Herowannabe

Alright, seeing as how half the people who have responded so far are saying that the 2nd doesn't work I REALLY don't want to postpone it until then. So I'm planning on the 26th. The owner of Game Night Games got back to me and he's double-checking scheduling and expected attendance for the other events so that they can give us as much space as possible. So plan on the evening of the 26th, most likely at Game Night Games, but if that venue doesn't work out I have a couple back up options we can use for that night. (EDIT: I'll get a more official, detailed post made in the next day or two with more specifics) Yes I did... But I'm not going to say more until I know 100% for sure that we can make something happen. And we're not likely to know that until sometime after Gen Con.

Okay, cool. Would anyone nearby Provo that is planning on coming to this mind giving @RippleGylf a ride so that she can attend too? I don't think so... at least, not over these issues. Crafty said that they are still shipping the game out as is to backers, and then will send the fixed components in a separate shipment in about a month. As the game is still perfectly playable with the current components, they aren't a good enough reason to delay. The are only two reasons why I can see delaying the game: Shipping takes longer than expected and most of us kickstarter backers don't have copies of the game in hand by the 26th. Game Night Games doesn't have enough space for us on the 26th. I just got an email from them saying that they have a few other events going on that night, so space is limited. So it depends on how many people can come, and how much space they can set aside for us. So with that in mind, if we had to delay, who would still be able to attend the following weekend, Saturday September 2nd? That's Labor Day weekend, so I'm hesitant to move the party back unless we absolutely have to. Still though, if it works for people it may end up being for the best. I know that I personally am free that weekend, and GNG doesn't have much on their event calendar for that day, so we'd have more space (Note that I'm still set on trying to make the 26th work if at all possible). Pinging everyone who has expressed interest so far so that we can get replies quickly. @Themasterhunter @little wilson @Rubix @firstRainbowRose @Ecthelion III @Emerald101 @Elenion @ChaosModifier @RippleGylf

Whereabouts (roughly) are you located? If the desire is there I'm sure we can figure out a way to get you to the party. By the way, for anyone following along, I still have not received any official word from Ed at @Crafty Gameseven though I have pinged him several times now, as has Crafty_Pat. I don't know what's going on there. But Crafty_Pat has said that their team is doing inventory this weekend and once they're done with that they should be able to give us a solid date for the release party, so at least we can expect that soon.

Well Crafty just posted this in the comments section, partially in response to my questions: Gen Con is this coming weekend, so it looks like I was right in my guess. While it's likely that some backers will have received their copies of the game by the 19th, not everyone will have, so it's best to wait at least until the 26th- perhaps even a week after that if that's what Crafty wants us to do. Yes, they just released the Masks of the Past expansion (dealing with stuff from Shadows of Self and Bands of Mourning) a couple days ago. Personally I'm planning on coordinating things and playing House War, but if someone wanted to run an RPG session I think that would be a great idea. If anyone wants to take charge and Narrate an RPG session, just give the word. No problem, but don't sell yourself short. Without your ideas and suggestions (and frankly, your desire and interest) this release party may not have even gotten enough traction to get off the ground. So thank you!

Crafty did indeed receive the shipping container today. Based on that, and their estimated processing time, and what they told me about their shipping method (USPS flat rate), it's looking like people should start receiving their copies of the game around the end of next week. But undoubtedly, not everybody will have the game by then, so I think we should plan on Saturday the 26th for the release party. At this point I think we can consider that date pretty solid, pending confirmation from @Crafty Games.

Getting closer to a delivery date. Crafty is expecting to receive the shipment at their warehouse tomorrow, and then will start processing everything and getting orders ready to ship. They're thinking that they might be able to start shipping games out next Monday. So... could have the game in time for the 19th, depending on on which shipping method Crafty will be using.

I'm guessing we'll find out sometime within the next week, but like I said above, at this point Crafty Games doesn't even know for sure when they'll ship. Customs isn't very predictable.

Unless they get in on the Kickstarter by preordering before the pledge manager closes tomorrow- which is exactly what they're doing. In which case they will receive their copies of the game at the same time as all the other backers.

Long story short: we don't know. Crafty doesn't even know. The shipping container (for North America) is currently working its way through customs and being transpsorted to Crafty's warehouse. Once they receive it they can start processing and shipping out orders. So it could be in our hands in roughly 1-2 weeks.

Improve our chances of what exactly? Regardless, I know that Game Night Games has emailed Crafty to order copies of the M:HW to have on hand and they're setting aside space for us for the release party, so it would be kind of awkward to change venues at this point in time. Now we just need word from Crafty so we can set a firm date/time. In other news, it looks like we will be able to get ahold of some official promo stuff for the release party. I don't want to say too much at this point (partially because I don't know a lot of the details myself, and it's not 100% set in stone yet...), but just know that that is in the works.

I spoke to the owner of Game Night Games tonight- they are happy to host us. And it sounds like they'll probably be ordering a few copies of the game in case anybody wants one and didn't order it through the kickstarter. They said that Saturday evenings are typically the best for them, and since it sounds like that also works best for all of us I think we should plan on that. Still waiting to hear back from Ed from Crafty Games for exact details on when we can expect to receive the game and any other direction for the party that they feel like giving us. EDIT: Looking at things... the pledge manager closes on the 7th and the boat is working its way through customs right now. So it's possible the game could start shipping as early as 1 week from now. As such, I think we're looking at either the 19th or 26th for our party. There's a small chance the game might get here by the 12th, which would be incredible, but alas I am not free the 12th, and neither is Game Night Games. I am actually running a different event there that night (anyone play X-Wing? Come join us!)

