Lair of the Mountain King: OOC Thread

[spiderwrangler]

Trying to decide if I want to join you guys in drinking from the magic pool...

[thinkslogically]

doooooooooooooooo iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiit

[Dusk9]

You can probably use magic to push yourself around? I mean it's not fast, since you'll need to meditate your mana back really often, but still...

So, is Eaten in the pool room now? Or am I still a few rooms away?

[thinkslogically]

Ah shit, I forgot to draw him! he's in the pool room

[Dusk9]

Alright, let's do this!

...sooo, how's this pool work again? We just roll two d20s, yeah?

Roll 1: 3
Roll 2: 6

Whelp, let's hope lower is better....

[M0rtimer]

Yeah, floating sounded fun until I figured out I have no control over it, good luck.

[Dlover]

Also definitely the best way to treat your dm's and surely not to come back to you...

It's a cultural exchange. We show our friendship through insults and teasing.

[GathersIngredients]

Maybe you could make some armour and imprint it with the essence of weight to keep the floating chief down? Then you can walk around when you want to, and (undress a little and) float around, if needed. Just a thought.
Because the pool might not solve the problem, but instead give you another one on top of the floating.

[M0rtimer]

Yeah, like I said, the plan was for you guys to ignore your chief like you usually do, not for Theis to actuall fling me in again.

I'll probably just conveniently miss the pool so I don't have to do it again.

Anyways, we seriously need to decide what we actually wanna do. I'll just be heading back upwards if none of you guys are joining in beating up a ghost.

[Theis2]

I'm ready to join fighting the ghost, and if you won't roll the 2d20, then I guess I'll have to do it for you!

[Dlover]

Why do you think we're gathering the chaos energy?

[thinkslogically]

This is the first time this has come up I think (at least in a while), but you can't typically do things to another player against their will. So in this case, burned will miss the pool unless m0rt says he doesn't.

[Synch]

I've given my opinion on what to do but most seem to overlook me One of the pedestals has a crown symbol, so I think we should take the crown there, along with the moonstone, dragon egg and serpent egg.

[M0rtimer]

Nah, I'm not ignoring you, I'd just want to fight the ghost, if we're gonna fight the ghost, now. Considering it's literally next to us and ideally we don't come back here after we leave.

Also it's a decent idea Gathers. Might try to do that. I think I might need to get a wand or something to store wind energy in though, so I can blow myself around when need be.

Or maybe I should practice the sacred art of fart-fu...

[thinkslogically]

Hey folks! OK, it's honest opinion time: do you guys want to keep going with this?

I feel like the slow pace is killing what is already a slow game (because I made the mechanics take bloody ages), and I know that the vast majority of that has been my fault. It's not fun to wait 2 weeks to basically recover 2mp.

Anyway, what do you guys want to do? I'm happy to keep going of course, but I'm also happy to overhaul the rules / schedule because I feel like interest is waning. The last update has been up for a week and there's only one reply... That suggests to me that you're no longer particularly having fun

FYI, while tone is difficult to convey in text, I am genuinely asking. I honestly won't be offended by (constructive) comments

[spiderwrangler]

I definitely would like to see it though, I just sometimes get lost as to what rooms are where, etc. But the main thing for me was that I was waiting to see if everyone else was attacking, and got caught up in the other games I've started in that update daily.

[GathersIngredients]

I'm still interested. I just had tons of stuff to get done for work lately in order to be able to go onto my vacation next week "unburdened". And now I need to do some preparations for my vacation (like packing and stuff), and I'll be having little to none Internet connection during the upcoming week.


A map might help to keep track of a) where we are/want to be going (to find our way around) and b) where we haven't been yet (to tie up "loose ends" and/or find things we have missed but might be crucial).

