> With their penchant for injury, the objectionable things they'll eat, and their having far more joints on their limbs than most normal people, children remain one of the greatest vectors for terror ever known.

Anyone actually used the SamePage tool?

@BESW @doppelspooker you guys are too much sometimes XD

@LyndonWhite Once. Why?

Why have you only used it once?

I always think it looks cool, but never have I tryed it.

I was ~recruited~ to take over as GM for a group whose GM had left.

(I.e. a worker at my FLGS said "hey, I know you run games, there's a group who's short a GM, you interested?")

I think it helped by dint of being something I could step through during a session zero which was also a "I'm taking a leading role in your coherent friend-group I'm just meeting."

No other group have I felt the need to use that document. I do a session zero, and I have notes on what I'm going to want to talk about, but there's also lots of discussion and e-mail chains and background experience before start that we can lean on.

I've used the SPT as inspiration for more open-form discussions, but never the Tool itself.

That one group... we harmonized pretty well. (Except for the travel time it ended up consuming. One pair of players moved a little farther away which pushed me over the 1:1 drive:play time ratio. And I have so many opportunities to play/run closer that it was hard to justify that waste of three hours driving. To run for a group of (nice) strangers.) So I'm not sure we really needed the SPT for its declared purpose.

@trogdor :D!

@BESW This. I go go back and look to make sure I don't forget something important, but my generic start-of-campaign notes have it pretty well covered.

@BESW @trogdor i'm off to bed, will see you in the morning for some inspectring. (inspectre-ing? inspecting? whatever it is, spookiness will be had.)

@LyndonWhite Are you starting something new soon?

No.

InSpectration?

Not just "InSpection"?

i wonder if there are policetergeists

(My 5yo just walked up to me with five M:tG cards splayed in her hand. One each of RGBWK. "I win. A rainbow." "Yes. Yes you do.")

(Too political.)

@nitsua60 awww XD

@doppelspooker One of the great things about InSpectres is that the players get even more explicit control over "what's really happening" than most Fate iterations.

So... I don't know if there are policetergeists! You can tell us if you roll well enough.

The idea is that in setting up these XP triggers/counter triggers during the chargen phase the group will know exactly what they want out of the game.

Is there any mutability in triggers?

if you feel they are not working out for you

Got it.

@doppelspooker ok them XD

@nitsua60 WURBG, you mean. (Awww)

@Zachiel If, in the 20 years since my last M:tG game, I hadn't forgotten the standard abbreviations... yes. That's what I meant =)

hey again @NautArch

howdy howdy @Shalvenay

@NautArch ready to start?

sure, anyone else able to join or am i doublefisting characters again?

@NautArch looks like you'll be doublefisting again

okeedokee

hello there @Tano

hey there @LyndonWhite

hi

how're things going?

Background is a cut from "The Knife Grinder or Principle of Glittering", by Kazimir Malevich. Which is now in public domain due to age.

Things are fine.

alright here

(Have we interacted before?)

probably not much

(I am going AFK now, bye)

Approximately how good is darkvision? Equivalent to full moon?

"You can see in dim light as if it were bright light, and in darkness as if it were dim light"

Except no colour.

As a DM, what are your fave 1st or 2nd level spells (dnd various e) for encouraging tactical play from the player party? e.g. Taunt, with the fighters etc lined as a gauntlet ready to dish out attacks of opportunity to all rushing past.

My favorite tactical D&D situations always come from D&D 4e, which doesn't do "levels of spells."

Auras and creatively triggered reactions were a ton of fun to play with.

Kobolds in 4e can use their opportunity actions to shift 1 square instead of the usual opportunity attack.

Environmental features, like a rune circle that can let you teleport your move speed as a move action, can turn ordinary combat into a battle for terrain control.

But most important for tactical play is to give players goals other than "kill the others before they kill you."

Guess who? 750 words into a blog post title on the topic of making combat faster .. "I pride myself on not wasting people’s time." ... and there's another 450 words before he gets to an actual useful point.

@BESW Even with "kill them first" being the goal there can be tactical play.

@Erics Someone of a pugnacious disposition?

@Miniman A =)

@Miniman query: answers by [user] on questions asked by [other user]

@BESW I think I've written this one before, but I can't find it. Give me a sec.

Trogdor called it.

@BESW data.stackexchange.com/rpg/query/…

Thanks!

@BESW You're welcome! Pretty low-effort, really. Also, trogdor called what?

That you'd probably already written that query.

Ah, right.

I did find it eventually, but it was aggregate.

@Erics I will say: if it's the "dolphin" post you're reading, it's worth it. I use that one every session, every system. Not just for combat, either.

@nitsua60 Yep. The info is good, but a 1,200 word preamble?Blech

Eyup!

Evil Hat is releasing some new fate dice, and they're releasing them in packs of 4 rather than 12 (which is helpful!):

@doppelspooker Relatively or absolutely more affordable?

@Anaphory Both? :D A player only needs 4 to play, so having the option to buy just 4 instead of batches of 12 is helpful.

But in case you need 12 for three players anyway, should you buy 3 4-packs or one 12-pack (assuming there is one 12-pack you can decide on)?

