Ponyfinder · 12:05am May 8th, 2014
Apparently, I at some point ordered a copy of Ponyfinder. Or something.
Between this event transpiring and my receipt of my actual copy of the book, I forgot that I'd ever done it, and in fact forgot that Ponyfinder was a thing that existed. In case anyone reads this and doesn't know, Ponyfinder is a thing that exists.
This isn't a review post. Surely it ought to be, but my name isn't Shirley. Suffice my review to be: It's really awesome.
I made this blog post to comment on one facet of the setting that I consider regrettable. Ponies in the book are depicted as Lawful more than Good - nearer Mechanus than Elysium, tied more to Arcadia than to Celestia. That's Mount Celestia for you clueless primes. The reasoning given for this alignment decision is to describe destiny as order, not goodness.
I dislike this. I do not see Destiny as a specifically aligned concept. Destiny is aligned the way planar realms are aligned - it matches the dominant alignment of its plane. Mechanus has a Lawful Neutral Destiny. Elysium has a Neutral Good destiny. Limbo has a Chaotic Neutral destiny. More of Mechanus is directly influenced by destiny than Limbo, of course, but Limbo itself is still destined to be chaotic. Anything that would strip Limbo of its chaos is fighting against destiny, but just because destiny is more pervasive on Mechanus doesn't mean it's harder to fight there. It means the opposite, actually. Making chaos in Mechanus takes less effort than making order in Limbo. It's also slightly less likely to go horribly wrong. Limbo's chaotic destiny is a more focused and immediate influence than the self-correcting cosmic orreries that comprise the infinite destinies of Mechanus. Limbo gets to be chaotic because it's chaotic, whereas Mechanus has to exhaustively justify the machinery of fate. It makes retaliations slower and ironically much less inevitable.
Since destiny is an aligned concept but not a specifically aligned one, every realm has its own destiny with a unique alignment guiding said destiny. The influence of destiny pushes ponies to good alignments, not to lawful ones. Equestria is a minor paradise. If it was a planar realm, the "mildly good-aligned" trait wouldn't make anyone blink, and neither would the negatives to mental stats for non-good individuals. Conversely, the "mildly lawful-aligned" trait would be obviously inappropriate for a setting that contains both Pinkie Pie and Discord. Fitting into paradise is the destiny which cutie marks are all about. They're NOT about finding a place amidst the gears of a cold machine reality (as Mechanus destinies imply).
I miss living in a town where I knew table top role players. Sadly I've fallen behind the times in terms of gaming system news. I keep hearing of Pathfinder, but the only only thing that's stuck in my head is the fact you can play a witch with prehensile eyebrows.
Prehensile eyebrows.
PONYFINDER?
AS IN, YOU OWN PONYFINDER?
I don't know how to feel about this.
On the one hand, I'm not sure whether I believe in God. (I believe the question of whether God exists can be determined, I just haven't settled in to consider it.)
On the other hand, CLEARLY this is a sign from god that we should find a way to play Ponyfinder. Despite having previously decided I wasn't going to take the time and mental bandwitdth(world-building) to play any RPGs (at least not while ponys was a Thing), I've been reading D&D books all week, and I rather enjoyed the impromptu DnD-type segment I and some friends played yesterday.
Were are you approximately? I very much doubt we're close enough to play in-person (though if we are we totaly need to get together
), but there's online options. And if we play online, we can pull in other people. (poke poke 2089570)
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The only thing I know that's newer than approximately 2005 (possibly excluding some stuff I picked up from Ghost?) is that WotC did some clever stuff with the combat system in 4e, and the parts I've read of the dnd4 DM's book are really good, but they did some things I don't think I like with the classes and setting.
Yes, I own Ponyfinder. I have some experience with tabletop gaming, even. I collect tabletop books as kind of a hobby. I enjoy reading them more than gaming, with most crowds... Still, I always give a group a chance. I am definitely interested in playing the game with friends.
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Have I ever given out my physical location here? I probably shouldn't. It would mess up the infiltrat-I-I mean, of course! I'm in the Seattle area! Nothing suspicious about that! Where are you?
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While I'm at it, where are you? I've found that being a Seattleite is uncommonly good for finding out that my quirky friends are actually not so far away.
