My sleep schedule mucked itself up and I've had a nonstop headache for the last five days. These two things are probably related. I don't have a specific start date in mind. I can say that character validation is one of my least enjoyed parts of starting a new game and once we push through it you probably won't have to wait this long for activity.

I'll give your suggestion of a pre-crisis thread some thought. I wanted everyone to meet each other formally during the intro crisis, but I'll see if I can finagle something.

I share your 'hating the character validation'.


Just chatting:
That's by the way why I follow the advice in the link you referenced. I tend to do the character creation during the actual play of the game. And then the validation is spread over a long time, and is mostly 'does this align with your vision of the character that you are displaying in the game'. It helps the players too: they don't need to think about everything up front: they can discover their character in the game and he/she can 'emerge' naturally during the RP.

The hardest thing about character validation is translating the formats of disparate players into something that makes sense to me. I tend to have a fairly coherent format that documents every point expenditure, and I don't (usually) use generators or spreadsheets.

So, I think maybe we could do a short thread where you're attending or passing through a Hero Association recruitment rally of some kind where everyone can interact and maybe explain to each other why they haven't already become Heroes. If you followed my RTJ prompt then your characters should be reluctant to become heroes until the Crisis Moment that will be our first official scene. Does that sound like fun to everyone?

I should mention that one of the reasons my schedule got wrecked was because I got sucked in to playing Oxygen Not Included with a friend, but the spell is starting to wear off and I think I'll be returning to business as usual within a day or two, so such a thread might actually slow down the formal start of the game unless we do them in parallel.

Parallel is good :)

And that makes a lot of sense the idea you had. I've not tried Oxygen Not included. Sounds interesting. I haven't played a game like that for ages

I absolutely cannot recommend Oxygen Not Included. It punishes you for everything you do and it is impossible to achieve a state of stability where you feel safe about trying out more complex game concepts. I still haven't figured out how to reliably make steam. It is quite possibly the least rewarding game I have ever played.

You just saved me pain and effort. Thanks!

To be fair, it is a game about trying to defeat entropy, so the constant lingering sense of inevitable failure and reliance on things that feel like glitches is kind of the point. There are ways to achieve stability but they are not easy or obvious.
This message was last edited by the GM at 12:15, Fri 17 June 2022.

I know this might have been lost in the ONI discussion but this was an explicit question I need ya'll to answer. ^_^;

Sorry, I think I must've skimmed that before and just kinda missed the part about wanting our input.

Yeah, that's definitely something that I would be interested in

I thought I'd responded with "parallel is good". I think that would be a great start

You did but everyone else was silent.

Can do parallel intro threads, sure.

This is the medium to attempt such things

I'll put something up tonight then, if ADHD cooperates. I already have a decent idea of what the scene looks like, so it's just getting it down in a textbox.

Looking forwards to it :)

You probably said, but I just want to be really clear. Is it before 'the event' or afterwards? If it's before I won't have any powers but can be there as a kid who just wants to see heros.

It will be before.

Even more fun. OK I'll just be going to gawk at the great heros

Actually, I just had the thought that we could probably go directly from hero rally to inciting incident. It's better than my original plan, which is "I didn't really have one!"

That works too.

Have fun with which ever.

It's getting quite late here (long day) so I might not be responding until tomorrow

I'm so sorry it took this long. Subsequent posts won't be so hard; the first one is always the roughest.

It is :) Like writer's block

I'll post tonight

Nothing kills creativity better than a blank page, full of the crushing weight of potential fallen short.

Poetic~

I think Eveline is talking to Susan! Pointing it out because it had to be pointed out to me. Anywhoodles, while I won't always do this for the introduction phase I'm waiting for everyone to get at least one message out before I start introducing NPCs. I've pulled a bunch of NPCs from my back catalogue so that every PC has a personal rival, and hope to introduce them super early on.

Yeah, sorry if that wasn't clear.

I wasn't sure if we were supposed to be engaging with each other immediately or just kinda doing whatever and going off with NPCs, so I'm very happy to edit or get brushed off as a weird stranger and go wander somewhere else if it better suits what we're doing.