I’ve hit my daily “like” cap at least three times, in no small part because of Donald_Petersen’s posts. 
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Aww. Y’all are gonna make me use up all my Likes.
toe scuffing the dirt
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This makes my head hurt!
Are we playing Badass Dwarf Fortress?
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…run by Thomas Friedman as an experiment in unregulated repair markets.
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There will be simpler times ahead for the simpler-minded. Giving birth to this Round felt like… giving birth.
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Ooh!
Apologies in advance of Morton and I go quiet (and are a bit slow today too)
I got pulled into a VERY intriguing project that helps a bunch of people if I get it right, so I may be focused on that to the exclusion of all else for a few days.
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hang in there. These things always start rough.
But yeah, Simpler is usually Better.
Looks like things are already shaping us nicely… you have no idea how nicely.
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Is the game going to be able to work with people just popping by once a mission or so to sign up for the next round?
Seems like (this round at least), we need a lot of engagement - I’m not sure how well alliances are going to build if we don’t hear from half of the players until the last minute…
How’s that form for mission choices coming?
It will work, but the people who participate more will have an advantage, as they’ll have clearly established allies and business partners. It’s very good to have someone who “owes you one.” We’re trying to accommodate everyone though, and there are a lot of people involved in this game, with schedules at varying levels of busyness. If you only have time to pop in once per round, that’s enough. Still, the more often you post in the thread, and the more dialogue that happens, the more you make friends with other players, and the more you make reading the thread entertaining for everyone else.
Very soon, now. @penguinchris is just making a couple of final revisions to make the data processing simpler on our end.
@daneel: It’s over in @penguinchris’s post here.
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I lost my secret code.
Now what do I do?
hail @JonasEggeater or @penguinchris I bet. either via PM or through this special song of summoning.
I’ll PM it to you now.
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Jonas, I bet you never expected to be in the wasteland and role-playing first line IT support.
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I did this (maybe grannies and eggs, but there we go): click on chart box in Excel, Ctrl + C, open Microsoft Paint or whatever the old .bmp program is, Ctrl + V, save as jpg, upload.
Lots of columns then no issue beyond keeping it legible in BBS!
Means no clipping etc, which XP doesn’t do without downloading something.
Edit: Doesn’t MS XL have some sort of LiveLink to online publication? I gave up a bit on ActiveX or whatever it was, knowing that eventually if MS worked at it it would work, but haven’t looked into it in a while. Would mean you wouldn’t have to keep copy / pasting.
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What would be really useful is a ‘current status’ for who’s signed up to what mission. Also a static page with what can be done for fixing up - eg a locked BBS page would be fine, so we have somewhere to go to remind ourselves rather than trawling the Round page. I say these things, and acknowledge time / effort constraints, and thank you all heartily for setting this up and rolling with it!
I like the team thing, it’s a laugh chasing around on PM, once everyone figures out it works then they’ll go for it.
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@peregrinus_bis, addressing your two points:
I was hoping that my long post in the Round 1 thread, where I showed labels and pictures of everyone’s cars would have been sufficient, but if you still want to be able to view that in the spreadsheet, I can add a column to the right of everything else, so that it can be easily cropped out when Donald wants to post individual results. Also, one of Donald’s priorities when it comes to posting results is keeping them legible in the thread without having to click on them and enlarge. By the way we’ve been using Google Docs (not MS Excel) to do up the spreadsheets, so that we can all work on/view the same version at the same time. It acts pretty much the same as Excel, of course, and it does have live online publication, which we have been using. I hope you’ve seen the link to the public sheet, but if you haven’t, it’s right here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/pub?key=0AmjdwXdRMixFdFdtMzFRbm96SVU3RjdDbFRacTlZb0E&single=true&gid=3&output=html
That link will always lead to the most updated version of the public sheet in the spreadsheet. Also, if you look at it right now, you’ll see that there is a column for everybody’s mission choice for the current round. That will be getting filled in more and more throughout the day, as I get the form information already submitted all organized, and as more forms keep coming in. However, to save people the nuisance of having to go back and refer to that link to see how they did throughout a Round, we expect to keep copy/pasting as well.
To address your second post, we are working on figuring out how a “sticky” thread would work, where players would always be able to go to reference information relating to the current round. I think what’s going to happen is that Donald, Chris, and I will each make a couple of posts in a thread, have codinghorror lock it so that no more posts can be made, and with each new round, we will just edit our posts which are already there in order to keep information updated. Once this thread is set up (hopefully, this will be in time for the next Round), there will be a link to the spreadsheet there, as well as the current round’s mission option, currently available upgrades, and any other information related to the current round.
Yes, there’s a lot of time involved for all three of us, but it’s a lot of fun working on these things together. Plus, seeing you guys all (or almost all) enjoy the outcome, make friends and enemies, and expand upon the story is hugely entertaining as well.
