I'm doing well at the moment, but real life is acting up a bit. I might still be a bit slow. But I intend to keep this going, even if only weekly. This is just a small heads up. I will try to get to an in character post as soon as I'm able to.
This message was last edited by the GM at 11:24, Sun 01 Aug 2021.

Sorry to hear IRL is getting tricky, and tes please, don't abandon us :_(   We're just getting started...

Does everyone know where to find their character sheet on this site or have I forgotten to activate it?

In reply to The Powers That Be (msg # 67):

I know, but I'm using the Character Description instead, so everyone can see my story and traits just clicking on the name/picture. I'm keeping my dice pool in the bio, though, because it's more immediately visible.
This message was last edited by the player at 19:14, Wed 04 Aug 2021.

That works!

Now I'm tempted to roll for the dance, if only because it'd be fun to fail.

The dice roller should be updated. I had thought I'd already done that.

Me and Roland came to the conclusion that we didn't finish his character creation Story and the traits and bonuses. We're working on this now. It's almost done, at which point he can roll for things and the story can move on.

Let me give you a hand:

Weakness for blondes +2
Allergy to blue velvet +2
Likes being a pawn in intrigues +2

3 dice pool

In reply to Anne de Arras (msg # 73):

heh, though i don't think so, he's already taken

Not to be a rulers lawyer, Sergius, but your bonuses add up to 17 dice, and 15 is the maximum, not even counting pool.

In reply to Anne de Arras (msg # 75):

oh hold on, I thought i had fixed that - here's what i have.

 Promising Young Knight of the Golden Fleece (+3)
Hero of the Hundred Years War (+1)
Sir Jaques de Lalaing's savior
Looking to fulfill his chivalric oath and seek glory

does that still add up to 17? i'm brand new to the system (the ones without a number next to them are +0)

That should be good, with five pool dice remaining. Make sure to note that down somewhere too. Some people do this in their character bio lines.

looking at the dice-roller I have figured out a way for it to count successes. The only problem is that it looks for target number or higher. If we change the number to roll to a 6 it's the same idea as counting the 1's rolled, right? Anyone object to this?

Anne, that was beautiful!

He he he, thanks. Had to make it worth forfeiting a die ;)

Apologies for the delay in posting, I can honestly say that this has been an absolute bastard of a week in terms of finding annoying stuff for me to waste my energy dealing with. And not a nice bastard like Anne, with the shapely and well seasoned ankles and the salty tongue.

I will hopefully get a post out in the next half an hour - my rate should be acceptable for the coming week, but it might not be daily - I'm leading all day training sessions for three days and it can drain me even at the best of times.

I'm ending the end of summer vacation as a teacher, which means I'm gonna start prepping for school and then in September be beginning with school as well. I'm comfortable with daily-is answering of questions or asking for rolls, but I will most likely only do weekly big updates, in which I parse everyone's actions in a big post.

I blogged about the pool and my experiences with it over here: https://thebeardedbelgiansplay...ing-out-at-pool.html

Also, one of the first posts I did was about a gorgeous comic that fits our type of game/story I think. Read about it here: https://thebeardedbelgiansplay.../the-golden-age.html
This message was last edited by the GM at 11:58, Mon 09 Aug 2021.

Nice write-up! Interesting how it does the opposite of Lady Blackbird: ace the roll and you keep the dice, instead of keeping them if you fail the roll. Not sure which one I prefer, but The Pool sure feels more unforgiving of a fail, losing all "gambled" dice and no refreshment scenes. This makes me think I should go "all in" every time to avoid losing dice (which resulted in Anne losing her whole pool in her second roll, as we know). Still learning how to go about it, mechanically - but it's a lot of fun so far :D

Thank you and yes! Lady Blackbird uses one of the first hacks of The Pool, called the Anti-Pool, which is indeed more forgiving. I've been reading up on things. (the game is old enough that you have to go to the archived internet on the Wayback Machine. We can discuss what we want to hack after the first session ends. I'm thinking of seeing wether or not this entire feast deal has been good enough to count as a session and do end of session stuff soon. Then we can see what we do as to rules accommodations. Wether we all are game for a second session, what we would change, etc. I mainly wanted to try things out with the Pool, rules as written, before I started messing with it. I've got several suggestions.

this is where I started reading more: https://web.archive.org/web/20...epoolvariations.html

I'm always open to discuss variations, although I perhaps am a little bit less sold on the Anti-Pool approach. I may be missing something, but it doesn't really seem to make gambling worth it (because either outcome seems to bite you - if you lose the roll, you keep your dice, but if you win, you lose your opportunity to gamble in future), or indeed an actual gamble.

If that's the case, as a player I'm liable to simply play it safe for the entirety of the game until the climax, or indeed deliberately try to fail rolls in order to game the systerm, at which point I just throw all my accumulated failures into the ring at the finale happy in the knowledge that they'll get refunded immediately.

Again, this may just be me still getting into the spirit of the game and learning the rules - I'm looking back and I don't think I'd realised that I gambled my whole pool on simply picking up rumours - in my defence, it was half 11 on a Tuesday night!

Tuesday, 23:30 - the heroic time for heroic decisions.

I will attempt to update tomorrow, but the day is going to be quite filled.