If they looked more...fancy I'd consider buying them but something in me revolts at the idea of buying reskinned d6s if I have so many d6 already lying around :P

@Anaphory Probably if you had three players you'd buy a 12-pack, I'm gonna go out on a limb and guess that's still the cheaper option per die.

@ACuriousMind Personally it feels better to have the pluses and minuses, and it skips a mental step. Four pluses looks more awesome than an assortment of 5's and 6's, I think? But also you can take a marker to some d6's to make your own fudge dice:

@doppelspooker I'm already used to the mental steps from counting successes/failures on d6 in Shadowrun, so it's nothing I have to get used to anymore

Orrite!

hey there @Anaphory

hey as well @NautArch

Tonight we played InSpectres, which was fun.

We used a heavily-annotated D&D manual and some equipment borrowed from a local priest to exorcise and destroy the imps who were moving around the wax statues in the Ripley's Believe-It-Or-Not Odditorium.

@BESW It was so fun.

I'm glad you and @trogdor got the reference I was making with the priest & the blind lawyer. :)

InSpectres is a pretty great system, looks like. It's got fun narrative control mechanics, nice character sheet details, and we got to have a whole lot go just hilariously badly and move forward anyway -- so it's a system where there's no pressure to keep things going smoothly.

There's some mechanics where we build up a business, and the business gives us more ability to succeed and correspondingly more challenging jobs, which is nice. It means I'm actually feeling encouraged to spend the business's resources so that we can maintain the business's size and status as not too big.

It definitely has some mechanics to yoink for nurturing a thing (a town, business, guild, etc).

The franchise mechanics in InSpectres are more about the franchise bolstering the stats of individual characters. For a system about nurturing a common business or whatever for this friend of ours, I'd add some meat to them so the common business/town/guild/etc is also its own thing, and the characters can be about bolstering the that thing as well.

@Shalvenay howdy! Had another thought. The final boss seemed a little weak, multiple yeths with pact tactics and some stronger combat casting from their leader would have upped the ante. Or maybe the mibitaur under a threat to add tension to end the battle quickly.

(slow time in the conference Hall)

@NautArch yeah, I didn't want to push too hard on the final boss -- the encounter's already capable of taking a decent chunk off you as-is, and if some of the rolls go the NPCs' way...

Play the game, takes the risks!

Lit braziers could provide healing as an option

@doppelspooker yeah I watched Daredevil so I got that pretty fast

@trogdor \o/

@Miniman I called you a cad and a villain :P yeah I just figured odds were you wrote the thing already

@doppelspooker personally I would prefer they made the character sheets less,.... busy would be the word

I was confused at first by all the stuff they covered over with the actual important information

still a great game overall though

@trogdor yeah the character sheet designs are a bit over the top compared to ... just ... writing stuff down in a google doc

yeah

@BESW (or @trogdor if you want to ask it) remember to post that question about that stress result of 1 that you rolled that emptied your skills or whatever it was, but did nothing to your Current Stress, iirc

I am not a fan of including uneeded info and then covering some of it with the stuff you actually need

it sends a false flag to my brain that I am missing important stuff

@trogdor yeah there's some bits that get overlapped because they're just fluff additions to the sheet, and bits that get overlapped but they're actually still options (like being a "home office").

yeah, that is what I am talking about

I was not a huge fan of that

but it was only a minor blot on an otherwise really neat game

like, here's all the important bits that actually matter, highlighted.

yeah I understand that now

oh, no, i mean, i'm just highlighting this because look at what a mess it is

I am just sorta filing this occurance away for future reference next time

@doppelspooker fair enough

and then there's stress: everything on there is a numeric score you keep track of, but stress is not, but it's recorded with the same type of field, suggesting it's the same kind of thing. but i think instead you actually write down the number of your recent stress roll?

it is a real mess

@doppelspooker uh, I dunno

cause it seeeeeems like stress is literally just how many dice you are missing

nah that's the part above, where you say you now only have 2 / 4 academics dice

.... maybe ??

when my character scored stress i just wrote "annoyed (-1 dice to next roll)"

no I know that, but why would you record your latest stress roll if you already know the result?

@doppelspooker ooooooh ok

that makes sense yeah

but sometimes you don't need that, which is still confusing

looks like annoyed (result 4) is actually the only result that has any ongoing impact

(IE, sometimes you have a more permanent marker of what the roll means already)

all the results are "do this thing, ok that's done, now forget about this and keep going" -- except 4, which is "remember, on your next roll you skip a die"

@doppelspooker it's actually more temporary though

but it is the only one that requires tracking and doesn't have it anywhere else

yeah

@doppelspooker oh, if you mean it that way yeah

all the other results get recorded elsewhere. results of 1-3 say reduce your skill scores above, result of 6 says add some cool.

result of 4 is the only thing that has an effect which has nowhere else you can write it down.

you could just get rid of the "current stress" field and just have a checkbox that says "[ ] annoyed"

unless you're meant to ongoingly roleplay that you're frazzled

mmm

it's a pretty messy sheet

again though, not the worst thing, it was still fun

Apropos of nothing, just dropped $6 Rich Burlew's way for a .pdf of OotS-style print-and-fold minis.

@Erics Obviously, but that's just tactics for its own sake. Tactics are more fun and less forced if they're tied to story.

hey there @eimyr

@doppelspooker cats do like to pretend they know a lot of stuff