The Gaming Den

And yeah, us stating dicepools and you returning results is just fine.

echo

This picture didn't inspire my character, but it damn well could have. Mexico is the greatest.

Now, onto the real reason I'm posting:

Chamomile wrote: Marco has an Ulmian hit squad at his command, so of course he can get some common street criminals to do what he wants.

This got me to brainstorming since I like having stuff squared away and because I like making shit up. Here's a couple proposals for what the lesser aspects of my assets could represent if I were to really try cashing in my favors.

1. Las Calaveras, or the Skulls, for those less inclined to Spanish. A Día de Muertos themed street gang the younger up and coming Ulmi have been trying to groom into becoming something of a farm system for their LA ambitions--things are heating up in LA, and as a simple matter of demographics they need more muscle if they wish to stay relevant in the SW. Many of the members are fresh from Mexico and south Texas so while they are not in on the Vow of Silence they do have a worldview strongly shaped by the Tradition of Misdirection. So they don't call the cops under pretty much any circumstances and their reputation is such that not too much attention gets paid if they start babbling about black magic or Rey Mysterio moonsaulting a werewolf. Unfortunately they're still just mortals, and many of them are about as subtle as the Halloweeners or Baseball Furies. When defending their own turf, they're as hardcore as any rating 2 Asset, but if Marco wants to use them for anything remotely professional or requiring a high degree of loyalty he'd be best served leading them himself or having his Ulmi Hitmen at least ride herd on the operation at a 1 hitman per 2 gangers ratio. So, basically, Marco'd be maxing out at 5 hitmen and 10 gangers before the operation becomes a total clusterfuck, and there's no real guarantee that they'd be thrilled to work with him again if a bunch got killed. Usually he just pays them to go with his hitmen and stand around looking creepy when it's time to collect late protection money. It's money well-spent though, because when they do drive-bys they are likely to do it in cars like this, so their victims end up feeling well and thoroughly trolled.

2. As a rating 1 comparable, just some "house" wisps would be cool. Basically, I'm thinking Marco's Finances consists of his car, a healthy chunk of ready cash and a nice little rented villa in the Venice Canal Historical District and at any given time there's enough loyal wisps floating around the place that getting in and out without him eventually finding out about it is pretty wicked hard to do.

@Echo: I took multiple stabs at trying to write the Holmesian analysis and discovered I can't really write that sort of thing. There were five male and two female robbers, all of them have a smattering of normal heights and weights. If you want to write up a Holmesian super-analysis of your own with those results, that'd be pretty cool.

@Whipstitch: The Las Calaveras sound pretty cool. I am less certain about the house wisps as a Rating 1. Having an incorporeal, invisible, and omnipresent security system on your house seems like it's worth more than the pack of regular guard dogs a Rating 1 resource would get you, but I'm undecided on the issue.

EDIT: Oh, and I nearly forgot: the latest post again involved me writing out multiple paragraphs on behalf of PCs. Since I did actually have a general direction of the conversation to go on this time I'm reasonably certain I got it right this time, but if I screwed up or this is a bad idea in general, let me know.

EDIT 2: Oh, and also, I don't really know what your average jacket and gloves would be made out of, but that's what the robbers wore when ransacking the place. With his absurd seven hit success, J-Rock can probably find some trace remains that would indicate this.

That's fair--I'd argue that Necromancy or Aura Perception is kind of a hidden cost for making good use of wisps, but frankly a bunch of stuff is kinda hard to evaluate in AS anyway and Necromancy's certainly at the top of the list, so I can hardly blame your misgivings. Whenever I show the game to people the combat oriented players often seem to think Necromancy is a bit of a turkey while the more investigative types find it to be fuck off powerful.

The conversation with the rat works fine. That's pretty much what I'd have written if it were realtime instead of PbP.

You know, I was giving myself a quick refresher on the rules and it occurs to me that while I can see ghosts and she can intuitively sense that I am aware of her, we can't actually do anything to each other from across separate worlds, which begs some questions about how we're actually talking. Strictly speaking, this means I still probably should have done a Summon Spirit first* to get her on the mortal world, which would render her visible to anyone but still incorporeal to everything but wood. Also, I don't actually have Compel Spirit, so it's not like I would be able to personally send her back easily, either--I guess she might have to take a well, shadow gate or wait until sunrise to get booted back automatically.

I think that the intent is that basic necromancy lets you use any sense to perceive things going on in the Shallow Gloom. But it doesn't actually say that, it just says "see".

The more I think about it, the more I think I favor the "see but can't speak" interpretation of seeing into the Shallows of other worlds. For Limbo and Maya it gives you an awesome ghostly vision of creatures that are normally solid, sometimes interacting with things that aren't there in the mortal world, but there's still a barrier there. They can't see you, can't hear you, and will walk straight past you, and that's awesome and spooky. For Mictlan this is less awesome because ghosts are already like that pretty much no matter where they are, but sight without sound works better for two out of the three worlds including the one this campaign is set up to focus on, so (barring public outrage) I'm rolling with that. Which does mean Marco should've Summoned Spirits (oops), but this time we'll just retroactively assume he got the three hits he needed (especially since an argument could be made for reducing the needed hits by one since she seriously died like four hours ago and thus her spirit is still pretty fresh).

Plus, I already viewed her death via Psychometry on top of her already being in the corresponding Shallows, so if we were really splitting hairs there's probably a case to be made for familiarity being worth a bonus die for being somewhere between "Here's the unidentified body" and "Is a friend" even if it clearly isn't enough to merit a Threshold 2 on its own.

Chamomile wrote:@Echo: I took multiple stabs at trying to write the Holmesian analysis and discovered I can't really write that sort of thing. There were five male and two female robbers, all of them have a smattering of normal heights and weights. If you want to write up a Holmesian super-analysis of your own with those results, that'd be pretty cool.

