I’m shy, and don’t get too involved in online discussions here or elsewhere. I’ve never done real life role playing games either, it’s intimidating.
I was hesitant to join the game here for that reason but ended up really enjoying it. No need to worry. I highly encourage playing once we get this up and running, especially if you enjoyed just watching BSD.
To that point I think we should make sure the interface doesn’t become over-complicated and intimidating. A big part of what made it easy for me to get involved with the game was how free form and open ended it was. All the complicated rules and intricacies in other games make it uninviting for all but the hardcore.
I mean that’s what seems to be the consensus anyway, just reiterating - from the player’s side, only the shop orders and mission selection and so on should be automated, and everything else left open to the player’s imagination.
Your character development and animated gifs were a great highlight of season 1.
I loved so many of the many surprising developments that many of you BSD season 1 players added, I don’t dare to try to name all your contributions now, all at once, at such a late hour (though I do expect the great bartender and the great diplomat to continue their roles.) But I certainly can say that what you all made me laugh heartily and also motivated me to want to participate more here with bb (after years or of lurking), and most especially in the next iteration of Badassery.
I think the vision, so far is not to make the whole game a programming task. Only the supporting choice-and-calculation aspects. All the in-game development, animated gifs, storytelling, etc etc etc, ALL of that still remains in the GM and players’ hands. The interface will ONLY handle the math. That’s it. The free-form stuff that was so wonderful will remain unaltered. Just the drudgery of bookkeeping needs automation.
Yep I think that’s what everyone’s been thinking, just wanted to say how important I think it is. I was thinking about this back when brainstorming began and it seemed like it’d be easy to impose artificial limits. I mean, I thought about how I would program it (limited programming experience) and realized it needs more careful consideration than I originally thought. Anyway, not too concerned
Well, it seems as though @Donald_Petersen has got everyone ready to play his scenario (almost everybody, anyway); in fact, some people seem to have started already, so I’d say we need a toolkit in short order
Yes, indeedy. Who’s our volunteer to get the number-crunching infrastructure in place? Ideally, if I’m going to steer the story, I’ll need a colleague to not only crunch the numbers, but collaborate with me on assigning point values and risks and such. I’m brand-new at this stuff, and yet I appreciate the need for a balanced game.
Edit: also, since whoever takes on this relatively thankless task won’t actually be able to play, they should feel encouraged to join with me on the story aspect, as much as they’d like. No need for me to hog all the fun part!
As an outsider, it seemed to me that @patrace kept the ruleset sufficiently vague as to enable some degree of fudgery on his side to prioritize storytelling and fun over gameification.
I’m not saying PatRace played favorites - I’m saying the lack of explication of the calculations helped him to paint the most interesting story that the roll of the dice demanded without having to worry about rules lawyering.
I can’t say. I’ve never seen a campaign run as seemingly enjoyable for all participants as Badass Space Dragon.
My not inconsiderable experience had been far more about competition than mutual laughs, which explains why I dropped it before I had respectable facial hair.
Oh, no doubt. And yet there still stats and dice rolls and odds to contend with. My only experience with that stuff is as a player, when they’re hidden under the hood (Fallout 3 and Baldur’s Gate and suchlike). That’s what I’ll need serious help with.
Yeah, exactly so. I have a job and two kids. This particular time of year I can devote several hours a day to this stuff, and I certainly like it enough to avoid burning out, but I was a Theatre Arts major, not a Math major. If somebody can build the spreadsheet, I can happily input the data each round and output the results (assuming the spreadsheet itself can perform the random “dice roll” calculations), but Pat shows how his Damage Multiplier works (and it worked beautifully, I thought) and I feel like Homer Simpson to his Carl Sagan.
I can build a spreadsheet if we just want to use a spreadsheet, although my understanding of the calculations is far less nuanced than the actual calculations @patrace used - I was a little embarrassed about the spreadsheet I made last time to calculate mission results after finding out how much more to the calculations there were than I thought (science major yes, but not math or engineering or physics or anything calculation-heavy).
But anyway, I think I could build something that would work. Problem is that it seemed like what took the most time for him was manually inputting everything and manually copying out the results, and that’s what we wanted to automate. As for creating a web interface and database setup to make that easy, I understand how it would work but I have not actually done anything like that before. Hopefully one of our web developer brethren will come out of the woodwork.
In the mean time, perhaps we can outline exactly what we need calculations-wise for this game (a detailed outline)?
I’m sick too, and busy with other stuff I have to do. My intent is to assist with automating the math. But it sounds like y’all are anxious to get another game up and running before I’ll have a chance to put together anything meaningful. I don’t want to hold you back - by all means initiate and get started. The API to Disqus can wait; it will just mean a huge amount of manual labor for the GMs.
In this kind of game you definitely need some latitude. People came up with a lot of good contributions and we had to flex to fit them as we went. Escrow is a good example. That was a pain-in-the-ass to shoehorn into the game part way through but we tried to make it work because we didn’t want to put too many walls on the universe. Anytime you tell someone they can’t do something you make the world a little smaller. The trick is figuring out a way to say no that’s consistent with the universe. Hmmm… like parenting?
We generally concentrated on story first and then wrapped our calculations around that. Is there a strong chance people are going to get damaged here? Do they get some bonus from their shields? Ok, now we stick numbers on it and have a formula to test out.
A lot of times we were grading on the curve. We wanted results with that hump in them so the weaker ships didn’t get totally obliterated every time and the stronger ships didn’t have a cake walk.
All the math aside, it sounds like there’s momentum here to just get a game going. I’d suggest just going for it and taking longer turns while you’re figuring it out.
You can get by with a spreadsheet. Before I started BSD, I initially thought I might just keep some dice by the keyboard for decision making.
Side note, I will absolutely be working on a game engine for BSD later in the year and I’ll run another forum game when it’s ready. Right now I’m working on fulfilling a Kickstarter project and preparing our gallery for the summer season. If anyone gets to Juneau, Emerald City Comic Con, or SDCC, it would be a pleasure to meet you!
Yup, that’s what we used. It’s kind of ugly but it served us well… here’s the spreadsheet we hobbled together to run the game last time. Some of the text lumping formulas might be useful at least.
Edit - We used some formatting that we weren’t supposed to… I forget what. I’d suggest checking with @codinghorror on how to best format your output to suit the bbs.
My bad, I got so flummoxed by the large # of related PM (private message) notifications I closed this topic accidentally @sam. It’s really a PM-specific defect of Discourse that we will look at next week.
