Are we talking asynchronous forum game?? I can commit to an average of one turn per day.
I’d love to try this also. I’ve never actually played Traveler but I made a bunch of characters years ago in the PC game.
It would definitely be asynchronous and on the forum. Further format TBD. And it would go more slowly than once a day for sure.
Ok, so rules wise, what should we players read?
I’m guessing book 1? Should we also read 2 and 3?
Also, this might be of interest (I think it’s 100% compatible). Maybe, depending on what you have planned.
I would be willing to consider it but I have no knowledge of Traveller at all.
I also am intrigued enough to want to try this, but know basically nothing about Traveller.
I would be interested although I too have never played Traveller.
We had our Session 0 for D&D 5e Tomb of Annihilation campaign today. A combination of lots to do makes it convenient to run a canned module. Been a long while since we did too, and it has gotten good buzz.
I don’t think it is a spoiler as it is the first thing the players get to know when the scenario starts, but you never know. The main conceit of the adventure is that there is a death curse that causes all humanoids that have been raised from the dead to wither away.
The party will be a mainly elven noble house trying to stop the thing that’s going on as they think they will lose a lot of influence if their elder members are lost. There’s a good mix of classes and interestingly connected character concepts, including a courtship feud between two scions of the noble house; the influence of celestial and infernal powers on a branch of the family; the half-elf family member that has been station as a scout in the ancestral homeland of the elves (with his own ideas of what TRUE ELFDOM is); and the human (1/16 elf) great grandson of the family matriarch that has a chip on his shoulder.
What can possibly go wrong?
Read book 1 for sure, but I feel like with a forum game we could get everyone through the thing not fully knowing the rules. I honestly have very little idea of how this would work.
In my experience, people just kind of vanishing after a few weeks.
Yeah it seems hard to get these off the ground. Our Unknown Armies try was fun, but we never really pulled together a quorum and we (at least I definitely did) had trouble figuring out how to do the session zero part right. That’s probably on me partially. I never got a good grasp for what we needed to do to get going. Might’ve worked better if we’d done more of it on forum? Dunno.
Oh, I was specifically talking about play-by-forum. It’s easier (not easy, but easier) to keep voice/roll20 sessions going, since among other things there’s a specific schedule to adhere to. But every play by forum game I’ve ever been involved with (roleplayingwise, at least) has fallen apart because players and/or GM just ghosted.
I’m looking forward to see what format @Broosky proposes. I think it’s mostly about the story and format. Not everything works forum wise.
I’m off to buying book 1 and reading the basics.
Yeah, it definitely could be a problem. We did at least finish this:
I find boardgames tend to be stickier because you just have to submit turns. There’s no creative writing involved.
Whoa! Creative writing??
I think the creative writing on a rapid asynchronous schedule is a big deal.
I love roleplaying but I’ve decided that I shouldn’t try online play by post again because it is all too easy to have not responding because you don’t have the time to give it the full treatment it deserves turn into ghosting. Or, more commonly, a sort of semi-ghosting where different people keep being the one to stall the game for a few days. Often no one person is to blame but it eliminates the momentum and the game stalls.
Getting into a character for a game session with friends is easy. Getting into a character for a few minutes once or twice a day every day at a time when its ok to type longer messages is tougher.
Another issue is reaching consensus about what the next step should be. It can lead to days of waiting around for someone to make a decision. It helps to have a clearly defined “caller” who can state the direction the party will take, after giving everyone a chance to speak up if they disagree.
Thanks for the explanation. I had certainly not expected any creative writing. I sort of expected:
- The door is locked
- Character X tries to pick the lock
- fails
- Break it down, then.
I may need to reconsider if this forum role-playing thing is actually what I want to do, at least in the format of what is expected from a forum role-playing thing.
I understand what you mean. Maybe dropping the word “role-playing” in place of something less common but perhaps clearer: “a forum scenario simulation powered by the Travelers rules”. Constrain your first scenario to something brief that is easy to complete. This sounds like a text-based based board game without a pre-determined win condition.
I think role-playing implies some creative writing (or improv) and an open-ended set of experiences the players are partially in control of. All of that is the hard part to keep going in a forum game.
For the record, I don’t have time for a forum role-playing game but I might have time for “a forum scenario simulation powered by the Travelers rules” :-)