Yet Another Oracle
I've been working on a JavaScript Oracle tool that integrates many of the ideas I've played around with. The tool is not in its final version, so it has some warts (some of the text windows might become pages, or be hidden altogether, etc).
Chris Stieha has very kindly given me feedback many many times on a jillion things, and I am looking for one or two extra play testers so I don't bother him all the time. :) Anyone who might be interested in playing around with it and sending me feedback (questions, comments, bugs), please hit me up in this thread with your email addy (or hit me up at solorpggamer at gmail dot com), and I'll send you a private link.
I thought I was done, but more actual play revealed some annoyances & nice to haves that I wanted:
ReplyDelete- First annoyance was the inability to turn off the interrupts. Though I've found them fun in more typical sessions, I'm finding that they don't quite fit what I need for Our Last Best Hope.
- Second annoyance was that in smaller mobile devices, sometimes it's hard to hit a button. When it came to adding corpus texts via the
'analyze' button, I didn't always known when a corpus was successfully analyzed until I went to the play tab. Now there's an alert given every time a text is analyzed, which is nice when you are analyzing multiple texts in one go.
- The nice-to-have that I wanted was a new scene prompt asking the user for a scene name or title. For the most part I just enter numbers: (1,2,3, etc) but you can enter anything you want as the scene header.
Regarding my actual play of Our Last Best Hope, it's been going in spurts and false starts. The #1 reason for that is that I've been trying to play mobile and I've been having some issues.
The main annoyance, at least with my mobile devices, is that if I put the browser in the background it doesn't take long for it to refresh the darn page. As you can imagine, that wipes out whatever game I had on the screen which sucks because not only do you lose your logs (if you haven't saved them to a file), you also have to re-load all of the corpus texts (not so bad on Android, but a real pain in iOS).
I don't see a near term solution to that so I've decided to treat this as a desktop tool for now. I may try something in the future with local storage like Mike Overbo's RanDM tool (assuming this would address that problem).
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I've run into another sort of speed bump while playing OLBH which is similar to the speed bump I hit when I tried to combine predictive text with the oracle prompts: there's a certain tension between the prompts and the predictive/generated text. The prompts tend to pull you in one direction while the generated text tends to pull you in another (though sometimes they 'cooperate').
OLBH has its own set of prompts in a way, with all of the pre-defined story elements('sane' and 'crazy' cards, etc). I'm finding that the corpus texts I chose don't quite support the interpersonal drama some of these do, which means I have to dig deeper into the generated text and engage in more cherry picking. Not bad, but not as easy flowing as when you have a figurative blank canvas.
This is nothing the tool can solve, but the right mix of text for the corpus would work (still wide open for experimentation).
Guys, my next actual play scene of OLBH. After this, I will be playing the actual threat for the scene, which involves the OLBH system.
ReplyDeleteplus.google.com - #sharedscifi Our Last Best Hope - The Killer Asteroid - Act 1 / Scene 2 Thi...
I was hoping to play the "crazy" card for Hema in this scene, and that needed to show some way in which Catherine drove Hema nuts. Instead, due to how the movie transcript text came out at a particular point, it "demanded" that I play the "secret" card instead (i.e. reveal that Hema has been diagnosed with brain cancer). This is the type of unexpected direction I want from the oracle. :)
I still managed to more or less start establishing that Hema is starting to find Catherine somewhat annoying, which might segue into playing the "crazy" card if they get to do another scene together.
In the near future, I will be playing a more typical RPG system with the tool.
Chris Stieha Todd Zircher Mike Overbo
Cool, I'm always a fan of solo tools that throws the player a curve ball every now and then. :-)
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