[Zweiblumen]

Once we learned that Kat was a vampire and had no nanites, I started suspecting she had not lost her memories after all.

That was my suspicion as well.  But there was no way to prove or disprove it.  And she appeared to be loyal and not backstabbing so Doc dropped it.

[Tecumseh]

As for the fates of Red Team's free spirits, that's a story for another day. Malevolence's conjectures are very good. Katsina would also speculate that her spirit was delighted to be separated from its vampire body. APB, however, would be in for a rougher transition. How would a technomancer handle being permanently severed from the Resonance? Especially if the Resonance was replaced by something as alien as the astral world? It would be a struggle to maintain your sanity, methinks.

Ryo's plot had two holes. I asked about them and he admitted they were accidents.

1) The IC date is February 2075. The date of Stolen Souls is April 2076. It would make more sense if the IC year were 2076 as well. I seriously considered retconning this when I took over but eventually decided I didn't want to mess with the shifted days of the week, as we had already established that it was Friday and the weekend crowds (and/or people using their cabins) would be in Aspen the next day. I don't have Boston Lockdown so I don't know if there's a canon date for the beginning of CFD. It might not be impossible that Doc picked it up in late 2074, but if he did he was probably at the very forefront of the infection.

2) The Infected aren't susceptible to CFD, so Katsina should have been left mindless (not brainless) and drooling. This is squarely within the realm of GM handwavium, but there are a few possible explanations:
a) Katsina's regeneration magic helped preserve her mind, if not her memories (unlikely, as Regeneration magic doesn't affect the nervous system);
b) Kat knew what was coming and counterspelled it take the edge off;
c) Kat actually has a persistent low-level infection of nanites streaming to her from the others. Her Regeneration kills the nanites off, but before that happens they are active for a few moments. Perhaps those moments were enough to reboot Kat from her vegetative state.

Pick which one you like, as it is technically a plot hole. But, to be be explicit, no, Katsina did not have any more of her memories than anyone else did. If she did, she would have had 86 years of karma. Imagine that as a PC.

However, to point 2b, Kat did know what was going to happen, sort of. Why was Doc the Crumpled Man? Because Kat tricked him into triggering the Blank Slate.

Kat knew that Blue Team (or at least strongly suspected, correctly in either case) that Blue Team was going to execute Red Team. Thinking on the fly, she tricked (or intimidated, or used Influence, or whatever) Doc into reading the tablet at the top, which is a magical language that anyone can understand intuitively. She probably hoped that the effect would be localized to Doc rather than affecting the whole van, but desperate times called for desperate measures. That's why the van crashed and why Doc wasn't secured by his seatbelt/harness like the others at the time. It's also why Blue Team was armed but Red Team had to pick up their weapons. I definitely did not pick up on that clue on my own.

[Malevolence]

2d) The spike in local mana (or even background count) caused by the activation of the artifact temporarily weakened the HMHVV, allowing the CFD (which, being technological in nature was unperturbed by the event) a few precious seconds/minutes to successfully infect Katsina and exert its will before the HMHVV recovered and wiped the CFD out again.


Of course, the argument that if she had her memories, she'd also have 86 years of karma necessarily means that she had that before losing her memories. So, yeah, prior to the artifact she was a total badass, so you have to wonder how Blue Team succeeded in capturing her, much less her whole team.


What did she trick Ohanzee into doing? There was evidence that Kat had used Influence on him as well. Unless Ryo had messed up and meant to place that signature on Crumpled instead.

[Tecumseh]

Look at Malevolence make up reasons on the fly. I officially declare him ready to GM!

You know, I never asked Ryo about the spell on Ohanzee's aura. That's a good question. I wonder if, instead of tricking Doc, Katsina cast the spell on Ohanzee to convince Doc to do it. That would be a curious way to go about it though, since Ohanzee could counterspell the attempt. Plus, while Ohanzee is the face, it was actually Rozkhi who was the team leader. Perhaps Katsina didn't know that. Or, as Malevolence suggests, Ryo misspoke himself and should have said The Masked Woman's aura was on The Crumpled Man instead.