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I'm in New York. Dang. This means the odds of setting up a remotely-resembling-realtime game with the two of us and Ghost and Tea[1] are almost nonexistant. I've got another friend with whom I've kicked around the notion of online gaming, however.
I know a fan from Canada who was living in Seattle last I heard...
[1] As I recall, Tea is some four or five time-zones east of me.
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The south of England. The bloody southerners were hogging all the jobs. That's not very helpful is it?
I'd love to give it a go, to be honest, but it would pretty much have to be a Friday or Saturday night thing (or possibly a Saturday or Sunday morning). Or perhaps a play by post thing.
It's a shame Google Wave isn't still about. You know how everyone couldn't work out what it was for? It was for play by post RPG games; I just don't think Google worked that out. There is Apache Wave though. I be I could set that up on an Amazon AWS box. I don't know how good it is.
Game ideas. I'd be tempted to pick something that's low combat, simply because even at the gaming table combat takes forever. One of my favourite games I've been in was one where we played agents of this organisation that (for once) was not sinister was was genuinely trying to help the world. What made the game unique was generally at the end of each arc instead of a flight there would be a big decision we had to make (as well as lots of decisions along the way) and the GM was very good at not railroading us down one or the other. In fact, if we tried to wuss out and radio back to HQ we'd, inevitably, get the response "you guys are on the field. You know the situation better than us." The unique thing about it was in about a year of sessions, we have about two or three fights.
I could (and have) talked for hours about how awesome that game was.
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I actually used Google Wave for a PBP RPG game. That was towards the end of it's lifecycle. The game folded when Wave did, having unsuccessfully attempted to transition to other environments.
It occurs to me that basically the only thing I know about Ponyfinder is that it's based, to some degree, off of Pathfinder. And so, I am going (rushing?) into this with no idea what I'm getting into.
Well, if thing goes through I'll be doing lots more of that. TO FUN! [[imagine appropriate emote here]]
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Isn't Apache Wave to Google Wave as... wait, drat, I don't have any good analogies. As Wordpress is to Wordpress.com? That's no good, wordpress is still active, on both counts. I can't think of any other semi-commercial->abandoned-to-open-source -ware.
Complicating matters beyond a plethora of timezones, I have a debilitating technical limitation that prevents me from being online between 2300 my time and approximately sunrise. So we'd have to work play time around that or by-post.
Setting-ish, I was tempted (knowing nothing relevant about either system) to suggest crossing over Ponyfinder with Exalted by way of Bad Horses' Mare of the Rings. I'd be unsurprised at being told that's a bad idea; can you tell I have never played before?
This is why I've been avoiding playing anything
. I wanna put my intense headcanonry and world-interpretation in fanfics, damit. I do little enough of that already.
This is surely sensible for an online play, but one of the things that's been knocking around in my head since reading game books is to play some pure-combat sessions. (And by "pure combat" I mean "story? Who needs a story? Throw some humongous mechs at each other, just for the heck of it".) I grasp intellectually combat taking forever; I've played both Axis&Allies and Risk, which take long enough themselves, and RPGsystem combat rules make them look the way Settlers of Catan makes checkers. This may make me partially dangerous to attempts to online play.
Am I very weird in thinking that combat systems would be inherently fun to play with?
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Funnily enough, I had about the same experience. I'd just got through introducing my character to the party when bam, Google makes their announcement.
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>Isn't Apache Wave to Google Wave as... wait, drat, I don't have any good analogies.
It's okay, I get what you mean. In truth I don't know for sure that Apache Wave is a good idea, but it's probably worth investigating.
>Complicating matters beyond a plethora of timezones, I have a debilitating technical limitation that prevents me from being online between 2300 my time and approximately sunrise. So we'd have to work play time around that or by-post.
That would be 3am for me, so no problems here, but it might be limiting for Causal. So it may have to be play by post? Play by post doesn't have to exclude live sessions for that once in a blue moon situation where they can be organised.
>Setting-ish, I was tempted (knowing nothing relevant about either system) to suggest crossing over Ponyfinder with Exalted by way of Bad Horses' Mare of the Rings. I'd be unsurprised at being told that's a bad idea; can you tell I have never played before?
I don't really know anything about Ponyfinder either. I'm just going to work on the assumption that it is a set of rules by which things like combat can be resolved that resembles D&D. I mean, the important bit is the setting, which is going to be some variant of Equestria.
