Roleplaying

[icycalm]

Who's up for a first session this Saturday, 6 or 7PM UTC? If I can get at least 4 players we are playing.


Edit: Sorry, I meant Sunday. Saturday I have the PA tournament.

[Some guy]

Count me in!

[Hanged Man]

Yup, I'm in too. I can play until ~1AM UTC, which is, hopefully, good enough for a full session.

[Steven Berg]

I can play Sunday.

[icycalm]

I can play until ~1AM UTC, which is, hopefully, good enough for a full session.

More than enough.

Remember everyone: we are talking Sunday now. The OP was an error.

[jeffrobot494]

I'm in.

[icycalm]

Okay, hopefully Qpo and recoil will also be in, but either way we are playing.

Whoever's playing should start character threads asap. We should be fully done with the characters in the next couple of days, so I can have a couple of days to test Roll20 with whoever's online. Actually, we might even need to use Roll20 to roll your characters anyway, so everyone should get an account now. I'll get a premium one to unlock all the extra features.

[Qpo]

I'm very in.

[recoil]

I'm in.

[icycalm]

We should have made all the characters by now to make it for Sunday, so we'll have to postpone the first game, I am afraid. I pretty much need one hour of preparation for one hour of play, plus at least an hour per character to finalize the character sheet, which means I'd need to spend at least a dozen hours between now and Sunday working on the game, and there's just not enough time. Qpo is very in, but he can't be bothered to make a character thread, and recoil hasn't said a word.

So we'll just have to put a brake on this and think about it more. To be perfectly honest, I am having second thoughts about it. I love the game to death, but there's a good reason I stopped playing it 20 years ago, and that reason still exists: the damn thing just takes up too much time, especially for the DM. So let's give it some more time and some more thought. I don't want us to rush into anything we are not properly prepared for, and end up having an inferior experience, and forming a bad idea of the game as a result.

[Some guy]

That's fair enough. I'll continue to make my character in case you do decide to run the game.

[jeffrobot494]

Bummer. I still would love to play any time. I'll keep working on my character too, even though it feels a little silly now. Some guy, maybe we can go ahead and create our characters on Roll20.

[icycalm]

lol, I can see the character sheet already:

Strength 20
Constitution 20
Dexterity 20
Intelligence 20
Wisdom 20
Charisma 20

You can't create a character without a DM, silly.

But I can see you guys are excited about this, and that gets me excited too. Sergey read the entire PHB in a day lol. I don't think I've ever read it cover to cover.

I am sure we'll play at some point. Maybe even next week. It won't hurt to try at least one session. But I can't begin work on the adventure (which would take me almost an entire frigging day!) if I don't even know how many people will be playing, and Qpo and recoil let us down big time. I'd rather they have declined to play, than say they're in and then leave me hanging there. Maybe we should just aim for a 4-player team for next weekend.

[icycalm]

Oh but I forgot, there's also danjiro in that case... He already bought Fantasy Grounds on Steam, so he's fired up to play too.

We need to think about this more.

[recoil]

Sorry for the wait. I've been reading the Handbook and the Thief's Handbook. The amount of detail that you can put on your character is mindboggling and as a completely new player to this it felt a little overwhelming. I've put up my character sheet on the board for review and to start keeping track of everything.

[recoil]

Also, do I need to be around for the character roll? I wouldn't mind not seeing the rolls myself, since the adventurer kit is generic, I only need 9 dexterity to be a thief and think it would be quite fun to write a back story based on a random roll for this first character.

[icycalm]

Via email:

So I just flunked the (re-re-)re-exam and realized that the only times I've been actually productive in school is when I haven't checked Insomnia at all (that one period of like 3-4 months I was gone). In other words, I'm dropping out of the D&D group and won't be checking the site for a while. If you need me for the PA clan games I'm still in if you let me know by email that you need me to make four. I'll probably even set Steam to not log me into Friends automatically (I might play Dota 2 a bit if I start to get cabin fever, but hopefully not).

I had to make a stink to get a reply from him. And why couldn't he post it in the forum? This is why I am hesitant to jump into the game. I just don't want to make a huge time investment, only to get dumped later on by people who can't even be bothered to make a forum post to inform others of what they are doing. When would he have informed me of this, if I hadn't complained in the forum? On Sunday morning?

[icycalm]

And yes, I said that it's okay for people to come and go from a campaign, but not before we've even begun, when I am supposed to be making preparations for an adventure of 6 characters! 6 1st-level characters is already underpowered for every published adventure for 1-3 levels (they all have additional requirements such as "at least one 2nd-level character", or "character levels totalling at least 9"), and with one player less we can basically forget about it unless I make major changes to it. Which I can't fucking make if I don't know how many players are playing!

Anyway. I still want to play. I just had a bad day yesterday because I've been taking on too many projects and underperforming in all of them, but when I woke up today all I could think of was D&D. So we'll build the characters slowly one by one, we'll get everyone to read as much of the PHB and the FR sourcebook as possible, I will prepare at least two adventures to give you a lot of choice, and when all the chips are in the right place, either next week or the week after, we'll play. And danjiro is in if he wants in. Just make a character thread and we'll take it from there.


P.S. I also found an adventure for "5 to 8" characters, by the way, so parties larger than 6 are not completely unheard of. I am slowly going through all the published adventures available (many of which I was not even aware existed), and I'll see what our options are. If anyone else besides Qpo wants to drop out or is having second thoughts about this, please let me know as soon as you know.

[icycalm]

Also, do I need to be around for the character roll? I wouldn't mind not seeing the rolls myself, since the adventurer kit is generic, I only need 9 dexterity to be a thief and think it would be quite fun to write a back story based on a random roll for this first character.

You've chosen the most generic kit and you don't even care to be around when we roll your character (which, the way the last character creation method works, is not even possible). There's no way to half-ass this without at the same time diminishing everyone else's enjoyment of the game. If people make strong characters I could throw you straight into a full adventure even without any 2nd level characters, and you'd have a chance of surviving it. But the more half-assed characters you have the greater the chances that you, and maybe the whole party, will die early on, and the less fun everyone will end up having.

Or I could try finding some short 0-1 level adventure to start you with, which will give people a bad impression of the game because they are not very exciting.

[recoil]

Alright, definitely don't want to half-ass this. Since we are taking more time to set things up, how about we use this Sunday to roll for characters?

[icycalm]

I don't want to spend my entire Sunday rolling characters. It's fun for players, because they only have to do one, but I have to do six, and it's just not fun -- not without any actual gaming thrown in to ease the sting of the boring (for me, since I am not making one for myself) character generation.

The best thing for me is for people to nail down as much as possible in their individual threads before, and then, when I see them online, and I have an hour to spare, to take them on Roll20 and finish things up.

But I don't want people to be deciding on classes and kits when they are with me. It's even better if they have already picked their race, alignment and all their proficiencies in advance. They can always make changes when they see the actual numbers, but the better prepared they are, the quicker this process will be for me. Hence why I am asking everyone to post as much as they can in their individual character threads in advance.

[icycalm]

Including names, by the way. And once you have a name, I want you to rename the thread from "jeffrobot's wizard" to "Merlin (1st level patrician illusionist)".