TRPG General Chat

BESW

12:00 AM

We are not puny! We're punny.

trogdor

you are both things

you do not get to deny one and embrace the other

BESW

12:26 AM

Loose Threads—On the edge of fairy tales are those who are collateral dmg from other's Ever Afters. @EvilHatOfficial http://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/196127/Loose-Threads--A-World-of-Adventure-for-Fate-Core?affiliate_id=144937

Tweeted by Fate_SRD on October 18, 2016 at 5:31 PM

Shalvenay

1:47 AM

hey there @Quentin

Shalvenay

2:03 AM

hey @nitsua60

nitsua60

hiya

Shalvenay

how're things going?

nitsua60

@Shalvenay tired from that meeting... but generally good. My son's responding well to his medicine, so the discomfort of strep has largely passed.

Shalvenay

@nitsua60 good

nitsua60

Now just trying to finish some work so I can maybe call it quits before 11pm =\

BESW

3:47 AM

My lovecraftesque cards came today.

trogdor

nice

BESW

...the books are apparently still "one to five weeks" out.

Because mailing to Guam.

Do you remember who wanted the second set? Was it Jake?

trogdor

I believe it was him

on a side note, I ran into him about a week or so ago

BESW

Oh, nice.

BESW

5:23 AM

@trogdor I do have the ebook of Lovecraftesque, so with the cards it'd be totally possible to play it before the book comes in the mail. And it's very much a three-is-better-but-two-works-fine game.

(And one of my interests in Lovecraftesque is that its structure might actually make twosies workable for us? Worth a shot.)

Magician

@BESW Are the cards a part of the game?

The brief description of how it plays doesn't mention them, and the preview version has seemingly been taken down.

BESW

@Magician Yeah. You get "special" cards that let you break rules like introducing a certain level of horror earlier than it'd usually show up.

You can play without them, but by my reading it's a big part of making the game re-playable.

Magician

5:38 AM

Curious. Let me know how it plays out. I don't think I can get the rules in any way yet.

BESW

There's also cue cards which just describe each role, and you pass them around as you switch roles.

Little reminders of what role you have in that scene, and what that means your responsibilities and limits are.

Playing without the Special Cards means easing up on some of the strict rules, like at what point in the narrative violence can be encountered, because the cards would otherwise be interjecting that.

But they also let you, for example, take over as narrator for long enough to reveal an extra clue in that scene, or to initiate a flashback scene that interrupts the current one.

Or you could play a card that says "From here on out everyone is allowed to reveal sorcerous occurrences" or "Anyone may now reveal impossibly inhuman creatures and their effects."

Most cards have specific triggers like "Play this after a scene in which something was revealed that could have a sorcerous cause."

And then they may also have limits like "The Final Horror can't be a sorcerer."

Magician

I take it each game would only use a fraction of the cards?

BESW

Usually only one card per participant. Two if it's a two-player game.

Magician

Huh. So these are major twists to the game. Do you get dealt a hand and play one out of them, or just play whatever you get?

And how many cards, total, are therhe?

(sorry for all the questions)

BESW

5:54 AM

20 cards, and you each get one dealt to you randomly at the start of the game.

It's designed for one-shot play, so one major twist per player is still quite a lot.

There's even a card you can only play in the first or second part of the game, which kills the Witness (shared PC) or otherwise renders them irrelevant (jump the story forward fifty years, maybe) and the group makes a new Witness who stumbles into the mess.

[is having fun reading them]

If you have the Strange Writings card, you can play it after any scene which featured mysterious, possibly incomprehensible writings. That card lets anyone, starting in Part 2 and going on to the end of the game, reveal inexplicable effects that happen when the writings are read or their instructions followed--and they may also reveal that anything the writings describe is not fictional after all.

Magician

6:09 AM

I take it there are strict limits on what can be revealed normally, to make this special?

BESW

yeah.

Until the Final Horror scene, it's against the rules to reveal anything blatantly supernatural, introduce a clear threat to the Witness, or show any direct evidence of violence.

These are the rules that need to get relaxed if you're playing without cards.

...hah!

> DEFEAT THE EVIL (Instant Effect)
Play this card during the Final Horror to name a mysterious thing that haa been narrated during the game and the meaning of which has not yet been revealed. The Witness realises that this thing is the key to defeating the Final Horror.
The mysterious thing must be appropriate to the task. A strange ritual could banish an elder god, for instance.
(Only include this card in games with a tone of heroic horror.)

Magician

So... Without this card the Witness can't win?

BESW

It's... unlikely.

In the scene of Final Horror the Witness's "role is chiefly to be appropriately horrified and powerless," but there are notes on what happens if the Witness tries to fight instead of escape or just stand there:

> The Witness may try to fight. This is almost certainly a foolish idea, for the Witness is now placing themselves in direct confrontation with cosmic forces. Once again, it is up to the Narrator to decide whether the Witness succeeds, but they should strongly consider having them fail. In both cases, go with what makes sense based on your idea of what the horror is.

Lovecraftesque is strongly focused on the Witness's inner monologue, or gibbering lack thereof.

The Witness is often the character who discovers he's a fishman too, or who stands outside the tomb while his friend is devoured by the undead inside.

The game goes back to Lovecraft's original cosmic horror notions and mostly eschews the later pulp adventure additions to the Mythos.

It just... strips off that nasty racism and such.

SevenSidedDie

6:53 AM

@trogdor @BESW @nitsua60 In my experience, it's quite effective to just use a flat document that everyone can edit, with Periods, Events, and Scenes being nested list elements. We did this for a <s>Diaspora</s> Microscope game on Google Wave once, but all the structural formatting and multi-editor features we used then have since shown up in Google Docs.

