First! Thanks for playing! I've got a lot of high hopes for this campaign. I suspect at least a couple of you do too. I hope I fulfill all our hopes and this campaign rocks face. Enough of that, though. The intro session will be, hopefully, next week! Unless someone can't make it. I will actually need all eight players there. I feel like I'm listening to a quarterly review. You nervous? I think I'm about to get laid off :( You'll be starting at effectively 0th level. Mechanically this doesn't matter. Flavorwise what it means is that you possess any inborn talents that your backstory says, and have any equipment that you bring with you - you'll be playing your characters pre-Aesir augmentation. There's a story reason for this, and a bit of a narrative one - I want your characters to have trained together as a u nit for at least multiple weeks prior to the act ual campaign start. am I still a forklift, because that might make training tough Immediately after the first session, the augmentation starts, and you are no longer a forklift. * JesseLman nods. Back. Flavorwise, the augmentation is what makes you an "adventurer". I'll cover some flavor on the healing surges, on the death saves, etc. That's really all that's happening, is that I'm attaching flavor to the existing mechanics. Right. The intro encounters are also important for ME, because I need to get as quick a handle as I can on how to challenge your particular team with encounters. So they may be a little rough initially, especially as I sort out how to use Gametable effectively. I expect they'll be a bit rough on our ends to, to varying degrees As we figure out what our characters are particularly good at. * Chamelaeon nods. A note on the intros - we may move awfully quickly at points. I will leave room for roleplaying, but I am going to try to keep us zipping along. If you feel like you want more time to mull over the nature of the augmentations or any personal reflections, OR have a sit down with an NPC, let me know! We can do it as a mini. Which pretty much goes for the entire campaign. If you want to cover something specific, let me know, I'll make the time for it. Any questions on the intro stuff? Nah. Don't think so I'm pretty good. There's not much there to ask about yet Nope. I've got a checklist of background bullet points, you want me to shoot you those in msg? Go for it. So! Mechanics. I will post the .part for the backgrounds this weekend, almost certainly on Sunday. After that, I need you guys to download the .part, apply the appropriate background (should be pretty easy to tell what it is) and then save your character file. Then, post that file to the wiki! All of you should have upload rights. That saves me endless trouble of rifling through emails to make sure I'm current. I'm bad at emails. You can respec _at any time_. Just let me know what you're doing. The goal here is to have fun, and it really, REALLY sucks to play a build you're not happy with in a game like 4e. Truth. It also means we should have some freedom in testing things out. * NinjaDebugger move three squares, turns on cloaking cloak. Yes! Don't feel bad about experimenting. In truth, you guys ARE kind of walking experiments - the Aesir augmentation is never quite the same twice. And letting the techs get their hands back in you to tune and tweak is fun for them too. So there's no flavor worries about it. I'm a hands off kinda gal. Okay, I have a question about main sessions. I don't think there's anything else mechanical. ? So you said it's biweekly, with rotating teams. So does that mean you expect the sessions to be episodic and finish at the same day they start? Or would the two-parter happen in two weeks? For instance. I anticipate that your missions will almost always take longer than one session to finish. Sometimes we may be out of sync between the two groups, as far as time goes. It shouldn't be too much of an issue. Does that answer your question? So the A-B-A-B order is still go even if we don't finish something in one week? Will there be overlap between the two? That was the plan. I'm pretty good about offering recaps, and I almost always get logs posted. OK. So if you're worried about "I don't remember what's going on" then I aim to alleviate that problem. There WILL be occasional overlap! For certain occasions I may call for a double session where everybody's in on the game. With 8 players that will be intensely crazy, though, and I don't anticipate it happening often. OK. Do you have an idea on session length, or is that TBD? Well I am old now Don't want to pull a Robin now, do you. So if we actually start around 7 I imagine we will end by 11 at the absolute latest. Especially if I have a little GM's Helper. (PS that means alcohols) Consdiering ND turns into a pumpkin at like 9:30 Yeah. A very surly pumpkin it's easier when I have something actively distracting me like a game or an active discussion sometimes I stay up until almost ten thirty on weekends! So. For the nubs to my GMing style * JesseLman nods. << >> is description notation. [ ] is a foreign language (in the past it has almost always meant Sleythin or Earthese but we've got a couple new ones now). ~ ~ means a secure communications channel, usually only to your teammates. % % implies a telepathic thoughtcast, though that should happen infrequently if at all ~~ ~~ means it's SPOOOOOOOOOOOKY. I ain't had call for that one yet! Do you use for OOC chatter, just asking HA no I hate that shit It is the hardest thing to type, seriously, who decided that ( ) is OOC. I do not plan on having a separate OOC channel until and unless the tactical talk just overwhelms any semblance of what is actually happening in the combat. I like seeing everything that's going on in one log. (Note: 4e is extremely dice heavy, that will not be completely fun in the same channel.) What are you talking out of character of? (Someone who's awake.) I guess we'll see. Maybe I'll set it up as a strictly dice channel. So that deviant ND can't look in on our playing I like watching dice roll. :( Aren't you going to be running the dicebot? I got new router, so Dicesuke's back the new and improved dicesuke with extra bastardry Even More Random Oh. Last things. You may have guessed from the way I have not given any fucks about your item selection, but you won't be getting gold from combats. Like respeccing, you may trade out items when there's downtime. (within reason, where "reason" is defined as "Please don't make it suck to make encounters for you") There won't be XP either, we're doing Dramatic Levelling. Is the item level max going up as w elevel? Yep. The only reason there's a max at all is because I'd like to try to keep the system afloat as we strap a rocket to it and skip it across the lagoon Last thing, and some of you know this already We will be hitting epic tier! But do not plan out what Epic Destiny you are picking. I have Planz. I think that's it! Any questions? Nope. I got nothin Can I be Awesome? YES. I really hope everyone is awesome. I don't think I have any more questions, no. 19 00:00:00 2011