Re: Wishes for next chapter

[Baelon Drakeson]

For instance, seeing these made me think "
Black goals and Green goals!"

That would give us a variety of goals that at least some of the time would end up in tension (at least in terms of task prioritization): Faction, House, and Personal.
Lovely when an activity promotes all three - but sometimes you would have to choose between working on a personal goal or a faction goal... and you have to decide which is more important to your character.

Perhaps we may even give people conflicting goals, which may play out interestingly. Like having personal goal "
staying chivalrous"
and house goal "
start black market trading"
...

Well, personal goals are... personal. They should be set by the player with Reader's approval.
Really, A character may wish to stay chivalrous, but that is not so much a goal - it is a way of being, a personality trait. I would hope that characters are not swiftly and easily abandoning their long-held and entrenched beliefs out of expediency to accomplish a short-term goal. That's just not realistic - it should require a lot more soul-searching. Ideally, there should be more than one way to accomplish the house goals (and faction, if that is implemented). It should be possible (but perhaps harder) to accomplish the goals honestly and virtuously. Conversely, there should be temptation to 'cheat' or be dishonest or villainous to accomplish the goals easier or with less resources... but with a real risk of being caught or revealed, which would come with a stiff penalty. In other words, just like the real world - illicit activities can be more effective at accomplishing goals, but carry a risk of severe adverse consequences.

For instance, instead of "
start black market trading"
, a goal might be "
establish trade connections (6 VP)"
with legitimate trade deals worth 1-2 VP and black market or otherwise illicit deals being worth 2-3 VP, but with a risk of discovery (which should be able to be at most partially mitigated by the characters, if at all) and resource hits - Influence and Wealth, perhaps (influence for the loss of face, wealth for fines).

I've been working on that, in support of my idea for multiple armies on the same battlefield. Having a single, static battlemap of huge size is, at best, unwieldy. The best I have come up with so far would involve multiple maps, one or more that are static (castles, immovable siege, whatever) and one or more that are 'mobile' - basically rolling maps with coordinates relative to the static map, so that long range siege can play a role in both areas, or units can break off from one "
zone"
of engagement and move to another. As they would share a coordinate system, distances can be calculated. A master map showing the terrain would probably be necessary, but seeing it wouldn't be used for units, we can scale it down to one symbol per square representing the terrain type (with a key of course). It would be easiest if much of the battlespace is mostly all the same terrain, of course... but terrain makes things interesting. :;
):

This is easily done by taking it to an offsite host, like pyromancers. I do a skype group that uses this quite successfully.

I have a marked preference not to utilize off-site technologies as a primary game mechanism. Orokos isn't bad because it is very simple - web forms and server-side scripting. Other than cookie issues that are easy to trouble-shoot and fix, there's not much to go wrong. However, because of various security measure I often have problems with flash-based web applications. They are also not particularly mobile-friendly, and I know some of our players post from mobile devices frequently. As a means to generate terrain maps to use as reference, which are then posted to the forums? Maaaybe. As our primary combat maps? I'd strongly vote no.

Thank you, no. Contributor? Sure - we all are, all the time. Architect? No. Too many ways that could be completely unfun for various players. Not everyone enjoys what Theo thinks is fun and exciting. Theo doesn't know everything going on behind the scenes. Theo would have to make massive assumptions (really - we all already are) about what is going on in other places and how it affects us. Reader gets to see all of our private forums. Reader knows what our shadowy types are doing in the shadows, and what the NPCs are doing when none of us are around to see it. Reader should stay the story architect.

I think it was meant as a joke, and in that case I think you killed it

Theo did not mean it as a joke. Hence his comment abut postponing it. Given that it was not a joke, I truly hope I did kill it. That was the idea. :;
):

One more thing: more choice as in 'forced to choose': (telltale games defined a whole game genre around it): 2 events at the same time, or two mini-stories at the same time like the offseason canon-events.
It is nice to have all the PCs at the same place for main events, but it is equally nice to have differently mixed groups at different events.

I like this!

[Reader]

Thanks to everyone for contributing here and to Yoren in particular for collating things.

Working on including lots of these ideas in Story 3. Objectives should return for example - just needs an evening or two set aside to write/post these and helps drive interaction. As several players note, conflicting objectives (at various levels) helps drive drama.

[Reader]

Request fulfilment, thanks for all the feedback.

Faction scoring and objectives return:
viewtopic.php?f=75&
t=2984

House Objectives coming up soonish too.

[Kevan Lyras]

The inclusion of Benefits and Drawbacks in the event design as well as the influence of personal background (Lyras Hersey, Ben's meeting with the high septon etc) in the new story 3 events are very nice!

Also, I like the availability of choices in events like the Masquerade ball.

[Reader]

Thanks. Trying to offer more choice and risk/reward elements in my stuff to match Nathaniel's good example.

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