Agent 333's FantasyCraft Camaign Log

[Crafty_Pat]

I like the story so far, though it seems to be progressing rather slow...a function of online gaming? I have never tried (nor will I).

Online gaming, from my experience, does seem very slow when compared to playing at an actual table. It takes longer for most people to type even a simple sentence than it does for them to say the same sentence in person, and that's not even equating for one person in the chat being a kind of slow typer.

True, but if you have the patience/desire/need for it, it does have at least one major benefit: players who aren't as likely to roleplay in person may shed their inhibitions and/or get more into it online.

[Agent 333]

I like the story so far, though it seems to be progressing rather slow...a function of online gaming? I have never tried (nor will I).

Online gaming, from my experience, does seem very slow when compared to playing at an actual table. It takes longer for most people to type even a simple sentence than it does for them to say the same sentence in person, and that's not even equating for one person in the chat being a kind of slow typer.

True, but if you have the patience/desire/need for it, it does have at least one major benefit: players who aren't as likely to roleplay in person may shed their inhibitions and/or get more into it online.

Very true, a lot more is said in character than normally in this group. For one, the players actually call other characters by their character's name, instead of using the player's name or saying "Hey, you!"  .

[Ferdinand Von Plat]

I like the story so far, though it seems to be progressing rather slow...a function of online gaming? I have never tried (nor will I).

Online gaming, from my experience, does seem very slow when compared to playing at an actual table. It takes longer for most people to type even a simple sentence than it does for them to say the same sentence in person, and that's not even equating for one person in the chat being a kind of slow typer.

True, but if you have the patience/desire/need for it, it does have at least one major benefit: players who aren't as likely to roleplay in person may shed their inhibitions and/or get more into it online.

That's my experience as well. My RL group tends to be moderately into roleplay but not very descriptive. They have characters planned in their minds but sometimes they get conflicted with the actual acting portion of roleplaying and just kind of narrate their actions like they're an outside observer, but online groups tend to actually get really focused in the roleplay and spend more time developing their characters.

Also, online gaming can actually speed up quite a bit once the players (and DM) learn that pre-typing some things like combat action descriptions before they're needed speeds up things that tend to be especially slow (combat, for instance) quite a bit. Unless you have a pressing need to change your action after you pre-typed it, in which case it's not any slower than it would have been had you not had something ready to go when you needed it.

[Aryxbez]

On another note, is anyone actually reading this? I'm sure it'll be interesting to read later, once the plot progresses a bit more, but right now it might not be all that intriguing. If anyone is reading, any suggestions on style or whatnot? Would you prefer I wrote out what happened novel style, rather than going through a play-by-play summary? It would take longer, but it might end up more interesting in the long run.

If it's to any consolation, I'm one of those that has discovered, and now currently reading this. So far it seems to have been good, your style works good enough, it brings in some in character stuff a bit, such as with the telling of the backstory and sand bit.

Although, I might like to hear details on any battles that occur, just to see how they're handled and such. I'm recently going to get into FantasyCraft somewhat, and want to learn all I can, see what battles look like and such. Although I've seen a couple of examples of battles elsewhere, one being a thread of two 10th level mage and Warrior, as well as a wuxia based one.

Alright, two players independently decided to make Saurian Fencer Swashbucklers. What the HELL about Saurian screams SWASHBUCKLER? Oh well...

That is a good question, it is as perplexing as it is amusing. I suppose ye give a Yoshi a rapier, and they'll go a mile.

[SilvercatMoonpaw]

Alright, two players independently decided to make Saurian Fencer Swashbucklers. What the HELL about Saurian screams SWASHBUCKLER? Oh well...

That is a good question, it is as perplexing as it is amusing. I suppose ye give a Yoshi a rapier, and they'll go a mile.

Well they get +2 Dex, another +2 that can be applied to Dex if you want, and +1 Defense.

[Aryxbez]

Ah, that sounds interesting, I suppose I shall check them out whenever I get the chance. Also, how well do you think they work as Yoshi's? I'm curious, as I think it'd be great if you could make a Yoshi in FantasyCraft.

Also you said 13 players?, do you plan to run a game with all of them at once? As I'd think that quite the madness, although it's possible to run an RPG with more than 6 players, I think it would start to break down after that. Especially something like combat, 13 characters at once, it'd be quite the madness I'd think.

Although that could easily allow the whole, "meanwhile" this group of 6 fighting, the other 6 doing Roleplaying (politics, investegations, etc.)tasks, and perhaps the loner guy doing a stealth mission or something.

[Krensky]

I'm in a game that runs reliably with 13 to 16 players. It helps that the game is more social and intrigue and is relatively system light, but it can be done.

[Agent 333]

Well, of the 13 people I invited, only 6 actually are playing. Which is roughly the turnout I expected. I wasn't sure which 6 would say yes, but I got a pretty decent group. Now, if I had my choice in the matter....

[Agent 333]

Alright, another Monday, another session. More network problems this week, which ironically let the player who was late not have to miss anything. So serendipitous overlapping problems? After we got things going there were no more network problems...

