor

that sort of comes from the way we handled this though

it isn't like we are a gaming group who has been running this system together and coordinating stuff for years

it was our first game

BESW

Yeah.

That's kinda my point; I'm totally out of practice with that kind of thinking.

Because in games like Fate, you don't lose a resource until it lets you be awesome.

Fate's resources don't fizzle, there's no cost attrition.

trogdor

well, you do still have stress and consequences

but stress hits go away pretty easy

and consequences can be used to get Fate points, and don't just "happen" cause you messed up some tactical strategy.

BESW

4:19 AM

Yeah.

This still isn't exactly the concept I'm trying to get across, but it's closer.

trogdor

Fate is better at telling a story that is interesting if the Main Protagonists fail at something

I mean jeez, I voluntarily threw my main character under the bus, so to speak, cause I thought it would be awesome

it isn't even just the Fate point economy, I had 3 Fate points left, and I wasn't getting a compel

I just wanted this thing to happen

though I will say that the Fate point economy is a pretty decent way to teach you that failing forward is a good thing

BESW

...also I'm not sure I've ever seen that many natural 20s in one night, especially since I don't think the PCs got any natural 1s either.

Those d20s were really happy to be let out of their bag.

Magician

@trogdor That's a thing we also noticed: in Fate players are happy to see bad/dramatic things happen to their character, and the fate point they get for it is not the actual reason for doing so.

trogdor

4:34 AM

yeah exactly

Magician

I think it's still important, as it signals that it's a correct play, not a loss that other games teach you to avoid at all costs.

trogdor

course, that doesn't mean I don't want that Fate point

Shalvenay

@Magician -- yeah, that's one of my issues when I try to do freeform -- I either go for things that are too bad, or too intricate

trogdor

@Magician yeah

Shalvenay

(i.e. they sit outside the lines of other players, or are failures that are so complicated that other players refuse to engage with them)

because those are the failures I'm interested in -- I find that most of the failures that others consider narratively interesting are actually rather boring for me because they don't provide enough technical surface area for me to engage with

BESW

4:50 AM

"Technical failure" is probably the mis-match point more than the extent of the complexity.

doppelgreener

5:07 AM

@Magician that is a pretty good observation.

It suggests totally that it is okay to fail.

trogdor

the thing is, I do like failure in Fate, but the main reason I do is because it has almost everything to do with the choices I make, and almost nothing to do with making mistakes

BESW

Fate forefronts the reasons people fail.

trogdor

when Dr Light got stuck in that time bubble, that was me deciding not to use 3 Fate points that I still had left cause I wanted him there

BESW

@doppelgreener Character aspects, rather than dice randomisation, are the main source of failure in Fate--so yeah, "the choices I make" are kept front and centre.

doppelgreener

@BESW explain what you mean there?

trogdor

5:12 AM

it wasn't even me being compelled, it wasn't me failing a roll I had no way to "fix"

doppelgreener

that one's gonna trip out people who didn't notice what happened xD

BESW

@trogdor Right.

But it's still the same idea:

trogdor

yeah

BESW

Your choice rose from your character, and by making character aspects the core mechanic of the game it keeps character-based choices at the core of the story.

trogdor

I just mean to say, the entire reason it works for me is that no one can force me to fail in a way I don't like

BESW

5:13 AM

Even when we aren't mechanically interacting with aspects, they're there under our noses.

Just like in D&D, our character sheets are about 70% combat, so we make combat choices.

trogdor

also randomness has much less to do with it

BESW

In Fate, most of our character sheet is personality and relationships, so we make personality and relationship choices.

trogdor

this is true

it's almost more a role play engine with combat and other stuff just sorta sitting there in case you want it

BESW

(In Cthulhu Dark our character is human/profession/sanity, so we make choices around those concepts.)

trogdor

which I do

just role play by itself isn't entirely what I want

Magician

5:17 AM

@BESW Not... necessarily. It's an option, but you can just as easily have Fastest Gun in the West and the like as aspects.

BESW

That's still character.

Magician

Some personality traits can be derived from that, sure, but the focus on character or skills is up to the player.

Some personality traits can be derived from having low Int, too, after all.

doppelgreener

Magician's suggesting that you can have your character sheet also be 70% about combat.

BESW

@Magician Fen resembles that remark.

