This thread is for general OOC game chat. First posts, general intro, metagame stuff, etc.

I will try to have an OOC thread for each game thread, as appropriate. Please do not post OOC into a game thread.

Please keep personal/bio info to a reasonable minimum, and stick to the usual forum rules of no current RW politics (to include social politics), no current RW religion, no personal attacks of any kind, no matter what they're based on. I'm not going to define "current" except to say that if it feeds into the strife of today, it's current enough to prohibit. Play nice.

Exceptions to the topical prohibitions may be tolerated only when they are 1) not loaded, 2) not partisan, 3) germane to the game or to the player's situation, 4) brief, and 5) indisputably factual. #5 is no defense if other parts are violated.

Example of a valid exception:

"Sorry I can't post for the next three days because the President is in town and I'm part of the local security effort."

Again, the principle is: stick to game stuff, don't get too personal in this thread, play nice and don't raise or respond to things that will bring on strife.

If you want to exceed the bounds, do it offsite and/or in PMs and don't bring it into the game. If it turns out to be out of bounds even for PMs or other media, and it affects the game, I will take steps to rectify the situation, up to an including ejection from the game and/or reporting to the site admins. For example, don't stalk, doxx, or hit on other players. This is not where you should be looking for romantic or sexual relationships. Sad that all this needs to be said, but better to say it once and never again.

If you have questions or need standards clarified, feel free to ask, as long as it's not JAQing off or trolling.
This message was lightly edited by the GM at 08:49, Tue 17 Jan 2023.

For anyone lurking and reading, I'm going to try to post the "looking for players" within the next few days.

When and if this happens--and if that's now and you are reading this after getting accepted into the game--please bear with me as this is my first game on this site and I am not yet confident in how all the functionality works--groups, etc.

I will be asking questions and working with the players to figure it all out. Hopefully at least one will have been a GM here...

Hi everyone (well GM and Redwing guy at the moment!).

Okay, I have added several players. This is the probationary period. I've seldom had to say no to a player application, but it's happened.

Please introduce yourself briefly, talk about game stuff, and feel free to give me advice on the way to set this up, the functionality of the forum, etc.

Questions raised by players already:

Is there an attribute auction? As posted elsewhere, no. Your exact stats are to be kept secret (honor system) and you should never post them publicly. Allocate your points as you wish and you (the player and I (the GM) will discuss and tweak and finalize as needed.

Will the play style be PVP or PVE? Mostly PVE. Deadly and direct PVP is not encouraged, but it might happen as the story develops. Politicking, secrets, one-upmanship, sibling rivalry, etc. are all more or less expected in an Amber game, but if your PC's goal is to bump off the others, you're in the wrong game. Other than Amber, I've GMed and played WOD a lot, and in both cases, the goal is storytelling, not power gaming. Characters should have goals and ambitions. Players, in a sense, should have no goals or ambitions for their characters, other than to play them truly and well.

I will eventually make this an Adult game just to keep things simple and avoid any issues with the underage, but 1) please keep things at a level below erotica and 2) right now neither I nor Redwing have Adult access as it takes 2 weeks, so I can't set it there now.

"Choose one ancestor" means you choose. You want to be Corwin's kid, or Fiona's or whatever, or Suhuy's, make your case. Most of the time I will say yes, unless it's silly. I decide what's silly.

Your usual residence? Entirely up to you. Amber, the Courts, somewhere in shadow (bought personal shadow or otherwise), whatever.

More forum functionality weirdness/learning curve:

I guess if I do the "add player" function but do not assign a character name, it doesn't actually add.

So, I'm going to add some placeholders (Redwing Guy is one such).

You should all be able to figure out who you are.

I make no promises, but I am a night owl and most of my posting will be between noon and as late as 4 a.m.-ish PST

If it's before noon, the coffin will likely remain uncracked.

How do you see who is part of the game?

Oddly, I either can't see it, or don't know where to look.

And, there should be several more visible now.

Hello all!  Looking forward to being among such excellent and admirable hobbits cousins!  :)

(or siblings, or distant relations, or, you know, whatever.)


Click the link labeled "The Cast" on the top menu.

Hello all.

Glad to be here. Looking forward to a proper name.
This message was last edited by the player at 15:02, Thu 19 Jan 2023.

Hi Placeholders!

I'm a placeholder too :)

Can I ask for our character sheets to be enabled for editing?

Done. Thanks, just one more example of "I don't know what I don't know."

Keep 'em coming.

Shout out if you want help :) I'm sure a load of us would be happy to assist

Hello Everyone

Well. I run a game on this site so I can help out as and when.

Hello everyone!

Looking forward to the game already; even if we're in the building stages of everything. Should be fun!

Hi all.

A long-time Amher fan here - ever since I borrowed The Guns of Avalon from the library.  Which was a while ago.


