Red Trident will swing there if we don't have extra capacity re Gravitas. He'll stop and observe as close as he can without getting spotted hoping to use his gravity attack from a distance in concert with another attack.
I'm basically riding along, and Starchild is less than confident in the presence of established heroes, so he is going to follow the others' lead.
RT will coordinate with Gravitas with his gravity powers to also increase his personal gravity.
It's an established fact that purple-clad gravity-power superheroines manifest their abilities like so:
Dumarest and
Bunch haven't posted since my last post. I hope to rectify that with my next post. This plot might have ended up more convoluted that I intended, and might have benefitted from being a bit more straight-forward, especially for play by post. So hopefully when I post later, I will be able to give you all some options on where to go next. I will say that I intend to have the characters go home and sleep and start the next post on the morning of June 2nd.
Tulpa Girl - I added a bit more description to my previous post regarding Gravity Manipulation after I initially posted it.
If it makes you feel any better, I miscalculated running Boot Hill PBP the first time I tried it; the upshot is I learned a lot about what not to do. The gory details are still in the Pub annals.
I had fun. Something about supers games makes it harder for me to get into character. Sorry for slowing things down early on. I really appreciate you doing this.
If it makes you feel any better, I miscalculated running Boot Hill PBP the first time I tried it; the upshot is I learned a lot about what not to do. The gory details are still in the Pub annals.
If it makes you feel any better, I miscalculated running Boot Hill PBP the first time I tried it; the upshot is I learned a lot about what not to do. The gory details are still in the Pub annals.
I'd also be curious as to what you felt your mistakes were. That way, should I ever run anything PBP, I hopefully won't make the same old mistakes (but rather make new and different mistakes instead).
Much of it may not be applicable to superheroes, due to superheroes being passive/reactive characters for the most part, but the main thing I realized was to start with everyone already in town with numerous possible courses of action they can pursue as a group or individually. The reason is that way if anyone doesn't post frequently, the others don't need to wait on them before their own course of action can proceed. When one player slows down a game, others get stuck waiting and lose interest as a result, and then your game will not likely recover momentum. For instance, in the first Boot Hill game, everyone was riding with a stagecoach to Tucson and one player posted infrequently before dropping out altogether, leaving the burden of running him as an NPC on the referee, and because I also made the error of starting them en route to Tucson, there wasn't a lot to engage them individually to hold their interest. The slow pace of posting made the trip to Tucson take far too long and eventually, between the waiting on other players and not having much else to do, everyone more or less lost interest, including me. Part of the blame also goes to passive players who wait for you to shove things in their face rather than picking up threads during roleplay, which is more of a difference in expected style of play. When I run a "sandbox" (I hate that term), there are all sorts of events going on around the PCs and it's up to the players to ask questions, get involved, choose a course of action, and so on, but some players expect to be handed a task/mission to complete. The main lesson I drew was: have a lot of things players can pursue without needing to wait on anyone else. It might require chronological juggling when groups split up (as I've done in the current Boot Hill game), but it keeps the active players engaged and the more passive players can still participate.
Dumarest. I definitely like the idea of putting the players into a situation where they can follow one of several different threads right out of the gate in an attempt to keep them all happy and to account for different posting rates. I'm just trying to see how you could apply this to various games and genres.
In the OD&D game there were no parameters aside from "everyone starts out here." The PCs decided to know each other before the game began. Then they were presented with a map of their environs:
Dumarest - I hear ya regarding niche protection. I could care less about that but I have played with many players who are usually concerned with getting a good mix classes and abilities. I have always told my players to play what sounds fun to them but they usually still discuss as a group who is playing what to try to get a thief, a fighter or two, some spell casters, etc. I’ve got no problem with a whole group of thieves or fighters or whatever personally. I’ve just encountered many players who do. This has somewhat been forced on players over the years as newer editions of D&D have put a much more heavy emphasis on ability scores and class abilities and so-called class balance and encounter creation that is appropriate for the party level. I greatly prefer having some easy encounters, some moderately difficult ones and some that are so scary that running away is the best course of action. But a lot of today’s players would be unhappy with that imbalance. To each his own I guess.
Yeah they're great maps!
Dumarest said, this would potentially allow for different posting rates depending on level of engagement. I think these changes from what I actually did would have helped. It would have been better to save the big plot line that I was leading to for later in the campaign and start with more straight-forward stuff.
Dumarest - Yeah, that might work. That is kinda what I was alluding to further up-thread with the idea that multiple plots can be presented to the players and they can decide which ones they want to deal with and if they split up to tackle two or more things, so be it. Of course doing that with the heroes all playing as lone wolves right out of the gate would probably work better than if they were an established team. A concern might be that the players are not interacting much with one another, mostly one-on-one with the GM. If the game was advertised that they would be lone wolves with only occasional crossover, I suppose it wouldn't matter much since the players would know that from the start.
I'd probably try to run it something like the old Batman Family comic book, an anthology of characters who know and work with each other sometimes and sometimes work alone, depending on the situation.
And for a variety of reasons, I wouldn't use Golden Heroes again for a play-by-post superhero game. I have (and really like) DC Heroes 2nd edition (the big black boxed set) and the Batman RPG. I used to have Marvel Super Heroes years ago but no longer have it. DC Heroes would work pretty well I would think, although you would need to refer to the action and results tables for resolution of dice rolls.
