- Ryan

Another reason people jump up to problem solve first, ask questions later on the Internet is to battle the signal vs. noise issue – also known as “Too Long; Didn’t Read” (tl;dr). Which is an oddly telling description for the same problem Ryan addresses under a different name.

If someone presents their “solution” earlier rather than later, there is the perception that it will be seen; before thread drift, off-topic posts, etc. dilute the conversation. There is an intrinsic reward.

So how do we create incentives to create conversations with depth?

Glad to know I’m headed in the right direction – and I REALLY can’t wait to see what you’ve been working on for Mythender.

Then I realized that applied in all kinds of things, but in math I couldn’t bullshit my way past it.

So, what I’m saying is yes. When you actually write down each part of the model in your head, you find the bits that you hadn’t realized you’d missed.

On a related note, this won’t affect my pitch for DHTG, as things appear to be settling down and I’ve still got some time.

But if you do, bill it like the opener to a movie. And point out that whatever they do (and maybe how they’ll die) will be reincorporated in the latter part.

- Ryan

I was in a Call of Cthulhu game with my closest friend out of high school running the show (he now runs the show on a string of great novels, comic books, and other stuff, and his gaming just foreshadowed his brilliance). He managed to run a periodic game that included at various times my wife, his (future) wife, my cousin, and several other friends. The game began shortly after Silence of the Lambs came out, about mid to late 1991 and predating Delta Green and the X-files. The cutting edge (from our perspective) premise was that we all played FBI agents. We all lived in different places and were in various graduate schools, working, etc., but holidays we managed to get together to play through several investigations over a couple of years.

I played a character named Rajiv Jayachandra, a forensic specialist (and I wish I had a lock on the idea because damn if Chris Carter didn’t steal my character and turn him into a hot redhead). In any case, he was a crack investigator, though not the shooter for the team by a long shot. I walked a fine line, on the one hand having him the academic in a group of gun toting G-men, on the other hand he spoke like the character of Apu on the Simpsons, and on the third hand (Indian-American character humor there) having him emphasize his ethnic identity as an important part of his background. I think he holds up in retrospect, though clearly I had few “credentials” to be a South Asian “script writer” being pretty much “a white male aged 18 to 49″ (“everyone listens to me, no matter how dumb my suggestions are.” [thank you Home Simpson]).

We had a good run on a mix of home brew and published scenarios, and then our Keeper, my friend, pulled out a tough scenario from the Cthulhu Now! book (“The Evil Stars”). The investigation went well enough, but it became clear that our likely Federal Agent response to the threat was likely to get us all killed, because we were just not that magically inclined (in a previous adventure, our explanation to the internal investigation on why subduing a bunch of drug dealers (okay, they were cultists with an evil Cthulhoid golem)) required nearly 1000 rounds of ammunition based on the spent casings at the scene, and the best we could come up with was “They were on Crack, sir.”).

So, as often presents itself in a C of C investigation, there was a way to foil the plot, if you didn’t mind selling your soul and losing your sanity. I decided that my investigator would do it. He was extremely protective of the other characters, and arogant enough to believe that he had the right to make the decision on his own to save them, even if it meant a pre-meditated doom for him. I basically entered into a devil’s bargain with an Elder God (or its avatar, or hyperintelligence, or whatever; Hastur, I think). In return, I got a magical artefact that could blast what the bad guys were summoning, and an additional psychic power of some sort, which actually did not come into play.

In the future, for this, I would always be in danger of turning and becoming the being’s vessel.

So, with a large amount of the details omitted, I let the team know that we could take on the baddies. We strapped on the kevlar, got our big guns, and stopped the ritual, which was at a rock concert, just in time. The artefact worked as advertised, and what could have been a messy death for us, instead worked out to be a reverse TPK for the cultists.

Happy ending.

Except, now I was the liability for my fellow agents. Only one thing to do. I made sure they were all evacuated from the scene. We let the Bureau investigators and local law enforcement take over, and then I drove off by myself. I did not write a note that I recall. I just decided that Rajiv would have thought it was time to lay down the burden since he was now a ticking time bomb. He had not failed his SAN roll, he was not temporarily insane. This was as a sane a decision as a Call of Cthulhu investigator makes.

He jacked a shell into the chamber of his service weapon and then ate the bullet.

The silence, followed by the shocked “no!” from my fellow players was pretty priceless. It was, in fact, unforgettable.

And, with the fine twist of Call of Cthulhu fate, I found out from my friend the Keeper that the curse I thought I had ended with that bullet was just transferred. Though it would have been even more ironic if it transferred to another player, the write-up suggested that it was passed via blood relationship, so somewhere, one of Rajiv’s cousins had a real “oh crap!” moment. My friend hinted that he might weave that back in down the line.

I rolled up a new character, but I never got to play in that campaign again. The logistics as we all went our different ways became far to impossible. Those games were some of the most fun, and best run, I have ever played. And I went out with a bang, on my own terms.

Hard to beat.

Thanks for providing space to share.

It’s nice that y’all have jokey times with this. Not everyone has. Ask any group where the girlfriend-of-the-GM ran the show because of sex.

- Ryan

http://21sided.o-r-g.org/2012/01/dungeon-world-xp-hack.html

Summary: Drop Aid, but Mark XP when the move is covered by one of their highlights, not one of yours. Also maybe tweak Aid or Interfere move to not be quite so crap.

That’s why I ditched Aid/Hinder as a flag.

- Ryan

We found healing to be the most problematic. We found it worked better in Aid than in Defend, as Aid/Hinder by itself is very weaksauce for the first few sessions until you have some +2 or +3 bonds. But we had other problems with healing anyway, as per: http://21sided.o-r-g.org/2012/01/21sidedint-dungeon-world-analysis.html

We used hard coded, as it’s easier for everyone to keep track of, with the occasional “That was totally Discover, mark XP” when as GM I noticed it.