An strange idea

[Lew]

I had a thought a moment ago.  Has our campaign evolved to a point that we just hold sessions to pass time in order to keep the board moving?  Its just a thought.  I'm sure everyone will have an opinion now that I've asked the question.  It's likely that the question has already been lurking around a few of your minds.

I'm not even close to proposing a change in our campaign.  We've invested far to much effort to risk what we've built.  Also, just the thought of a major change will make most of us cringe.  What I am putting up for discussion is an experiment.

In essence it would be a board campaign, absolutely no live sessions.  For ease, we could place it on Muldav in the same timeframe we are playing now.  Or, we could do something different.  I don't have many preconceptions.  The idea is now about 20 minutes old.  The downside would be distracting from the current board activity for our real campaign.  The upside would be developing a system that might eventually be worked into that campaign.

There is no reason everyone would have to play, and on the flip side Stew, Russ and / or John might be interested.  Just a thought, maybe not even a very good one.

[Cope]

Asynchronous (not real time) game play would be interesting. An experiment would be cool. I would suggest a small group 2-4 characters.

Synchronous game play would be even cooler, but not sure we could get everyone online....

[Fingers]

I agree with Terry that playing a session together on-line would be a nightmare? For me i'd have to play a rather silent and slow character as my typing skills would dictate!   Hmmm... sounds familiar? 

I think battles would be a very slow process. "Ones" wait a couple real-time minutes to get everyone's damage results, "Two's" wait a couple more minutes.

"Lew what does the battlefield look like, where's everyone at?  Lew then types it all out.  Players respond their movements and actions..."Three's" wait...  I think you get my meaning. Typing everything and waiting for everyone to catch up might be too much??  Now if combats went to a COD kinda thing, maybe?

I think the disjointed time-lines could be a problem too but we deal with those fairly well adjusting and ignoring irregularities.

I'd try it, but I don't believe we can truly replace the in-person sessions without using some kind of conference call or web video?

[Lew]

My intent was not to run out combats.  My thought for the flow would basically be what we do now, without the sessions.  Those would be replaced by COD rolls.  I also did not expect to run in real time.  Once again it would be much like the board.

Now we have some flexability.  If you had a dungeon crawl, we may play out some basics. Such as

Post one:  After a few hours and a few small fights, you run into a major encounter.  No one dies, but you're low on healing.  Do you pull back or push on?

Post two:  Push on!

Post three: After another 20 minutes you spot a group of bulky looking armored ogres, what to you do?

Post four:  Attack!

Post five: You loose the fight, but successfully withdraw.  One character was left, maybe dead, maybe not.  What do you do.

and so on.  This could be played out as we get to it.  Players could imform me of general strategy, aggression level, etc.  Or we could handle the whole thing with.

You spend two days working the dungeon.  You get this treasure and this DP and this person died.

We have a lot of options.  It doesn't even need to be run on the Muldav.  The bonus would be that we've already developed so much.

[Cope]

I agree the mechanics would be different....I like the idea though. The dice are just numbers anyway.

[Dj]

Well - "sessions" could be held online in real time. With some technology enhancements, the battles could run smoother and better even than on paper. There is some loss of flavor by going to all technical, but it is an option. It might let us "meet for sessions" more often. Collaborative maps over the internet are not uncommon, and I've written a battlemap program once...of course, none of the rules work for it anymore.

It somewhat reminds me of a comment I read (Dragon Magazine I think) about variations of playing - there was a mention of one group who didn't even use dice. At the time, some 20 years ago, I wondered how they could even do that.

[Cope]

Let's make it Eldrin's bitches. They already have some personnas. Keep it simple. No dice needed, maybe set a rule that at least 3 people have to be online to play and we rotate DM responsibilities.

[Keck]

if it is possible I would be interested also

[Lew]

Rotating GM's is an interesting idea.  I've always wanted to do that anyway.  I think a low stakes campaign where the next GM steps in at a set time would be challenging.  They just take the current situation and run with it.

How we do combat will largely determine who can play and how many people need to be online at a given time.  What I mean is, the more detail we add the more people will need to be live to handle their characters.  My intent really was to avoid "sessions".  For the most part someone should be able to play by getting on the board about 10 time a week for 15 minutes.  Of course, some will do more.  That should be a minimum though some will be on more.

Nothing set in stone, though, even in my own head.  Under any scenario we might occasionally get together at the same time for a major event. 

[Fingers]

So would there be character sheets with skills and all or would we just be playing the personas and ignoring the numbers and rules, like making levels?

[Lew]

I think we would need characters generated in the usual way.  Though exact numbers may never matter, a character's strong points do matter to status and role playing.  Skills, may effect COD rolls in some cases.  I still think that people need to have characters that make real quantitative gains over time.

Character's should definitely get DP and make levels.  The goal is not a pure role playing campaign. Even it was their should still be DP awards.  In truth the only goal is to see the result of the experiment and hopefully learn a few things to apply to the main campaign.  Of course, we may learn it just won't work to our satisfaction and this experiment will prevent us from screwing something up.

[Head]

I'm all for trying whatever but it seems to be problematic during the work day when most are actually on the board for me since I seem to keep getting interrupted LOL.  Would a chat room kind of thing work better for this?  Probably not since that would make it tough to "catch up" and no permanent record unless it was logged...  an option for when a scheduled real-time feedback scenario is needed maybe?  I dunno..

[Lew]

I agree that real time interaction would be difficult.  Let's compare the current campaign to the proposed experiment.  The group is ready to head of on a mission.  Instead of handling in a session a new thread would be started.  The GM would do the describing that he normally would and end the post with you see this, now what.  Over the course of a couple days posts and COD rolls would fill in.

It would be very similar to what we did during the Emeral incident, except the characters would have a chance to die and gain DP.

Alternatively it could go thus.  The Arbiter, makes a few rolls and describes the whole set of encounters to the players.  He give DP and treasure and the roll play continues.

Remember my premiss of the experiment was that we may have come to a tipping point in the main campaign.  Moving from the board filling in the dead spots of the sessions to the sessions just killing time so we can play on the board some more.  So bogging the experimental campaign down in long detailed board combats would be pointless.  Also, forcing players to be online at a certain time on a regular basis might be impossible and it certainly wouldn't be what I was looking for.

Now, another product of this experiment may not be what I expected.  It may be we find methods to run a campaign in which we do have virual sessions.  It is not what I was getting at, but it seems to be what most of the response is concerning.  It would take more work, but we could try it out.