Let's Go Steal a Dungeon (MotBM OOC/Planning)

Sarnai is so inexplicably disliking this lady on first sight and I think I figured it out. She's envious as fuck that the lady is somehow here, on purpose, in the place of hostile monsters, seemingly without the need for a team to adventure with. Not that Sarnai wants to go alone. But she'd really like to rush in and not have friends nearly crippled. Who does this ominously powerful npc think she is?? >:[

 

Sarnai thinks of her fellow party members as friends?? :O Lyriae thinks of them as, like, "bunch of random helpless* strangers that need me to protect them I'm stuck with because they're paying me"
*Stella and Sarnai being marginally less helpless

 

There are some things you can't share without ending up liking each other, and knocking out a bunch of acid-spitting flowers is one of them.

More legit answer, she's a bard of valor brecause she's a great big nerd who wants to be the star of songs and tales of heroism. She quit wizarding school to go learn magic that involves dance and song and poem and pun instead of rote book learning, to hang out with adventurers and fangirl and learn to wield a battleaxe. This bunch of dinguses may have just met, but they've just screwed up; they didn't just do the job! They actually went along with the reckless idiot adventuring idea! In her heart she's feeling warm fuzzies for them all.


eta Also this isn't her first adventuring group. She's had other, longer term friends get hurt. :( if it ever become relevant i might even think of details about them

 

that's gonna be rough for her when they all inevitably die! :D

 

That's okay because she'll probably due too! :D!

 

artsy adventurers: roll d20+willpower not to cry

 

petition to just throw the ruins of the statues in front of her and run for it

 

signed

 

okay so do we lie to her, or? I feel like "well the lion legit attacked us" is a pretty good excuse, and we can ask her, like, "how do you advise we collect animated works of art in future without damaging them?" or something, but the hummingbird did nothing to us. :( maybe we can claim an orchidman smashed it?? or maybe this is sort of an inevitable-combat NPC encounter, like the last one.

 

On the one hand, that sounds good. Close enough to true, indicating we want help and regret it...

On the other hand, Sarnai claimed to be a wizard for months because it was easier to pretend that and do her own thing, than to listen to her parents' or husband's opinions on the matter.

Right now I'm mulling over:
The hummingbird and Lapis attacked each other while we were attacked by orchidmen. We were, tragically, too busy with the flowers to stop it. But we collected parts of their remains.... for.... appreciation???
I need to nap before I can decide how much deliberate in-character foot shooting to do.

 

I guess the fundamental question here is a play style question.

Where do we want to go in the range between
[all decisions are valid in-character and blind to all gameplay strategies] and
[all decisions are talked out ooc to improve our chance of survival]?

Making dumb unilateral decisions is fast and interesting and risky... and making in-character decisions is sometimes difficult when the characters aren't very fleshed out. So if we don't discuss stuff ooc, there'll be a lot of player blindspots informing what we do. If you're cool with that, then I am too.

And player blindspots aside, goodness knows we laughed and cheered when Alabaster poked the painting.

 

WHAT A LEDGE please continue to provide copious Sarnai backstory it is all immensely entertaining

she's been hanging out here for a while, I think, so she probably knows that Lapis went in after we were done with the orchidmen, or at least after they'd been in there for a while. also, how the hell is the hummingbird supposed to have blasted a stone lion to bits?? while causing several different types of spell damage plus axe marks??? but hey, if you want to tell an ill-considered lie... :P "because appreciation" sounds pretty good to me, though. appreciation and, perhaps, a pragmatic interest in wealth that would encourage her to pay us more...

mm... this is a complex question. I think the medium of this game automatically lends itself to OOC discussion and deliberation—like, if we were doing this in real time, I bet people would respond right away IC (I know I would), and I don't think we'd be like "WAIT WAIT NO THAT'S REALLY BAD STRATEGY" once someone had said something. and I think that no-retconning principle should also apply here, but reactions are gonna be much less immediate. nothing wrong with immediate reactions, but forum play doesn't lend itself to them. so snap IC decisions are valid, but a lot of the time there'll be that gap in which we could discuss.

personally I like OOC discussion because anxiety and Must Plan The Thing, so my tendency is both to offer opinions on in-game decisions whenever I have the opportunity and to solicit them whenever Lyriae'll be the one making the decision. you might have noticed that already. :P so I would not enjoy cutting it out entirely when there's a gap in play allowing for it, but no one else should feel obligated to participate, either; I can also shout questions into the void and see what echoes back, so to speak. :D whiiiiich is to say if people want to discuss a decision they're making, I'm totally down to discuss, but if they don't, they can just make it and/or tell me to buzz off.

also as it is I don't think there's too much danger of our OOC discussion making our gameplay unrealistic? @The Frood Abides has way more experience with how that can go wrong, so he ought to weigh in too, but like you said we, uh. we gleefully endorse many of our characters' bad decisions on the basis that they are a) classic whoever, i.e., in character, and b) really funny. so if a character thinks something is a good idea, hey, who are we to stop 'em. but like you said, there's also the question of, uh, actually fucking surviving this dungeon, so. we probably shouldn't make too many deliberately bad decisions, but I don't really know how many is too many. Frood might care to hint at that, too, since he has a better idea of this dungeon's difficulty than we do? oooooor we could sink or swim by ourselves. that is also an option.

 

I think it's perfectly valid for you to discuss options OOC. You're not exactly highly trained warrior-sages, and your PCs probably think faster than you do. My main concern re: metagaming is when players use or share information that they couldn't possibly have in character. None of what's been said so far is outside the realm of what might be going through Lyriae's and Sarnai's heads independently.

 

I contemplated sending out valentines here buuuuuut 1. spoons 2. don't really feel the need to be anonymous with this, so I'd just like to officially state for the whole group (if the continued likes hadnt clued you in already :P ) that you guys are great, and following along with this campaign is great. best characters, best decisions (as in they make sense or are fun or both), and a huge thumbs up to frood both for starting it up at all and for managing all of it. Yay! \o/
(you could easily rewrite this to sound a lot more fangirl-y and itd still be entirely accurate, btw. i'm excited when i see either of these threads have updated. good fun good fun)

 

@Erica this is a very sweet message to wake up to, thank you!

 

@thegrimsqueaker this isn't official material per se (it is produced by the official guys, but it's in the playtesting stage), but I think you'd like to check it out! (the relevant part is at the end of the document and is titled "Lore Mastery.") it really reminded me of Liron! :D I dunno if Frood'll let you use it, especially since we've already started this campaign, but maybe future incarnations of Liron can have it someday...

 

ooooh, need to look at that! tyvm!

 

gently nudges players to make an IC decision

 

As I am afraid of making decisions, I am cheating.

Rolling a d20 to decide where on the scale I'm going, and then writing a response based on that.
20 = crit success for IC Reasoning = IC actions.
1 = crit success??? for OOC Reasoning = IC actions

 

A result of 5. So mostly favoring the OOC strategizing, but with her own twist and a bit of her own bias/fears for flavor and self-sabotage. I'm mostly stealing EP's idea.