For what it's worth, I always assumed that nobody got their entire skillset back, at least not in the first week of your amnesia. It was part of the mechanic that made it possible to spend karma on the fly and upgrade skills without the necessary downtime. So just know that however badass your PC is, your PC's previous self was even badasser.

[Malevolence]

I've got an idea for a campaign, or more accurately, a series of shortish missions, loosely formed in my head but I don't have the time to run it. Kind of a mix of Sunt Venatores Venationem and Kindred Bond - kind of a high powered campaign where all of the PCs are Infected. More of a military campaign than a gritty Shadowrun dystopian-future/fight-the-power thing. But I digress.


Anyway, It took much longer than I intended, but IC is up. Ohanzee's starting to feel less magnanimous. He's half tempted to use Control Thoughts to have one of the Vory captives (he doesn't know they're Vory, of course, but he does know that they work for some sort of criminal organization) message Mom that they are all dead, something something unknown forces, something something closing in. The bullet to both their heads. Live or die, Ohanzee's and Sam's SINs are effectively burned since it is safe to assume they are known to that organization.


Also, Ohanzee owes Styles a souvenir. Any ideas?


I figure we'll drop their phones and any weapons we choose to leave with them up the road a couple clicks, just enough so we can get to the road before they can make a call. If Ohanzee's SIN is compromised, Doc could be in trouble. So we want to buy some time to meet up and then send the rented RV on its way. Ohanzee also wants to take a peek at the info we got from Cannon before setting the prisoners free, just in case it has information on Mom that might change his mind. Probably using one of the burner phones.

[Tecumseh]

That sounds good. I'll post ICly based off that.

I'm at post #1999. Trying to figure out what I should do for post #2000.

OOCly and separately, I'd like to do a debriefing of the game. What people liked, what work or didn't work, and so on. This can be specific to Tabula Rasa or is can be about play-by-post in general. Practical or philosophical, it's all valid. Be as honest as you can be. I already consider the game to be a huge success, and my ego is healthy enough that nothing you could say would really convince me otherwise, so go ahead and let her rip.

As I've said before, my biggest regret was losing 8-bit. That's obviously outside of our control so I didn't lose much sleep over it. I don't know if it's better or worse that he dropped off the boards entirely. On one hand, you hope he's okay. On the other hand, at least he didn't abandon this game specifically.

From a game management standpoint, the sequences where we had everyone engaged and posting regularly were the combat sequences. The in-between stuff, the RP segments, were inevitably slower. This is true in every game I've played in and it might just be a universal constant among PbPs. It's probably due to the insistent nature of combat (do or die) and the fact that it's clear whose turn it is. RP is much more nebulous. It's a bit of a pity because the moments I really cherish are those turning points where characters make the decisions that define both the direction of the game and their own nature, but those inflection points can be hard to come by organically.

I'm finding that it's necessary to have a team leader, or someone to whom the decision defaults to in absence of anyone else deciding something. Obviously it's best when there's consensus, but when there are six players plus a GM plus the nature of the interaction (posting, written word) it can take a long time to build consensus around anything, even small things that are small or unimportant to the plot. You never want to railroad as a GM, but sometimes it's just more expedient - and in the overall interests of the game - if you just pick the players up from their current location and drop them in the next spot

I have a loose idea in my head for a "campaign" that's really a connected series of action sequences. (Sioux Wildcats on a mission.) If Tabula Rasa was 90% RP and 10% combat (at least from an OOC days-spent standpoint) then the goal would be to flip those ratios. Of course, I don't know if that much combat is wearying and if people would just burn out after a while. I might try that later next year; we'll see.

[Malevolence]

Re: the 90/10 ratio, that was largely what I had in mind with the mission based profile. Though not necessarily all combat, the 90% would be more action (skill checks, combat, etc) - more tactical and immediate decision making and less long term planning. More snappy chat and less hours long discussion/poker table chat.


