Uh.. Where *is* the master suit's closet, again? I can't quite make it out in the map.

I love Krys's "I'm in the closet"... I think that ship has sailed a looooooooooong time ago. (Mixed metaphors FTW.)

On an unrelated note, *is* there a garden hose that Jack could use to keep the fire at bay for a few seconds? It would probably be bad seriously news for Krys if she got a scar... She can't audition to play Khal Drogo.
This message was last edited by the player at 19:21, Tue 03 Feb 2015.

Ug, flu is no fun. Hope the baby doesn't catch it. That's even less fun. By the way, how was baby's first Christmas?



You have to go through the master bath to get to it. It's that large storage space behind the tub.



I dunno, Krys is a bit goth, it might work for her. For a garden hose or something along that lines, he would need to spend DPs for a plot twist. Yes, the fire spreads quickly and it does take time to free Krys but, there is a door that goes from the master bedroom to the porch. You don't have to traverse the rest of the house to get out, and the fire started on the opposite side of the house.

She did. She is mostly rid of it by now, but indeed, she was not a happy camper.

She spent a nice long Christmas (1 month of holidays) in Italy with grandma, who spoiled her rotten as grandmas are wont to do.

Then she came back, no longer got spoiled to ungodly levels, and caught the flu on top of it.

You can see why she's kinda mad at life right now :P
This message was last edited by the player at 21:59, Tue 03 Feb 2015.

He grabbed most of his stuff. You could do a die roll, Notice/Perception. If you roll high enough you could find something he missed. However, this will cost you a couple of minutes while the fire and smoke spread.

Jack said he'd try to post today, he's been swamped with work. Or so he claims... he's in the Bahamas right now. I've been stuck with snow, ice, and half a tree falling on my son's car. But I'm sure Jack is working very hard ;-)

It is a tough job, but someone has to do it.  Why not me?  :-)

Just to be clear, Jack has found the harpy, not Krystal.  He is trying to get out, which the path of least resistance (and fire) should be the sliding door in the back of the house.  I wanted to post a private line to all, but it seems that skill is beyond the abilities if my IPad.

Also, I made a slight edit to my last post. I was momentarily confused, but I am all better now.

Tom should have no problem freeing Krys. By the time you guys get upstairs, the fire will have spread to engulf the family room. The front door and the sliding glass door that Jack went through, are no longer an option. Your only exit is through the door from the bedroom to the back porch, and flames are already spreading to the garage side of the porch.

If you guys want to chat or post anything while you're still on scene, you can but, you don't have to. If you want to include talking to the cops or the paramedics, feel free to include them. They would ask fairly standard questions.

I've got a busy weekend coming up, so I'll let this set here until Tue. At that time, I will be jumping forward to a few days later.

I believe that Jack intends to suck all the oxygen out of the tank.  And I am sure the pain of his injuries will be overriding the adrenaline he has been riding on.  It is a great drug, but it does not last long once the danger is over.  Put a fork in him, he's done for the day!

Fantastic scene, CTA!

Tom is going to discreetly walk away in cat form, unless Krys or Jack need him to be present.

Actually... Tom is literally going to sniff around and see if he can find traces of Paul. If he had a car, he's probably long gone now, but on the off chance that he was on foot...

If he can-t find anything, he'll askthe others if they are OK with him leaving, since they cannot freely talk to Zoey unless he's present.
This message was last edited by the player at 12:33, Tue 10 Feb 2015.

Sorry, meant to get this up yesterday.

Paul left in a car, which was later found burned almost as well as his house. The cops have no idea who he is, where he's gone, or how he's travelling. It's like he came into existence several months ago and has vanished without a trace.

I expect everyone, including Zoey & Bogie, to be at the club to meet Corbin.

I'm working on an epilogue scene but, it might take me a couple of days. Feel free to chat among yourselves while you hang out at the club. Let me know if there's anything else you want to do before I end the episode.

I'll be wrapping this episode up this week. In the meantime, I want to share this link to an article about roleplaying games that I think has some points worth considering.

http://bit.ly/1wJx1i4

I borrowed stole the idea of using song lyrics to note significant changes in scene from Krystal's player. Also, I read a book series a few years ago where the author included a playlist of the songs she listened to while writing the book. I thought that was kind of cool. Most of the time, these were the songs I was listening to when I crafted the scenes they were featured in.

That's a wrap on our first episode! Hope you enjoyed it.

Fantastic!  And creepy as hell!  I'm so glad that I am not Krystal right now.  I can just picture her in that 'sitting on the shower floor hugging her knees' position.  Not too sure that I will sleep well for the rest of the week.

Good luck, Krystal.

*pouring coffee into eyes*
Sleep? What? What's that?

The next couple of weeks are going to busy for me. We have out of town guests coming for a few days. After that, we'll be out of town and probably offline for a few days. In between my son has his birthday on top of other things going on. I don't want to start the next episode until after all that so, we're going to have a couple of weeks downtime.

In the meantime, we can chat about the direction we want the game to go in. I'm open to any honest feedback you want to share about how you think the first episode went -- what worked, what didn't. Also, if you have ideas of things you want to delve into with your character down the road, send me a PM.

As I said before, I would like to revisit the idea of moving to Storium. I'll post more on that later. I am also still working on the payroll for this episode. Bear with me.

If everybody really wants to move to Storium, fine.

However: I've been playing with these stats for over a decade, I am familiar with them, I can tell what they mean. The moment we move to Storium, no matter how much "in service of the story" the system is designed to be, I can already tell that Tom will not be the same character, and it will not be the same game.

