[Tecumseh]

Yeah, the site was down for 2 or 3 days. You couldn't have posted even if you wanted to.

Lorebane, are you trying to get us to the finish line as quickly as possible or are there things we should consider, like talking to Brian or figuring out what we want to do about the tarot card?

[Lorebane24]

I want to get there relatively quick, but I don't want to totally gloss over talking to the kid and exploring the card if those are things you guys want to do.

[Lorebane24]

Just wanted to give a heads up that I am doing field observatioms all today, followed by student teaching orientation, followed by a class, so there is a good to fair chance i wont be on tonight.  Tomorrow tho, I am home all day working on a presentation, and ill check in whenever I take a break.

[gilga]

Thanks for letting us know;)

[Lorebane24]

Also, who is going to GM the next section?  I probably compile some notes tonight after my class and send them on over.  I'm starting to get that shadowrun itch again, but in this last run I was at a bit of a loss on how to handle combat/initiative in a pbp, so I'd really like to see how someone with more experience handles it before I step back into the GM seat.

[Tecumseh]

Combat is simultaneously much better and much worse in a PbP. The good news is that you have plenty of time to look up the relevant rules and get everything right. The bad news is that the back-and-forth of it can take forever. Even simple encounters can last 2-3 weeks.

I'm spread a little thin at the moment (GMing two games and playing in two) but can probably GM a future chapter. Has anyone else got the bandwidth to GM Chapter II?

[Beta]

If nobody else is eager, I might be willing to take a shot at it.  But I need to think about it for a day to make sure I'm going to be able to support it properly.

Also I've never run a PbP, run ShadowRun for more than one player, and the last time I ran a group in anything was probably in the Bush presidency.  Bush Senior.  (I say probably, because it might have been during the Reagan presidency ....)  So whatever I'd do would be kept pretty simple, and I make no great promises.  (All of those disclaimers aside, I've been running a one player game of ShadowRun for my son for several years now, so I'm not completely clueless about running SR).

[Tecumseh]

Everyone has to start somewhere. And this is one of the most gentle introductions, given that you have a group that you know, the original GM feeding you the plot (and probably acting as a sounding board for ideas), and players who can largely GM themselves.

[gilga]

I have bandwidth, but I am more than willing to have Beta do it.

[Beta]

I’m happy to have Gilga take the first run, if he has an idea.  Else I’ll keep working on coming up with something. 

One thought, to take a leaf from Missions, is whoever is GM’ing, their character gets the same rewards as the rest of the group (assume that their character was off doing something on their own at the time).  That way if one person ends up doing more of the gm-ing, their character doesn’t fall behind in development.

[Lorebane24]

Would you guys be okay with me playing a PC during this round robin GM thing?  I was thinking for the first few runs at least we could alternate between me and someone else, so I'd be GMing every other run and providing notes for the others.

[Jack_Spade]

Sure, just make sure your char is in debt too

as for GMing: At the moment I'm still ab it streched thin.

[Tecumseh]

Beta, I think the idea is for the runs / plot direction to continue to come from Lorebane. The active GM should have some latitude and discretion to change things to meet their needs, but that would keep us on the overall arc of the tarot plot.

I don't have any issue with Lorebane playing a PC, although I've personally found it wonky when trying to play in a scenario where I know the overall direction and some of the behind-the-scenes details. But that's a personal preference not to run my own NPC whenever possible; that's not a dealbreaker against anyone else doing it.

[Lorebane24]

One thing I had been thinking is that (some spoiler here, but meh) the icon with the pumpkin face is a technomancer and somewhat starscreamish #2 to Nightmare, and that could offer a chance to test out the house rules I had come up with for technos.  I had intended for him to be a potential ally, though the other hitch is that he's already submerged as a dissonant techno.  He's got a history with an MCT subsidiary (forced dissonant submersion before his escape), and he uses the Aphenian dissonant stream which makes him obsessed with connecting dots that aren't sometimes there, but makes him good at interpreting the weird images on the tarot.  He'd been engineered as a bloodhound in MCT's hunt for the cards, and serves a similar function for Nightmare now.

[Tecumseh]

Starscreamish! What an adjective!

Our non-North-American players are unlikely to understand the reference, but it's highly evocative to me.

I barely understood the rest of the explanation.