I think that complex decision making, especially when you have a whole world of choices, is much more difficult over PbP. There are so many moving parts and each little piece has infinite variation. Trying to get a detailed plan via post is tedious and slow much of the time. This is where realtime communication would be immensely helpful, or as you mention, having a leader, or more accurately "man with the plan", though less gender specific.


Another place that PbP falls flat is when you have detailed interactions between characters or (more frequently) PCs and NPCs. You either grind to a halt writing one sentence at a time so that the other party can respond, or you do as we did and write these unnatural monologues, which the other party then dissects in reply, which you then inline quote replies to and so on until what you have is only vaguely related to an actual conversation. I enjoy the opportunity to roleplay, but sometimes it might be cleaner and/or more expedient to either have the GM write out a complete interaction or Cliff Note the conversation. Most of my RL friends aren't great role-players, so our at-the-table (or Roll20) games tend to resolve much of the NPC interactions like this:


Player: I try to talk my way past the guard - I'll mention that the Big Boss sent me to check on the prisoners.
GM: Roll (whatever)
Player: (Rolls) I got (result)
GM: Okay, he seems convinced and lets you pass


This is a simplified example, and for such a brief interaction (and face-to-face or over Roll 20) is less fun, but for some long thing like an interrogation it can be more expedient to summarize, at least in a PbP format, but even in a live session since the rest of the table might not get as much enjoyment out of it (though if you have a good player and GM, the interaction can be as exciting as watching an action/suspense film).


The open world nature of this particular campaign left a lot of large, complicated decisions to be discussed, and that caused it to slow during those periods. I suspect a mission style format where there are much clearer short term objectives and less focus on long term, complex decisions could help keep the action flowing and the pace comfortably fast while still allowing for story arcs, character development (in the dramatic sense, not the karma spending sense), etc. If I do ever run it, I also hope that it keeps the GMing easier since there is less variability and complexity to track/plan for.


Those are my initial thoughts, anyway. I might have more as I stew on the topic longer or read other's thoughts.

[Poindexter]

At one point you mentioned something along the lines of "I barely even scratched the surface of everything that could have happened in Ryo's notes." and I'm curious. What all else COULD have happened?

[rednblack]

Oooo, ideas for new campaigns.  I always love tossing those around.  I started a home game last night based on Tabula Rasa with some brand new tabletop RPG players.  What could be better than whiskey, cigars, and Shadowrun?  SR5 is perhaps not the best way to dip someone's toes in the RPing water, but they did very well.  Since they were brand new to the system, I built 4 chars and had them wake up in a lab/ritual circle with the alarms going off, sans memories.  It was a great way to introduce them to the mechanics of the game, as whenever they wanted to try something, they'd find out a little bit more about their specific character. 

I pulled a lot from Tabula Rasa right down to the chars.  We have a Russian combat monster troll -- though he's also got an EVO SIN and is not associated with organized crime -- and his partner, a decker/medic who's day job is as an EVO spider on team one.  Team two are shadowrunners comprised of a druid full magician who wields a crossbow with narcojet and a bio-adept gunslinger in debt to all the wrong people -- which should be real fun when they come to collect.

The deal is: EVO has team 1 pose as shadowrunners to build a team through a fixer and collect a technomancer.  Aztechnology gets to him first and the team bursts in the door as some Blood Mages are attempting the Hand of Glory Alchemical Ritual.  This was probably doomed from the beginning, as Magic and Resonance don't get along too well, but it was certainly fragged up when the team burst in the door firing off assault canons and HE grenades.  Anyway, a magical boom erupts as well, and that's why they wake up with amnesia.  I'm probably way off base with canon here, but hey, experimental Blood Magic has to have some rather interesting effects.

On the PbP side, I've been mulling over some other ideas.  One is ShadowCrawl©, a D&D1e-styled dungeon-delve that would be pink-mohawk to the max and would give players the opportunity to drastically alter the landscape of the sixth world while potentially slaying a dragon in the process.  Very combat oriented, very lethal, and more than a little bit silly.  Edge would be refreshed and karma given for keeping with cheesy RPG tropes and making copious references to bad action movies.

