I just wish you could Control Winds a dragon into submission ;)

I wonder what Draconic for "wake turbulence" is... ;)

"Massage."

New RPG: Frog Messengers.

"Good morning, Mr. Croak. The woman you're looking at is Princess Brandywine. This is the Deep Forest, where she is currently lost while searching for her kitten Puddles. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to find Ms. Brandywine, attract her attention, and give her sage advice. As always, should you or any of your team be caught, squashed, or eaten, the IMF will disavow all knowledge of your actions. Good luck. This fly will self-destruct in fifteen seconds."

Aspect looking for a character: Lasers will help!

@BESW that sounds very Amarrian ;)

...so, now I have to actually write up an Umdaarian Lion-O.

[returns to notes]

@doppelgreener I think I'm gonna have to fiddle with his context a bit to make him fit in Umdaar.

@BESW I'm pretty sure Discipline is hard-capped at 3, but I can't find my book right now to look for a quote.

The character sheet only gives 3 boxes, which is... implicative?

It may say something to that effect when it first explains what the dice are? That was always the impression I had, anyway.

Well, it only requires 3 white dice per player in the materials section.

In practice my current group will never care.

Aye. Plus, getting better at resisting the madness would be counterproductive.

It's not really a campaign system anyway.

They're almost all "What? less mad? WHY?" players.

lol

this is true

I was half sure myself it wasn't possible or intended

Nobody spent ANY Hope for Discipline.

Instead we spent Hope to succeed with Madness talents, mostly.

only one of us spent any

the system isn't made for a single game like what we did

My favourite bit of the session (aside from when Doctor Light engulfed the top of an Atlantean ziggurat, grabbing up hapless Atlanteans and then dragging them with him into the future) was when Myka turned into a time-controlling Nightmare and Greener volunteered his character to be her first victim.

I think normally there would have been roles to see if he could get away

And Baker really set the mood when his "what just happened to you?" turned out to be "My arch-nemesis walks into the room and asks me to join his cult, so I'm going to strangle him and hide the body."

didn't he just knock him out?

Yes, the body was still breathing.

oh ok

no other reason for a brig otherwise

@Magician I used a "heightened madness" hack I found on a forum: every time you cross off a response, you also switch out a white die for a red one. Lets the threat of becoming a nightmare loom in a single short session.

The system lost some of its nuance, but for a one-shot that we wanted to be as dramatic and extreme as possible, it worked very well.

I do think it wasn't the absolute best use of the system,.. but i think it worked well for us

that message switched around in a weird way,...

It did.

We got Doctor Light back in a satisfyingly dramatic way that has kicked up all kinds of short-term and long-term problems for the group to deal with: Stellata's dealing with having experienced every guilty moment of her life; Myka and Baker are both developing unstable psychic powers; Brother Adrian's locked up somewhere on the ship; ancient Atlantean rioters are also somewhere on the ship; the ship's biological atmospherics are compromised...

@BESW that's fine! This is a challenge made for fun. Fun should be more important than accuracy. I was imagining the end result would be more of a homage or strong reference, an actual Lion-O attempt is already awesome

@trogdor Raycia and I both spent Hope in order to tie on rolls

@BESW "Myka's gone insane." "She's going to become a nightmare now." "Who's standing closest to her?" [hand goes up immediately]

(I didn't even know quite what would happen but I knew it would be good.)

@doppelgreener ah ok

I guess it all got spent then

@BESW I agree, it was extraordinary.

@doppelgreener I'm very glad you volunteered, as I didn't want any dice to get in the way of whether or not it happened.

personally, I was not entirely ready with stuff at the time for Dr Light to stress out about

even less so if it was limited to guilt

I can certainly think of things now of course, but not at the time

We can usually rely on Greener and Raycia when it comes to needing a PC to freak out for good character reasons at a moment's notice.

...Hmm. I was thinking we'd cut straight to the Nibiru-1 Object and its secrets, but given that we now have compromised life support, Atlantean rioters, and a mad cultist...

Dr Light will fix both those problems!!?!?!

not the cultist one

he didn't cause that

Obviously, but should we have a session about it?

yeah

I was just teasing really

I don't know how much we want to dwel on those things, as a group, but I am up for it

Actually, I was thinking... Stellata broke the life support. Myka's got potentially crippling new empathic powers to deal with. Doctor Light is probably still feeling like he needs to take over and fix the ship, albeit in less drastic ways. And there's the Atlantean rioters to deal with.

...this may be an opportunity to spotlight Baker's leadership skills.

Especially in going head-to-head with Doctor Light re: control of the ship.

@doppelgreener Thoughts?

I think it'd be nice to just say outright "This is a session about Captain Baker of the UNSC Icarus II, and the many challenges of command."

The other PCs are present as obstacles and/or assets for him to overcome/deploy.

like insubordination in the form of someone else who thinks they are in charge

XD

Yes.

@BESW Alternate thought: our characters don't learn anything about this. The N1O object lands. We leave. They now have a ship, parked beside an enormous black-body object. This is a pretty good time bomb.

Settling the ship down does not seem like something we can necessarily do properly and dramatically, compared to the payoff of "oh hey now there's a ship in orbit of this space-world you're on and they figured out how to arm the weapons. Who installed those, anyway?"

(and we may go for Brother Adrian having organised the Atlanteans to do this, or otherwise, an Atlantean organised them, and Brother Adrian is someone who we hate but who might actually be able to help us with them)

yeah, maybe the Atlantean thing should get drawn out.

But, yanno. Doctor Light challenging Baker for authority, and the broken life support system...

