Debriefings

Just a thread for debriefing after games!

That was a ton of fun! Anyways, I think that went quite well. Personally, I'm not a fan of popcorn, roll20s got a pretty good initiative counter built into it, we could use it...? Group works well together. Good classes, good characters, good chemistry. Combats a little bit better without the grid imo.

I agree with popcorn initiative vs original. Group will work well. Agreed on the no grid for combat, but it help with distances in 'making' our own maps...

As far as initiative is concerned I like initiative rolls at the start of each round of combat. i think that's standard but I've played with GMs who like to roll once And to use those rolls throughou So just wanted to clarify which version we'd use

I definitely learned much about how game flow might work. Some very rough thoughts: Good I felt pretty decent about my ability to improvise a dungeon ecology. The map I grabbed from someone else, but how it was populated, what was in it, and the details were all of my own devising, either done during the 30-45 minutes prior to the encounter (mostly while we were discussing other things), or on the fly. Some sharp crisp descriptions about what the characters were doing from the players! Felt reasonably balanced in terms of "rule of the dice" To my great delight, I threw an "unfair" encounter at the party, telegraphed this somewhat, and the resulting fight was suitably on the edge. 5E's bounded accuracy makes the unfair possible though. Bad I was confused at times and inconsistent in how I was narrating action: emotes, descriptions, or normal "GM" speak. I need a better system for distinguish how certain types of information are presented to the players. Popcorn Initiative: it was confusing, and it slowed things down more than a simple initiative tracker would. I've since tried this in my local group and appreciate the impact it had there but it doesn't seem to work well with the built in lag of text based communication. Ugly There were pretty clearly moments where action slowed down: I'd give some narration of what was going on, and each player needed to have their say about it, then respond to the others, then respond to the responses, before concrete action going forward was taken. Some of that is good cautious play, some of is probably natural awkwardness of people that haven't played together. For the rest, I need to adjust my expectations of pace a bit. I flubbed some of the rules on passive perception more than once, I need to a better job of keeping player's PP scores on hand, especially since at least one of you has a very high score by virtue of a feat. Drawn maps sometimes deviated significantly from the "real" map, even when I was pretty sure I had described it well. Not sure if that's a real problem, or if I should just smile and let it ride, and let the mess get fixed if an unexpected loop later shows up. To comment on everyone else's statements, given those and my own experience I think I'd prefer to shelve the popcorn style initiative in favor of standard normal initiative using the built in tracker.