Another idea is a low-powered street game that's very political and local in scope.  I haven't been terribly fond of either Street Scum or Street-Level rules as written, so I'm still trying to hammer out what it would look like exactly.  I want magic to be rare and dangerous to the practitioners from a if-it-gets-out-that-you-are-a-mage-people-will-want-to-kill-you perspective, and I also want high level gear to be very difficult to obtain, but a lot of people like SR and other roleplaying games because of the power level and toys.  If I can figure out how to navigate the crunch, I envision some street-level criminals trying to eek out a living in a highly contested area of the sprawl where alliances are important, backing the wrong horse could get you killed, and a solid earner is a commodity to be bought and traded until they get too big for their britches and need to be eliminated. 

For Tabula Rasa I don't have much to offer in the way of criticism, constructive or otherwise.  I think we had some solid RPers, and I'm thankful that Tec laid down the law when needed to keep the game moving.  As has been touched on, people tend to post less often during the RP scenes, and I've also noticed that to be true for all PbP games I've ever been in, regardless of the system.  I'd like to know to best address that, as one of the things that I really like about PbP is that I can think so much more in-depth about my responses and painting the scene -- as both a player and GM -- when there isn't a table waiting on me to figure out how to describe what's going on.  One possible solution is trusting the players enough to RP some of the less-important NPC responses and vice-versa, but I don't think that would solve the issue outright.  And, you can't have combat level tension in every RP scene. The players and the chars need to breathe sometimes.  As a GM I've noticed that immediate carrot-over-stick incentives can help some: "Hey, nice job with the RPing there, take a karma," or "Hey, when I look at the last page of IC, I see you've posted two-to-one over anyone else, take a karma."  Tossing hooks toward specific chars can also help when they haven't been posting as regularly, but I've noticed in my own games doing so puts so many spinning plates in the air that there's a very real risk of losing momentum in the actual run because people are chasing down all these side bits and pieces.  It makes the game feel very real and inhabited, but there's a cost there as well.

I can say that I was most invested in the game when my understanding of what Ace wanted and how he could best enact his plans to get it were immediately available.  I loved Sam's confession about the commlinks followed by the combat, followed by Ace thinking about whether or not he should just geek Sam there.  I loved the tension between characters when they showed up,and in retrospect I think I should have made a bigger deal about Katsina not telling Ace that she was a vampire before she was outed to him.

I was least invested in the game when it came to Chino.  I just didn't do a good job with him, and ended up playing him paper-flat.  Big thanks to Tec for keeping him involved and with some semblance of a personality -- however split it was. 

I also feel like Doc and Ace was under-explored, which is too bad because there could've been some fun stuff there.  I just never got a sense of what their budding relationship was really like other than the mutual need that they had in one another.  My imagination just faltered in that regard for whatever reason.

Although it happened more early in the game than later on, I really liked the interactions that Ohanzee and Ace had, especially at the Natelys. 

Thanks again to everyone for sticking with the game and for being such great players.  I've mainly stopped advertising in the Looking For Games threads, so watch your inboxes for invites should I need any fill-ins or start up a new campaign.  Should you be too busy, etc. null sheen chummer, but you've all got a spot at my table anytime.

[Zweiblumen]

The hardest part about PbP is loosing players/gms.  This game had both!  Yet still survived

I consider this a big success as well.  It was wonderfully organized and the attention to detail was obvious through out.  Credit for that to both Ryo and Tec!  Having well defined rolls for the team members is great as is having a "team leader."  I love that it sort of revolved between Sam and Ohanzee for this game, with most of it being Ohanzee (but that's besides the point).

To Mal's point about the difficulty of role-playing complex interactions, IMHO these are as tedious as "combat."  It's just social combat instead of pew-pew combat.  It doesn't lend itself to long missives from one side or the other, but trusting your players/GM to "Do The Right Thing" (TM) can allow for the longer posts.  PbP can be rough, but it's better than when "Post" was short for Postal Service rather than Forum Post.  I really like the creativity I get to express through PbP vs. F2F play.  That said, I like the reactivity of F2F.  As the game says, there's a price for everything.

