Recruiting: high scale Pathfinder, Taldor, aka Byzantium focused

Started by Kolbrandr, June 02, 2013, 03:46:12 AM

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EroticFantasyAuthor


Kolbrandr

Quote from: RubySlippers on August 01, 2013, 02:01:08 PM
When will this start?

When I have enough fully hashed out characters to start up overall plots. Some people turned in some sheets in the last few days that I've been reading over in that sense.


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Nataleigh

I sent what I had to Kol. Gotta do a few things after he looks it over, but that shouldn't take too long. Just skills. He's got the important stuff. :P
I'm BACK from vacation! <3 <3 <3

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Zaer Darkwail

I PM'ed my char concept now. No levels or stats done as my level after all depends bit on the fluff/concept what I have. But I start grind the char asap once given what level or any extras I have.

Kolbrandr

I've been super fried the last 5 days or so from covering a local theatre festival for a place I write for, should be sending out replies to things in the next couple of days.

Zaer Darkwail

Ouch, sad to hear you had been draining busy :P. I will wait patiently a reply :).

Nataleigh

No worries, Kol. Don't let yourself get overloaded. We can wait. ^_^

I've been really kinda fried IRL as well... it is not fun. :I
I'm BACK from vacation! <3 <3 <3

We need more teachers and students at St. Jude! Please join! <3

Kolbrandr

So, I finished the Zonaras writeup and was inclined to post it, and I've been sending some replies to people, but, here's the thing, of the players I have had note interest/been talking to..

Flying Tengu, and Trilogy have formally withdrawn at various points, along with that dude who wanted to make that Andoran affiliated character.

Xerial, Avorae, and Phaia have been unresponsive for hugely extended enough periods that I'm just presuming they're out as well.

Gingerscorpion left Elliquiy completely more or less, and Ruby Slippers seems to be sort of banned or something.

I'm not sure what Meliai's current status is.

And particularly that such includes several people I've spent not a small amount of time working on characters with, it's left me feeling more than a bit disheartened about the whole thing.



kckolbe

Damn.  Worst comes to worse, you could just save the worldbuilding stuff and start over with recruitment.  I mean, you do have a fairly rich setting here.
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Nataleigh

I'm BACK from vacation! <3 <3 <3

We need more teachers and students at St. Jude! Please join! <3

TheGlyphstone

If it's any consolation, I still have a lot of interest, just no time.

Zaer Darkwail

Indeed, start over the recruitment or you can keep families and ideas what the other potential players left and add them in as free game lore material.

I am myself have interest and if given warning I can make the char for this game and then make daily posting schelude (hopefully).

EroticFantasyAuthor

I am terribly sorry but I think it might be best if I bow out, I just can not seem to find the inspiration/motivation to work on character backstories and my faction.  :-\

RubySlippers

#814
I'm still here and can play. I like my character. My advice though is run with what you have if you keep world building especially when the world building has nothing to do up front with a characters interests its prolonging starting. Take many of the noble houses unless your a member of a house or an ally why bother doing all that extra work now, do it as the game is going on.

yaracyrrah

If recruitment were to open again I would tentatively be interested, though I've only just begun to dig into the setting material.

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Ebb

Okay, Kolbrandr, here's my advice:

1) Reread the first post to this thread, from back at the start of June. If the kinds of things that you wrote about back then still excite you, then go to step 3. Otherwise go to step 2.

2) If the idea of a Taldor campaign that's the kind of thing you would want to play in no longer turns your crank in a big way, then gently wrap things up, thank people for their participation, and move on. Maybe resurrect the project in a couple of months if you have the itch. Without a huge and continuous influx of GM energy and passion, games die, so you don't want to be doing this if it's not something you really want to do. If you go this route, you certainly have my thanks for leading a very interesting world-building exercise, and my interest should you ever restart.

3) Okay, so you've decided to go forward. You'll need new blood. It's kind of hard to get new people to read a 33 page Recruiting thread, much less a giant-sized Wiki. So you start a new thread, specifically for recruiting new people.

4) My suggestions for new recruitment thread:
- Every new person gets to make a level 10 character, using the character creation rules. (Or if there's an existing player they can get bumped up to 10 if desired.) No worldbuilding required. People are encouraged / mandated to tie their character to the organizations and characters that already exist, rather than carving out new territory. This should lower the bar for getting people involved. And people love to make Pathfinder characters -- making a level 10 gestalt character ought to get some bodies through the door.
- Possibly give out small bonuses based on how many points of contact new characters have with the setting that's been written up. Could be as easy as 1000gp of extra money to spend for each organization, PC, or important NPC that gets mentioned in their character background (up to some limit). Just a little incentive to read through some of the work that's been done, rather than creating your character in a vacuum.
- Periodically post a list in the recruitment thread of all accepted characters. Accepted characters are locked in -- no more tinkering. (Use the wiki list for this instead if you like.) This will also affirm commitment from us 'old timers'.
- Pick a start date for play, and an in-game event or three that will draw people together. Maybe one upper-class event, one lower-class event, one combat/adventure type event. Tell everybody they need to justify their character being at one of these events. Start an IC thread and an OOC thread for each. People can use the OOC thread to help work out how/why they're there. Maybe give each character a little "hidden mission" (You're at the party to sound out the Andoran ambassador about trade deals. You're searching through the slums for your lost brooch. Etc. Even better if these tie to other PC's.)

5) Leave conceptual space for new people to roll up characters (using the same level 10 criteria) later and drop in, once they see how much fun people are having. Unlike an adventuring party in a dungeon, it ought to be relatively trivial for players to enter and exit this game, which is certainly a strength of the setting you've chosen.

6) As Ruby suggested, build more world when we need it. Don't worry about filling out the rest of the setting right now. You'll always have more great ideas as we go anyway.


And in case it's not obvious, I would like this to continue and I'd like to be a part of it. But not unless you're excited about it to. If it starts off feeling like a dismal chore for you, it won't get any better along the way.

Thanks again, and I hope this wasn't too presumptuous.


Kolbrandr

Having taken some time to think about this..

So the thing of it is, at no point did I view the work for this game as a dismal chore. I was enjoying talking about characters and character work with people, it was part of the notion of wanting to try to create something more involved with people as participants in that creation, allowing them to thereby establish a chunk of setting around themselves in a way that a lot of online rp just doesn't seem to allow, or treats in a very cursory, indifferent way. To give people some sandboxy power for agendas and self determination. It was part of why I wanted everyone to be able to take their time with this, and incentivize so doing, instead of rush out some basic thing.

Part of why it was otherwise disheartening as far as people falling off for the many reasons of course that people do, is that it seemed like a good solid number of people were entirely looking to do that and excited for the chance to do so. It wasn't that I minded that others wanted to create something more basic in light of that, and indeed, as some of you can attest, was even happy to take time to work with people to help them carve out a place in the game and understand character creation and such stuff besides, but that was along with making the central idea of the game go.

The idea for instance of 4 thereby, that's basically what I was looking not to do.

I think for now I'm going to put this away for a while and just think about if I want to try this again some other time, it's not as though the stuff on the wiki, or the setting material in my files are going anywhere.

In the end, I acknowledged it being something of an experiment, that it didn't quite work, well, it is what it is. That happens with experiments.

I'm going to otherwise lock this one, as I seem to be able to.

To say, to everyone that was able to put something forward, and even to people that faded off, it was at least fun to talk characters and worldbuilding with you, and a lot of what you guys put together was really, really great. Thanks for giving me as much of your time as you did at all, I really appreciated it.