>This is surely sensible for an online play, but one of the things that's been knocking around in my head since reading game books is to play some pure-combat sessions. (And by "pure combat" I mean "story? Who needs a story? Throw some humongous mechs at each other, just for the heck of it".)
No, I can understand the appeal. That's why stuff like Tomb of Horrors is so popular. It can be very intense to play a loosing situation and just see how long you can survive. It's just not very Equestria.
It's also very hard to get right. You need to push the character party just hard enough. Push them too hard and they die and it's lame, don't push them hard enough and they sail through and think they're immortals.
That said, The Immortal Game played in a continuity where the battle of Cloudsdale was lost might fit this. It would end up being a very dark game though.
I'm not sure I'd really want to play like that though, so I might be out.
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How'd that work out, otherwise? Did Wave seem like a good environment for play? Were you in long enough to get a feel for that?
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History feature to the rescue: a quick google had found me this review, from which I understand ponyfinder to be just (I should say, 'just') an FiM-themed setting for pathfinder. Thus, it'd be pathfinder with ponies. Nothing wrong with that.
Causal, have you read enough to speak to this? Does that sound right?
Mm. It occurs to me that the term "wargaming" probably applies to what I'm thinking of. Or y'know, mix WarHammer 40k with Risk with some DnD4 combat rules, with a dash of Bolo-verse and your choice of humongous mecha for flavor as appropriate, and just play the combat, player ((mini-)army) versus player ((mini-)army). (Though, frankly, I like the image of such a warmech wading through a combat zone, laying obscene amounts of waste to most everything around it.)
Don't worry though, I'm not suggesting that here. As you say, combat is not the thing to do on-line. It's just a thing I want to do somewhere sometime somehow.
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To give my opinion on that: yes, it was. One thing that was especially useful was the ability to make any chat box private — because everyone loves passing the GM notes.
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So it's just a setting? I'm tempted to say we don't need it. We're on a fan fiction site. We have imaginations. Perhaps I'm being stubborn though. A book does have the advantage of putting everyone on the same page.
I suppose it may come to who is GMing. Is anyone other than me particularly feeling like doing that? Because I'm semi-feeling like saying that possibly I maybe could give it a go.
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I'm just tagging y'all to register my interest. Sadly, I also have to register my complete lack of time, but y'know. I do have interest. :)
So. A few quick comments.
1. Logistics of play-by-post. Wave was good at it, to be sure, but in my experience you can get by with using forum software and some sort of real-time chat thingy. It is inimical to combat, though. If we gave up on asynchronous gaming, we could always use custom-built stuff like this.
2. Ponyfinder. So it's a setting for Pathfinder? Huh. Odd choice. I like Pathfinder, but it is a D&D derivative. Loads of combat. It's what it is for. Odd choice for Equestria. I would have used the FATE system, personally. Just rules-light enough to make sense. I'd say ignore it, like Powered says we do, but while we've imagination to spare for the setting, we'd still have to do things like figure out how various pony tribes work stats-wise.
3. Combat only sessions. Wouldn't work, in my experience. Combat in most RPGs just isn't rewarding enough on its own. It's the context around it that makes it work. If you want a very action-y RPG, what you do is you get yourself a competent GM, and run a massive dungeon-crawl. This gives your combat sessions the context and flair they need to be good.
4. Combat light sessions. My current tabletop game is centered around an investigative agency in a steampunk-y fantasy world. I found that it's best to imagine each session like an episode of a TV show[1] and plan accordingly. That means that there's an action scene somewhere near the start that's brief but memorable, and a possible action scene near the end to ramp up the tension. Of course, since they are government agents their goal is to kill as few people as possible, and this has had a massively transformative effect on combat. Suddenly combat is more of a failure scenario and to be avoided, and once in it, they seek to end it as peacefully as they can. Very interesting dynamic.
[1] That ended up being a sort of theme, actually. I started giving my sessions titles and production codes, and I even cut together a show intro with credits.
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Sadly I was kind of expecting that response. That said, in my experience doing asynchronous (yes, you and definitely a computer scientist) gaming is less of a time commitment. My experience was coming home, checking my emails, checking the gaming thread and coming up with my character's response while munching on dinner.
Quite possibly, but I see time zones ending up too much of a problem. But a even a play by post game can have live sessions from time to time. The game I played in had them from time to time (on rare occasions where everyone was in the same room) but it folded before I could join on.
