Claincy

Yeah, I've been working on doing just that For this specific part the information is so scattered, convoluted, contradictory and illogical at times that I need to document and map it out just to get a mental picture working in the first place

Working with established code bases that are virtually uncommented & undocumented is frustrating at best. When the client and previous developers have also had difficulty communicating, the structure of the database is bad as a result of the development process and nobody seems to have a clear idea on the process through which the data was changed into the form the app uses it all makes for a bit of a nightmare to sort out. I like the project, it's interesting and all but this particular aspect is really difficult and frustrating. Also, my head hurts just as much as always so even focusing on something simple and logical is a lot harder than it ought to be. (I'm "ok" and I'm handling it. It's just frustrating and painful.)

No worries As Hero mentioned there is no need for the story to be about toppling the lord ruler. The narrative can be something grandiose with far reaching consequences, or it can be something more personal and focused. The standard advice for building a campaign is to start small. In a D&D style setting this most often means creating a small town, a couple of NPCs in it and a couple of surrounding locations. In the MAG that is more a matter of creating a starting job, a couple of friendly NPCs and a couple of obstacles. However, that's not how I like to do it. For me this is the second step, the first step is to come up with a concept for a long term campaign arc. What this usually means is coming up with 1 character who wields considerable power (whether through magic, resources, influence or whatever) who has some sort of major plan they wish to accomplish. You don't need the details of the plan yet, just some idea of who they are, what they want, why the want it and some concept of the type of resources a their disposal. I'll flesh this out a little with a couple of other major players in the narrative who may have complementary or conflicting goals and then I go to planning the first job. Once you know who some of the major characters are and one they are trying to accomplish it becomes comparatively easy to seed connections with them throughout the campaign. I love secrets and mysteries in rpgs so I pack a lot of them into my campaigns. You don't need to know the answer to a secret when you seed it either The phrase "There's always another secret" can be something of a guiding principle One thing I like doing in my campaigns is to drop 3 or 4 little hooks or secrets that the players could investigate and then let them decide on the ones that intrigue them, and ignore the others. Then you're spending your time developing jobs and stories that you know the players are interested in. If the players are looking into something of their choosing, there are a couple of secrets for them to uncover and if it has some connection to the player characters you are well on your way to an interesting narrative.

Welcome! The first piece of advice I can offer you regarding the MAG (Mistborn Adventure Game) is to visit the Crafty Games Forum too. The level of activity in the Mistborn sub forum varies but there is a lot of discussion about the game there and there are a number of people with experience playing & running the game who check the forum regularly Steel ministry is another MAG focused website where we've done a bunch of play by post and the people there are also very friendly. (There's a significant overlap in users between steel ministry and the crafty forums, several of us are also on 17th shard). I've had some experience Narrating the MAG/GMing in general though I'm far from an expert, I'm happy to offer advice. I can't offer too much specific advice without knowing more about the story you ran and what worked/didn't work but I can offer some general advice. In my experience the MAG tends to work best with a large degree of player freedom, the setting and mechanics don't lend themselves well to a strict linear experience. When I prepare for the MAG I tend to plan the following: What's the problem that needs to be solved?/Job for the crew to accomplish. (In an ongoing campaign this may take the more general form of a couple of different hooks, mysteries or job proposals that the players can investigate as they please.) How do the player characters find out about it? Or what incident incites it. Who might be involved? (3-5 characters is usually enough. Name, profession, a distinguishing feature and what they have to do with the narrative is all you really need to know.) What are a couple of obstacles the players might face? What are a couple of things the players might decide to do? (The players will likely come up with something you haven't thought of, but briefly considering this can help you think about the other questions.) This pattern of planning works better the more comfortable you are improvising. The aim is to give you a framework to help you improvise around. The less comfortable you are improvising the more details you are likely going to want, to a point. Beyond a certain point you get strong diminishing returns as you are mostly creating stuff the players will never see. If you have a small number of encounters and NPCs ready you can slot them in where-ever your players end up going. Nothing is canon until it enters the game. For example let's say you have an obligator by the name of Todd (please don't actually name an obligator Todd :P). Now you know that Todd is a minor obligator who works at the Canton of resource and handles a lot of the paperwork to do with the warehouses near the Tin gate. He's very intelligent but open to bribes and tends to be a touch sarcastic, he also tends to repeat himself using different words. Great! You're all set for when they look into the records for those warehouses.....except they don't. They go their directly to scout them out and talk to people in the area to try to get information that way. Oh look: Todd happens to be doing an inspection of those very warehouses at that very moment! Or perhaps the players instead decide to try to bribe someone from the Canton of Orthodoxy for a lead on sensitive reading material (banned books) that the players think might be stored in one of those warehouses. What do you know? Todd is actually a minor functionary at the Canton of Orthodoxy! As another example there's nothing wrong with subtly switching which house a planned nobleman character belongs to either. You can do the same thing with combat and other encounters. The important thing to be careful of here is that you don't tell the players when you do this. So long as they don't realise that they were going to encounter that character either way it's all good. If you do this now and then you're fine, if you do it all the time the players will start to guess what's going on. Just try to make sure that their actions have significance and their choices matter. The two biggest specific tips I'll give are these. They're simple in concept but if you do them (and you don't have to do them amazingly well) it will have a significant impact on how much the players enjoy the game. Try to connect the job or some aspect of it to one or more of the players characters on a personal level. If the players come up with something cool or clever they want to try, say yes if at all possible. One of my personal favourite lines as a GM/Narrator is "You can certainly try". If they have a cool idea that sounds very difficult or unlikely, let them roll for it (and reduce the difficulty slightly for cool things). You want to encourage creativity. (Though if they do something too inappropriate for the group, outright impossible or harmful to the game in some way, then do say no.) If this cool or clever thing effectively bypasses a challenge you had prepared, good for them! The players will feel just as accomplished for tricking their way past a challenge with a clever scheme as they will engaging in it the way you had intended. If you are struggling with developing your own story and looking for examples there are small campaigns in the back of the Terris: Wrought of Copper and Skaa: Tin and Ash supplements. If you like I'm also happy to send you a pdf of my rough compiled notes from my campaign for ideas. Two important notes to close with: -Everybody starts off pretty average (or bad) at GMing/narrating. (New players also generally start off being pretty poor at roleplaying.) It takes practice and deliberateling working to improve to become a really good GM but you absolutely can do it -Don't feel bad if you feel nervous, every GM feels that way before a session. Even the amazingly good ones, so don't feel bad about it Hope that's of some help, and don't let an average first try discourage you from trying again. (My first few sessions were....not great )

