??  ??

What? I'm answering questions.  What are you doing?

Or did something I say not make sense?

Let's see how well embraced my compatriots' sensibilities are with my PC's military dark humor! :cool:

sorry Opaopajr... this game seems DOA.  I've gotten formal quit notice from Headless, and he was the most active poster.  I was going to post something but I didn't think anyone else was still paying enough attention to bother. My bad.

Quote from: Spike;1008164sorry Opaopajr... this game seems DOA.  I've gotten formal quit notice from Headless, and he was the most active poster.  I was going to post something but I didn't think anyone else was still paying enough attention to bother. My bad.

Sorry I haven't had too much response... Things are interesting, but somewhere I'm getting lost in how to respond. I have found it a bit harder to keep Traveller play by post moving that D&D because the next course of action isn't always so clear, and without being around a table, you can't tell if the pregnant silence is because people are too busy to respond or everyone is waiting on someone else to pipe in with an opinion or what. Face to face, you can read faces and it's easier to prompt for someone to take action, or at least propose as action for someone else to take...

Frank

But I almost got off the ship this time!

Sorry it hasn't worked out. I know I'm not the only one struggling with the format... but it certainly didn't help that you guys treated everything like a potential trap!   :confused:

At least its not like that one group I took over from another GM where every player character brought two crowbars.  I wouldn't have been shocked if the PLAYERS brought crowbars just to prove their characters had 'em!!!

SHOCKED I tell you!

Anyway... I guess I'll fall back and regroup, either to figure out where it went wrong so I don't repeat it, or decide if its even worth trying this format again.  Its been a mildly unpleasant way to play, if I'm honest.

Well, it is a challenging format. If it helps you are welcome to join my PbP and we can futz around together. Then you can suss out what you like and what you don't and what you feel keeps momentum.

That said, one of the criticisms I'd offer is: often it seems we had naught but obvious choices. Granted, it's just a perception from my angle. But it is something to hash out as a way to see how to make the open world feel less "funnel-like." Sometimes we give all this loving detail, yet haven't figured how to make it feel inviting (less punitive) to attempt.

Only if you are down for an after action report, though.

I'm not adverse to that

If this is the AAR I'll add my 2 cents.  I had 2 frustrations.  First we haven't made a choice yet. I will first say I think this is a transation issue, translating real time experence to play by post experence, not an "evil railroad dm" (trade mark held by therpgsite.com) issue.  I think the first month of the game online could have been played in an hour in person.  And if there are no real choices in the first hour of a game thats ok.  We are settling in getting a sense of things etc.  If you flow charted what we played a lot of the boxes would say, "that doesn't work goto the previous box" many of them would say "that does work go to the previous box" some of them would just have some flavor text and say "go to the next box."  

All of that would be great in person, we would get to roll dice, we would find some limits, we would get a sense of what we were in for.   In this format the opportunity cost of a bit of flavor text (not the right term and I fear its overly pejorative in this sense but it isn't supposed to be, flavor text is essential here we're role playing not playing M:tG) can be 3 days.  

That brings me to my second issue.  Information density.  It was too sparse.  Waiting a day for a couple lines from you, or less from another player is just a tease, enough to frustrate, not enough to satisfy.  The couple times we got a dozen posts in a night were fun.  When we couldn't get that the posts needed to be 3, 4 , 10 times as long.  And explicitly sign posted, I am doing X until y or z (or other), or "the slagged low port is too radio active to expore until you find hard suits."

I am certianly guilty of short posts and I'm not sure I would be willing to write 10 times as much.  So I'm not really sure how helpful my input is.  

None of this is meant as personal critism, just one persons analysts of why this game limped.  Offered in case you decided to take another swing.

Yes, one of the reasons Momentum! is so important is the churn allows for smaller posts and the game feels lively (which is where characterization can sneak in). But that requires buy-in from players, too. I recently fear I may have killed my own game again trying to keep everyone at the same time pace.

But the medium really doesn't support it. It's too easy to deal with life -- and then forget to contribute regularly -- that there is no immediacy to sustain momentum. And stalling for other players to catch up deprives momentum. It really has been a learning lesson on my part as well. It feels like running an Open Table with Stable of PCs game, trying to juggle everyone's attention or lack thereof.

How to juggle that? I honestly don't think you can. I think the medium is one where active players are favored with more content and passive players are left in the dust. Active players will give you the regular feedback: will engage, will post often, will explore, etc. And all that covers Headless' issue 2. Momentum, it seems to be everything.

As for issue 1, feeling funneled into one obvious, or no good, choices? That's a challenge. It seems like you had a very specific campaign concept, but we didn't feel 'let in on it'. So perhaps it was an issue of buy-in and not knowing what sort of responses, (read: active player behavior,) you needed to forward the campaign. We can say sandbox, but it is easy to forget that just means one aspect of scope of play, not facets involving genre, atmosphere, decision priorities, etc.