Also I'm looking for an excuse to give Dan a session in the spotlight.

@BESW Equip him to take charge immediately on Umdaar as a strategic field expert.

We land on a strange and foreign world full of unknown threats and opportunities and he's the one able to actually keep us in control enough to survive it.

@BESW We didn't break the entire life support system. But Stellata did destroy a lot of it. My thoughts are that we're better off winding up with the DRYH dreamworld ending when we're already right near N1O, and we're all "thank goodness!!"

Those are my thoughts at the moment - I am not sure what we can craft out of life support failures + rioters + brother Adrian on the ship, but if we set out to N1O and give the rioters the ship, they'll fix up the life support (or resort to measures to stay alive) and then start throwing a ship-sized wrench in our moon-sized plans.

Baker has an opportunity to be in the spotlight in either kind of story though.

Also, Dan is normally the kind to sit a little back, and join in when there's a him-sized space available to step into, rather than the kind to assert himself upon a situation. I don't know how comfortable he'd be with ordering people around, and ordering people around is a good way to give away the spotlight rather than occupy it. So perhaps taking charge is not necessarily the best way for him to get the spotlight this session.

Alternately though if he's seen as a leader everyone's looking toward for, well, leadership in this situation, that would point the spotlight his way - because we'd be continually pointing it his way. "Baker, what do we do?" "Holy cow. Baker, what do we do with this?" "I'm picking up strange readings, have you ever seen anything like this, Baker?"

Myka and Dr Light are exciteable scientists. Dr Light is arrogant enough he'd be the kind to charge ahead directionless, he knows exactly what he's doing, of course he's done this before. Stellata would definitely look to Baker for guidance, especially given the state she's in.

(I am happy for that consequence to indicate more than distrust: this fresh out of emotional trauma, nothing is going to be OK.)

... I might give her an 'emotionally traumatised' mild consequence.

I think Baker naturally has the greatest amount of field training relevant to a situation like this though. This is like... the battlefield. He might have some relevant small scale (private? secret?) war experience, and he's almost certainly seen a number of gunfights in his time.

You know those stories where a frightening monster is loose and wreaking havoc within a building or a small area, and a whole lot of nameless extras are trying to take it down? I think he's been one of those nameless extras many times.

Now take the scenarios where people let that monster loose, or are otherwise conducting espionage (with guns), and he's been the guy fighting off those people, too.

Everyone can handle themselves, but Baker's the one who can handle a team.

You've sold me, but you'll need to work with Dan over this coming week to make sure Baker's mechanics reflect that concept effectively.

I've got an idea to sort of reinforce his competency on Umdaar specifically.

Two ideas, actually.

I was thinking we might need to create a Baker v2 for this. His current character sheet emphasizes the part of his character that comes out day to day - N1O might bring out an entirely different side of his character, and that would truly be a different character.

Yeah. I think it's closer to what I've seen Dan try to play him as, though.

I might spend some time on this version trying to make his character mechanics dance

@BESW Shoot! I'd like to hear these.

@doppelgreener Specifically, ways that Umdaar will react to him.

Neither is fully formed yet, but one idea is based on some ideas I've been toying with about the N1O's computer interfaces, inspired by Lord of Light.

The other is about how Lion-O will interact with him.

Basically Lion-O would recognise Baker as the leader and confer with him, and if anyone else--like Doctor Light--tried to cut through the chain of command Lion-O wouldn't play along.

As for the Lord of Light thing... not sure Troggy wants to hear that.

@BESW Spoil-lair?

Sure.

Hmm. I'm feeling rather conflicted right now.

On one hand, I'd really like to know about my long-tail Q and A performance.

On the other, I don't know that I want to spend the bulk of my Sunday on a SQL query.

:P

Dangit DuckTapeAI!

We were going to cross the 10 hours mark!

...

So close...

sniff

One day...

so, @Althis and @DuckTapeAl -- thinking about repurposing some quadrille paper (4 squares to the inch) for dungeon drawing...got any suggestions to make that work well?

I personally never do Dungeon Drawing.

I stopped precisely mapping dungeons like, 5 years ago,

The most I ever do is map drawing.

@Althis ah, I take it you stick to theory of mind combat?

And I don't use quadrille for that.

When I played games that use combat matrixes, we just did it like in a JRPG.

When I do non-TotM combat, I use a 1-inch square reusable dry-erase mat.

Throw down a few details and some borders off the cuff, and ignore it once the combat is over.

aaah. don't have one of those, and am going to play tomorrow, although where'd you pick one of those up? it sounds like quite an essential DM accessory ;)

Most gaming store have them. Maybe book stores too?

alrighty then. still haven't been in my FLGS for ages :P

If you don't have one, then just using quadrille paper where 4 paper-squares is one game-square you should be alright.

...that's going to make for a dungeon which is one to two rooms to the sheet. I suppose it depends on whether you want to be compatible with standard miniatures or not (I actually don't have minis for this -- I was working in a pinch when I got my initial batch of at-the-table DM stuff, so all I was able to grab to sub for tokens was a bag o' D6s, but I've tried running TotM 5e combat before and adjudicating ranges becomes...hard!

That's when you stop trying to precisely adjudicate ranges. :P

yeah, I punted and fudged the range on a spell

One of the important bits of TotM combat is that the story you're telling is more important than the specific numbers involved in the fight.

...yeah.

If the idea of not knowing exactly where everyone is and what they can reach bothers you, you're not going to have a good time doing TotM.

Is there a computer in the room you play in?

@DuckTapeAl no

Hmm...

Yeah, sounds like you're basically SOL. :P