Looks intriguing, though more powerful (and probably more complex) than we need. But I’ll fiddle with it, see what it does. Thanks!
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BTW- I think it’s safe to say that Donald returning to finish this story is what inspired David Lynch to return to Twin Peaks.
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Maybe…‘Donald’…is…David Lynch?
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Donald and I have met in person and while he does have wild hair, it’s not quite that wild.
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It’s my understanding that he’s influenced George RR Martin to finally finish off his books.
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I wish video games incorporated some of the search-engine-scavenger-hunt puzzles like Donald and Chris have put into BWD.
Are there any vidja games that rely / require the players to use resources and lore from the wider internet, outside the “game?”
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http://www.acornelectron.co.uk/eug/revs/shards/Mystery_Of_The_Java_Star_000.html
I don’t know why this came to mind, because it doesn’t. But hey, nostalgia.
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My god, it’s full of bars.
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Was fun to try running through Badass Space trying to take (mostly) nonviolent missions. Ideally that meant shipping or escorting, but I had to be flexible in my morals to include non-attack missions, excepting in the final round.
-tip to @daneel for advising me to engage zero drones when I thought I had to shoot at something.
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Hey guys, I know it’s been a while, but tonight I started re-reading the old Badass Dragons of the Wasteland threads. For some reason, I started with the Round Three Thread, and I gotta say, it was a hoot and a half reliving those crazy days of our mutually misspent youths, and I read for three hours straight before I looked up and realized my back was killing me and that we really, really, REALLY need to start up another of these things.
Did we ever get an answer to this query? That was the single element of BDW that I think we got most right. It was a shit-ton of work, but even if it only resulted in a few minutes’ amusement for the players, it was a lot of fun to make all the puzzles and maps and things.
I have the enthusiasm to run another of these games (having learned many valuable, if occasionally hard, lessons last time), but I am unsure if I can handle the time commitment just yet. My wife and I just bought a slightly bigger house, and we’re nearly done moving into it, but I also gotta find a new job post haste, so… who knows? Anyway, I miss playing Badass with all you other badasses. Anyone wanna gin up a game?
For that matter, anyone got any clever ideas how to gin up a Badass game that is even lighter and nimbler to run than @patrace’s games have been? His look like sleek marvels of minimalist elegance and efficiency compared to my own raw tonnage of fictive verbosity, but I know his games are no easier a time commitment for him than BDW was for me and @penguinchris and @JonasEggeater.
Whaddaya think? Can we discuss further how to optimize the Badassery?
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So we’re playing at your house?
What’s this thing? Know nothing about it, was wondering if there was something that could automate some aspects.
Would take us out of here, though.
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I think that would work. I didn’t delve (ahem) too deep but it looks like it’s so flexible it could be set up to keep track of everything, taking away the hard work, but we’d still be telling the story here in text rather than on that platform. The game master would still keep track and post stuff here, and all of the narrative takes place here, but all the actual work is done on that platform.
It would have been perfect for Delvers, which I’m still hoping will pick up again…
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Yeah, I checked it out when @gwwar recommended it, and it certainly looks like it would handle all the stats and rolls and such, but since I’m such a n00b to RPGs of that sort, I’d have no idea which template to use as a starting point, or whether it might just be advantageous to build the whole thing from scratch. I wonder if @patrace had any specific pre-existing game template in mind for BSD1, since what we used for BDW was just a modification of that. When I look at all the templates they have, with all the character sheets and attributes and stats and such, it kinda makes my eyes glaze over and my head spin. I’m reminded of why I desperately needed Chris and Jonas to help with that stuff!
Heh, just had a closer look and yeah, it’s a bit dense. It is unclear how you define how the game actually works once you create it. Since we don’t need anywhere near that much complexity, it seems like maybe it’d be nearly as much work to wrangle that as just creating a simpler solution from scratch - in theory, anyway. You would have to be a reasonably knowledgable developer 
Developing a moderately complex web app like this is something I would like to learn, but it’d probably take me months and then not be that great. Gotta start somewhere I suppose.
edit: The thing is that what we need is not actually that complex… it only was complex for us because we were running everything manually out of our spreadsheet, doing almost everything that computers are supposed to make easy for us ourselves because a spreadsheet is not the proper tool.
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As a lifelong RPGer and a late addition to the happy mutant door game club, I’ll say that BSD2 brought an outsized amount of joy to early 2015 for me personally. The fundamental gating mechanisms seemed straightforward in retrospect, but the spit and polish added by the players made it something so much more than that. Having missed the BDW era (sadly!), I can’t speak to the best elements of those games. What I felt worked really well with the BSD2 universe of @patrace was:
- well defined and enforced turn deadlines, along with communication as to if/when they changed
- a clear set of mechanics, which allowed for each player to take risks and explore their own personal play style (mostly)
- what felt like a clear narrative arc that was influenced but not necessarily driven by player interaction
Like @penguinchris , I’m also hoping Delvers makes a return. Failing that, I’m eagerly anticipating the next iteration of Badass Mumbles of the Mumble, whatever it looks like.
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I just found (rediscovered) the actual GM Toolkit Development thread where some progess was being made, particularly in the last dozen posts or so. I wonder if we could see if @gwwar and @awjt (is he still around? That old thread has him identified by some @anon34812172 ID for some reason) and @bizmail_public and @Felipe_Budinich maybe want to help us get back into figuring out a Discourse plug-in again. Discbot sure has proved handy (thanks once again to @gwwar!), and it seems to me (a guy who knows pretty much nothing at all about coding) that @awjt had zeroed in on an excellent way forward right here:
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Hear, hear. I found through experience that players lose enthusiasm (and the game subsequently loses players) when they have to sit around too long, wondering what’s holding things up. My logorrhea makes for delays simply because I paint myself into a corner of wanting to tell a great story, and I get bogged down in an overwhelming mass of details. I like to think that my world-building generates vividness, but really it just results in walls of text and an overly-engineered narrative that (in BDW, at least) ran too much on rails. And it slowed us down, too. Pat’s approach is much more elegant, and not nearly so hard on the casual players who don’t have the time or inclination to wade through some GM’s third-rate genre novella each week just to see if his character survived or not.
That’s another priority. I kept fiddling with the mechanics, sometimes clinging to certain ones that I thought made the game have more dramatic tension, but most of the players just found tedious.
One thing that I’m curious about is the best approach to inter-player interaction. The BSD games were mostly PvE games, with a certain amount of cooperation allowed (and encouraged) on some engagements. Anything that strayed into PvP territory was rare, and not well-received (I am reminded of what happened with Jason W and the Bad Penny).
Should PvP play always be discouraged in this venue? I had kinda wanted to encourage some competition between players in BDW, and I’d thought it might go over okay since I had removed the factor of permadeath by allowing “killed” players to continue in new cars with start-over stats… but the BDW players really didn’t want to compete with each other, and always preferred to cooperate. I made repair parts scarce, so they pooled resources rather than undercut each other. I thought a healthy dose of paranoia and uneasy alliances would make the game more fun, but the players didn’t think so. Was I wrong altogether, or was that just the attitudinal makeup of that particular group of players? And if the latter, would that generally be the attitude among players in this BBS?
Whaddaya guys think?
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If you think about the classic D&D style game (which I don’t think either of us have actually played), the players don’t compete - they don’t necessarily have to work together all the time, but it helps. This is actually a TV show cliche!
I don’t know how we missed that, but, it seems like everyone else figured out long ago that players don’t like to fight each other in this type of game 
I think having one of our NPCs secretly working with the enemy was great, and a reasonable solution to adding conflict without alienating players.
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