That site does look interesting. I've never used anything like it though, and by that I mean any sort of miniatures, props, or even a table. Occasionally we had diagrams drawn on a whiteboard. When I see things like that, I can't help but wonder: do people really use squares and miniatures?
Which would not be me. I am not good at doing runnings of combats.
(Fun story, given that fact: on only my second ever attempt at GMing a game, the character party decided to take a side and join in on a huge war that I had expected to happen as background for some events the players were supposed to be interested in. I ended up floundering and trying to make up the details of a massive arcane war on the fly.)
Funnily enough, that was just the analogy my friend who ran the Aeon game (the one I mentioned) used when explain how he did the game.
Make having to resort to combat a failure. That's a very interesting way to influence the characters. All too often I've been in games that felt like starting the combat was the one-size-fits-all solution to everything. I'll have to remember that one.
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Oh, before I forget, here's a tip I wish I could claim credit for. Give the character party a guy who isn't there to solve the plot, but is there for knowing and dealing with the regulation doing "boring" diplomacy.
For example, I was in a game where the characters were random people with minor superpowers recruited by a government agency to investigate things. We were there because we had powers. Our team got two further agents who were careerer members. One of them had no superpowers, the other had no power other than that he could not be killed (always useful when hanging around characters). So if we move in somewhere to investigate and the chief of police needed talking to, one of those guys did it in the background. Which was good because it gave a sense of real world bureaucracy without it ever needing to slow down play.
Aghtoomanycomments
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Sorry.
Damn right I am.
Oh, a light async sort of game would probably work a treat. Anything live, and problems start to occur. Especially since to sync up to Causal and Toafan we'd have to roleplay at, like 4AM. Ugh.
Yup. I do.
D&D-style combat, ever since third edition, only comes into its own when you have a square grid and minis. Of course, it depends on the game. We've had games where we barely touched the dice, of course.
I did it in a very interesting way, too. I give them objectives at the start of every mission and some of them are bonus objectives with XP bounties attached to them. One of them is 'Don't kill anyone.' Another is 'Do not cause any complaints to be lodged against you.' You'd be amazed how quickly the players adapt to being non-violent diplomats.
And the best part is, they don't resent it because they aren't forced to be non-violent. They just have to figure out how to fight non-violently. And, um, politely.
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Oh, I built a whole mechanic out of bureaucracy. I introduced a new stat—Clout that measures how influential they are in their agency, and I introduced the heavy use of Knowledge(Law), too. Missions often have jurisdiction problems and handling these is, naturally, quite important. Works quite well. Hell, one of my players is a lawyer. Okay, also a sorceress, but primarily a lawyer.
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I'm just sort of tagging everyone because I can't follow the conversation right now. Um, this'll be vague until I've sorted it out better...
Ponyfinder is a setting for Pathfinder. It's basically treated as a new continent on the world map that was there all along, and assumes that the setting includes both humans and ponies. The continent is named Everglow. Ponyfinder includes details for playing in three different time periods of Everglow.
The earliest time period ("before the empire") is exceedingly pony. The only humanoids on Everglow are a few small communities of dwarves, who trade with ponies but have a commitment to neutrality with surface powers. They have neither surface settlements nor interest in claiming any. The earliest time period corresponds roughly to the Windigo Era in FiMFiction canon. There are more pony tribes with greater diversity than in any later era, but xenophobia is a major problem and violence comes more naturally to ponies of that era than later ones. (Well, maybe not the third era.) Most communities are insular and strictly monotribal. There's not a lot of trade or travel, and there is a lot of untamed land in Everglow.
The second time period ("height of the empire") is still dominated by ponies, although elves and humans have started to show up on the coasts. This is the era in which Everglow is most civilized, and the one which most corresponds to the show. Most of the pony tribes have actually faded into obscurity at this point - instead of the dozen or so different tribes in the first era, there are now the three we're familiar with. Individuals of the other tribes mostly show up as isolated births (ponies are not necessarily born of the same tribe as their lineage).