If anyone doesn’t have easy access to the rules this site has character generation rules in the Heaven - Gaming Resources forum

Very good catch, I forgot about the Heaven Gaming resource area.
I came by Amber the opposite way. I bought the gaming book read it and thought, I better read these Amber Chronicles and from there I got hooked.

Does the GM have any thoughts on players collaborating on a background?  Close siblings with a lot of shared history, that sort of thing?  I've seen that done in lots of Amber games but never tried it myself, I would imagine it kind of gives the game a whole different feel, having someone you'd think of as a reliable close ally and confidant.

Greetings everyone. Sorry for being the last one to post. I’m new to RPOL and still learning how to navigate my way around the site. I read the Amber series a very long time ago. Looking forward to revisiting it and experiencing the world of Amber all over again with each of you.

Feel free.

I'm loading your individual "Begin Game" threads, which are group-specific.

For example, Sir Rilar's thread is Group 1.

I believe only that player and I can even see its existence, right?

Or can everyone see the existence of the thread, but not the contents?

Or something else?

I'm obviously feeling my way through the way this all works.

Everyone can see that there is such a Group and that Sir Rilar can see it (that’s in the Cast list).  Nobody else can see threads in that Group.

I can only see my personal thread.

Advice: groups go wrong! Keep it simple. For example one each is good, but when you start doing 'a+b+c' in one group and 'd+e' in another and then in the future want to do something else it causes lots of problems

It also reduces the enjoyment of the story. Seeing what others do is part of the story. With this then we only get to see a small part of the story. You as the GM get all of it, but for the rest of us it feels like no one else is posting. It's worth if you have valuable secrets to hide but it does increase the likelihood of the game dying quite a lot

In reply to Lady Amelia (msg # 24):

Hmmm...I do take your point.

In my long-past game, I'm pretty sure we did everything privately to start. Then, when two or more PCs would meet, I'd create a new thread with "Fred and Joe" or whatever and that would be public for everyone to see and enjoy, on the presumption that "three can keep a secret--if two of them are dead." In other words, once two people know something, it will not stay secret forever. Secrets known only to one can be handled via PM or whatever.

In any case, I think that's a reasonable compromise. Comments?

***

Separately, I am finding this whole site clunky and difficult to work with. On ORPG, there were sub-forums to game forums, and subs to subs if necessary. There doesn't seem to be that function here.

Instead, the groups provide a way to do things, sort of, but it's non-visual and counterintuitive to me. Is there any way to create sub-forums or forum levels within the MEHSV game?
This message was last edited by the GM at 18:36, Fri 20 Jan 2023.

For those of you who have a "character name," be it a placeholder or final, and if you haven't already, please start loading your proposed character sheets including history and/or backstory into your character sheet file.

For those of you still in "visitor" status, I will get to you as I am able.

There are threads and that's it as far as I know.

Your compromise sounds excellent!

I've not used ORPG so I can't really compare it. I've not had any problems (I'm running two games with about 20,000+ posts and am in others with 60,000 posts) but I guess you don't miss what you don't know about.

I have a handful of pretty vastly divergent character concepts I'm mulling over at the moment.  Does anyone who's nailed down their concept a little more firmly want to share a super-broad top-level description of their intentions, so anyone who appreciates a bit of variety in the game can avoid stepping on anyone's toes?  Not anything that would reveal any secrets certainly, just something vague like "naval-warfare-focused daughter of Caine" or whatever.

Young Daughter of Dierdre. Not well tutored in any exotic magic things. (i.e. no trump/advanced x, etc).

Also I should ask, where in the timeline of Amber are we starting out?  Right after Patternfall or right after the Merlin books would probably be the common options, but maybe we're at some other earlier or later moment?

From Game Info

Ooooh, I must have missed that, thx much!

The GM told me off for not reading...so I did some reading :)

The Merlin Chronicles and the Short Stories certainly introduced a lot of different things into the mix of the cosmos.

Nicely. :) But damn straight! Thanks. Can I get a "Like"?

And that's all grist for the mill, but we'll try to start with our feet on the ground and fly as we go.

You can have a like!

I'm just reading the books again now... Gosh I had forgotten how much I liked zelazny. If only we could have a Lord of light rpg

Have the rest of you seen this?

https://www.google.com/amp/s/d...mber-1235224773/amp/

Interesting! Will look forward to seeing just how well they do with it. And who they get to play the characters.

Please don't update it for modern audiences...

Im looking at any number of modern movies,cartoons,streaming services.

I’ve seen it, but it’s just another step on the way - and it’s taken years to get this far.  So, don’t hold your breath.

What you said Lady Xantria. Please no mobile phones...

Having seen how the Rings of Power was handled, I have little faith in the ability of modern producers to remain faithful to the source material, regardless of how well thought of or hugely successful said source material may be.

So the thought of a NPiA adaptation scares the hell out of me, because some clown may decide to 'improve' it.