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Wait - I can make enemies? Awesome!
Gotcha on the spreddy. I’ve got the link already bookmarked - that’s where my rainbow chart came from!
I’m working on an analytical engine to bubble down the potential impacts of missions on players. Well, no I’m not. Yes I am. No I’m not.
Back to work!
Edit: I’m ok without the cars!
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@jonaseggeater can you check my stats? The sheet looks like I have 52HP, I should only have 40.
my fault, I submitted multiple sheets 
what I posted on the thread is right…
Gotcha. I was going down the list, and hadn’t finished with your resubmission of the form yet.
We’ve now done two rounds. In the spirit of of providing some color on how this all looks from the player’s perspective, I would like to provide some feedback . Feel free to accept or ignore whatever you find helpful.
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You have all put an enormous amount of work into this. This is a much more ambitious effort than Badass Space Dragons started as. Thank you. For such an ambitious undertaking, we are off to a great start. These things always start rough.
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Your choice of setting was brilliant. Having us strut our cars about before action began was a great way to drive the social interaction before the gameplay mechanics came to the forefront.
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MORE CROSSLINKING BETWEEN TOPICS, PLEASE. We collectively made a vital discovery towards the end of BASD: if the GM puts a short “link post” at the end of each topic that provides a live link to the next topic, a lot more players participate in the newly opened topic. Obviously, I will do this if no one else does, but best if the GM posts the cross links.
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Backstory. Backstory is essential to the worldbuilding that makes a game compelling. But how much of that backstory is needed up front? While I appreciate that back story, the Boing Boing BBS isn’t a great UI for expository writing, so I find it hard to follow the extensive narratives. Notice how, from a UI standpoint, this post is so uninviting. The current presentation of that narrative slows my processing the GM information, thereby interfering with my effort to engage the players and the game. I wish I had a more positive suggestion to make here – maybe some threads should be focused on exposition and while other threads focus on player interaction? I am not sure how to improve here, but an additional bit of thought might greatly improve the quality.
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Data Entry Spreadsheets. GREAT WORK. KEEP IT UP. Like any software project in beta testing, the Round Two entry forms had some good things and a lot of not-so-good things. Keep the improvements coming, because this should really improve game execution for both users and the hard working folks supporting the GM. Private Message me if you’d like my personal whine list, but really, I am content to be a “beta tester” while you get this streamlined.
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Game Mechanics. WHOA is this complicated. From my standpoint, there too much information, and the information presentation is too fragmented. I haven’t been able to get my head around a coherent whole, which makes it difficult for me to craft the pitches that drive my game play. Just to be blunt, if we don’t get the gameplay simpler, AND SOON, I will have to withdraw because I simply don’t have the real-world time to process this much fragmented information into quality game play.
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Simplification Suggestion. A huge amount of confusion is currently driven by the bizarre repair process. A driver has to buy some stuff from Stretch, find a mechanic for some of the repairs, then go back to Stretch for upgrades and more repairs? and there is something about Tires? WTF? Notice, we spent more time discussing repair dynamics than mission dynamics, on what was supposed to be a group mission round. That Ain’t right. Here is my suggestion for an in-game way to streamline this. Get Stretch out of the repair business. He sells parts and supplies, nothing else. To get anything done, including upgrades, you need a mechanic. Give the mechanics free rein to set their own rates. To make it interesting, limit the number of cars a given mechanic can service in a given round. Five would have worked well this round. Now you’ve get a great mechanism to drive the formation of small teams, which in turn should make for some fantastic coalition politics.
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Choose one limiting resource and stick with it. Currenlty we’ve got gas, LP, presumably pepperoni pizza, and maybe tires as universal limiting resources. Simplify. You get better game play with a single universal limiting resource. Choose one and quietly move the other one (or two, or is it three?) out of the gameplay. Keeping this stuff as part of the narrative is fine: for example, my loss of two tires leading to the “ski-ing” was fantastic. But do we need a separate repair category for this? couldn’t this have been additional HP losses?
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Simplify the stats. As a player I am supposed to manage a complicated repair mechanism, optimize SEVEN stats, while constrained by two (or maybe more) limiting resources, literacy, tires, something called RP – and I’m sure I forgot something. And that’s before a I PM a single player and try to arrange anything. Can SP and MV be combined? Do we really need Tires as separate repair headache? With this many degrees of freedom, do we really need LK? Maybe let drivers take their luck score and convert into some other stats, for example.
In short, we got a great game with great players. We are off to a fun start. But to keep the momentum, we need to simplify the game mechanics – soon.
THANK YOU FOR THE HUGE EFFORT YOU’VE PUT INTO THIS.
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