The third time period ("fall of the empire") is being overtaken by human and elven kingdoms following the death of the immortal queen of the ponies and the splintering of the empire over which she had immortally ruled. Not so immortal after all... The death was foreseen, and she tried to prepare, but somehow all of her students turned out to be arrogant dumbasses without her noticing. This lead to the empire splintering bloodily rather than having the straightforward succession the queen had intended for it. The third time period doesn't makes much sense. I'm pretty sure it only exists because the writers wanted to give a Bad Horsie playground to players who are numb to good things. It might also have been an attempt to ensure that the "current day" version of Everglow would have a better tonal mesh with "standard" D&D tropes, so that Everglow might be fitted more easily into a normal D&D campaign as a continent across the ocean from Galarion*.
*Galarion is the standard Pathfinder setting.
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That setting makes me grumpy, truth be told. Especially the third period. And the introduction of all D&D has alongside ponies. I want to play in Equestria. If I wanted to play with Elves and Dwarves and such I'd use my own setting, thankyouverymuch.
Thanks for the synopsis, Causal.
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In the first two eras, using Ponyfinder as-is and just dumping references to humanoids is a trivial conversion. They aren't ubiquitous enough to get in the way. If a player group is trying to keep to the values of the show, they wouldn't use the third era anyways.
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Everything I know says that passing notes at the gametable is a great thing. (Possibly excepting the actual mechanics of the notes.) Secret information? Done. Whispers? Done. Background information only one PC would know? They get to decide whether to share it now!
> book advantage
Yes, but only to the extent that everyone has the
samebook. Though there is Ponyfinder-the-wiki, and so far as I know we can get all the relevant pathfinder material online at no extra cost.(I shouldn't be surprised at the Ponyfinder being just a setting. It's explicitly a spinoff from Pathfinder after all.)
Though after reading that review part of me is tempted to try to get that book. Not to use it, just to have it as an artifact.
> GMing
Not me that's for sure. You don't want me GMing, this'd be my first game. Not first game GMing, first game.
Otherwise I'd be making a similar "Yeah I guess maybe I could probably do that."
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I'm not sure if I'd want to see long comments from you[1]
#1 I've got a roll20 account, as it happens. (I've never used it, but...) I'd thought about suggesting it, but decided not to.
One of the problems is that it assumes synchronicity, and you and Quill are some twelve hours apart. And maybe you'd both be fine with it, I don't know. But I can see the schedule for that being awkward.
Roll20 is very combat-friendly. I'm not married to the idea of combat with this, but we might find the map useful for other things. (That said, from what I recall of their layout I'd expect it to be a real pain if we didn't use the map.)
#2 Nothing's to say we can't rip off the existing stat blocks for our own purposes, so long as it's just for the one game, right?
I mean okay, converting pathfinder-style stat blocks for use with Fate sounds like a stunt unto itself, but it's a thing could be done.
Narrative-oriented with MLP sounds rockin', but beyond that I'll step out. I've heard of lots of systems I think sound cool, but all I've ever played was one session of "roll this die while I pull a DC from thin air".
#3 I've spawned a horribly pointless time-consuming diversion
See "wargaming", 2113124. I'm thinking of something more like Chess or Risk than anything fitting the 'R' part of 'RPG'. Also, I'm unconditionally not suggesting that for this.
[1] because on the other hand, GHOST COMMENTS!
[2], but if these are quick...
[2] I rather miss the reddit emotes.
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Google Wave worked really well, actually. It's the only asynchronous gaming platform I've ever seen work. The campaign got through character creation, party introductions, and what I would estimate at two sessions of game content. I say 'estimate' because I'm comparing apples to oranges here. I think it would've been the equivalent of two sessions if we'd have been around a table for ordinary sessions.
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I'm surprisingly inexperienced too. In games, I'm usually agitating for permission to play a reptillian character. I also naturally regard combat as a failure scenario. I tend to think seriously about how to handle prisoners, and fight in a way that makes it relevant. My character is the one at the table who is fighting with nets and a nightstick, grappling rules and a coil of rope, or environmental hazards and improvised weaponry. I've generally garnered praise for the creativity, but it definitely creates extra work for the GM and other players. My tastes are odd; this has hindered my ability to fit neatly into groups.
I've tried GM'ing, but I'm rather incompetent at it, so if the game were relying on me to GM it just wouldn't happen. Which means...
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This conversation is much more cheerful when you say you feel like you could give GMing a go.
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Oh sure. Like Chess on steroids. Well, steroids and magic and wonkin' huge fireballs, but eh.
