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Playtest - Through the Ansible
Through the Ansible is an experimental PBP game I'm writing. The rules are in the other thread by the same name. For the purposes of this playtest, I think three players is sufficient, with an expected limit of six posts (and therefore about three weeks of play time).
I understand that this is a pretty unusual game, so if no-one's interested, it's no big deal to me. But if you'd like to give it a try, please feel welcome to let me know.
I understand that this is a pretty unusual game, so if no-one's interested, it's no big deal to me. But if you'd like to give it a try, please feel welcome to let me know.
Comments
Looks like we're good to go! I'll change this thread to an "Out-of-Game" thread, and we can post character ideas here. I've thought that it would be cool to have a more formal character creation method, but right now we all just describe our characters in a paragraph or two, focussing on the values and beliefs of their home-culture.
Sure, no problem. I'll get on that tomorrow.
Dr Hewett Arot
Dr Arot (pronounced like "Arrow") is a scientist from the Erd system, three planets that form a loose confederation of hundereds of city-states, each run by a large oligarchy. As a noble's son, Hewett was expected to follow a career from an early age, and was guided into the sciences. He grew up studying biology, alien morphology, and physiology. His people prize knowledge of physical processes, and have developed a martial-arts like system of body development based on their extensive knowledge of their physiology. Due to the practice of this art, Dr Arot looks like an incredibly well muscled human, though extremely tall and limber. He has dark, reddish brown skin, and light body hair all over his body. As he matured, Hewett's interest in alien physiology, and even alien psychology, grew to the extent that he was no longer comfortable in the laboratory-palace of his home state. He joined the ekumen to further pursue his study. He has found it difficult to adjust to the ekeumen's way of understanding other cultures, as he finds it difficult to distinguish between physical and mental processes, as so many other humans seem to do. This, coupled with the extrodinary privilege of his upbringing means he is often baffled by others' ways of understanding things. He is most happy when he can study something in isolation, take something apart to see how it works.
For future chargens: maybe we want the keyword list first (so our characters riff off that), but otherwise a simple questionaire could do a whole lot, especially if it gave a few "either X or Y" choices that a character wouldn't have otherwise considered.
I'll try to post mine in a few days.
Bone and Superior
Citizen Shann Vesper
Vesper was born into modest yet respectable roots on the planet Kesseau - her mother being a 4th-grade labor chief - but her innate talents would quickly take her elsewhere. As tests revealed her aptitude for math and pattern recognition, she was granted a scholarship to enter schools for the sciences. By her sixteenth year, she was well on her way to a prominent role in Industrial Economics, where she quickly became known for her unorthodox and idiosyncratic views.
Her interest in self-organizing economics and commerce theory made joining with the Ekumen a logical choice; the opportunity to see other worlds in the midst of their independent socioeconomic evolution was too great to pass up. However, she could not make the trip until she had reached 27 years of age, at which point her service to Kessau was considered complete and she was granted license to leave her world.
Keywords: debt and conditioning
Objectivity is a key virtue for the social scientists on the planet Vulpana. However, they found it very difficult to keep their objectivity through the many years required to become a properly trained social scientist. By the time a qualified explorer was trained, hir head was filled with so many preconceived notions that any findings sent back were immediately suspect. So a conference of the greatest minds in the field was assembled and they hit upon a workable solution. Their explorers would be picked from the ranks of the dullest laborers. Not being educated enough to have preconceived notions about such high social science, they could then be assured of unbiased data.
Until a month ago, Bob Miller was a maintenance man in an apartment building primarily responsible for keeping plumbing and electrical systems functioning smoothly. In his spare time, he watches Zero-G Rugby and drinks fermented vegetable extracts. He joined the explorer corps because "it was like a vacation only he got paid". His goals for the mission are to "make new friends and find out how they do stuff". Rumor has it that a second conference of social scientists is already being planned.
Keywords: sports and infrastructure
At some point, someone can make a first post. It seems a bit daunting, since it will be defining so much of the game all in one go, but I'm pretty keen for it to not be me who does it. Does someone else feel like stepping up?
I suppose I'm just a bit wary of characters that are written to work in the opposite direction to the others, but that's mostly based on bad experiences with other players in other games. I can see this working well here. I should probably stop being such a control freak
Rich, if you can see where your guy is going in sync with the tone of our posts, then that's good enough for me and I'm ready to go.
(FWIW I think this part - trying to hash out our genre expectations basically - is a good part of any game. Please don't take any of my comments as negative here - I'm just trying to take that step of expectation-matching to the PbP realm.)
On an unrelated note, it seems like we've all chosen keywords that more-or-less directly relate to our characters. That's not part of the game rules, but I wonder if it should be? Is there an elegant way of doing that?
On the keywords relating to the characters, I was wondering if it might work better if the keywords referred specifically to the other characters in the game. The character blurb seems to do a good job of stating what the player wants to explore. The keywords could then be chosen after the character blurbs are written to show what Player A would like to see Player B and C interact with. For example, Shann is interested with Economic Models and so I pick the keyword war because I'd like to see how she'd look at that through an economists eyes. Just some thoughts.
I'm glad you want to get involved!
Elder Hamnan comes from the planet Faryoun, a planet covered by 90% water and a small archipelago. Despite this, the Faryoun people are a highly technological and peaceful race, with no war or internal conflict to speak of in over 30,000 years. They are governed by an elected council of 113 Elders. Knowing they have limited space and resources, the Faryoun practice very strict population control. They also conduct very thorough aptitude tests on everyone before assigning them jobs.
The Faryoun people are very accepting of their governments control. They practice a religion based on the ocean, both are called Waa-lan, which promotes behaving like water: accepting what comes and taking the easiest path. Nearly everyone follows Waa-lan, which they demonstrate by placing a small, woven basket into any body of water once a year. This basket generally has a small gift inside, which is considered very improper to discuss. This is the only religious holiday on Faryoun and the only day when no one works.
Elder Hamnan is a retired government leader who joined the Ekumen because of an in interest in foreign cultures. Like all Faryoun, he is short (about 1.5 meters) and thin. Age has made his whiskers droop and hair gray, but his eyes and mind are still sharp. He lost his right leg to a parasite while studying another planet, but it was replaced with a very lifelike robotic leg. Although the leg works even better than his old one, since then he has always carried a cane and favored the leg.
Elder Hamnan is a kind, old gentleman who is largely concerned with the quality of his life. For him, visiting other places, meeting new people, and eating fine food are the chief goals for the remaining years of his life.
Festival and Execution