Magician

@doppelgreener Right, you can focus on what your character does or how they do it, not why.

BESW

5:19 AM

@doppelgreener Aye, but Fate works hard to avoid that with things like the phase trio.

Fate's hackable enough that no statement can be universally true, but we can talk about trends and tendencies.

(I've tried to make combat-focused Fate PCs with minimal personality, and failed.)

Magician

Aye. It's possible to run a fully relationship-driven Fate game, just as it's possible to run an adventure Fate game where you jump across chasms, but most of the time you'll be somewhere in the middle.

I think part of it is that we've all played D&D for years, and so we jump at the opportunity to not just describe the way our characters fight.

And yeah, there's plenty of advice in the book on making up aspects that'd play a role in a variety of circumstances.

doppelgreener

I haven't played D&D for years!

For each edition I could count the number of sessions I've had on one hand. For a couple of them, one finger!

I've jumped at the opportunity to express how my character fights in the right way, unbarred by "you must be level 7 first, by which time this is useless"

Shalvenay

yeah, that is an annoying aspect of D&D

how much is linked to progression

and yeah -- FATE's a "resolve conflicts however" engine xD

Magician

In almost every game I ran after Fate, there was at least one moment where I found myself thinking "and this is where I'd compel them." It's amazing how much smoother things can go with players' cooperation.

doppelgreener

5:34 AM

<< Still looking forward to the dwarf session of our own game...

I haven't compelled much. At all. Maybe not ever, I can't remember if I have.

But next time being totally driven by failure will give me the freedom to compel people however.

"Here, let's make this more of a catastrophe."

Shalvenay

yeah, that reminds me, I need to get off my duff tomorrow and whip up a visual aid for my FATE campaign

that's one of my big issues as a DM -- I'm not at all comfortable yet with the visual-arts side of it

Magician

@doppelgreener If that's the 13th Age dwarf game and not some extra on-the-side dwarfing you're engaged in, so am I. After the game last night I have a much better idea of how tough 1st level PCs are, and what the plot should be.

Shalvenay

oddly enough, I've never been a fan of dwarves

(the Tolkien/D&D/... variety, that is)

doppelgreener

@Magician Oh! I am looking forward to the 13th age one as well. But there is also some on-the-side dwarfing which I was referring to: in our regular Atomic Robo game, I am planning on running a session focusing on the invasion of some dwarves.

doppelgreener

5:56 AM

Mainly I plan for things to fail horribly and unavoidably and be a complete disaster, so that we can feel relaxed and have no obligation to keep things on the straight and narrow. The straight and narrow is no longer available.

trogdor

you have a different dwarf game?

you're cheating on us?

XD

doppelgreener

the 13th age game on our side!

in which i play Theodr!

trogdor

ah ok

so you are a dwarf in it

that makes sense,.. I was wondering if it was just involving several dwarves from the start

doppelgreener

theodr, tomb warden

trogdor

yeah, I remember now

Wibbs

6:14 AM

@DuckTapeAl welcome to the other side \o/

BESW

6:26 AM

@Wibbs We've got games on the other side!

2

trogdor

lol

Lymia Aluysia

6:52 AM

So, hey. Minor GURPS 4e question. I'm running a campaign of that, but I'm not too familiar with its balance.

... if you take, like, Magery with the Song restriction for -40%, then the one-college restriction for another -40%, does it really end up being 2 points per point of Magery?

I put on those restrictions for flavor reasons for a test character, then took a step back, and was going, like, "is this really OK?"

Magician

Most chat regulars aren't that familiar with GURPS, from what I understand. But that sounds like a decent main site question.

trogdor

yeah, I have no idea how GURPS mechanics work

Lymia Aluysia

Oh well.

BESW

It does sound like a great mainsite question.

trogdor

it does seem like something that should be posted as a question on the main site

Lymia Aluysia

6:57 AM

Yeah, I'll get it up then.

Decyphering this system is a bit of a PITA

I can't easily figure out what sorta damage output I should expect from someone with a gun in normal conditions because of various stuff like RoF and recoil. >.<

Magician

I'm at a point in my gaming career where the mere idea of including recoil in regular shooting mechanics causes me to cringe.