At the rates I'd expect combat to move, I'd also expect the benefit from minis and the benefit from a decent whiteboard map to be similar. Like the way you could play chess on a whiteboard if you really wanted to. Actually, from reading the DnD4 books, I'd reckon that if you can't handle the majority of your combat encounters with chess pieces, and maybe some LEGO or something for the big creatures, you're doing something wrong.
They're not actually needed (except in DnD4, where everything is written to assume you'll be using them), but they cananddo come in handy.
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Well, magic is typically a complex and labyrinthine set of rules, right? So it'd make sense that the sorceress is also a lawyer. My question is, is she a lawyer who happens to be a sorceress, or a sorceress who happens to be a lawyer?
Or did you mean one of your players is a lawyer? (Or both!
)
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I'm with Ghost on this one. Grump grump grump, frump frump frump. I propose as a baseline we pitch everything having anything to do with the Standard Pathfinder Setting, including the entire "third era", and pick-and-choose from the rest.
(Now, you can do some interesting things mixing ponies and humans, if you're creative. But if you're not making ponies the main, why bother?)
This is a useful synopsis, with a loose mental map of what's out there. Thanks for writing it.
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I see I'm going to have to think of some sort of pitch then. I'm tempted to go down agents working under Celestia and Luna because I've got that part of the government better defined than other bits of the setting. Though I can think of a few other options though.
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Funnily enough the wave game I was on I was playing a Petrok bread Dragon King in a character party of Solars. The GM's pitch was "you want to play a dinosaur, right?"
In another Exalted game I tried playing a martial artist who was lame. The point was to force me to think up interesting ways to describe how my character would fight with only one good leg. Sadly I couldn't make it to enough sessions and ended up dropping out of the game.
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Just had a quick look through the FATE system, and on the face of it, it seems nice and simple. I'm liking the idea that there's just one role for everything but I will probably need to read it more thoroughly. Failing that these is a system called Wushu that is so simple you character sheet can be written on the back of an envelope.
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Most fights we did had no props. Occasionally we'd be half way through and it would dawn on us that things were just become too unclear and we'd ask the GM to draw everything out. But we never bothered with squares. There was just a vague "how far is that"/"about 30ft"/"good, I love the smell of bad guano in the morning."
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I was once recruited into a campaign by the GM saying, "So, the party is about to meet these kobolds, and that made me think of you." I spent the next session playing Batman with attacks from cover against unaware enemies, and the one after that shoving baddies into pits. Clever weakness wins against strong dumbness.
That was 4th Edition D&D, which I hated at the time, but in hindsight should be praising for making mobility a more effective part of tactics.
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Just thought I'd give you guys and update. I had a little time last weekend and I managed to get Apache Wave mostly working on Amazon. A little more fiddling and it'll be up.
It was also much, much harder that I anticipated. It's a measure of just how big of a failure wave was as a product that there there appears to be practically nothing in terms of community or userbase left even after the clout that Google brought to bear on it.
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This reminds me: What system are we using? Are we bothering with a particular system? Unless I hear otherwise, I'm going to scrounge up six hours over the next weekorso and read through the Ponyfinder/Pathfinder materials just so it's percolating.
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I don't know. I'd favour something simple but I depends on what sort of champaign people want. Something a little more chunky like Ponyfinder would make sense for certain styles of games such as the one where you just dump them in a world and let them go anywhere. I figured I'd just set up the play environment first.
So does anyone have thoughts about the "feel" of the potential game. Do you want to play a bunch of freedom loving adventurer types? Government agents for whom a resorting to violence is a failure? Something in between? Naturally I have final say if I'm running it but I could probably be persuaded to go in either direction.
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Well, this has to do with why I asked.
Before I go further, a little anecdote-type thing: My favorite RPG rule comes from Minimus. Paraphrased it goes like this: "You can always decide you fail, even if the dice say you succeed." I think that says things about me, but those things might be true of our entire group.
So a bunch of thoughts:
"Traditional" RPG violence is contraindicated. At least, I assume so---this is Equestria and whatnot. We don't have to play that way if we don't want to.
Getting the Main Six involved is probably a failure condition. More so as not to tax your writing creativity than because I think it's a bad idea. Mind, I suspect that on balance it is a bad idea, but I can also see going on preposterous romps where the main six always get called in during the denouement to clean up some side effect or another. (I'd probably read that, but I'm not necessarily suggesting it.)