To RnB's point on Doc not having as much of a direct relationship/interaction with others in the group: I think that really happened when I chose to go PvP early on.  That caused a lot of distrust between Sam/Chino/Ohanzee and Doc, which was his "team" and he was somewhat alienated from Kat/Ace due to being on the "other team."  I was also trying to keep him a bit aloof (but not rude) with his high intellect and a bit of a alien personality from the nanites.  I felt he was the most comfortable with the fact that he was a non-metahuman entity (consciousness) using a meat construct to reside in.  This, along with the limited options for moving on, left him so that helping the team was in his best interest, but he wasn't going to be overly friendly.  He'd do his job, and help/protect the team to further the cause of getting what he wanted.  Namely to not be hunted and have the means to live independently.

Mal: if you get that game started, I'll be the first to toss my hat in the ring.  I think you'll make a great GM!
RnB: I'll keep my eyes open for a PM

[Tecumseh]

Post #2000!

To Poindexter's question, a lot of the possibilities were listed in the character backgrounds that I posted. But I also think the Ryo had a much different type of game in mind. In some of his PMs to me, it sounded like he intended to layer confrontations and enemies on top of each other. For example:

1) The Vory come looking for Sam;
2) Ares comes looking for Ace and APB;
3) The Black Lodge comes looking for Katsina for being a turncoat;
4) The original Johnson (also Black Lodge) comes looking for Sam for reneging on their deal;
5) SecForce comes looking for Ohanzee in connection with Gloria's disappearance;
6) The Atlantean Foundation and/or the cultists come looking for their artifact;
7) The free spirits come looking for their bodies; and,
8) Doc's nanites make the group feared and hunted even more than they already are.

I tackled some of these complications (1, 3, 7) but largely did them separately. Based on a few things Ryo said (like not intending Tabula Rasa to be a long game) and other things he did (like using Ace to one-shot a helicopter out of the sky with a hunting rifle), I'm guessing what he had in mind was a fast-paced game where the enemies and complications quickly popped up, layered on top of each other, but also quickly went by the wayside without drawn-out encounters dedicated to each. Ironically that's similar to the game type that Malevolence and I are contemplating, but that's not the direction I wanted to take Tabula Rasa a year ago. I'm still very happy with my decision, but next I might try it the other way.

Small tangent before I forget: the Knight-Errant HTR team that you encountered at the beginning of the game was not a K-E HTR team. They were the cultists, posting as a K-E HTR team. There were some clues about this - such as the team speaking Lakota but not English, and why K-E, an Ares subsidiary, would be flying a Nissan Hound instead of an Ares Dragon - but the group didn't seize on them. That's not a big deal as there's probably not much you could have done differently anyway, but I thought I'd mention it. End tangent.

To rednblack's point about Chino, I also regret that Katsina moved a bit into the background when I started GMing. This was for several reasons:
A) Trying to avoid having a Mary Sue;
B) Trying to avoid situations where Katsina is interacting with NPCs, thus leaving me to RP with myself; and,
C) General exhaustion after being responsible for all the other OOC and IC posting that a GM has to do.

I'd often want to post something for Katsina but then I'd look back and say, "Gawd, half the posts on the page are already from me. Let's leave some space for the others to breathe, shall we?" The flipside of this is that she didn't get as much attention and development as she might have otherwise. She's one of my favorite PCs that I've ever played, so I might have to find/create some opportunities for her to have some further adventures. I like some of the constraints she offers (being largely focused on melee combat and alchemy) and also some of the contradictions she embodies (the helpful, maternal natural-born-killer).

