Star Frontiers

[Recklessfireball]

NJWilliam: Welcome aboard. You should be able to post to the forum now.

sulldawga: No problem. You're welcome to join any time, if you change your mind.

[rremedio]

I'll have my character done tomorrow.

[Recklessfireball]

Cool. Looks like Bhart has his up. Looking forward to seeing what you guys come up with.

[Recklessfireball]

Thought I'd bump this up. I've got a nice player base of six people now, but there's still room for plenty more. If you'd like to join, give me a shout out.

[greyarea]

I'm new here and interested.

[Recklessfireball]

Welcome aboard!

I've got you added to the usergroup. You should be able to post to the game forum now. Shoot me a PM if you have any questions or need help with your character.

[Don7x]

Not so big on play-by-post, but I'm a huge fan of Star Frontiers and would love to join in the near future. Can you squeeze in one more for next month?

[Recklessfireball]

Don7x, I've added you to my usergroup. Whenever you decide you're ready to play, go ahead and submit a character and I'll work you in.

[Recklessfireball]

Thought I would bump this up. I recently got a PM from a guy wanting to play in a one post a week group. Since all my current players post once every day or two, I was hoping to scare up two or three more players to form another S.E.T. Team. So, if anyone is interested in a slower paced game, feel free to give me a shout out.

[sulldawga]

Thought I would bump this up. I recently got a PM from a guy wanting to play in a one post a week group. Since all my current players post once every day or two, I was hoping to scare up two or three more players to form another S.E.T. Team. So, if anyone is interested in a slower paced game, feel free to give me a shout out.

How would that work? Is it going to be a really, really slow moving game, or are you going to fill in more of the blanks yourself between turns to keep things from getting stale?

If this will be more of the latter, and you're willing to put up with someone who's never played SF before, I'll do it.

[Recklessfireball]

How would that work? Is it going to be a really, really slow moving game, or are you going to fill in more of the blanks yourself between turns to keep things from getting stale?

Even if I fill in the blanks, by nature, I think it would sort of have to be a slow moving game. Unless we combined multiple actions within a compressed time frame, per post (e.g. each post simulates the passing of several days or weeks in game time, and all of the events which occur during that time). That would be more akin to reading a historical account than participating in a present tense adventure scenario, though, and I'm not sure how satisfying it would be to play.

That's not to say I wouldn't be willing to try it, if it's what everyone wanted to do. If we get two or three more people that are interested, we can kick around ideas for how we'll structure it. I wouldn't want to start before we had a pool of 3 to 5 players. On the other hand, it might be hard to find enough players for that slow paced of a game. We'll have to see what kind of interest there is.

[onlyme]

Thought I would bump this up. I recently got a PM from a guy wanting to play in a one post a week group. Since all my current players post once every day or two, I was hoping to scare up two or three more players to form another S.E.T. Team. So, if anyone is interested in a slower paced game, feel free to give me a shout out.

I would think you would need to tweak your game play. Go with a more simplified combat approach. have them make a set of if-then rules. (Attack with this weapon until out of ammo, then use next weapon. If HP gets below X, run. If ...) You would then play out the entire battle round by round in a single post. That way the players are only making higher level decisions each week. Normal, expected responses would have to be assumed by DM. ( ie. a medic would naturally assist a wounded PC after the battle. Maybe randomly roll for which PC they help )

It becomes more like those adventure books, where you turn to random pages based on a decision. Much of the plot happens without input, and only key decision are left to players.

I think if you did as normal play, a single battle would take months, and you would never have a good flow.

At least that is my two cents...

[Recklessfireball]

I think I see what you're getting at. It's kind of like those choose your own adventure books, where you can choose to flee, fight or hide- go north, south, east or west- and so on. Then you turn to that page, and read several pages of descriptive prose that explains what happened as a result of your choice. That might work, assuming everyone involved was good with the format. It would require me to do more of the heavy lifting, but I'm okay with that.

[Norjax]

Hi. I'm the individual that is interested in the weekly-paced game.

