SCHEDULE
Yesterday's planned game was the first cancellation since January. Summer is busy, schedules become irregular, and the traffic sucks. Last year we agreed to close down the game for the summer rather than fight those challenges, but we weren't playing "club style" then, and we used "freeze-time" instead of "1:1 time," so it was disruptive when one person couldn't make it. This is not a problem at all under our current scheme. It’s possible to play sporadically, or not show up for a session all summer, and still have a viable character you can jump back in with in the fall. I intend to follow the planned schedule as well as I can, but it is likely that I will need to either cancel or remotely run one or two of the dates.
Rather than burden us all with a second, short downtime period for May 31 - June 4 before the next game this Thursday, June 5, we'll just start that session at May 31.
Please remember that I can run off-schedule sessions, and you can issue more elaborate, contingency-based downtime orders. We can also play mini-sessions in groups or one-on-one in person, by email, Discord, or whatever. Remember that the game world will keep turning whether we play in it or not.
PLAYERS & CHARACTERS
Jay has decided to quit the game and he leaves behind four characters which anyone is welcome to adopt. As you can see on the Leader Board, these characters are all first level (so you can change their alignment without penalty) and have between 431 and 1,001 XP (so you can get a jump on leveling up). Even though ratings are earned by characters, they follow their player, so these characters come with no ratings when they are adopted. They’re on the roster below with the rest. All of the characters in the game are currently at the same time: dawn of May 31, 1479. Some geographical consolidation of the characters also occurred. Here's where everyone is. Boy, there sure are a lot of "castle" places around here!
- Castlemaine
- Calvis Mulroney (Andy O)
- Nicole Connery (Andy O)
- Edmond Connolly (--)
- Shay McFarland (Barry F)
- Patrick Cartney (Cole W)
- Tralee
- Ronan Mulqueen (--)
- Alison Heath (--)
- Connor Ryan (Cole W)
- Cieran Keane (Justin H)
- Eoin Sweeney (John S)
- Castlenoe
- Sarah Smith (--)
- Connor Hely-Hutchinson (John S)
- Sean Gavan (Adam M)
- Castle Island
- Colm Stewart (Barry F)
I’d like to remind everyone that you are encouraged to invite new players to join the game any time.
TIPS & TRICKS
Here are four brief considerations for skillful play.
- Read or re-read "SUCCESSFUL ADVENTURES." Beginning on page 107 of the Players Handbook, this short section, just a page and a half of text, is pure gold.
- Talk to the other players before we meet for the game. We usually only have about 4 hours to play and eat and socialize. Buying armor & weapons, hiring mercenaries, deciding what to do, and so on are activities that can be done outside the session without supervision from the referee. Activities that earn your characters XP, however, are almost exclusively possible during this 4-hour period. Gaining XP is the objective of this game, at least until your character is in the 8th to 12th level range, so maximize the amount of XP your characters earn during that period.
- Divide treasure strategically. It's easy to simply divide your spoils even-steven, but that's not always best, for example, when one or more characters are approaching their next level threshold. The XP earned from combat is divided by the referee, and I will always split it evenly between the surviving characters and henchmen (not hirelings). The XP earned from treasure, however, is up to the players to divide. Once a character earns enough XP to be eligible for the next level, he cannot earn any more XP until he trains for that level. If he's not going to have the cash to train up, then he's going to end up adventuring to get money without being able to also earn XP which is inefficient. His share of XP still gets divided out to him, but those XP are simply wasted.
- Always submit downtime orders. Missing your orders earns a rating of 4 on each character who is "NO ORDERS RECEIVED" that period. The average of your characters' ratings is the multiplier for all of your characters' training time and costs, so keeping your average rating as close to 1 as possible benefits all of your characters. Only characters whose player has a rating of 2 or less is able to self-train, which is a special consideration for the rarer classes and higher level characters who may have difficulty finding a higher level character of their own class under whom to train.