BESW

....maybe if Megatron is a PC?

trogdor

lol

I really was interested in trying GURPS out at one point

Magician

Well, I can absolutely see recoil as an aspect on an oversized weapon, but as a permanent rules fixture everyone has to take into account always - ugh.

trogdor

but after trying out Fate, it is no longer a particular interest

BESW

7:10 AM

Mmm. GURPS is still on my radar as Something I Should Probably Know More About, but...

trogdor

it has too much mechanical weight to it, and you have to keep track of too many things, as I understand it

@BESW I mean mostly as a thing I would play myself

knowing something about it is a different thing altogether

BESW

Aye. And I'm a bit more interested in the practical mechanics of game design.

Lymia Aluysia

Recoil's abstracted heavily, at least. To be honest, I'm not sure I want to use GURPS.

But, like. I am pretty sure a few of my players won't thrive if I go use Fate.

BESW

There's a lot of room between, like BRP and Unisystem.

Lymia Aluysia

What are those like? I'm looking at GURPS since it supports varied player characters and campaigns in one system.

BESW

7:24 AM

If you can get pretty specific about what your group needs, a game-recommendation question could be very helpful.

I've never actually played BRP (best known as the percentile system used by call-of-cthulhu) or Unisystem (used by Buffy and all-flesh-must-be-eaten), but they're both generic-but-crunchy engines used by many different settings and genres.

Lymia Aluysia

The premise of my campaign is that all the PCs are from different worlds (and, to be honest, GURPS' tech level system makes this harder than it could be), and will be exploring multiple diverse worlds during the course of the campaign. Standard multiverse stuff, but... yeah. Stuff like D&D is not going to work.

BESW

Probably what's more important than setting is genre.

Magician

Do your players desire crunch? Because Fate fits the "system with very different characters" bill easily.

BESW

For example, all the Doctor Who RPGs have to accommodate going to a totally new and different PLACE each adventure--but they generally expect PCs to have the same "talk first, run second, tinker third, fight fourth" approach to problem-solving regardless of the challenge in front of them.

Lymia Aluysia

Crunch's not super-important, but... none of us have any experience with narrative systems, and there's a player or two who I don't think would do well with it. :/

BESW: Hrm... I'll have to think about this carefully.

BESW

7:29 AM

See also Cortex Plus, which fits a "heroic character drama" sort of game: Smallville, Leverage, and Firefly all have RPGs which use that engine.

Magician

I know some people like Savage Worlds as a medium-crunch flexible system, and nominally it has all sorts of splatbooks supporting different genres and settings, but I've had bad experiences with it.

BESW

So figure out the kind of action/problem-solving/story you want, and find a system for that, maybe?

trogdor

honestly, the only thing that I personally miss from anything that is not Fate is the crunch anything else might have

like 4E, there is no way in the 9 hells I think 4E is better than Fate (as a personal opinion), but I do still think it has a better crunch to it as a tactical system

in fact, I took enjoyment just making characters to do specific mechanical things

but I would say I still like Fate better as a system I would actually play

Lymia Aluysia

Doesn't Fate, as a system, assume that you'd be looking it at more as... telling a story together than playing a character?

Magician

Yes and no. You still very much play your character, but you're more mindful of the larger story.

And you sometimes let bad things to happen to your character, because it makes for a more compelling story, something most other systems teach you to oppose.

We've just had a conversation about this earlier today.

trogdor

7:43 AM

yeah

we did indeed

Lymia Aluysia

Mind linking it?

trogdor

you are definitely playing your character,... you just also happen to be deciding what you want to happen in the story regardless of, or against, the interests of your character

though that also does not preclude going into their interests, it's just that doing so too often is not encouraged

4 hours ago, by Magician

Hm. But even Fate has mechanical choices: to Create Advantage or to just attack, to let that one-stress hit land or spend a fate point and avoid it.

Lymia Aluysia

One of my players has a bit of adversarial "beat the campaign" mindset at times, and two others are pretty big on player immersion. Would Fate work well for them too?

trogdor

here is about where it started, at least in a useful way I think

Magician

@LymiaAluysia I think Fate is great for immersion. It rewards you for following through with your character's personality traits, positive or negative.

trogdor

7:48 AM

I can't speak for your players specifically, but I have played with people who were into D&D about beating the campaign

and even was that way myself to a lesser degree, I think

but playing Fate changed that

mostly because there isn't a GM who's sole purpose, at least as dictated by the system if not by themselves, is to destroy them

the GM's job in Fate is similar in some ways as a GM role in D&D, as GM you still set up the world and act for the NPC's and decide what said NPC's do in most situations

BESW

Character immersion can be rough, depending on how the player imagines it.