Honestly, it was the “choose your own adventure" format I had in mind. I’ve been contemplating this style of PbP for a while. Perhaps these characters would be more akin to an NPC than player characters. Maybe these support player character’s (SPC’s?) actions and decisions would affect the player character’s adventure arc but not necessarily interact with them? They would adventure in the background of the overall setting.

I’ll post some ideas this weekend.

[sulldawga]

Yeah, I would definitely be interested if it were more like the type of game described by onlyme and Norjax.

We don't need several pages of descriptive prose from you necessarily, RF, but you'd definitely be doing more of the heavy lifting than us.

I envisioned running a PbP 4e D&D game like this, since the whole process of figuring out where everyone was during combat, who was doing what, and whose conditional powers kicked in when, during a PbP game, took forever!

[Dogma]

I'd be up for giving this format a shot too if it gets off the ground.

[Recklessfireball]

We don't need several pages of descriptive prose from you necessarily, RF, but you'd definitely be doing more of the heavy lifting than us.

Hee, hee. Well, yes, I was thinking of the books I read when I was a kid. I wouldn't have the time or patience to write one of those books, of course, but the end product would probably look like some of the longer posts I've written in my game so far (ordinarily, I try to keep my posts much shorter than those).

I'd be up for giving this format a shot too if it gets off the ground.

Three people would probably be enough to get started, though four might make for a more well rounded team. We could get things going with you, sulldawga and Norjax and add another player or two later, if anyone is interested. If we do the choose-your-own-adventure type game, I wonder if I should streamline the combat system, or handle all the dice rolling myself, or some combination of the two?

What do you guys think? Do you have a preference for doing your own dice rolling?

[sulldawga]

Whatever is easiest for you. We can give you a set of 20d20 and/or 20d6 ahead of time if need be.

But I don't care about rolling my own dice.

[Norjax]

He's what I propose.

We (the players) each pre-roll 100 d10's into a 10x10 matrix. When a roll is called for, Recklessfireball will randomly select which value to use by making a roll himself where to enter the matrix. After entering the matrix, a roll on the grenade bounce table is used to determine the next direction of travel. Once a value is used, it is crossed off the matrix until all 100 numbers are eliminated. After all the pre-rolled values are used up, a new matrix is populated with 100 new results. In this way the players control some aspect of their destiny by having rolled the required check, and RL's roll will add the random/suspense element.

RL's task is to place us on a course to a pre-determined destination/conclusion (know only to him) and allow us to select the path; akin to the choose you own adventure style. When die rolls are required, RL would communicate the results of the actions with a player's representative (I volunteer myself) who will write the descriptive prose for the others to read. In this way the chosen representative (the Caller) would act like a secondary GM and alleviatete RL's burden.

If we have enough player, I think we should start a topic in the game forum and make our characters. We can work out the details of this experimental play style in the game's forums.

What are your thoughts?

[Recklessfireball]

We (the players) each pre-roll 100 d10's into a 10x10 matrix. When a roll is called for, Recklessfireball will randomly select which value to use by making a roll himself where to enter the matrix. After entering the matrix, a roll on the grenade bounce table is used to determine the next direction of travel. Once a value is used, it is crossed off the matrix until all 100 numbers are eliminated. After all the pre-rolled values are used up, a new matrix is populated with 100 new results. In this way the players control some aspect of their destiny by having rolled the required check, and RL's roll will add the random/suspense element.

Assuming everyone else is okay with this, sounds good to me.

RL's task is to place us on a course to a pre-determined destination/conclusion (know only to him) and allow us to select the path; akin to the choose you own adventure style. When die rolls are required, RL would communicate the results of the actions with a player's representative (I volunteer myself) who will write the descriptive prose for the others to read. In this way the chosen representative (the Caller) would act like a secondary GM and alleviatete RL's burden.

I'm not sure I'm following you, here. Could you give me an example of what you mean? I don't necessarily have any objections, but an example would help me visualize what you have in mind.

If we have enough player, I think we should start a topic in the game forum and make our characters. We can work out the details of this experimental play style in the game's forums.

No problem. I'll add you guys to the game and make a topic titled Game Format (S.E.T. 3). Campaign ID is 106, by the way.