#blorb — Public Fediverse posts

#boatmode session 35 (yes, both sessions this week were on consecutive days). More basic dungeon crawl out on abd-Yson Island fighting skeletons, pirates and ferrets. And items! I love it when gems and items have a lot of personality.

Spent some time discussing OOC after which we rarely get time to do. I said that it’s super important that all the players have a way to communicate without me—so in case there’s a problem with the game, or they want to continue without me, they can. I love that they want to play in my campaign and I want that to keep being voluntary, and never that they feel held “hostage” by all communication going through me.

This may sound weird but it’s because I do have a very different style of DMing (I mean I have a blorby style which is different from the 3e/4e mainstream). A lot of things that other groups would be up in arms over—such as the amount of PVP, intra-party scheming and stealing etc, extreme lethality, mixed level parties etc seems to work fine.

Also I cheated on #blorb! I did an unblorby thing! They were examining some mosaic eyes on a mural and by the book the eyes were absolutely normal and I improvised that the eyes opened some doors further in. See, this is why I need the blorb principles—to reign me in. I don’t have a problem improvising things. “What’s the problem, it’s all wallpaper?” Not really… because there was no prep lacuna here to justify improvisation. The wall was described. It’s just that they thought the eyes were weird. I shoulda woulda oughtta just stick with it. The last something similar to this happened was some tar stuck to a wall in In Search of the Unknown (in KotB campaign) and before that the weird time-fluid on a house in Cookie Tin village in #Glitchworld.

I want to describe things in an interesting and vivid way, but, when my mere description turns into a “puzzle” I feel like I’m absolutely cheating compared to all the real and interesting solidly blorby puzzles they could be spending their time on instead (such as what happened in Jumlat or who made the weird claw marks down on level four). It’s only happened a handful of times over the almost 300 sessions over the last six years, but I want to do better.

I used to play an all improvised style, and then blorb is the other way around. As much as I can is set up for me to not have control, for me to lose control.

I finally figured out that that’s the central difference between me and #MCDM. Anything he can do to retain control—like fudging dice, stacking decks, secretly scripting scenes with particular players (such as what happens with commander in Chain #001), having clocks where instead of a clock he decides when things happen etc—he does. And I do everything to not have control. Never fudge, never stack decks, OK admittedly the occasional player-co-scripted surprise (like Jalara being the pirate queen of Durrar or [I don’t remember the character name] being a prisoner of Valindra in the Heart of Stone), and I love setting up mechanics to determine what happens. #gloracle take the wheel! The glorious oracle of dice, rules and prep!

I had a module where the water supply of a city was in danger, the party seemed to be more interested in other things. Now, the intent of the module writer was probably to, IDK, I think they just assumed that the party would follow those leads which makes sense if those leads are the only things going on, but, #boatmode is a “drinking from the firehose” style campaign. There are a lot going on! There was no built-in time pressure for the water supply—the players could save it whenever and if they did it within one day, they got even more gold, but no real deadline.

That is weaksauce. The entire world does not revolve around the Sea Ghost Trading Company. So I put it on 3d6 days + randomly how many would die.

Then, once those days were up, I really wanted to flinch. I was like “Why oh why didn’t I build in a chance for one of the many rival NPC parties I’ve made to be able to stop it?” But then I realized it was too late to make that change. I had committed to this mechanic and now it was time to just report it to the party on our internal “domain news” page. I really really wanted to cheat but I didn’t.

In hindsight, it might’ve been pretty patronizing and crappy to have some other NPC party be outshining the PC party that way. That did happen in our Coursair Council campaign (up north in Hawa) — I had the NPC quest giver on an “If the PCs don’t do it by X date, I’ll go do it myself” and I rolled both for the when and for the whether she managed to do it or not. She could’ve died in there, she could’ve been more patient — I rolled for both those things. But I get that the party thought it was a bit bad that she went down there and kicked all the cultists butts on her own. Almost DMPC style 🧕

This is why I can just eyeroll at stuff like “PTA is sim, Archipelago is sim”. OK, good luck with that. This is blorb.

Realism and blorb https://idiomdrottning.org/realism-and-blorb #texts #rpg #philosophy #realism #blorb #flamewars

Clues in TRPG mysteries Now rewritten, almost three times as long. RIP brevity but hopefully in service of clarity. #texts #rpg #blorb #zendo

#boatmode session 17

Kind of a no-happen session was the review I got from my beloved dorks♥

They finally got to do some boat navigation, I struggled af with the math around hexes and hours. Two miles per hour means three hours per hex. I made several mistakes throughout the session around that I believe. But I need to remember that mnemonic. All the, uh, “pre-math” around ship travel I had already done before the campaign was for a proper boat not this li’l dinghy.

They went to the island, found one entrance to a dungeon, bailed. This thread is spoiler-free (as in “players may read it”) so other DMs, please don’t say the name but it’s a dungeon that is kind of well-known in the DM community for not being Jaquayed enough and, uh, so far they’re not kidding! The name for it in our campaign is “Sunless Island”.

Home in Safaq, a lot of stuff had happened but one of the players is like “But my character didn’t hear any of that, only the other player’s character heard it”. Such is the extreme anti-meta nature of the playstyle of my darling dorks.

But that’s fine by me. My prep can handle it. This campaign has effing massive prep. Close to four shelf-feet of physical books and that’s not counting PDFs, multilayered SVGs, and org-files. It’s ridiculous.

One very unexpected thing for me as DM was that one of my fave NPCs, “The Brine Hand”, an old salty sailor turned imam of Hakiyah, packed up and left town! This is why we #blorb gaming!

We have table-driven rules for the religious service of clerical player characters and that was one of the consequences off of one of those tables. Kind of an unexpected consequence for me! But made perfect sense diegetically as far as I’m concerned. Great job by the #gloracle ♥