'The Magicians' again -- time period?

[bear_necessities]

@il-volpe said in 'The Magicians' again -- time period?:

major part of setting is a school from which you graduate, people may want time to go faster so it's conceivable to ICly complete the program within the MU's lifespan.

If the major part of the setting is a school from which you graduate, why would you want IC time to go fast and conceivably have people graduating and not interacting with the main setting?

I'm a fan of faster time pacing as long as there's a lot of handwavium that plots aren't timeblocked. But that being said like ... think of your setting and try to be realistic about it, because if the POINT OF THE GAME is to be a student at Brakebills (and there's nothing to do past the point of being a student), then maybe don't speed-rush it to graduation.

[GangOfDolls]

@il-volpe I think it's actually to your advantage that the story doesn't actually call out what actual year it is. It could be a few years behind present day, at present day, or actually beyond present day.

The timeline of the show, which in a lot of ways gets into a lot of details the books didn't have time to get into, is actually much more compact. It's happening over an ~18ish months turnaround, but because television requires yearly production cycles our brains assume that this is also happening over several years. It's also the case that most people have more context from the show than the books, so that's their reference point.

I listened to the books on audio file and enjoyed them but actually perfer the way the show tells the story.

There's also the option of picking any number of the 37 timelines out there and just going with that. None of these are elaborated on much, except for the current 40th in which things are taking place, the 23rd in which you see some characters transiting between timelines, and the timeline that makes Dean Fogg a complete psycho.

So, there's a lot to work with and while we know that most of the main/many/some characters eventually die in all 40 timelines, the 'when' of each of them doesn't need a whole lot of expansion other than stating which timeline this is and the outcome hasn't happened yet.

Or you can start the 41st timeline, in which it's all up to you.

[il-volpe]

@bear_necessities A major part, but not necessarily the major part. A solid quarter of the people I've seen express enthusiasm to play want to play hedges, and while I hate to split the player base, it'd be a disservice to the source materials and those players not to let them. So it'll have some New York City magical community goings-on, and graduating won't be the end of a PC.

@GangOfDolls I don't think the show and the books tell the same story. I figure the show makes a better game and aim for something like the show but with more of the book's imagery; e.g. Brakebills is almost entirely housed in a single sprawling mansion that has some rooms that are bigger on the inside; it does not look like the University of British Columbia.

I had not considered having any of the timelines from the source materials apply, even if they do overlap with the game's timeline. That seems like running a module for players who just watched a different group play the module.

[Derp]

@il-volpe said in 'The Magicians' again -- time period?:

FS3, with a lot of odd prerequisites.

How? FS3 doesn't handle magic at all.

[bear_necessities]

@il-volpe I'd really nail down the game set-up before you even begin to worry about the time period. Having hedges + graduate students + Brakebills students + whatever is quite a large spread, and you really run the risk of cliques icing people out of plots, especially if there's not a common goal to unite them all.

Why not make a game about hedges? The hedge community has a lot of interesting aspects to it and could be a good game. It would attract people (like me) who are particularly meh about playing The Magicians: Harry Potter Edition and don't want to play magic college students going to classes.

[GangOfDolls]

@il-volpe Fair. I think my comment about the timelines is that there's an opportunity for creative license that allows for you to focus on the game you want to run without having to hemmed into what is already known about the timelines. I'm not actually suggesting you foster an environment where timeline hopping hinges on the game function or plot, just that it's an easy way to diverge into what you want to run.

[il-volpe]

@Derp said in 'The Magicians' again -- time period?:

How? FS3 doesn't handle magic at all.

How not? I need to hammer out the details but as far as I can tell, rolling attribute Personal Magicalness + action skill Spellcasting tells you if it worked, and a bunch of different other skills tell if it's within your power, without them you fail without a roll.

[Coin]

@il-volpe said in 'The Magicians' again -- time period?:

@Derp said in 'The Magicians' again -- time period?:

How? FS3 doesn't handle magic at all.

How not? I need to hammer out the details but as far as I can tell, rolling attribute Personal Magicalness + action skill Spellcasting tells you if it worked, and a bunch of different other skills tell if it's within your power, without them you fail without a roll.

What people mean when they say that is "it doesn't integrate magic well into the combat system".

But it hardly stops anyone from using the basic attribute+skill system to make magic rules. You're just going to have to go through some stuff to finangle integrating it into the combat code.

Hardly impossible, depending on both your coding ability and your desire for what magic can and can't do.

See:

Spirit Lake
Gray Harbor
The Savage Skies

[faraday]

@il-volpe said in 'The Magicians' again -- time period?:

@Derp said in 'The Magicians' again -- time period?:

How? FS3 doesn't handle magic at all.

How not? I need to hammer out the details but as far as I can tell, rolling attribute Personal Magicalness + action skill Spellcasting tells you if it worked, and a bunch of different other skills tell if it's within your power, without them you fail without a roll.

FS3 has nothing built in for magic at all. This is mostly a problem if you want to use the combat system, because then you have to handle magic manually and lose a lot of the benefits of the automated combat resolutions.

Now if you aren't planning to use the combat system, or if you can fit your magic system into what's already built in (e.g., magic is a skill like any other and spells work just like weapons), or you want to extend it with custom code (e.g. what Spirit Lake has done) then it may work. It just comes down to what you need.

[il-volpe]

@bear_necessities What's nailed down (but not in any practical way) is that the geographical setting is NYC, with grid representing bits of Brooklyn with its hedge safe house, and bits of Manhattan with another one, with oscillating rival/ally relationships between the two. And Brakebills. While hedges couldn't go to Brakebills easily, students and faculty and alumni can all use both city and school.