I ran 2 D&D sessions in the past 24 hours, both went well

...apparently this is a thing now.

I'd like to echo what the others said above and add a piece of advice (if you think it's stupid just ignore it). I'm coming from a similar direction to Jondesu here as I've just reached the 4 year mark of being in constant pain. So unsurprisingly this has been on my mind a bit lately. Most aspects of life get better and worse over time and new good and bad things happen but some bad things do stick around. It really helps to find just 1 or 2 things that are unrelated to all the crem going on and that you really care about. Not just long term things that will hopefully come to fruition years in the future but things that you can do right now. For me that's my faith and tabletop roleplaying games but it can really be anything. Whether that's making a new series of videos, writing music, writing fiction, a game, a sport, a social group, faith or something else entirely. Something that is present in the short term (though something that pays off in both the short and long term is great) and that you can look forward to on a daily or weekly basis and/or actively make progress towards. I can be struggling to cope with the pain, feeling like there's no end to it and that I'm screwing up my job because I haven't been up to working. And on top of that I'm not making any progress towards my real goals. Then at the end of the week or fortnight I sit down and run an RPG for friends and see the enjoyment they get out of it. Thinking about crafting the adventure that they draw that enjoyment from and creating specific things they will enjoy is something that helps sustain me throughout the rest of the time. My point there is that sometimes it can be something that you do for others as much as for yourself, if you feel like you are positively impacting others (like you are already doing on this forum btw) it can help. I'm not saying that is easy, it's not. But finding and actively choosing a thing or two like that to focus on when it's bad can help.

@Delightfully Smoak @Pinnacle-Ferring Congratulations!

A watched Shard never posts. *nods sagely*

@Herowannabe Oh no Hope you find him ok.

I'm a couple of episodes behind because of the delay in airing in Aus, but season 4 is miles ahead of season 3 in quality imo.

*Glances back through the archive* Hmm ok, I vote for @FeatherWriter (Alyx)

Very cool

It's designed to be played for single sessions in 1 and a half to 2 hours and to be easy for anyone to try I'll definitely post about it in the Creator's Corner when the design is more complete.

Thanks Good luck! It's a very rules-light system designed to encourage roleplaying and improvisation rather than mechanical challenges. The basic conceit is "The Aredeli live short lives compared to the other races, reaching maturity at 3 and rarely reaching ages above 8. They have a strong oral tradition centred around a set of legends they all learn at a young age. Once every 8-10 years when the Aredeli people face a crisis of great magnitude the elders declare a new legend to be in progress. Aredeli from all walks of life jump at the chance to be immortalised in a legend. The risks are high but to many Aredeli the opportunity is worth any danger." That setup results in a lot of characters who really aren't suited to adventuring being part of it, which can be fun

I'm sorry, that really sucks *hugs*

Tried out a rules-light single session rpg I designed today. It went really well! Well enough that I'm seriously thinking of turning it into an actual product to release.

Saw that, really hoping it's good

http://coppermind.net/wiki/Women's_script

Nice Looks like a good refinement of the rules I think, and a I like the card design. It's probably worth adding a quick note stating how many of each card are in the deck.

Heh, there was that thread for that in Entertainment late last year. I spose it'd probably be better to continue that one than to start a new one. I think I didn't keep posting there because I wanted to avoid double posting but I suppose separate rpg sessions 1-2 weeks apart are probably sufficient reasons for doing so. Another cool thing from tonight: One of the memories was from an ancient blue dragon and shortly afterwards one of the players remembered another large blue dragon that was talked about earlier somewhere else in the campaign and figured they might be the same one!...He was wrong That was actually this dragon's sister. But he was involved in those events. A lot of things in my campaign are interconnected, secrets are everywhere and many major things to come have been hinted at or affected existing events. It's very much a single major story with multiple parts rather than a sequence of fairly separate campaigns. The point I wanted to say was that the players are just starting to realise this and think more about how things may be connected and that's very satisfying. To be clear; my campaign isn't just a railroad with a defined path but there are many things that happened in the past that effect current and future events. Additionally I do know what a whole bunch of different individuals and factions want and are planning and I have a good idea how some of that is likely to interact with the players.