The Role Playing Public Radio Forums
General Category => Role Playing Public Radio Podcast => : Gerrin August 31, 2010, 12:22:32 AM
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Hi All
I would like to provide some feedback about the Incident on the Liberty Bell game at Gencon as I was one of the players the guy on Tom's right who gunned down the Chief Engineer. I'll explain motives later as it was nothing personal with the player.
First off Tom thanks for the game. My group that was there, there was four of us total did enjoy it, and found it one of the best games we played at the con.
Some feedback from myself and the group as we chatted about the game that evening.
Pros: You kept the pace moving.
You provided a variety of characters to choose from.
You kept us guessing at what we were facing and I still don't know for sure what it was.
Cons: The Navy hierarchy is a bit different then what it looks on paper. My character for example was a deckhand, (in the navy referred to as a deck ape during WWII), my character (an able seaman) would answer to the Bosun and the captain. Also in the navy there is a clear division between hierarchies, engineers and deckhands don't listen to each other and often times call each other deck apes (the deck crew) or snipes (the engine crew). With that in mind the chief engineer giving my character an order wouldn't mean a whole lot. The purser-pharmacist's rank is given the military rank of ensign. The doctor should have been in charge of her as he would have been the head of that hierarchy. The stewards were fine as the chief steward oversees the kitchen but lets the cook take care of the real stuff.
The only senior officers left on board were the doctor and chief engineer.
Secondly a map of the ship would have been particularly useful in giving us ideas of where to go and explore. A map of a liberty ship can be found here. http://oakgrovedesigns.net/homepage/libships/details.html I understand keeping it a bit vague, but I think that maybe if you knew a bit more about where things are on the ship it would help the flow of the game.
Thirdly and this is something we talked a lot about as a group the way you introduced us to the problem could have been presented differently. Some ideas that would have added a lot of depth to the game we felt were, first during the night having a german strike force board the boat to try to seize it. This would have given us a real sense of what is going on as the engines are going on and off and now we discover we have been boarded. This would have allowed us to put the ship on lockdown and we could have either eliminated the germans or the thing could have started infecting them, or they could have brought it with them. There are a lot of possibilities adding another element to the game. We really felt strongly that by including another faction to throw suspicion on we would have never seen what was coming. I really felt that the way you had us break away from the fleet really worked, but now if only you could have given us another possibility of what was going on.
Fourthly we felt that there was no solution without the use of violence. In CoC whenever a gun is used, its all downhill from there. We felt that the exploration part of the story was lacking. Perhaps that was without a map, we didn't really know where to go or where we could go. Also there was no clear way to react to what was going on as we are being shot at before we can really do any investigating.
It was as I said a good game, its just that I feel that with a little work this scenario could be fantastic. It just needs to fleshed out a bit.
Also my apologies as I mispoke about the caliber of machine guns on board, the .30's and .50's cals were replaced with 20mm machine guns and there should have been six of them. Thats what I get for studying the Asiatic fleet of WWII, misinformation about the Atlantic Fleets machine guns.
Tom if you have some questions about this please post or pm me. I would like to see this scenario go to the next level as its on the verge or being better then anything Ross has put out so far.
Chuck
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I guess I should post the game in question
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**Imitating a certain GM role-playing a certain corpulent goblin chieftain** Yes yesyesyes yesyes yes yesyesyes yesyes!
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I guess I should post the game in question
Don't give into peer pressure, Ross. You should show them your not intimidated by posting a different Call of Cthulhu game. Like, to pick one at random, the one Adam Scott Glancey ran.
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I think you should start posting two a week, just to deal with the know massive backlog.
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And half a year from now, we will probably have no new APs :(
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I guess I should post the game in question
Well, at least then this thread wouldn't be spoiler-y.
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I guess I should post the game in question
Well, at least then this thread wouldn't be spoiler-y.
The thread is less of a spoiler than Tom himself in the current show episode.
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I guess I should post the game in question
Well, at least then this thread wouldn't be spoiler-y.
The thread is less of a spoiler than Tom himself in the current show episode.
SHHHHHH ARE YOU TRYING TO GET ROSS NOT TO POST IT?
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O SHI
(http://imgur.com/WIgkf.png)
DELETING ALL ACTUAL PLAYS
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I guess I should post the game in question
Well, at least then this thread wouldn't be spoiler-y.
The thread is less of a spoiler than Tom himself in the current show episode.
SHHHHHH ARE YOU TRYING TO GET ROSS NOT TO POST IT?
Fuck! I mean... um... I agree?
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too late
all APs are gone
forever
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too late
all APs are gone
forever
Cue Darth Vader. NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
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This is all Gerrin's fault! And by extension, Tom because it was his game that started everything!
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And half a year from now, we will probably have no new APs :(
Told everyone. I didn't think it would be this quick though...
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I guess I should post the game in question
Don't give into peer pressure, Ross. You should show them your not intimidated by posting a different Call of Cthulhu game. Like, to pick one at random, the one Adam Scott Glancey ran.
i heard, from a certain podcast, that the ASG game wasn't up to the standards you guys liked in the other two games.
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I guess I should post the game in question
Don't give into peer pressure, Ross. You should show them your not intimidated by posting a different Call of Cthulhu game. Like, to pick one at random, the one Adam Scott Glancey ran.
i heard, from a certain podcast, that the ASG game wasn't up to the standards you guys liked in the other two games.
I'll believe it when it sack taps me. My standards are pretty low.
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for a ASG game?
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Or for sack tapping?
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Don't judge me.
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http://actualplay.roleplayingpublicradio.com/2010/09/systems/call-of-cthulhu/call-of-cthulhu-incident-on-bell-island/
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Praise and acknowledgements of your majesty!
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So have finally finished listening through this AP - took a while, what with my Ipod being stolen with me only halfway through, and having to listen on my laptop - and I think it's really solid. Once again, Tom does creepy survival horror REALLY well. The alien menace was unnerving to picture, and then scary as hell when the ship started SCREAMING.
In my opinion though, this one definitely suffered from being run as a con game. I think it added to the frantic, hectic pace this scenario ended up having - two hours to make the jump from creepy "just-around-the-corner-horror" to "Holy-Shit-All-Out-Gun-Battle" seems crazy to me. When Tom made the comment at the end of the AP that he thought it would have gone for four hours, it made a lot more sense.
The original poster mentioned that a map would have been useful in the game and just from listening, I agree. Most of the middle of the AP seems vague - I couldn't get a sense of where everyone was, which is much different from all of the Divine Fire APs - and a lot of the players kept making comments that they weren't sure where exactly on the ship they were.
This was definitely a fun listen - the scene where all of the PCs run back into each other on the main deck was hilarious.
"Ok, so they're all there."
"Who else is with them?"
"The captain."
"I douse him with gasoline."
Just beautiful.