MISSION OBJECTIVES:
– Travel to Portland, OR (45° 31′ 12″ N, 122° 40′ 55″ W) via rapid air transport.
– Meet contact, travel to temporary base camp with supplies.
– Make prompt first contact to home base Bemidji, MN (47° 28′ 25″ N, 94° 52′ 49″ W)
– Seek out interaction with locals, survey landscape and climate.
– Make continued contact with home base Bemidji, MN (47° 28′ 25″ N, 94° 52′ 49″ W)
– Interact with the culture and begin long term surveilance
WARNING: POTENTIAL CRITICAL MISSION FAILURE
Message:
Portland crew what is your status?
You have not wired a response with word of arrival or safe passage.
At this point BTSC can only assume you are MIA or worse.
We will continue to send signals in hopes of contact.
Please make a prompt response.
Krueger
TWST
First of all, sorry about the lack of communication regarding Tuesday night. I did put a small update on Google Calendar but it wasn’t exactly a Herculean effort on my part, I was so distracted by personal projects and catching up on sleeping after a 36 hour stay-awake session that I simply forgot to update you guys on the situation. From now on I’ll send you guys EMAILS! (since it’s the most direct and persistent approach, I wager) if the situation changes for any reason.
The other thing, which is really rather minor, is just a forewarning my current philosophy on D&D sessions. I generally create a scenario with a basic idea for what’s going to happen in the next week’s “big event”, and let you guys do it how you want to do it. In my opinion, it seems to allow for more “organic” roleplaying, as the encounters aren’t restricted to a predetermined set of possible outcomes (Note that this is not an attack on other styles of storytelling and DMing, it is simply easier for me and we tend to have the same amount of fun, I think).
However, this essentially means that I do not really “plan ahead” to the session after the session I’m working on (although, of course, I do have a grand scheme for the overall story of the campaign, but it can easily change depending on what you guys do).
What this means for next week (and following weeks) is that if we want to do a lot of D&D in that time period, we can’t exactly do it absolutely whenever, but I will try to write the next session quickly after we get done with any given session. This usually only takes a few hours, so we should still be able to do it a whole lot if you guys want to. Basically, I’m just saying that I won’t be sitting on a giant mound of content that I’ve been stockpiling for the last few weeks, but I will instead simply write the next leg soon after we finish the previous one. STILL, we could potentially do a session every night if we wanted to.
Whelp, as you all (should) know, I’m in Wichita this week. Concerning D&D, this complicates things a bit. I don’t know what you guys’ situation is, but down here I don’t have a physical game board or any of the other usual equipment, save for my laptop and webcam.
Basically, my question is: How do you guys want to handle it? Do you want to just put it off until next week or try to do it somehow, perhaps using RPTools? I could probably put together something in that vein, although seriously don’t know how easily (if at all) we’ll be able to connect to the same game, as it uses only one specific port to connect, and if that port isn’t forwarded, it simply won’t work to host. I know Zach’s ports are forwarded, but I was never able to do it myself. Additionally, the problem of going through two different college networks (Beloit and BSU) are going to be trying indeed.
DISCUSS.
So I’m looking into getting a laptop for when I go to Asu. and just as a secondary machine. For some reason I’m thinking Mac, but I know I could get something together that would be a middle ground between powerful and afordable. Any help?
Grieving for the loss of D&D yesterday, we got to thinking of a way to play D&D without having to rely on webcams. It’s been mentioned before, but we’ve now come to the conclusion that the only way (That we have come up with, at any rate) we can reliably do D&D is to use a web-based game table, such as RPTools or Gametable. Now, I know that these options are hardly ideal, but I can’t think of any other reliable way to subvert the fish eye viewing problems that come into play when trying to run an intricate board-based encounter (As D&D is want to do) over a webcam.
So let’s have a conversation. Any other ideas? I’m sort of at a loss.
Remember when the idea of mind-control devices (The kind that allow you to control things with your mind, not being controlled by some Orwellian overlord) were some far-off fantasy? Well, that shit is finally REALITY. Cue The Jetsons theme, and the flying cars and dinner in pill-form (Or whatever the clichés are these days).
As you fellow continue to plan for your mass exodus to Portland, I as the only of the quartet remaining in Bemidji would like to recieve updates. What are your plans, tenetave time tables? I would hate to remain in the dark until the day where you guys say “we’re leaving this weekend…what didn’t you know?”