Fate expects out-of-character discussion between players to be a fairly common thing.

trogdor

but the PC's in Fate are expected to have as much say in the setting, world, and NPC creation as the GM

BESW

"Beat the campaign" can transfer to Fate really well if it's about overcoming in-game obstacles.

But if it's about outsmarting the GM's plot or something like that, Fate will be eternally frustrating.

trogdor

yeah, outsmarting the GM's plot is not a thing in Fate, at least not to the same degree by a long shot

Lymia Aluysia

@trogdor You're describing this player a bit. It's not bad enough to be a problem normally, but... Well, Fate is Fate.

Er...

@BESW *

BESW

7:53 AM

Also if "beat the campaign" means being unable to embrace your character's failings... that could be problematic.

trogdor

and even then, if it is a thing to much of any degree, you are doing Fate the wrong way, cause the PC's should be deciding some things, at least

BESW

Fate is good at incentivising the playstyle it expects, though, so it can be useful to introduce a player to new ways of gaming.

trogdor

I would suggest that you ask your players if they are willing to give it a shot

Lymia Aluysia

I'd need to make them understand the implications of the system too. ^.^;

trogdor

don't start Fate as like, a whole new campaign you are starting

do a one shot

let them make characters, express what they would like to see in the game, and then run them in it

this is the best way I can recommend starting Fate.

if your players like it, they like it

Lymia Aluysia

7:57 AM

Hrm.

trogdor

if they don't you can all discuss with each other what it was exactly that bothered them

BESW

So, here's how my first Fate game went:

After a 4e session ended early, I got two players to help me run a scene in Fate because I was really excited about it and wanted to try it out.

trogdor

if its something you can fix great, if not, maybe the system didn't work for some of your players

BESW

To get them started on high concepts, I gave them a word and they added one: Gunslinging _____ and Martial _____.

We wound up with a Gunslinging clown and a Martial mime.

trogdor

XD

it was hilarious

Lymia Aluysia

7:59 AM

Talking about, and trying systems like that isn't... "normal" in my group, nor is spontaneously starting a game. We hang out together in an IRC chatroom... pretty much all the time, so, it's not like we have defined meeting times.

trogdor

I don't remember why I didn't participate,....

Lymia Aluysia

... sounds like something some of my players would do.

:P

BESW

That's all we started with. I put them in a biker bar and threw a mafia hitman at them.

@LymiaAluysia This may be useful, if you want to change that:

27

A: How do I convince my group to try a new system without always having to DM it first?

I've had similar challenges, both with getting group buy-in to try new systems and with getting people to feel comfortable GMing anything at all. My solution was a long-game process of changing the "landscape" of how people at the table viewed their role in the game. I didn't set out to delibera...

trogdor

@LymiaAluysia ah, ok. sorry. I did assume you all met IRL on a relatively scheduled kind of deal

Lymia Aluysia

We do have scheduled stuff, but, like, that's when we have a game going already.

trogdor

8:03 AM

@BESW what do you mean TPK? there was no TPK :P

Lymia Aluysia

It's incredibly easy for us to stay in contact and talk with each other.

But, like. Having enough time and enough people present to spontaneously run a game isn't so easy. XD

But we are mostly college students, and it is summer, so.

BESW

@LymiaAluysia My group is similar. We talk online a lot, but only @trogdor and I can get together really regularly.

trogdor

yeah,... it's not the best

BESW

So we've been moving toward systems that are better at short-form and episodic play when someone else does show up.

trogdor

but it can be made to work

Lymia Aluysia

8:07 AM

It's not so bad for most of us, since we have a weekly schedule, and can generally find an open time that works each week.

The one big problem is that one of us now works retail, and Wal-Mart is apparently not a fan of a consistent schedule. :(

BESW

Eeyup.

Intermittent attendance is better handled by some systems/conceits than others.

Lymia Aluysia

@BESW I don't think this is our problem, exactly. Pretty much every single player we have bar one has GMed full campaigns before, and we do try new systems regularly.

But, well. In each of those campaigns, player agency was limited to character action (which, granted, were generally on the unrestricted side). So... Fate is, like, something new in a way that changing systems isn't.

