The finale of my Rolling Solo series where Mythic: Game Master Emulator and Sharp Swords & Sinister Spells come together for an actual play report. Mostly engine-driven prose and thought processes, but there's a brief combat encounter as well.
Thanks to everyone who's followed along with the series and I hope someone has or will find it useful in learning solitaire play. Spoiler Alert: I'm writing an "appendix" follow-up as well, to supply the reader with suggestions to the question, "Now what???"
http://wispsoftime.com/content/rolling-solo-chapter-6-part-iii-vincent-versus-the-volcano/
Thanks for posting this.
ReplyDeleteI like how you've set the fiction off in boxes; it looks great! I do a lot of mechanics blocks but I'm really bad at actually explaining them. You're about a million times more patient than I am. Are the collapsible boxes manually created? Pythia has a log format that does something similar with javascript but I never managed to make it pretty like yours!
ReplyDeleteIf you run into a lull, and want it to be up to rng how it ends, you might consider a d6 chart of events and a 10% trigger. Or do a reserve of "gm points" you can use to bump oracle results. I'm impatient though.
Tam H It's a wordpress installation. The narrative bits are just "quotes" from the wysiwyg editor. The inline text with background color is a shortcode included in the theme. The expandable parts is just a plug-in for "spoilers", which comes with its own styling, so I didn't have much hand in it other than telling it to be "brown", hah. :-)
ReplyDeleteNow I'm tempted to migrate. I like tinkering too much, I think, but it just looks so professional!
ReplyDeleteThis series is a great resource. Thanks for putting it together -- I think I forgot to say that earlier, haha.
I avoided WordPress for years, but finally just embraced the darn thing as I started running more and more sites. The good thing is, you can still tinker and create your own themes and plugins if you don't mind PHP. I've been working on plugins to display die rolls/results and a fancier way of breaking up actual plays.
ReplyDeleteI really enjoyed the post, thanks for sharing! I enjoyed the time you put into creating the story - it really made me feel like I was in the world, and like there was more for me to explore than just a series of rolls. Many of the feelings you expressed about thinking you would have been further, in combat, etc, echoed what I've felt with my SW campaign. It takes a lot of time to write what is essentially fiction, but it really pays off, especially in fleshing out in-world decisions, and, out of game, in coming back after a day or more away.
ReplyDeleteI was actually telling my wife that I think I'm going to use Fantasy Flight's upcoming generic Genesys RPG as a push to do some legitimate fantasy world building. Clearly I need a new rulebook for that... We'll see how that actually goes...but in any case, your post was great! I'll definitely stay tuned.
Thanks Ryan. I am always torn between writing and trying to move things along game-wise. I enjoy both aspects, but can't seem to stop myself writing. I'm going to look next at the 9Qs and similar frameworks to see if they help with "containment" of the runaway prose. :-)
ReplyDeleteI have the same issue; I'm still exploring how much prose feels "right" and that seems to change daily! What's right for one system isn't always right for another, too.
ReplyDeleteSometimes I feel like I spend more time working on frameworks to drive the story than I do actually playing!
Tam H Makes sense when you think about it, though. GMing for me was always about trying to build a story in which the PCs could play.
ReplyDeleteOh, I think that's pretty typical, I had the same experience as a GM! It wasn't until recently that I discovered sandbox style, and from there emergent story.
ReplyDeleteIt's just a balancing act; too much prose, and why not just write a novel? But not enough, and it's hard to find a reason to continue -- well, unless that's what you enjoy, haha. Not knocking it, I think we all have different things we enjoy.
This is interesting. I will post something soon.
ReplyDeleteTam H yea, it definitely feeling like novel-writing!
ReplyDeleteMan, I have got to rethink how I format my AP's...
ReplyDeleteTodd, I'll accept that as a compliment. Haha ;-p. Things seem to fit into 3 categories for me: commentary, narrative, and mechanics. I format the narrative in a "quote" block, the mechanics in the "spoiler" boxes, and the commentary is just the usual page formatting, though I do find it useful to include mechanics inline as well sometimes.
ReplyDeleteI think what I've been doing works well to separate these items, but I'm not entirely happy with it. I have some other ideas but haven't had much time to put into it as yet.
Depending which platform, if any, your blog is running on, there may already be plugins or extensions to get you where you want, or just some straight up css classes applied to an enclosing div.
If enough folks are interested, I could make a "tutorial" sort of post for how to achieve similar results in the major blogging platforms.
Oh, yeah. It's a compliment. In the sense of "man, screw Spencer Salyer with his awesome formatting and neat separation of narrative, mechanics, and thought process. He thinks he soooo awesome.
ReplyDeleteI should just delete mine."
But, yeah, a tutorial would be awesome if you have the time and interest to do so. I'm on blogger, and it's really hard to find ANY tips on formatting it. All the tips I've found focus on ways to monetize your blog, and that's...like, not remotely what I'm looking for.
I like how you put the focus on the commentary by offsetting the prose. It's inspired me to slow down a little and actually explain stuff like "why I just rolled 10d10", haha.
ReplyDeleteThere's room at the table for all sorts of approaches and they're all fun to read! Sometimes I do prose, sometimes I just keep a running commentary. It's all good. :)