Experience Awards

[bravesirrobin]

In this thread I will award XP. I'll try to make a note about why there are differences in the awards for each session, though generally the differences will be small enough that it's largely irrelevant. These are not meant to be overly critical or insulting, cos I think you are all great roleplayers, just my feelings about how the session went. I would appreciate feedback in the same vein about my own performance as GM.

This post will contain a running total of what we have covered so far;

Jarakel: 5190 XP
Lu Tsen: 4980 XP
Raffgar: 5145 XP
Y'lemon: 5200 XP


NPCs:
Siaz: 2400XP
Pong: 1300XP
Rilling: 2100XP
Smother: 1500XP

[bravesirrobin]

Backstories:

Jarakel: 50XP, good story, i think we mentioned details that could be added.

Lu Sen: 40XP, interesting stuff, brief in places, but good on relationships

Raffgar: 40XP, nice, a sense of time-scale would be useful, as would more of the emotional impact of stuff

Y'lemon: 80XP Awesome. very good on emotional as well as events. again sense of timescale would help

[bravesirrobin]

First Session:

Ok, there wasn't really that many encounters here, so there's not a great deal of XP to earn. Awards should increse for next session.

Jarakel: 270XP. good roleplay, good ideas and fulfilled your function within the group.

Lu Sen: 240XP. good roleplay, not quite sure what you were trying to accomplish at times, also i think you could have done tech-ie type things more

Raffgar: 260XP. good roleplay, fulfilled function.

Y'lemon: 240XP a little uninvolved at times, which is mostly my fault, but roleplay was good.

[Blackrat]

bravesirrobin said:

Lu Sen: 240XP. good roleplay, not quite sure what you were trying to accomplish at times, also i think you could have done tech-ie type things more

In what sense? Also bear in mind that my character is by no means just a techie queen.

And for your notes, it's Lu-Tsen

[bravesirrobin]

cool. i will make sure i use the right version from now on. though i can't be bothered to go back and edit it in.

as for my note i can't actually remember now sorry, will try to be more specific in future. as for the techie thing, i know you can do a lot more than just techie, but i think your techie skills could prove more useful than you have realised yet. i am reluctant to say more, cos it's still something you could think of next session, but there are some more specific things i am thinking of.

[Blackrat]

bravesirrobin said:

cool. i will make sure i use the right version from now on. though i can't be bothered to go back and edit it in.

No no, that's fine. Just for the future.

bravesirrobin said:

as for my note i can't actually remember now sorry, will try to be more specific in future. as for the techie thing, i know you can do a lot more than just techie, but i think your techie skills could prove more useful than you have realised yet. i am reluctant to say more, cos it's still something you could think of next session, but there are some more specific things i am thinking of.

Ok. I'll think about it. Remember I know very little about the setting, though, so if there's something I'm missing because of that I might need a little prompting... But although my character does like teching, she prefers talking. (Unlike in RL ) I'll see what I can come up with. If you're very lucky, I might even post it.

Also...

bravesirrobin said:

I would appreciate feedback in the same vein about my own performance as GM.

...I award you 300XP for your GMing.

[bravesirrobin]

YAY!!!! wooooo XP.

basically anything mechanical you can make a repair role to see if it's possible to get some sort of funtionality out of it, i'll point out some stuff you could have done when we have escaped from the situation at hand.

[Blackrat]

Sounds good.

[Blackrat]

bravesirrobin said:

i'll point out some stuff you could have done when we have escaped from the situation at hand.

I assume we've now done that? I'll p'raps catch up with you sometime in the next couple of days and you can give me some ideas?

(P.S. Hope you feel better soon! Hugs)

[bravesirrobin]

Oh yeah. The main one was comlinks actually. And you spotted that already. Like I said, you can make repair checks to see if anything is repairable. And you can often monkey around with droids with computer use checks (e.g. the sonar on the mining droid could have been repaired).

Actually, in terms of improving future sessions how did everyone find that? BR seemed a little pissed off at points but I was hoping it was IC.

It also seemed like you guys felt a little annoyed at me at times for not pointing stuff out to you more, but I'm hoping by you coming up with the ideas yourselves, there will be more sense of achievement. There were multiple ways to get out of the situation I had set up as well. You guys found the most obvious and probably easiest one, but I wanted to mention in case you felt rail-roaded. Also the campaign is going to become way more open from this point forward.

Experience awards will be up when LH returns my corebook. As will a new PBP thread to take us up to next session.

[Blackrat]

bravesirrobin said:

Oh yeah. The main one was comlinks actually. And you spotted that already. Like I said, you can make repair checks to see if anything is repairable. And you can often monkey around with droids with computer use checks (e.g. the sonar on the mining droid could have been repaired).

Ah, ok. I'll certainly be on the lookout from hereon in - thanks!

bravesirrobin said:

Actually, in terms of improving future sessions how did everyone find that? BR seemed a little pissed off at points but I was hoping it was IC.

It was mostly IC (LH, look out for Lu's apology in an upcoming post But see also below.

bravesirrobin said:

It also seemed like you guys felt a little annoyed at me at times for not pointing stuff out to you more, but I'm hoping by you coming up with the ideas yourselves, there will be more sense of achievement. There were multiple ways to get out of the situation I had set up as well. You guys found the most obvious and probably easiest one, but I wanted to mention in case you felt rail-roaded. Also the campaign is going to become way more open from this point forward.

This did annoy me a bit at times - I felt very railroaded. Perhaps it was just me, but I couldn't see any way to progress other than the path we took, and at several points our good ideas were wasted because they had no chance of success (e.g. all the faffing around over chasms; me trying to find something useful in the lift wreckage; climbing around in the vents while we were still inside the building).