So, the question is: what is there on Storium that can only be done on Storium? That is to say, could we play a Storium-like "session" on RPoL before actually moving, to see how things work out?
This message was last edited by the player at 18:40, Mon 09 Mar 2015.

I've been wondering that too. The next episode should be simpler and might be a good test of trying a Storium like game on RPOL. At least it looks simpler right now. You guys have a way of throwing monkey wrenches into things -- and I mean that in a good way.

I think the problem isn't Storium but the system we have now, to be honest. We have stats, and we know what they mean. Yes. But we're looking at this game from stats and dice and not a free-form narrative standpoint. If you've never played a Free-form game it's hard to appreciate Storium's simplicity.

The way storium is set up is that the Narrator just post as basic, "If, then, else" and the players use resources to tilt the outcome one way or another. In addition the players do the majority of the writing because they know what to expect.

How can we translate this to RPOL? By Bidding really.

CTA would set the scene and give us a challenge.
"The Fairy Queen arrives, somethingsomething dark side somethingsomething, and tasks you with finding Paul."
Then adds:
If everyone spends 1 Drama Point you tilt the interaction in a positive way. The Queen respects your character and offers your group a reward for finding the Fay he abducted.

If you do NOT spend your Drama Point you tilt the interaction in a negative way. The Queen will tolerate your existence but is annoyed by you. She tells you to do her bidding or die.

Now we makes our posts. During that post we say if we spend a Drama Point or Not. If all four of us spend 1 Drama, the net 4 Drama means we clearly got rewarded by the Queen. If only 3 of us spend the Drama points because one of us wants to save their Drama Points, then the same result. If no one spends their drama point - we still have to do the job but only to keep the queen from trying to kill us.

Example:
Tom spends 1 Drama Point and posts:
"My Queen, if you have come to us because you know of our reputation for dealing with this man, somethingsomething house fire somethingsomething without haste."

Krystal does NOT spend her Drama Point and posts:
Krystal rolls her eyes at the Queen, "Seriously? I thought you had Harry Dresden on speed dial or something." The Queen glares at Krystal for a moment, then turns her attention to the others.

so and so on.

The last person to post knows it's either going to go good or bad and thus they include:
After taking a moment to consider what everyone's said the Queen nods, "Very well. I will see to it that you are rewarded for finishing this task." Hearing this Zoey fist pumps the air, does a little dance then stops and asks "I'm sorry, your majesty. I hope my emotional display will not effect our reward." then folds her hands and bow.

Now CTA would be free to take over and give us specifics. If no challenge is represent we can just free post.

So why NOT spend Drama? Because sooner or later something will happen and we might wish we'd saved our Drama points.

Example:
The Vampire's body morphs as large talons and spikes rip through it's skin turning into something from a grown man's nightmare. [It will take a total of 10 drama to defeat the Hedge-Vamp or it will get away leaving you to lick your wounds in defeat]

Now we need to post our attacks and it's counters letting CTA sit back and watch the firework inserting more details if inspired to do so.

(This is just an off the cuff idea but probably the best way to reflect how Storium works for our game with it's system.)
This message was last edited by the player at 20:32, Mon 09 Mar 2015.

We could do Drama Points vs. Experience Points, to reflect Storium's system of Strengths vs. Weaknesses. Make XPs represent Strengths, and DPs represent Weakness (because weaknesses can lead to more dramatic moments, in my opinion). So everyone has to spend something, it's just a matter of which you want to spend. And I could put a Storium-like limit on how much you can spend. So at some point, you will be forced to spend Weaknesses because you are out of Strengths.

I wish you could see the scene we did today in Krystal's Storium game. I felt like I was put through an emotional wringer, and I don't think we could do something like that with the system we're using in this game. It didn't stop the players from throwing curve-balls, or being creative, or surprising us. I think it allowed for greater creativity, which why they were able to go where they did with the story. It also didn't guarantee success -- far from it actually. My character's fate was in the hands of the other players. Krystal said earlier that she would rather her character's fate depend on the cards instead of a die roll. That's how I felt today. I think stats and die rolls could have really short-changed the scene we ended up with.

I'm not a fan of complete free-form so, that's not what I'm suggesting we do. But I think the stats and dice are getting in the way of the story and the role-playing.

For one, if we want to play a Storium-like session, we don't need the Unisystem mechanics, we use the Storium ones: I don't think Storium has anything that cannot be replicated on rpol, but feel free to correct me if I'm wrong.

The problem here is, it doesn't seem to model characters with powers well, especially the kind of powers Tom and Zoey have.

These aren't finite resources, at least not in the context of an entire episode. Two spells and a Tk activation don't make Tom run out of Strengths, nor do they force him to activate a Weakness.

Zoey's intangibility doesn't run out. Her tangibility, as soon as she becomes able to achieve it, will, but even then, not in such a way that she has to spend finite resources to use it.

I find it hard to reconcile that with a system where, in order to succeed, you must spend a finite resource, and, most importantly, you must then spend a different finite resource before you can get the original one back. I get that it's a storytelling device, but it changes the character, not just the game.

Tom used his Blessing ability three or four times during this episode - as he should have, since it made sense to do so. How does that map to Storium?

Same for magic: without his shield, Tom would probably have died from the bullet wound, but using more magic during the same episode was still an option for him.

Does that mean he spent a Strength, and would therefore be unable to use magic until he spent his weaknesses?