Posts made by Ominous

Looks like I was right.

Thanks to those who responded!

@arkandel Not too many Ominouses out there surprisingly. Generally, if you see the handle, it's me or was me.

Why is the facility a part of this? Why not just have accounts and people can chat oocly then, , when a story starts, they get a character name, described, etc. for the character they are going to play. Unless there is a metaplot involving the facility and why the archetypes are there, it seems unnecessary fluff and sounds like it could lead to crossover as players drag events from one story into another. (You didn't save me in the last story, so I am going to fire my shotgun at you in this story, even if it doesn't make sense in this story.)

20 years ago, my teenage self was trying to figure out a username. I am not very creative or good with names and somehow I ended up with an adjective for something menacing and dangerous - exactly how a surly, jaded, "misunderstood" teenager wants to be seen. I have used it all over the internet ever since.

Deduction games, especially hidden movement games, are my favorite board game genre. I sadly don't get enough in real life as my friends are mainly boring Eurogamers, who like stock games and efficiency games, so I am turning here to scratch that itch. This thread is to see if A) people actually scroll down and look at this forum topic and B) people would be interested in giving this a go.

Letters from Whitechapel
The game is thematically focused on the police (up to 5 players controlling 5, no more or less, officers) hunting down Jack the Ripper (1 player) in the Whitechapel district of London. The game is based on four "nights" of play where Jack the Ripper kills a woman, a starting location the police know, and flees back to his lair, an unchanging location that he selected before the start of play, by moving around on numbered circles. Jack's movements along the circles are hidden, he doesn't have a piece on the board, and each turn he writes down where he moves to from his current written down spot, so a record of where he has been is kept. He has a few tricks up his sleeve to help him evade police, but each night, he gets fewer tricks.

The police hope to corner him, arrest him, or be able to declare his base's location at the end of the game. They do this by searching for clues at numbered circles surrounding the separate movement locations they use. If Jack has been at a circle they search, it gets marked with a clue marker. Jack has 15 turns to get back to his base by the end of the night or he loses. If he gets back to his base at the end of the fourth night and the police name the wrong circle as his base (a last chance at the very end for them to catch him), he wins.

Explanation of Rules: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f7UKJE0bcwk

Current Thoughts of Play-by-Post Rules
I will likely have six actions due every day - three by the police and three by Jack - at 11 am (police), 1 pm (Jack), 5 pm (police), 7 pm (Jack), 11 pm (police), 1 am (Jack) with a helper or me posting results an hour after the deadline (I work 3-11 pm and frequently get forced overtime to 7 am, so I sure as hell am not going to be awake at 11 am or even 1 pm, thus a helper will be needed for these times to work). Jack will be controlled by either one player or a team of four players discussing options with main control of Jack rotating each game night. Jack's actions will be PMed to me and my helper. The police will be controlled by everyone else with one poster having main control ever game nights, which will be resolved simultaneously (a difference from the board game). If there is enough interest, I might rotate main control of the police more frequently than after every game night, so more people get a chance to shine as the Chief.

Justice Anthony Kennedy is retiring, giving Trump another pick on the Supreme Court. After Neil Gorsuch's stellar performance so far, I wait with bated breath to see who Dear Leader nominates this time around.

@jennkryst Only if TS is allowed. Let's get that hot, hot facehugger action going.

I have wanted to do a few murder mystery games. This would only work as very short term MU*s.

@Thenomain Condemns only affected prestige which had no mechanical bearing on anything other than an e-peen score. If there was honestly a conspiracy to condemn Dawn that was a complete waste of effort and resources for one of the most pointless causes. Might as well work towards assassination or something.

I miss Dawn. That was some of the best RP I had on any game I have ever played.

On a more relevant note, I think that praises and, if disses they were to be brought back, may need (would need in the case of disses) diminishing returns for multiples in short amounts of time. The public can only be wowed or disgusted so much in a short amount of time before it becomes old news. After the Nth woman came forward about Bill Cosby/Harvey Weinstein/insert your least favorite scumbag here, were we that much more shocked or outraged?

@roz Just want to note that Darren voted against it. Redrain wanted nothing to do with the elves that wasn't head on spike related.

@roz I am pretty sure it only costs me 1 AP to share clues.

@thenomain The stock market is not hard to game-ify. Many board games have done it. It's just a really big auction house. People are selling X at Y price and other people are buying A at B price. Once these people meet and agree to Z price, that sets the new value of the stock. That is a very simplified version, but a MU* only needs a simplified version.

@roz I didn't say I wanted to be the gatekeeper or the sole possessor of it. It was the ease with which other people were gaining what I worked a while to gain. Neither would I say that what I want is necessarily good for the game. I was describing my personal reaction and feelings.

Of course keeping them difficult to access makes clues become similar to xp bloat - another barrier to entry for new players, as all the dinosaurs with clues overwhelm the new players with none.

@roz It was balanced out by me praising every god humans have ever worshipped for cutting down on the clue spam.

I am by nature an information hoarder. I like working hard to dig up clues, and parting with them only to very trusted people. Watching something I slowly digged up spread like a wildfire irked me.

I was also darkly happy when the nasty "you know too much and /they/ now know you know too much" revelation made the rounds.

@bananerz Apparently you weren't around for the first three months or so of clues when people had diarrhea of the mouth when it came to clues. Every scene had someone who was offering every single clue they had. I ended up with like 100 over the course of this time. Staff ended up putting an AP cost to it, which cut down on the sharing, but there was a brief bit of unhappiness at the cost being added.

@arkandel said in #WIDWW pt 2 - ST, Player, or staff?:

Some throw the rulebook in my face. Anecdote: Back on BITN I ran a PrP about a portal into some weird-ass mystery dimension. One of the mortals in it afterwards made a +job (without consulting with me first), CC'ed me to it, +rolled Academics into the +job and then paged me to give them the answers about how the portal was made and how you can open one or close one yourself. When I tried to work with that by offering some tidbits of information it turned that no, they wanted the full thing. Look, Academics, Library 2, 3 successes, gimme the full manual goddammit.

That's when you pull out a d% for sanity damage.

Oh, you didn't know we were playing Call of Cthulhu? We are now, because you had to go poking into things (wo)man was not meant to know.

@jennkryst That's how the Kushiel setting handles it. Until a woman undergoes a certain ritual, no baby-making can happen.

@apos Cogent arguments make me hot.

@tinuviel That was the point of my post. Institutionalizing courts of public opinion, especially ones like MSB, are a bad idea.