Plus, I'm not sure - with me only entering the game at a late point instead of from the beginning and with the breaks due to GM moving to USA and such (this is by no means an accusation!) - if I remember the GOAL that our little goblins had.
I think we were to stop some evil entity from doing something horrible and I vaguely remember some glowing runes in the sky and some voice doing a count down or prayer or something?

[Dlover]

I'm still here, no doubts on that.

Plus, I'm not sure - with me only entering the game at a late point instead of from the beginning and with the breaks due to GM moving to USA and such (this is by no means an accusation!) - if I remember the GOAL that our little goblins had.
I think we were to stop some evil entity from doing something horrible and I vaguely remember some glowing runes in the sky and some voice doing a count down or prayer or something?

I think we started as planning to reclaim our clan's ancient lair, but opening the front door started weakening the "cage" holding some sort of horrible demon, so we're now trying to make sure we can stop it from getting free. The voice with seemingly no source is said demon, and it can only see us / mess with us while we're in the main area, not side areas through the teleporter, like where we are now.

[spiderwrangler]

I had made a map for the under water bit, but not up top

[thinkslogically]

OK well that's good news A map (or two) is very easily done, and dlover has the main purpose summed up, except that you're also searching for items within the dungeon that you believe you have to place on the altar (where the dragon was).

[Dusk9]

My main problem personally is just lack of focus (on my part). This is the only game I'm in other than Mort's PTU game, so I've been having trouble keeping up to date with them. Especially with all the IRL commitments I've got to deal with now: last year of my masters at uni, girlfriend, uni society commitments, job hunting, food, etc. I've basically been popping in, seeing an update, trying to think of what to write, then going away and completely forgetting about it until the next day (when I do it all over again)

But yeah, I agree that a map would be nice. I keep forgetting were everything is. Also atm I'm just trying to think of something for Eaten to do while waiting for the others to get ready for fighting. I toying with the idea of trying to make something out of the ribcages, except I have no clue what would even be useful...more bone armour maybe?

EDIT: Also just remembered I've still got some of that green rock. Maybe I should go back to the forge and try making something using it? After we're done beating up this ghost, of course.

[M0rtimer]

Hmm... Well, it's definitely not that I want to give up on this game, I can tell you that straight away. But at this moment at least the game is definitely going through a bit of a rut.

Part of it for me has been that I've been wanting to move along with doing something, and I've been quite clear as to what our options regarding that were... But everyone else either had "one last thing" they needed to do, and it seemed as if by the time they were done, someone else had to do something else, which left me in a situation I could either go suicidal and go in alone, or be left with nothing to do/ something benign...

I do think there are some elements to the game that unnecessarily drag it out, but whether or not you adjust those is up to you. My personal rut has been simply that "I should post, but I guess I'll wait to see if others are finally done", and then consecutively forget I hadn't posted yet. That seems to have been resolved now so hopefully we can move things forward.

If you are considering making some things less tedious, there's a few ideas I could have...

-Mana regenerates automatically after/outside of battle: Currently end of battle simply means "And now I will spend two turns recovering the mana I spent", which are two non-interesting turns in addition to any HP you might have lost. It feels like it does very little to the actual flow of the game besides slow things.
-HP recovery: Sadly, while I feel that HP recovery suffers from the same issue, it's not one I have an exact idea for as to how you could fix it. I don't think it should recover automatically, but sadly with the way the game is currently structured, I don't think there are many other ways this could be handled.
Allow me to elaborate on this for a bit so you get an idea of what I mean- You like to deal large amounts of damage in a relatively short amount of time, usually followed by relative peace... To offset this, hitting 0HP doesn't kill you as long as someone is nearby to either stabilize you or transfer some HP into you... But this HP loss, coupled with the fact that we didn't have a reliable source of healing, pretty much branded in early to "rest to recover HP".