Drew K said: I definitely learned much about how game flow might work. Some very rough thoughts: Good I felt pretty decent about my ability to improvise a dungeon ecology. The map I grabbed from someone else, but how it was populated, what was in it, and the details were all of my own devising, either done during the 30-45 minutes prior to the encounter (mostly while we were discussing other things), or on the fly. Some sharp crisp descriptions about what the characters were doing from the players! Felt reasonably balanced in terms of "rule of the dice" To my great delight, I threw an "unfair" encounter at the party, telegraphed this somewhat, and the resulting fight was suitably on the edge. 5E's bounded accuracy makes the unfair possible though. No arguments here... Bad I was confused at times and inconsistent in how I was narrating action: emotes, descriptions, or normal "GM" speak. I need a better system for distinguish how certain types of information are presented to the players. Popcorn Initiative: it was confusing, and it slowed things down more than a simple initiative tracker would. I've since tried this in my local group and appreciate the impact it had there but it doesn't seem to work well with the built in lag of text based communication. I think how we all speak in and out of character needs to be clearly defined and obvious in game. The macro's used from the are clean and tidy and using the [[1d10+4]] style of rolling dice instead of the /r 1d10+4 or /roll 1d10+4 definitely cleans it up. As for popcorn I am glad it is shelved... it does work in voice or RL quite well, but in text it becomes an obstacle. Seeming we are going back to the inbuilt initiative tracker, are we going to roll once for an encounter or roll for each round? Ugly There were pretty clearly moments where action slowed down: I'd give some narration of what was going on, and each player needed to have their say about it, then respond to the others, then respond to the responses, before concrete action going forward was taken. Some of that is good cautious play, some of is probably natural awkwardness of people that haven't played together. For the rest, I need to adjust my expectations of pace a bit. I flubbed some of the rules on passive perception more than once, I need to a better job of keeping player's PP scores on hand, especially since at least one of you has a very high score by virtue of a feat. Drawn maps sometimes deviated significantly from the "real" map, even when I was pretty sure I had described it well. Not sure if that's a real problem, or if I should just smile and let it ride, and let the mess get fixed if an unexpected loop later shows up. Once the style of the party's actions and as we get used to each others skills, and we just automatically roll our dice with each other... whispers will be thrown... learning what languages each other speaks... Maybe a printout of our sheets to make things easier for you? You can now make the sheet in a separate window, so it'll be easier to print. Curiously, how much difference was there with out drawn map and your "borrowed" map? Can you show us a comparison? On that note... would a pre-prepared map with fog of war be easier/faster? ----------------------------------- To repeat my question from in game for all to see and add input too...."What do you think of making health bars visible? It doesn't allow us to know exactly what the hit points are, but gives us an idea how we (if not other creatures) are looking... bloodied, like they were just healed... It also saves the ooc question of "How bloodied do they look? Can players make sure to add in their spells, any race or class actions into the sheet before our next game too... if you're not understanding the sheet, don't be shy to ask. Make sure to tick the relevant boxes (For a quick rundown, try not to tick info block or description or higher levels unless necessary... you can summarize a lot of it in effects if need be... but if it's a ranged attack spell, with a save, make sure to tick the Attack, Save and Damage boxes...) It's also great so see such a great array of languages. Besides common, no-one speaks the same language as of yet... (maybe racial depends on TH) If I get the following wrong please forgive me, amend and clarify... John / Garlel speaks: Common, Dwarven, Sylvan, Orc Rowan / Poe : Common, Halfling Lee / Hollis: common, gnomish, giant, elvish, undercommon Avery / Skiv: Common, Draconic ..?????? TH / Chuck : Common, Halfing, and Thieves' Cant. (edited to add languages)

I'll be reading the Session Zero transcript at some point today. To keep up with the current discussion: Emotes, descriptions, dialogue, etc. from GM side: That'll come with experience doing it so don't sweat it. Action slowing down: I'll check it out when I read the transcript, but debating is often not a good practice in play, especially not in text play. If that's been going on, then perhaps we can discuss a limited version of improvisational techniques to speed up discussion. Passive Perception: I don't even use passive checks in my games so I wouldn't have an issue if it was house ruled out of yours. I'd have to change my feat though. Maps: This is a classic problem that doesn't appear to change even in online play. It's probably best if the DM just draws it in with the polygon tool, but still requires one of the PCs be a map-maker for the purposes of determining exploration tasks (and who is aware of threats). Health Bars: I prefer to make health bars visible between PCs. I'm also fine with us seeing monster health bars. I do that in my own games and it just works better for the reasons stated by John. Languages: Chuck speaks Common, Halfing, and Thieves' Cant.

In reviewing the transcript, so far I see what John was talking about. I'd like to suggest the following: When you log in, set "As" to your character name. It's a dropdown box just below where you enter chat. Now, when you are talking as your character (monologue or dialogue), you just type normally and it'll come up as, for example, " Chuck Dagger: Hello, everyone." When you want to talk as a player and not as your character, type /ooc then your statement, for example, " Ryan (Chuck): Hello, everyone." My display name in this example is "Ryan (Chuck)" which I set in the Settings tab. When you want to describe an action, you use /em or /me. It's good to do it this way because actions are things the DM needs to adjudicate into success, failure, or uncertainty (and thus a roll). So if you're typing your monologue or dialogue into an emote like I saw commonly done, it clutters up the chat and makes it harder on the DM to see where and when he needs to narrate the result of the adventurers' actions. There are several times where I could see someone taking an action that needed adjudication, but for which there was no response from DM (unless it was all being done in whispers). I can imagine that's a result of it simply getting lost. When I run text games, I'm looking for those orange boxes - those are the things I know I need to adjudicate. To summarize: In-character talking: Just type. Out-of-character talking: /ooc then type. Actions: /em or /me then type. So instead of typing: /em walks over to the orc and says "I'm here to speak to your chieftain..." it should be: /em walks over to the orc. I'm here to speak to your chieftain. /ooc I'm trying to bluff my way past him. Is this agreeable? (Note: Nobody's perfect and everyone will screw this up even when we've been doing it for a while. The point is not perfection, just to make it easier to see who's talking and what actions are being taken that need adjudication.)