IMHO anyway.

Those are the exact words I used talking to my better half about this J1. But you never know it might work out. We can at least hope :)

This wasn't 'hugely successful' though. Although I like it (very much), very few of my peers have even heard of it.

Yep. One more step in the right direction but this thing has been in the works for years. I'm not holding my breath.

Haha, great minds--I wrote my post above without reading yours, but we said almost exactly the same thing.

I've just added in my character details to the char sheet, so was wondering if it could be set to 'Variable Width, Word Wrap On' as this looks a lot better to me.

I've never managed to make it do that. Sorry. I manually format it

Players can't make the change, but the GM can. They'd do that by selecting Edit Character Sheet, if you look at the bottom of the Char Sheet text window there are two radio buttons - Fixed Width, Word Wrap Off & Variable Width, Word Wrap On

The GM also has the choice whether to make the sheet User Editable.

Please see the important announcement.

The above was directed t the GM, sorry, I should have made my intent less ambiguous.

With regard to the move of site..

I wish you all well! Have fun. I won't be playing with you.

Terribly sorry to hear that!

Is there a reason you mind providing?

Is there something amiss with RPGC that I am clueless about? If it's sensitive, feel free to PM me.

I am sorry to hear that as well Lady Amelia.

I don’t know much about rpgcrossing.com but the fact that the Terms and Conditions are labelled as being for “Dungeons and Dragons” is a little concerning - it speaks of a lack of care, at the very least.

Personally I like the setup here - I don’t see sub forums as being especially useful, and it s features I value that standard forums don’t have.

I'll attempt to join on the other site!  My issue is, I do much of my posting from work, and my corporate network has some online gaming sites blocked and others not, apparently randomly as far as I can tell.  I can get to RPoL just fine, but there are others I know I can't.  So if I can play there, I will!  I'll be able to find out when I get to work again tomorrow morning.

Have signed up.

The ability to include private text in posts is available also available there, so that's a wash.

It would be unfortunate if your work servers won't let you reach the new place.

And it's unfortunate that I'm having to do this, but I'm not kidding, it's killing my buzz trying to use rpol the way it's set up. I want to be happy to log on and play, not have this frustrated-in-the-pit-of-my-stomach feeling I have now.

So, as I said, best to rip the bandage off right away than make it worse by investing more effort here.
This message was last edited by the GM at 21:38, Fri 20 Jan 2023.

Actually I answered in PMs But there is a conversation here. So...



And... I read TOUs. I read the rules. I follow them. It takes time and effort to do that. I am the sad sort of person that actually reads a contract before signing them. I even read T&Cs occasionally and certainly if I am going to use a service extensively. I don't want to go through that for a new website.

And finally what PK said. Personally I like the setup here - I don’t see sub forums as being especially useful, and RPOL has features I value that standard forums don’t have.

I have character sheets here. A separation between character and player. Character descriptions. Lots of goodness. I've not seen on other websites. Perhaps there are better ones, but this is far more than 'just satisfactory'

---

All that said I am sure you will find lots of players on that site. Go with your heart. As a GM you have to be happy with your tools

Yes, they're a bit D&D-centric there, but there are plenty of other games hosted and it really doesn't matter what is played. That's up to the GM and players. Amber doesn't need specific support tools such as polyhedral dice rollers, dungeon mapping, etc., so it comes down to what I can handle, and what lets me focus on the story, not fighting the site.

You have this here. For example
This message was last edited by the player at 21:35, Fri 20 Jan 2023.

In reply to Lady Amelia (msg # 59):

All very understandable. You moving to the new site is comparable to me staying here, I imagine: painful to contemplate.

But sometimes one doesn't know what one doesn't know, and I didn't know I would end up hating the way this site functions. Obviously it has great people here. But if I only have one car, so to speak, I have to be happy driving it.

And so do you, totally.

All the best, Lady A.

It’s not that it’s D&D-centric - it’s the fact that they used the name, “Dungeons and Dragons” for their service in the terms and conditions - but they can’t call their service that.  They’d get squashed by Wizards/Hasbro if they tried and they ought to know that.  So why do it?

In reply to Lady Amelia (msg # 61):

Yes, I was replying to the above post that pointed out this ability here--I was saying, yes, they also have that ability there. Both do.

Done.

The new game has been approved and I'm setting things up.

It's here: https://www.rpgcrossing.com/forumdisplay.php?f=20284

If you are joining over there, you will need to register of course, and then friend me--screen name the same as here, David VanDyke.

PM me, and I will set you up a folder in the game with private access to the threads inside.

Friend request sent - but new users need to post 4 times before they can send PMs

You can go to the dice roll section and roll a few dice. That should do it. Also, pretty sure I got you set up so post in your own folder.

So if this version of the game is formally dead could you remove me from it please?  I don't like to leave stumps crowding up my list  :)