To contrast this with another game, and I'll pull up one of NLS old games here- (Not that I'm implying it's a better system- I'd argue it could be worse) These games had only one regular source of healing in the form of their "teller", which could only heal 1 HP/turn... 0 HP also meant death, but in return, damage was harder to come by and HP potions were a bit more frequent. (Which I know you have provided us the means to make, and have given us some too- But the former we never got around to, and the latter I believe we lost when one of our chars died)

But like I said, this system is definitely not superior considering the job of teller and knowing that every turn will be spent healing is not particularly an exciting one. And with the current game layout, not possible barring we'd take huge timeskips to get everyone back up to strength.

One potential thing I would try if you went along with the previous suggestion is that you could use MP to recover HP, meaning you could either stand still and recover 2 HP outside of battle, or move and recover 1HP, which would accelerate things a bit... Although technically not really canon as you wouldn't allow us to move health energy into us from nowhere.
-Adjust crafting: I think the main problem is that while you wanted to allow us to do crafting, it was never your intention for that to become a major part of the game, but it appears several of us took it like that. And while I suppose it's not a big deal to take several turns doing this if they don't mind, I do get the sense it's yet another one thing grinding down at the pace of the game.
Problem is that I don't feel like crafting should be like a "one turn" thing either. Personally, I think I'd prefer to simply make it a priority of us to not do regular crafting any more, so consider this more of a tell to the other players than you- You've already shown us you're able to give us some pretty cool loot if we look at the right places, which is infinitely better than anything we've made ourselves this far. Instead, if we want to do crafting, we should simply use the magical forge we found previously- And here we could also argue that this could be a faster process than regular crafting would otherwise be.

[thinkslogically]

Thanks for the post M0rt, thats really helpful and insightful Yeah, the teller being the only healer made it a crappy role for that player and I didn't want that here. You guys also took on the crafting WAY more than I expected, but that's ok. You made some cool stuff and I tried to give you an easier time in some of the initial fights to reflect how 'advanced' your stuff was relative to walking in naked! You didn't lose any potions though -I think Eaten or Finds picked up everything that was on the two corpses. ... or they should have anyway... I'll check.

The original reason for the slow MP recovery was because one of the ideas of the system was that spending more MP gives you access to more powerful magic. You guys have used this a couple of times, but haven't exploited it nearly as much as I expected, possibly because the "Try it and See" approach doesn't really explain anything. Essentially, a 1MP spell is weak, but by improving your individual magic, you can cast better (or more varied) spells using more MP. You can also combine your MPs to cast those better spells as a group. I figured having slow MP recovery would help tone down any munchkining, which I was REALLY concerned about cos I had no idea how to balance combat when this all started, but you're right -it's just slow. I also have a much better idea of what I'm doing now so I think it's much less of a concern.

So, what I propose is two separate systems: one for combat and one for not. Out of combat, HP and MP recover fairly quickly, one point of each at the end of every turn as a free auto action. That'll still take a bit of time to recover if you're totally knocked down but means you're at least free to do other things while you wait. Inside combat, auto recovery stops completely and you have to follow the rules we've been using to now.

Since this could easily be abused by skipping in and and out of an area with combat, I'll say that combat rules apply if ANY goblin is in combat anywhere in the dungeon. You guys have ESP, we'll tot it up to psychic distraction or something.

If that sounds good, we can roll with that and see how it works. I think it should help with the pacing problems we are having overall, but I'm more than happy to hear what you guys think.

[M0rtimer]

Oh yeah, this is true, and I can see what you're coming from... Ultimately though, using 2MP on a spell to deal more damage rather than two 1 MP spells still ends you with the same issue though- Having to spend 2 turns out of battle, because you can't recover it while inside it. Again though, I can understand why you originally implemented it- And I think giving the new system a try is a good idea.

(As for the potions I think we lost, that was all the way back when Asks' character died I believe... It's possible I am mistaking this for a different game and we collected the potion afterwards though)

[thinkslogically]

But 2+MP spells were intended to be different to 1+1 MP spells... It would be more obvious at higher levels though!

Fuck it. Let's see what happens with auto recovery.