Drawn maps sometimes deviated significantly from the "real" map, even when I was pretty sure I had described it well. Not sure if that's a real problem, or if I should just smile and let it ride, and let the mess get fixed if an unexpected loop later shows up. I think that was me mostly sketching on the map. I was sketching very roughly and just for my general frame of reference. I've played games that are all in the mind and my imagination is thinking something entirely different from the GM's which has, on occasion been detrimental to the game. So, if the map is inaccurate, I would welcome clarification from the GM if important (like, location of stairs or statues, or w/e) I like the above for chat

For me personally this is the first game that I've played on roll20 that actually uses the /ooc command. But I have no issue with using it. But as for commands I don't see a problem with: /em walks over to the orcs and tries to bluff his way past him "I'm here to speak to your chieftain..." I like both though, as a comparison Which would eventuate to My OOC will switch between /ooc and the double brackets for a while, until I do get used to it. I am in 7 other ongoing campaigns on roll20 (& three on outside sites) and the ((double brackets)) is their form of ooc along with my previous 8 campaigns on roll20.

Drew, after reading the chat log I was reminded that you were creating macro for lingering injuries... Is there any other macro's like this you would like set up?

I just haven't done it, but it should be easy enough to create a player-visible macro that rolls on that table, yes. Saves having to flip over to a separate tab. Not sure about others but I feel pretty comfortable working with the macro/inline rolling language. On maps, yeah I'll have to learn to to adjust as necessary perhaps. I may prep something here or there with dynamic lighting, etc. just to see how it works in the context of what we're doing too. TH, you've reminded me of something else, asking about actions for which there was no obvious response from me: I was doing that via whispers early on. This is another thing I'm a little unsure of...on the one hand sending players information via whisper so that they can relay it to the others is good for RP and getting in character, but it does slow the pace down. As in many things, it may be best in sparing doses. On initiative, I think one roll per encounter is just fine. Rolling every round may be "fun" but it's yet another bookkeeping slow down. I will plan to display health bars, sure. There's the potential for a small bit of metagaming, but only to the extent that players don't already know approximately how many HP something as, which is only true if they've never seen that monster in any other game before. The benefits seem worth it. I'm a little on the busy side this week but will try to get everything discussed in place for this weekend. One thing I have done is prepped some random rumor tables to give players hooks they can pry on--I will be posting these as private journal entries, so check your journal out soon to see what you might have heard around town. Bear in mind they may be somewhat or entirely inaccurate.

Player-visible macro for lingering injuries: /me has sustained a lingering injury! /ooc (Lingering Injury: [[1t[Lingering-Injuries]]].) The table will have to be set so players can roll on it and the macro set to be visible to players in Settings>Macro tab. Whispering most definitely slows the pace down. I'd like to go on the record now and state that I'll respond to whispers from the DM, but everyone else, please don't send me whispers because I just won't respond. I'd prefer to minimize their use. They are a time-sink and make it unclear whether the DM has actually narrated the result of an adventurers' action which confuses the basic conversation of the game. I think we're all capable of compartmentalizing information as needed so that we achieve the goals of play. Agree on initiative. The less gimmicks the better in a text game in my view. We need every time-saving measure we can get or else content covered per session suffers. Agree on health bars. I don't care if other players metagame and for what it's worth don't care at all about it when I'm DMing. Metagame thinking is a useful tool for making the game better if the players want it to be. Like anything else done without care though, it can also make the game worse. But that's on the player, not the tool. I tell players, "Engage in metagame thinking all you want so long as you're using it to enhance the game experience. But do make sure to take in-game actions to verify assumptions you're making so that you aren't disappointed if/when your assumption is proved wrong."

Was in the middle of doing some macros then saw your version: yeah, pretty much. I realize that now about whispering, agreed. It seems like a neat trick to be able to let the players narrate what they themselves see/know/understand, but it's clearly not worth the cost.