The session started with the party split: 4 on the first floor, two in the basement. I put it to a vote how we'd deal with it, and first floor first, then basement with the party arriving late depending on how long the top went was the winning solution. The top floor party had a conversation with an evil statue from Rao's back-story. The statue revealed that Kaliya thought that she was keeping the statue captive, but really she was his pawn too. He also admitted that he was not, in fact Amar, the Khudran god of light, but in fact a separate entity. He gloated that he'd defeated both Amar and Asad, Amar's evil counterpart. It decided it wanted to name itself Arraxxus. A bit of taunting one another later, and it disappeared in a puff of blue smoke. The party then headed downstairs to help their friends / get Kaliya. I ruled that between the conversation and actually moving from the statue to the stairs would take 4 rounds.

This is where things bogged down for a bit. The combat had 6 participants in it to start: 3 standard character "Khudran Demons", 1 special character villain Kaliya, and two of the 6 PCs (Aramis and Phathas). Kaliya starts the combat by shifting into her mantis-demon form. The combat went on for a while with no real ground being gained by either side, though Aramis went down to near half vitality before the rest of the party showed up. I don't remember a round-by-round, but needless to say, it took forever, and 2/3s of the party was kinda annoyed at the wait.
The rest of the party finally arrives, and then things get even slower. Not much happens for another round or two, then Naiwyn rolls a natural 20 on a Spellcasting check to Scorching Ray all three of the Demons. I had to make a spot ruling about crits and multi-target spells. First of all, Naiwyn crit's on a 15-20, and doesn't have to spend an Action Die to do so. I ruled (on the spot) that critting with Multi-target spells, each AD counts against one target each. I intended the free one to only hit one NPC, but Naiwyn's player bitched and moaned ("I built this guy around critting and you're nerfing me!"), and I caved, and let it count once for each NPC (they were Tough so only one of them actually died right away, but the other two were pretty gimped after that). Luckily, they didn't catch fire, but that's another story...

When Rao shows up, Kaliya shifts back to human form and starts talking to him, trying to convince him to end the violence so they can team up versus Revana. Rao doesn't buy it. Kaliya gets stunned by a pummeling tail slap from Aramis, then tripped the next round. After that, Silvia stabs her in the chest, with a critical hit. She takes enough to drop to 0 wounds, gasps out a dying statement, the ports away in a puff of blue smoke (Cheating Death, using the last 4 of my AD, which I'd been saving for just such an occasion). They finish off the mooks, Phathas's player privately told me he'd wanted to quit as the online thing wasn't working out well for him, so he ports out after saying something else cryptic... so... one player down.
The combat took freaking forever, but I got few complaints (except one player, who was ill, and quit at the end. He was a trooper and stuck around till the end of the session at least). I managed to spend all of my action dice, and the combat went well. Lots of different actions were taken. Aramis started complaining after a while because the dice gods were screwing him with a rake, but other than that most everyone had fun. Gotta work on getting combats done faster though, and prepare more canned dialog/scene descriptions...

[Daedalus]

What slowed down things in the combat so much?  If it was due to people taking a long time to make decisions, that will improve over time as people get better.  If it was due to something else, I'm curious to know.

[Agent 333]

I was the bottleneck, really. We're still learning the rules a bit, so that didn't help. I was double checking every time someone did something that didn't seem quite right. I had to keep checking things like bleed... I knew it was a save versus damage dealt or start bleeding, I just didn't know if it was Ref or Fort (it's Fort). I had to make spot rulings on things like "What happens when you get a crit on a Taunt check?" or "What happens when you spend two action dice to crit a special character with subdual damage?" or the like.
I thought 4 bad guys was few enough that they could all have separate initiative, that was a mistake. Should definitely have had the demons go on the same init, with a separate one for Kaliya.
Non-standard attacks were being thrown around, we're still getting used to how those work, had to look them up.
The dicebot certainly was endeavoring to make the combat go on for a long time, an abnormally high percentage of attacks were missing, on both sides.
So in the end, it was a combination of a lot of factors that drew it out, but there've certainly been a few lessons learned.

[Ferdinand Von Plat]

If the Dicebot's rolls keep being an issue you can sometimes give them a new seed to change the way the RNG generates numbers. Not that it necessarily helps if the PCs are skewed more toward success since it means they're going to be less challenged unless you spend more XP making things more challenging.

[Agent 333]

If the Dicebot's rolls keep being an issue you can sometimes give them a new seed to change the way the RNG generates numbers. Not that it necessarily helps if the PCs are skewed more toward success since it means they're going to be less challenged unless you spend more XP making things more challenging.

I don't think I have access to reseeding. It's not usually a problem, but it does tend to be very streaky: If you have good luck, you'll have a lot, if you have bad luck, you'll get a lot of that too. And then it'll abruptly switch when you least expect it...

[Ferdinand Von Plat]

I've noticed that problem in the past with dicebots in the past. It can be really frustrating on both the players and a GM when a combat suddenly swings drastically in one or the other's favor just because of a dicebot's RNG.

[Krensky]

Humans are notoriously bad at recognizing randomness. We constantly look for patterns, even though said patterns can very well be random. A PRNG (like a computer) will, for our purposes, generate just as much entropy as actual dice. You need to compare thousands or tens of thousands of rolls from a dicebot to determine if it has bias in it's PRNG.

That said, if your displeased with your dice roller, try DiceTool.

If you want actual random numbers from a computer, go to random.org and have it generate integers as you need them.