Or, well. Character action and the backstory you wrote... hrm.

I think my biggest concern with Fate is that generally our campaigns have a big mystery element to them. So, like, a pretty big GM/player information discrepancy, and a big part of our campaigns is investigation, and so forth. How would something like this work out with Fate?

trogdor

here is the thing, you can still keep any particular thing from your PC's

BESW

11

Q: How can I keep the nature and capacity of NPCs hidden to generate a fear of the unknown?

In traditional games such as D&D, the mechanics of the NPCs you face are generally an unknown quantity. The players and the characters only have a rough idea of what an NPC is capable of, based on what they’ve already seen - ultimately, a player does not know much about his or her adversaries. Th...

trogdor

if they want you to have a background story they don't know you can still do that

they just have much more say in anything that isn't specifically hidden

Pixie

8:21 AM

@LymiaAluysia This is how my group is, except more than one of us works retail or other unpredictable jobs and one person in the group has a chronic condition that is also pretty unpredictable. P:

trogdor

we have this issue too

Pixie

We started Spirit of the Century recently. We haven't gotten very far due to the limited time we've had to play, but it's been fun.

trogdor

one of our members had a whole couple months when he just could not show at all

and even now he can't show up on many days

Pixie

For my boyfriend, there's simply no way to know if he's going to be okay on a given day, and if he is, it might flare up during.

trogdor

is he on call or something?

Pixie

8:24 AM

@trogdor On call?

BESW

18

Q: Do you have to reveal your NPC's aspects?

Important NPCs may have hidden aspects that PCs are supposed to assess somehow before using them: can such a NPC invoke one of his hidden aspects without the GM revealing it to the players? Example: Let's say that Lenny is a drug-dealer working for a local crime lord that PCs are trying to take...

gm-techniques dresden-files fate aspects

trogdor

@Pixie Nurses and Doctors, for example

Pixie

@trogdor That's what I thought you meant but I wanted to confirm. No, he's the one with the condition.

trogdor

are sometimes on call with a pager, and if they do get called they gotta get over to their workplace cause it is an emergency

ah

sorry

:(

I feel like a jerk asking that now

Pixie

Oh no, don't!

I didn't specify and had been talking about jobs too.

Lymia Aluysia

8:26 AM

@BESW I don't think that's a problem on the low level, at least. At least, personally, I do a sort of mystery where the mystery has more to do with the world, and the overarching plot, and I don't generally try to use anything like "fear of the unknown" much. But when people talk about Fate, I do hear a lot about the players having an deciding role on the plot. And, well, this sorta mystery, I think, intrinsically involves hiding parts of the plot from players.

Pixie

I just wanted to confirm because we play online so "on call" could also be like, on voice chat. xD

trogdor

ah

I had not thought of that honestly

XD

Lymia Aluysia

I wouldn't think of that either. My group doesn't use voice chat. XD

Pixie

We don't either.

Zachiel

@BESW yeah, now I'm happy I don't play Fate.

Also, a 4e session ending early? How's that possible?

Pixie

8:32 AM

But yeah, we've just had to start planning around the possibility that he might not be there on any given day and that he might fall asleep mid-game. I also have a condition that means I might fall asleep before or during game time, though it's not as severe.

trogdor

our group does actually use voice chat, but on call has only ever meant one thing to me

when I voice chat with anyone I usually call it voice chat, or Skyping, or something

Pixie

I'd generally say on voice myself, and it's probably not a common interpretation of the phrase, but it's called a call in Skype so my mind went two places, heh.

We usually use text chat. We did use voice a few times during our last Pathfinder game, but it's not a regular thing.

trogdor

it can honestly be a confusing subject

everyone has some different terms for it, seems like

Pixie

8:55 AM

As for Fate and hidden aspects... keeping certain aspects hidden (though detectable or surmisable) doesn't necessarily seem like it would make for a bad experience. It would, however, be a different experience from the one Fate core's text focuses on. I'd think about it carefully since invokes and compels are an important part of the mechanics.

On the other hand, though you can't exactly compel an aspect you don't know, you can do a lot of invoking and compelling your own aspects simply from basic description. This is my GM's first time running SotC or (I believe) any Fate game, and he hasn't specifically told us any aspects at all. I haven't felt the slightest bit restricted by this.

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