The downside of flat files is you get a long list instead of a really nice two-dimensionally-spread view of your History, but its simple effectiveness somewhat makes up for that downside. You have to remember to scroll up and down more than with cards to keep your sense of the History fresh.

trogdor

@BESW yeah, certainly worth a shot at least

@SevenSidedDie the times I have played it, we used note cards to represent every event

course, that does not work the same way if you are playing it online

XD

BESW

9:33 AM

Author and gamer @swan_tower has great writing advice for gamers who want to turn their campaigns into novels!… https://twitter.com/i/web/status/788413417329688576

Tweeted by tordotcom on October 18, 2016 at 4:16 PM

BESW

9:46 AM

Tonight's dinner is roasted veggies (beet, carrot, white potato, sweet potato, eggplant, onion) with savory curry spices on rice, and banana bread with Greek yogurt lemon frosting.

The Oracle

10:27 AM

0

Q: Where Can We Ask "Is This Item/Spell/Ability Fair" Questions?

So I wanted to ask about whether a homebrew item is fair or overpowered, or even underpowered. However, I'm not entirely sure if those sorts of questions fit the guidelines of the site, so I chose not to post it. What would be the best place to send someone to get that kind of question answered?...

discussion

BESW

10:44 AM

**[Timely RPGery](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1nKltjD1HJ954pS3QZZL-E_ckNaKEeedxMKn7XwdFiio/edit?usp=sharing "Click for full source doc; please suggest items to pin!"):**
[BoH](https://bundleofholding.com "Buy RPGs cheap in bulk, support charities & indie designers!");
[Standing Rock](http://flamesrising.rpgnow.com/product/193183 "You can support the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe in its fight to protect its waters and sacred places by purchasing this massive RPG bundle.");
[playtest](http://www.modiphius.com/star-trek.html "STAR TREK ADVENTURES - Living Playtest Sign up");

BESW

11:22 AM

There's some beautiful art in LCQ.

doppelgreener

What's LCQ?

BESW

lovecraftesque

doppelgreener

lcq is a nice-sounding contraction but not the most intuitive i've come across

BESW

That was my reaction at first, but then I tried to think of a better one.

doppelgreener

LCE?

BESW

11:31 AM

The LC bit is pretty much locked in, which means... LCSQ?

At any rate, the art is awesome.

The backs of the Special Cards have someone sleeping with her cell phone on the stand next to her bed, but the screen has turned to water and creepy centipede-slugs are crawling out of it.

The Watcher cards have an idyllic summer oil-painting scene of a couple of people jumping into a clear pond... with a giant eyeball staring at them from the bottom of the pond.

diego

12:35 PM

@BESW So you know the Standing Rock link doesn't work, it says that title isn't available.

BESW

Ah, thanks. It probably ran out.

**[Timely RPGery](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1nKltjD1HJ954pS3QZZL-E_ckNaKEeedxMKn7XwdFiio/edit?usp=sharing "Click for full source doc; please suggest items to pin!"):**
[BoH](https://bundleofholding.com "Buy RPGs cheap in bulk, support charities & indie designers!");
[playtest](http://www.modiphius.com/star-trek.html "STAR TREK ADVENTURES - Living Playtest Sign up");
[blog](https://rpgbotch.wordpress.com/ "Share your RPG botches and learn from ours!");
[UScons](http://casualgamerevolution.com/blog/2016/01/2016-tabletop-gaming-conventions-a-comprehensive-list "List of RPG conventions…

nitsua60

7:57 PM

VTC rec

nitsua60

8:30 PM

VTC spam

KorvinStarmast

9:19 PM

@waxeagle Have not seen you very often, and wanted to share a few thoughts with you. Are you still about?

Anaphory

@BESW Was it you who ran a text (chat?) based Fate teaching game based on Dealing with Dragons?

Anaphory

9:40 PM

Microscope Thingies:

• Trello Cards can have checklists, which can be reordered. That means you can insert new Events=Checklist items between previously-established events. Still no way to see both the Phases overview and all individual scenes from an event.

• corkboard.me / NoteApp did not want my registration and has a very low collaborator cap.

• Spaaze looks reasonable, I need to test sharing – there is no link to edit a sharable version, just a read-only version like this

BESW

@Anaphory Yup.

Anaphory

Spaaze does not appear to be able to alter the Z-order of things, so you cannot tuck a scene under an event.

• Draw.io makes a google draw interface availabe for flow chart, and looks reasonable for use for microscope.

• Ginkoapp looks a bit too difficult to navigate for microscope's purposes.

Draw.io supports changing Z-order, zooming in and out, in theory sharing (though it failed when I just tried), you can fold away much of the GUI around. Looks like the best option so far.

@BESW Thematically that's what I would expect from Loose Threads.

BESW

10:03 PM

I haven't read it yet, but that seems possible.

Although, I get the impression Loose Threads is more about the ordinary folk on the peripheries of the stories.

Anaphory

The blurb on Drivethrough mentions “Dashing Damsel” and “Prince in Distress” or something like that as – I presume – high concepts.

BESW

Yeah, it sounds like the PCs are the people who were showcased in folktales, and they go around trying to help the people who weren't.

But this week I'm reading LCQ.

Anaphory

I want to talk about times-of-day in chat again, to discuss possible times for a microscope game. Did we find a good way to express them, and would meta.stackoverflow.com be the right place to raise a feature request (not that I expect it to go through, but you neven know) for time-display functionality?

BESW

Yeah, that'd probably be the right place--though StackApps might have an option already?

For me, I long ago became resigned to calculating time zone shifts.

Anaphory

What do you do instead?

BESW

10:19 PM

I pull up a service like Time and Date and just plug in the received times.

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