You are right about the wide spread, but I want that. And about the cliquiness risk, which is pretty big for any MU and made worse when you set stuff that encourages and enables characters avoiding one another.

BUT I set a lot of store on letting people play what they want if it doesn't roger the game-world. So it goes like, "Hmm, you might have a hard time finding meaningful RP as a talking, teleporting, cigarette-loving bunny, but hey, roll with it so long as you don't come bitching at people if it doesn't work out," and I'll credit the player with either wanting to give finding meaningful RP as a bunny a try regardless of the challenges, or with getting a giggle out of just repeatedly posing plopping into the room with their wiggly nose and saying "Eat my ass," and either enjoying it or finding something else to do.

The hedges and the after-Brakebills stuff is more interesting in the show and books, but I get the impression more people want to play Brakebills than don't. Also, it has a massive advantage in that student characters can be drop-in builds. You've already pretty much got 'late teen to mid-twenties, was a 'gifted' child, probably has a trauma, magic.' It's quick to get from there to playable, especially if it's my game because I'll let you rework your sheet during your first couple of weeks, and let you have many alts if you want, and do not give one fuck if you abandon the character, and prioritize approval speed.

[il-volpe]

@faraday I am not sure what could be built-in to represent magic when magic ranges from slicing somebody in two from a distance to making a marble come alive.

GoB never really had trouble with using the combat system in a half-assed way -- to resolve hits but usually not to resolve damage. 'The Magicians' seems even less likely to really need it.

[bear_necessities]

@il-volpe Sounds like you got it figured out. Good luck with the project!

[il-volpe]

@GangOfDolls said in 'The Magicians' again -- time period?:

The timeline of the show, which in a lot of ways gets into a lot of details the books didn't have time to get into, is actually much more compact. It's happening over an ~18ish months turnaround,

It's not really relevant, but in the final season, when Penny and Plum accidentally time-travel, they state that it's 2020, and that Quentin's welters award is from 2016.

I think the writers fucked up, though.

[il-volpe]

Anybody care to help me out with some (I think) simple code for Ares?

[SixRegrets]

@il-volpe I'd be willing to give it a shot, though I'd certainly put myself into the neophyte category at this point.

[il-volpe]

@SixRegrets Oh. Cool. Wow, thanks. Lemme know what you think:

What I want is for FS3 sheets to have a points pool to represent magical 'juice'. The way luck works is fine so I was gonna copy the code for that and the cookies and rename stuff and mess it up and scour the documentation and eventually bug Faraday asking what I did wrong, which is my usual approach to stuff like this.

What would be a lot better would be a proper plug-in that let you add some spendable pools of settable sizes and settable refresh rates/mechanisms to FS3 to represent whatever a game builder wants. Sanity points, werecritter shifts, how may spoons you can bend with your mind before dying of a nosebleed, how much resistance to the toxic effects of the mind drug.

What would also be nice for 'Magicians' would be to have it warn people if they spend too much at once.

[SixRegrets]

@il-volpe Would you want the 'magical juice'/mana/etc to be used in combat, or just manually spent? If yes to combat, repurposing luck is probably the best bet, though changing the names and etc is doable.

Are we talking about different players having different passive regen rates? Would there be more active methods of restoring this juice? The hospital function comes to mind, but in the world of The Magicians, it probably wouldn't be an every day hospital kind of thing. Performing certain spells causing damage to a 'magical organ' of some sort might work as well to work it into the damage system..

What would you want to happen, aside from a warning, in terms of code, if someone is to run out or exceed their magic pool?

[il-volpe]

@SixRegrets Just manually spent.

Luck is linked to cookies, so you'd add a bit to the cookie code so you also refresh your magic-pool by RPing. This seems appropriate enough and might be kinda great.

It also seems like a potential disaster, so having it easy to switch it to 'you get one every N hours' would be a good idea.

Nope, not different players having different rates, but different pools. I just want the one, but I can see designing a game that used a handful.

Staff should be able to add/subtract points. Also a setting where that's the only way to get them seems likely to be wanted somewhere, sometime.

Re: Spending too much. Besides a warning to the room and to the channel, nothing.

[Tat]

@il-volpe said in 'The Magicians' again -- time period?:

@SixRegrets Just manually spent.

Luck is linked to cookies, so you'd add a bit to the cookie code so you also refresh your magic-pool by RPing. This seems appropriate enough and might be kinda great.

Luck isn't linked to cookies in Ares FS3 anymore - cookies don't actually exist as part of core code, it's an optional plug-in. You get luck by being in scenes. Staff can also award luck.

You say that the way luck works is just fine, but the plug-in you describe is a LOT more complicated. It's not just 'earning' the pool, but limiting what happens when you don't have enough points in your pool (ie, what triggers that nosebleed).

Not to discourage you - it's totally doable. But it's probably not a small tweak and will involve touching a lot of core FS3. It's almost certainly impossible to do as a plugin proper without fiddling with the guts of FS3. Just a head's up!

[faraday]

@Tat said in 'The Magicians' again -- time period?:

It's not just 'earning' the pool, but limiting what happens when you don't have enough points in your pool (ie, what triggers that nosebleed).

As a generic "point tracker" system that's all done with manual effects, it could certainly be done as a separate plugin.

pools - Show your pools.
pool/award - Staff command to award pool points.
pool/spend - Player command to spend pool points.

That really has nothing whatsoever to do with FS3 though. A GM would have to manually apply modifiers or limit what abilities you could roll or whatever.

FS3 itself has no concept of point pools by design (apart from luck points) and as @Tat mentions, it would be impossible to build that in without some heavy custom modifications to the core code.