Note that this assumes things happening around the same time-period as the show, which doesn't have to be the case. I'm just saying that involving the main six is fraught with trouble, at best.
Ergo, "world-shattering" events and monstrously powerful artifacts are also contraindicated. These are more the Main Six' bailiwick, and not that often at that. (Again, temporal assumption--if we play a different time period, this need not apply.) We could get away with powerful baleful artifacts, depending on what else we do.[1]
However this is the magical land of Equestria, and I'm not opposed to the notion of Time Travel as Plot.
Episodic "sessions" could be useful. I'm thinking play an episode for some months, when that's finished let it rest for like up to two or three weeks, and then pick up a new episode. Mind you, I have no sense of scale here, so it may be that what I'd consider an "episode" could reach the limits of what we're willing to do. (Any of you would know better than me how long campaigns and individual adventures take.)
Hm... that's about all I've got at the moment. "Adventurers" in the Darring Do and Indiana Jones sense would work fine, the way D&D uses the term much less so. My instinct is that violence is contraindicated. Characters/story over flashy magic; at least on a post-to-post scale, medium-size flashy magic on a once-per-episode scale should be fine.
[1] Related, but questionable, example:
I've a mental picture of a player overriding the DM's description of the contents of a chest with a sword that's got powerful pluses...and a Legendary reputation that whoever
so much asfinds wields it dies horribly, and soon.2132240 Or, here's a thought: We could take this in the "here, let's all get together and invent some headcanon" direction just-as-much-or-more than the the typical characters direction. This thought is loosely based on the "dump them in the world and let them explore" idea, but more collab.
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I would prefer to play in the less settled world of the pre-unification times where some of the monsters are still out in the open and the ones hiding in the shadows have more diverse targets to scheme against (due to the lack of central authority in that time period of the setting). This permits bigger plots to make sense without butting up against the "but why aren't the forces that be already sending their other, better adventurers to deal with this?" problem.
I don't know how or even if this might affect your planning, but I tend to be fascinated by leaving a mark on the environment in games. If it was permitted, I'd have my characters spend a week in every settlement leaving behind something artistic for them. A shrine, a sculpture, a monument. More practical structures are fine too, of course, but it's easier to come up with a character who is dedicated enough to their faith or their art than to find one who is dedicated enough to... I dunno, build lumberyards everywhere she goes.
Hopefully, that suggestion hasn't doomed me. Regardless, the thought of leaving a legacy of change behind is what rewards me most. In my ideal campaign, some things are built, some things are destroyed, and there's more focus on what's built than on what's destroyed.
EDIT: Oh! Libraries! Libraries would also be an amazing thing to build in every settlement!
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ER MAH GAWD! We could play the group that built the library Twilight's been living in!
Built. Will build? Conjugate as appropriate to get the campaign we want.
(Assuming we use this, of course.)
Playing with ideas like this might be more fun than the actual game.
Oh oh:
> dedicated enough to ... build lumberyards everywhere she goes.
Sounds kinda like AJ to me.
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Sounds like AJ? I was actually imagining sort of an antidruid. An antipaladin is a paladin who falls to evil, right? So an antidruid is a druid who falls to lumberjacking.
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waitaminute. You're like three hours behind me. What in tartarus are you doing up at that hour?
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I don't know how to dance the Circadian Rhythm.
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An antidruid? I guess that makes a kind of sense.
I was thinking along the lines of dedicated, useful, productive--sounds like Applejack to me.
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Okay, before anything, would anyone mind continuing via email? I have Ghost's and I think I must have Toafan's but I don't have Causal's. Reply to all is just so much less awkward than scrolling up to find reply buttons.
I game in pre-unification times makes a lot of sense, to be honest. It's something I considered though my headcanon for that time is probably somewhat non-standard and not very well developed other than the linguistics. I could also try and come up with something more standard where Puddinghead, Platinum, and Hurricane literally existed.
No, that's actually a very helpful detail. It's handy to know what motivates characters. Actually, that gives me an idea. We could take a leaf from Exhaled and model cuite marks as your character's stated purpose/motivation.
Switching to the mission/decision oriented game style, my preferred answer is that you are those ponies.