One thing I would add, to avoid our starting point lockjaw from skill-gates, would be Suite of Baseline Skills for functionality. In a ship (space is no exception, the stakes just get worse) there's no room for error. There is a basic level of functionality to operate as a crew. If we're doing a crew game, give a package of mandatory ship skills at 0, skill-gates are gone.

If you want to simulate "victims on a crashing plane!" use redundancy: majority of players have the skill, one may not have it at all, and one has it at skill 1. (This becomes only really possible at 3 PCs or higher, but you get the idea.) In this way there is vagaries of performance, but if you have a table majority present things are at least passable (more consequences, but passable).

So now, feedback from you Spike! If you had to get us onto the same page again from the start, how would you approach it? What sort of expectations would you want form your potential players?

Hmm...

I'm sorry if my contribution rate was low. I did find the situation interesting and I'm sad to see the game aborted.

It was interesting to me to see a fear of mine with Mongoose Traveller perhaps shown up. The expansion of the skill list means PCs need more skills. Also, the more modern game style where if you don't have the skill, you really can't do the activity is perhaps an issue. I have been running Classic Traveller (1977) with mostly Books 1-3 using Christopher Kubasik'sTales to Astound thoughts on skills. Between these, instead of 3 different engineering specializations on top of Computer, Electronics, and Mechanic, there's just Engineering, and if you don't have it, it's not necessarily a disaster. But maybe we also needed more ships crew PCs, though it was never quite clear to me what the other PCs skills were, having a list of the PCs might have helped (for example, see this from one of my play by posts: Wayward Sun PCs. In a face to face game, it would have been quick for players to resolve issues of who had what skills if they didn't want to share their character sheets. I think Mongoose Traveller can still support the index card character sheet that was so often used with Traveller, or this kind of few line character description.

We certainly had some growing pains of getting started, but I'm not sure they are fatal. My Wayward Sun campaign only just saw the PC ship complete it's first jump after almost a year of play. It has stalled a few times, but isn't dead. I was in an OD&D play by post for almost 10 years, and it was slow, but continued to be fun.

One thing learned from the OD&D play by post is the old school caller can really help move things. Pick an active committed player and allow them to make player side decisions to keep the game rolling. Combine this with the GM trying to anticipate things and not always wait for a player response. That's a tricky balance, but having a caller puts the decision to move forward with incomplete input on the players.

I'm certainly still game for a play by post if you want to try again, or even if we want to tweak a few things here and pick this one back up.

Frank

I will admit that I'm not a fan of the way MongTrav handles specialization of skills, and have no problems with treating Engineering (Pick your Speciality) as just... Engineering.  I do agree with the observation that most of the game thus far probably could have been handled in an hour or so face to face, which is frustrating all around.  Combine that with long stretches of time (a week generally) where it seemed like it was just Headless and Me and... well...

I think one of my frustrations was due in large part to the low rate of posting, where the players (you guys) would get caught up on some minor obstacle over and over again (the computer being fried. How many times did I repeat... Its fried?), probably because you forgot or didn't notice the last time someone tried it?  Alternatively: you'd overlook BIG THINGS... like an NPC wandering around as if 'meh', because damnitall there's a computer to ask questions of!

Cue GM slamming his head into a desk repeatedly to make the pain go away.  

It was getting very close to the point where I was about to contradict myself and just... magically fix the computer so you could get whatever answers you were looking for and we could stop wasting time asking the broken computer for answers!  



Of course, I, as the GM, should have recognized quickly (-er?) that my players are not all that familiar with Traveller (or... MongTrav!) and pushed more obvious actions forward... maybe a simple checklist of things. Of course I also expected a lot more player interaction which never materialized, despite a few heroic tries early on from you guys.  I also got too caught up in my Big Idea for putting the group together, so when I wound up with No Crew ( I mean: A pirate turned noble who's big skills are guns and paperwork, a failed navy man turned soldier, a soldier and a merchant... its not that no one tried to bring Crew Skills... but thanks to random generation no one really had any!), I should have taken some time to alter The Plan (Say it like The Joker for maximum effect. I can't do links in my browser anymore for some reason) so that there was some sort of NPC crew to handle crew things and let you guys get on with being some sort of away team, I guess.

It's never wrong to restrict play options to fit a concept campaign.

Just like you can give Baseline Skills, or Skill Redundancy, to avoid gate-locks, you can similarly frontload that into Chargen Expectations. Say things like "you have to bring X amount of these Y functions for your PC to be at the table." Then we can chargen lifepath for something compliant.

One fix to the characters don't fit the situation you want to set up is to either tell people to skip the enlistment roll, so all PCs rolled are in a service that will make sense, or allow players to roll several PCs and pick the one they are most interested in playing in the situation.

For my part, part of the posting speed was not always being sure what input I could make. This is an issue that can be quickly resolved face to face. If players seem to be not cluing into the decisions that need to be made, one thing to do is call out what decisions need to be made.