As for rednblack's idea about a street-level game, I fancy myself something of an expert on the topic, having run three games that match that exact description over the last 20 years (2E, 4E, and 5E). My very first post on these boards (1999 posts ago) was an ode to street-level games, which I updated here not long ago. Zweiblumen got to play in the most recent campaign for about three months before Mrs. Tec produced Tec Jr., bringing the campaign to a close. While I love these types of games, I am coming to the conclusion that they are best played live and in-person, if possible. They benefit from the use of a wiki or other shared site to navigate what happens between sessions, but the on-the-fly developments from political maneuvering and social machinations and strategizing all really benefit from being done in real-time ("reactivity" as Zweiblumen says). The success of a game like this is also highly dependent on your players, even moreso than a usual game. If your players need a clear direction to go, they'll often sit still due to inertia and miss a lot of opportunities. If you have players that understand and appreciate an open-world sandbox and what they can do with it if they seize the initiative, then you'll have an absolute blast. I'm happy to discuss this more (at extreme length) if anyone is interested. One day I'll write a guide for it.

Other game concepts: I've been toying around with some one-on-one game concepts. As in, one player, one GM. One idea is to do a game from the Johnson's perspective. The player is the corper who is trying to negotiate internal politics to impress his boss and outsmart his rivals. No combat (or very little, in case one of your fellow Vice Presidents gets frustrated enough to eliminate you) but lots of Machiavellian manipulations. A variation of that would be the fish-out-of-water game, where the PC is a corper with a corpers skills that gets unceremoniously dumped into the shadows due to forces outside of his or her control. Another idea is "a day in the life of a shadowrunner". In my head, this is more of a shared writing exercise exploring what day-to-day life is like in the cracks of society. There's still an opportunity for action as the world unfolds around the player, but the player isn't the driver or the catalyst. After all, sometimes you can't go to a Stuffer Shack without a food fight breaking out.

That's enough for post #2000. I'd like to thank my generous employers for underwriting this post by paying me for my last hour of "work".

[Zweiblumen]

Post #2000!

W00t!  WTG Tec

Zweiblumen got to play in the most recent campaign for about three months before Mrs. Tec produced Tec Jr., bringing the campaign to a close.

This was a great campaign.  I think RealTimeGroupMessaging is a great compromise between PbP and F2F for promoting a lot of role-play while allowing for roll-play.  But, then I could be biased as Tec runs a great game apparently no matter what format we throw at him.  I hope, selfishly, that he's able to find the time to run another game because I really want to play in another Tecumseh game   (I might even play a non-matrix monkey one time!)

I'd like to thank my generous employers for underwriting this post by paying me for my last hour of "work".

++ to that.  My employers have underwritten a significant portion of my SR experience due to how much time I spend on these boards

[Poindexter]

When this game started, I worked at a smoke shop. Shortly thereafter, i got fired with no notice three days before my girl lost HER job, too. I was on un-employment for a while, then waited tables for this horrible, abusive armenian couples italian joint, then drove for Uber for a few months, got another shitty job at a sandwich joint making dick for money, and only recently landed something I can live off here in the last few months. I just wanted to give all that as a preface for my only complaint about the game...

I just wish I had been in a more stable place in my personal life, so as to be able to give this game a bit more attention than I did. I feel like i was a part of something really amazing here, and I kinda didn't take as much advantage of it as I could have. Everything that I didn't like about this game was a direct result of my not giving it the attention it warranted.

As for suggestions on improving things, I DO think that maybe a skype chatroom sorta thing might work. Aint gotta be video chat or nothin, but just a regular ole Oldschool typea AOL, Yahoo sorta chatroom thing for everyone in the game to chat bout shit in realtime might work really well.

Also, if anyone EVER considers running another game with these characters, PLEASE allow me to reprise the role of Uncle Sam, the existential crisis murdertroll. I'd utterly LOVE to catch up with these mugs a few years/months down the line.

[Poindexter]

Also, was that encounter with the infected out in the woods something Ryo had left for ya or was that something you cooked up, like the natelys?

[rednblack]

@Tec, thanks for the links.  Looking over them now.  I'll let you know if I come up with any questions.

As for suggestions on improving things, I DO think that maybe a skype chatroom sorta thing might work. Aint gotta be video chat or nothin, but just a regular ole Oldschool typea AOL, Yahoo sorta chatroom thing for everyone in the game to chat bout shit in realtime might work really well.

Forgive my ignorance here, but what does that "look" like?  Are there times when the whole team gets on at once to RP a section, make a plan, do the social stuff?