Generally, yes, just as in OC fic, though I always thought Pinkie Pie would probably be an exception to this. She's just too unfocused and her personality is very compatible with taking a supporting role.
But regardless I'm sensing a desire to do a free roaming game, so I'll have a think about that. Maybe I can combine the styles somehow.
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Email's fine for me. I know you've got my email. But if the wave's set up, why not take it to the wave instead? (Obviously, if the wave's not set up...)
Non-standard, pfft. My pre-unification headcanon would only be connected to the show by vaugest of shadowy refferences. I'm sure we'll be fine.
Also: linguistics headcanon GHEEEE!
Cutie marks as 'motivation' makes sense. I've just never been very good at that angle. Well, learning oportunity I guess.
Now, regarding free-roaming: I understand Quill's setup to be "there are no forces-that-be, and you are those other ponies". So... we'd hafta... find some way where we're selecting our own missions of that type? That could work, I'm just not sure what the difference would be. Maybe mission hooks just lying around and we pick up one or another and run with it. Or it could be "the forces-that-be are much smaller, and you are their 'those other ponies'".
Actually, I'm not sure how I feel about free-roaming. So I'll take your reading on face value.
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I've been in two or three really memorable games over the years and they fell into two basic pattens that lead to games that felt very differently. Perhaps things will be clearer if I explain them in more detail.
The Free Roaming Game
Or "the good game" as we started calling it because the GM dictated to us at the start that we had to play good aligned characters. The game started with a few linear adventures that basically cemented the friendships of the characters (fire forged friends trope) and then we got thrown out into the big wide plane that the GM designed. She put adventure hooks all over the place that we could pick up on at any time but we had a ship and were beholden to no one and could go anywhere any time.
The GM explain the model she was thinking of was the point in final fantasy games where you get the airship and can go questing or whatever. None of the quests are urgent until poked.
What made the game was that the character party was just awesome. Some of the best sessions just involved role playing and not getting anything done.
The TV Show Game
This one was a sci-fi game where there was the looming threat of an unstoppable invasion of formally super powered humans driven mad by something called "taint" (known as Aberrants) (it was less stupid than that sounds). We played a bunch of specialists working for an organisation called Aeon who were trying to do their bit to make sure the world was ready for this. The setting was nice because it managed to be neither a complete utopia or dystopia.
Our first session ended with us finding a mutated human trapped in the skin of a monster. The authorities were expecting an Aberrant. We neither wanted to kill the poor guy or let his existence make the news so we had to hide him somehow. We ended up calling in battalion we had waiting as backup and faking a battle with our shape shifter playing the part of the Aberrant while the trapped human pumped the area with taint. The battalion heard explosions and lights and a monstrous body being evacuated by Aeon and then were told to retreat due to taint. The area ended up out of bound because of the taint and we hid the mutant by making it seem like he was dead without having to move him.
As a consequence of our choices, the mutant lived, we bought some time to figure out if we could help him, and we looked like hero. Which unfortunately the next sessions involved us having to deal with the news and increased scrutiny in general.
A bit later there was a bit where we had to visit the colonies outside of the solar system. For the first time we were cut off completely from headquarters. There was no radioing for help or advice. That changed feel of the game changed completely for a bit.
Anyway, close to the climax of the game one of the decisions we ended up being faced was "do we destroy the Solar System?". There were good arguments on either side.
Two games styles that lead to two games with very different feels. Both game were amazing and I always looked forward to playing them. If I were to have a go at this GMing thing, I'd probably pick one of the two modes until I got comfortable enough to know what worked for me. So I guess what I'm asking is does one feel feel more appealing than the other?
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It isn't. Nearly, but not quite. It works but it needs copying putting on free tier hardware and given start up scripts. I'll probably have the time finish that this weekend.
There are three languages spoken by Ponykind. Plains, Unicorn, and Pegasus. Of these Unicorn was the first to get a written alphabet because Unicorns have the most need to write things down. Plains and Pegasus slowly die out, although Unicorn ends up borrowing many words from the other two languages and becomes Equestrian.
Plains sounds suspiciously like Latin because Celestia and Luna have Latin derived names. Pegasus sounds suspiciously like Greek and is the language Philomena was named in. Unicorn sounds suspiciously like English.
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Sorry you two. I've had a bad couple of days. I'll get back to you on the email thread probably Tuesday evening, hopefully.