I don't want to be harsh here - I understand there's a (very) difficult balance to strike between creating a realistic challenge where certain things just won't work and allowing the players to exercise their minds and come up with innovative solutions. But I did feel a bit like I didn't know what to do other than "click at random" because the problem was obvious but the obvious solutions were impossible, which distracted us from finding a workable solution. (Indeed, if I could have thought of anything else to do, Lu and Y'lemon's confrontation would have been avoided, because I would have had an alternative suggestion to offer rather than just saying "those paths will be a waste of time and an unnecessary risk", which I was convinced was correct, but was forced to go against anyway because we didn't have an alternative.)

Part of this is that I'm not very good at thinking on my feet, so my fault. Part of it is also that I don't really know much about the setting and haven't done any SciFi RP before, so am a bit slow to pick up on some stuff I can do - tech. stuff in particular. However, I think there are a couple of other things that would help:

i) Allowing us more varied ways of solving problems. (I know you say there were some, but given how obvious the apparent source of the problem, I think the way we tackled it was inevitable - feel free to explain and disagree iyw.) This not only means having several ways to solve a problem, but also giving us some kind of benefit for good rolls on good ideas, even if realistically the idea is doomed to failure. A slightly contrived example might be: Although my search roll to find useful stuff in the lift wreckage wasn't going to turn up a way to make the lift work again, it could have turned up something useful that we could have used in some other way - maybe another droid part or something, I dunno. Perhaps that other mining droid that we eventually found later on. But the point is, that way I'm being rewarded for trying to solve the problem (and rolling well) even if my solution isn't going to work directly. This isn't a great example because my solution was too obvious and it's better I guess to reward innovation and perceptiveness, but hopefully the point I'm trying to make is clear.

ii) Describing more of the surroundings, especially the unimportant bits. That will (a) give us more stuff to play off -> more ideas for solving problems, without you having to tell us directly, and (b) mean we're not focusing so much on the obvious important bits -> we might spot less obvious alternative solutions.

Does that make sense? For example, at the beginning when we were struggling to get out of the building, we had a broken heater (obvious problem), and a quick search revealed enough bits of maintenance droid to make 1 working one, and a mostly-useless mining droid. We fixed up the maintenance droid and it solved the immediate problem, and we took along the mining droid which solved a specific later problem (avoiding one of us getting stuck in a web, in this case, but it could have been using sonar instead). More random information (e.g. about stuff we found in the search or other things in the various rooms except the broken heater), while completely redundant from your point of view, would have meant firstly that we had more things to play with and therefore more options for tackling our problems, and also that the obvious heater problem was less obvious, thereby occupying less of our attention, potentially allowing us to discover alternative exits.

Plus of course more description is always good

Sorry, that was very long-winded. Giant in the Playground (www.giantitp.com) has a few good articles about texture, one of which - here - explains my point probably better than I have, and certainly more concisely. Sigh.

Anyway. You know I'm only being long-winded because (a) I can never express a point concisely and (b) I'm trying to help by explaining clearly. I'm not trying to bitch at you (God bless the Censor Ship and all who sail in her), and I think you're an ace GM, so plenty more GMXP from me but you did ask for feedback, so here's my rather extensive two pen'eth.

One tiny other point: We spent quite a lot of time looking up rules I know I'm as bad as (or worse than) anyone else, but I think it'd help game flow if we didn't have to stop so often to just check stuff out. This means (a) knowing the rules better and (b) caring less about the rules provided we're all having fun. I'm heavily in favour of (b) myself, but hey. And while knowing the rules is everyone's responsibility, it's particularly important that the GM knows them (or at least makes calls about queries in-game without disrupting the flow), especially as in this case he owns the rulebook too

[johandenerad]

I'm on board with the rules thing. As far as description and flavour goes, could we not bear some of the responsibility. Exalted style stunting things into existence as long as they're not too twinky/weird/lame?

[Blackrat]

Very true, definitely. But that's trickier when I don't know the setting well, because I don't know what I can find or what I can do with it in the world. Also e.g. "I find a droid part that does X" is enormously variable, so deciding what's twinky and what's not is tricky.

[bravesirrobin]

Thanks for the advice, I appreciate it, and I don't consider it you bitching at me.

I know I'm still weak on the rules stuff, but I am trying to get better, I find the easiest way to learn a system is to play it and I hope I will improve rapidly as we move forward.

The faffing about with chasms, was literally because you guys took a wrong turn. I tried to drop hints that you were going in the wrong direction, but again I didn't wanna just say "Don't go this way".

Basically the obvious solutions weren't impossible, they were just more difficult to exploit than . There were places in the mines where more equipment could have been found, that would have let you exploit the underground river or go up the mine shaft. The air vents could have led you in to the mines or out into the town - but again I didn't want to hand it to you on a plate, so it wasn't as simple as just climbing through them.

Describing unimportant bits of the surroundings has always been difficult for me, my mind tends to work in broad strokes, but it is something I will try to work on.

Basically I think you make several good points, and I will try to work on them, and thank you for saying it. And also, I am a fan of the collaborative thing, so although some things will not work, other things will if they seem like good ideas even when I haven't accounted for them.

[Blackrat]

Cool. And I'll try to get better at "thinking outside the box", to cliché it up a bit, too.

One small point:

bravesirrobin said:

There were places in the mines where more equipment could have been found, that would have let you exploit the underground river or go up the mine shaft.

But how should we have found these? By walking around randomly? Because that's what Lu objected to (quite sensibly in my view )