Mouse Guard PbP

Is anyone running one, or would anyone like to play? I would love to try this game out, and I wouldn’t mind playing or running. I think it would work well enough as PbP, and I noticed that the other BW forums have a folder just for this purpose. Perhaps MG could get one of it’s own?

I started a thread up at RPGnet to discuss the logistics of running MG PbP. A lot of MG would suit PbP, though I think you would need some ground rules about running the Players’ Turn.

I agree, though I would think it would be a simple matter of having the GM determine the order that the Player’s would post their actions. If the other Players got involved, say in a conflict, that would be fine, but go through each Player one action at a time, alternating them. So long as the Players understood that I think it would work well enough.

Yep. Color me interested in the PbP if you get things kicking off.

Well, I was hoping we might get a forum for PbP games under the Mouse Guard list, but I don’t know how to go about getting the attention to do it. I’d also have to figure out how to do die rolling.

There are die-rolling servers that will email your die rolls to the GM - probably quite a few of them.

Do you happen to know the address to any of those dice servers?

Invisible Castle is one I’ve used in the past.

Invisible Castle is my favourite too.

Okay looks good. Now would anyone be interested in playing PbP, aside from Skywalker who already showed interest.

I’d be quite happy to join in on a game! Like PbP, I do…

I was thinking maybe doing on at plothook.net, myself.

Well if you do let me know, I’d love to play as well.

Actually, just remembered an idea I had a wee while ago - What about a mIRC game? All real-time, handle just as a game would in person. Easy to get dice rollers for mIRC clients and such, and the game would all flow as natural as a real game.

We’re playing tonight over Skype! There’s a decent shared dice room here:

http://rpgp.org/dice/?

How’d the Skype game go?

I’ve never done anything over Skype, so I’m wondering as well…

I had this all written up but then the web ate my post. Later, I wrote a more game-oriented description of the session in the Millicent’s Stump thread.

Here’s the tools we were using. Stop reading whenever signs of madness set in.

[ul]
[li]Skype (for audio)[/li][li]PalTalkScene for video[/li][li]Twiddla.com as a shared whiteboard for scripting and viewing the map[/li][li]Google docs spreadsheets for the character sheets[/li][li]Udo Schroeter’s online dice room[/li][/ul]
This was just too much. Each of these tools was handy, but even dual monitors aren’t enough to deal with all of this nicely, and most of us have just the one.

Skype rocks. The sound quality is good, and (almost?) everyone had headphones.

PalTalkScene was a bust. After testing so many damn video links, somehow we neglected to notice that PTS only looks like it supports multiple video streams - but you gotta pay to get that going. Sanjeev was really disappointed when that went; Kyle didn’t care as he had no web cam anyways and actually preferred to free up his imagination instead.

Twiddla was … okay. It doesn’t seem to have multiple “pages” in the way that Vyew does, so I had to wipe it clean for different purposes. I have a small Cintiq tablet, but using that on a web-based tool is like power steering on a tricycle - annoying.

The online character sheets were helpful during character burning; I could flip from sheet to sheet to see how people were doing in the character generation process. I coudl see right away that Sanjeev was stuck on his instinct, and Kyle was puzzling over his last trait. But more on that later.

The dice server was fine, though you have to hold your mouse over the result to see the individual dice in a tool tip, to see how many sixes you had. It’s also slightly too large of a UI so it’s hard to make it really small in a convenient way. (Most of the time you don’t need to see much history.)

After the game, Sanj complained about the way the Conflict seemed to have only a bit of narration as we rolled dice, consulted our character sheets, scripted, etc. This and Kyle’s comment about video leads me to the conclusion that it’s really important to focus on the audio.

Computers are so… expansive that you can get lost in the apps. In particular, having so many streams of input (did someone roll dice? did they scribble on the whiteboard? send a URL through one of four chat mechanisms?) creates lag in the flow.

In person, if you look at someone else’s character sheet, you have to lean into their personal space. There’s an unavoidable conversational byproduct that has value of its own. “Oh, I’m not quite done my skills yet,” and “Uh huh, but that second instinct is cool!” The way we were set up, we could easily scan one another, but it all happened non-verbally - information was gleaned but without anyone else knowing. The physical analogy is that of us all sitting together, with laptops, with our backs to one another.

So my conclusion is to ditch most of the tools, possibly even rolling our own physical dice. I’ll be sorry to see the shared character sheets go since it’s really handy for my beliefs/goals/instincts GM summary sheet auto-generated as they type (!) but it’s just so much damn easier for people to refer to a piece of paper.

I suppose it’s no surprise, they say multi-tasking cuts 40 points off your IQ. (You heard it here first, the market collapse was really caused by a whole generation of managers and executives struggling to pay attention to one another under a permanent 40-point IQ drop from Blackberry-induced continuous partial attention.)

In fact, I ought to try playing without looking at the computer at all - just headphones, book, notes and dice, turn off the monitor. Use it as an audio link only.

PBP seems great for Mouse Guard but there is also a LOT of team work.
How does that go?
I mean doesn’t it slow the game a lot to wait for the other people’s help before the roll.
If some people take too much time between posts, how does it go?

By the way, my favorite PBP is RPOL.
It has very good functions to post but leave information hidden from some of your players ( even though you probably don’t need it for something like Mouse Guard :slight_smile: ), NPCs, character sheets, etc…

I would probably put a limit of 24 hours for help posts, though it might depend on activities and decided posting guidelines as well.