Depends which paradigm you're using. The original Holmes stories he pretty much just declared a thing to be true, and it was, but the recent movies used a sort of smash-cut-reconstructive thing which was totally awesome but very much a visual metaphor. If you're going for the latter, you need to narrate it the way you would a fight sequence, with lots of action verbs. Here's one way it might have been done.

"J-Rock scans the scene of the crime, and all around him becomes still. His mechanical eyes dilate, and the scene becomes overlapped with green grid-lines in his vision, recording and calculating every disturbance. The toppled-over file cabinet rights itself slowly in its mind's eye, sliding back along the floor slightly as pressure is applied in reverse across four points of its frame. Silhouettes of shadowy figures appear in his calculations, holding the frame at the points indicated, as their feet move backwards along trajectories mapped out by subtle disturbances in the floor - a shuffled paper here, a scuff mark there. One by one, each mark and sign is filled in by an inferred shape - a five-ten female figure expands in his mental reconstruction of the scene from a partial shoeprint on a crumpled page, her height and gender extrapolated from size and pressure indications. Her two male accomplices take form from a series of scattered glass fragments, followed by another female and two more males from a notch on a desk drawer and a half-crushed cardboard box.

The last figure is the easiest to extrapolate - a normal-sized male with incredible strength, who left his mark on ripped-open drawers and locks. The patterns of destruction radiate out like shockwaves from every place this man stood - particularly the grim scatter of shotgun pellets and the surrounding spatters of blood. The telltale flurry of papers near a clear space indicates where the victim had hidden for some time before making a break for freedom - a rush that carried her nearly a quarter of the way towards the door before the streak and puddle that indicated her final resting place, the stains marking out with gruesome clarity her frail feminine frame. A starburst pattern of smeared brains, blood, and bones lends a horrific mathematical emphasis to the final shot of the encounter, with only the scattered and discordant hints of the robbers' frantic and immediate exodus to finish out the events. Calmly, J-Rock flips open his notebook and begins to record the two complete shoeprints he can extrapolate from the scene, along with general descriptions of the seven perpetrators. Finally, he pulls out a pair of tweezers and carefully lifts a small piece of leather out from the crease of a twisted and broken file cabinet, placing it slowly into a plastic bag."

echo

We waiting on anything in particular to move forward?

As far as I can tell, the Harley/Adel/Andrus party has done their thing and is off to go meet up with J Rock and Marco. So we're waiting on the conclusion of the Marco/Ghost Girl scene.

I was waiting on the outcome of my interrogation roll with Janet.

echo

echoVanguard wrote:I was waiting on the outcome of my interrogation roll with Janet.

echo

She can't tell you anything you don't already know or hasn't said already. Unless you have some specific questions concerning things that might not have seemed important to a civilian/muggle.

Is there an outcome someone's waiting on that I've missed again?

Adel/Grek was attempting to put in a call to the Exarch to see if that opens up any leads.

For a while I ummed and ahhed about which stat Andrus' Limbo Politics background roll would run off, as if there's any possible negative consequences for getting either "not enough" or "no" hits and the dicepool isn't at least 6, then I won't bother.

If there isn't then he'll see what he can dredge up.

Whipstitch wrote:Adel/Grek was attempting to put in a call to the Exarch to see if that opens up any leads.

I apologize for spending like two days to respond. I double-checked and it turns out I actually forgot to stat up the Exarch, so I had to spend some time doing that before I could respond to that.

For a while I ummed and ahhed about which stat Andrus' Limbo Politics background roll would run off, as if there's any possible negative consequences for getting either "not enough" or "no" hits and the dicepool isn't at least 6, then I won't bother.

If there isn't then he'll see what he can dredge up.

Other than having wasted the time and effort it takes to get into Limbo and back, you won't lose anything if you fail the check.

In which case Andrus will spend a cutscene of Friendly Banter the other side of a mirror gate and curse the idiot who made him dump Charisma.

Unless I'm missing something (again), it seems like all we're waiting on is for people to show up and put a plan together. Why's this game dead in the water?

I blame the format of PbP - though I'm at a loss to see what box Shadow over Stygia is ticking that this thread isn't.

SoS is more of a straightforward dungeoncrawl. It's much easier to keep that thread going than an investigation.

It's probably my own fault, but I know I wasn't expecting an investigation heavy game when I joined--not to malign Cham's game, I'm just bad with investigation based games. Hell, the one time I played CoC, I was the guy hauling around an elephant gun and shooting the shit out of zombie grizzlies.

I didn't especially plan it as an investigation game either, but when one of the characters showed up with a private investigator and a lot of criminal contacts, an "investigate stuff" plot was the easiest way to get things started.

FWIW, I'm not going to get too butt hurt if PCs say "I'm not good at this/this doesn't affect me" and go do their own thing, declare follow mode or just plain declare they are staying home for the night and act like a fancy contact for a few scenes or even an arc. I'd rather have people throw shit at the wall like that and see if Cham is a good juggler than have PCs present but idling. The former could drum up interesting shit while with the latter people end up talking to themselves.

And, not to put too fine a point on it, but so far there hasn't even been -that- much investigation, and most of it has actually been successful. We've got a name, which means we can probably get an address, which means if nothing else Marco could grab a few goons and just try and pop a sack over this asshole's head and then hit him until candy and secrets come out.

Chamomile wrote:I didn't especially plan it as an investigation game either, but when one of the characters showed up with a private investigator and a lot of criminal contacts, an "investigate stuff" plot was the easiest way to get things started.

So everything is my fault, then?

I've been wanting to make a sizable post aggregating events, but I've been very busy lately. If someone else wants to take the lead on that, it's cool with me.

echo