Re: Game Night Games venue: Again, I know them well and I'm sure they'll be okay with it. If we get a crazy turnout (ie: more than a dozen or so people) then we might have to do some special scheduling, but most evenings they'll have room for several M:HW games going simultaneously. Re: GNG ordering copies of the game: TL;DR answer: Not planning to order copies at the moment, but they could be easily convinced to if there's an interest for them. extended answer: As for them buying copies: well, here is what I know. I asked one of the employees the other day out of curiosity if they would be stocking any (because I noticed that they had the MAG on their shelves, which surprised me). He looked it up and it is in the system with regular distribution channels so they could easily order some copies if they wanted to, but they hadn't done so yet. He (the employee) thought that they probably would stock a few copies once it was released but it wasn't his decision. Now, if/when we arrange to host a release party there with them then I'm sure they will want to have a few copies on hand for it, which is why I asked Crafty about getting in on the kickstarter preorder. Once we get enough info from Ed that we can start planning a release party, and if we decide to go to GNG for it, then I'll approach GNG and talk them into preordering some copies to have on hand for the party. Worse case scenario: GNG typically offers a discount for preordering games, so they would be offering a discount on preordered copies for the retail (non-kickstarter) release in october. re: Shipping: If I'm understanding their most recent updates correctly, assuming things go well at the ports (ie: 1 week or less for customs) then Crafty will have the product in their warehouse within 1 - 1 1/2 weeks, and then they'll start shipping them to US customers. That means we could be receiving them as early as 2 weeks from now. In another place Crafty said that right now it's looking promising for the game to be mailed out before Gen Con (8/17), so that would again put us in the 2-3 week range. I don't know when school starts, but you're right, we should try to accommodate that. A Friday or Saturday evening works best for me, so maybe we should plan on that anyway, even if the game arrives a few days before that (like a Tuesday or something). EDIT: I should note that I'm still not set on GNG as the ideal location for the release party- it depends on how many Sanderfans south of Lehi are interested and willing to travel.

I'll have my copy of the game available to use, of course. As for venues, my FLGS of choice is Game Night Games in sugarhouse, though if we have a fair number of people from Lehi or southward who want to come it might be a little bit of a drive. But I'm on good terms with Game Night Games- I know the owner and I've helped them run a number of tournaments and leagues, so I know that organizing something there won't be an issue (depending on the day of the week). Barring that, I know now there is a game store that has hosted a number of Magic events involving Brandon (actually it might be Dragon's Keep or Blakfyre- those names both sound familiar) so I'm sure they would be up for it as well, though I personally have never been there.

Thanks. Also, you would probably have a better idea of how to go about this than I would: is there any way of getting Brandon to attend? Or at least get an invite sent to him (and/or the rest of Team Sanderson- I understand a few of them are more board-game-y than Brandon himself is)?

It's worth mentioning that while this particular game has basically been filled already, there are a few more in the works, especially with the release of Masks of the Past just around the corner. If you have any desire to play in a PBP game (or even better, to Narrate one!), pop on over and say hi! EDIT: speaking of which, another mini-adventure just started recruiting. Come help us defend the town from a raging Koloss war band!

Indeed I am in SLC, thanks for the mention! Coincidentally, I just asked Crafty yesterday about doing a local release party and they responded today. I am now in touch with Ed over at @Crafty Games, and he said he needs a couple days to get stuff figured out. Regardless of what info/guidance they do or don't pass on to us, I would still like to do something when the game comes out, even if it's just gathering with a few friends at a local game store to play and eat pizza. I know there are a few other board-gaming sharders in the area that get together and play sometimes, but alas I've never been invited to join them. I don't even know who all of them are, but I believe that @little wilson is one of them, so I'll go ahead and tag her and we'll see if we can't get everyone together to plan this. EDIT: actually, does the site allow for thread names to be edited? If so, I suggest changing the name of this thread to "Mistborn: House War Release party" or something like that, and we can use this thread to plan, and use the one that @Pagerunner linked for general discussion about the game.

Woah! I just stumbled across this while looking for another post. Super cool! How is nobody else commenting on this? I didn't have time to watch the whole thing (right now), but I skimmed through it to see all of @Erosaito's artwork. Love that guy's stuff! Very cool you guys. Bravo!

@The Young Bard Now, the emperor was not a forger but that soul stamp was crafted specifically for him. If Gaotona or anyone else had tried to use that soul stamp on themselves it would not have worked- at least not for very long. Around a minute tops if Shai's practice stamps are anything to go off of, and that's only if the user is very similar in age/ethnicity/background/etc to the intended subject of the soulstamp.

There are a lot of possibilities for this to become broken. For example, what if the controlled player goes inactive- even for just a day or two? What if he decides to say 'screw it' and just tells everyone that he's being controlled (directly or indirectly)? Basically, I can see only one way to possibly make this work. Limit the control ability to telling the player who to vote for. If the controlled player votes at all he must vote for the player the sorcerers tell them to. Also they are not allowed to give away that they're being controlled. If they break either of these rules they are eliminated on the spot. Also, as has been said, letting players pick their own knacks could get out of hand quickly, even with you deciding what exactly those knacks do mechanically. This is because you'd be picking powers basically on the spot, without having enough time to balance them in relation with other powers. All that being said, whether it ends up broken or not, it still sounds incredibly fun. I'd sign up in a heart beat (dibs on the knack of being mute. I can't wait to participate only using dialogue when my character can't speak. )

Will do!

Okay, here we go (finally): First off, let's take care of the Cosmetic Role prize. Or well, prizes, because it looks like we have a tie. So congrats to @BrightnessRadiant and @The Flash! I'll be working on making a picture for each of you as I get the chance. I don't know how quickly I'll be able to get to them- Real Life is crazy at the moment, but I promise that I will get to them eventually, one way or the other. I'll post progress updates as I have them, too. Do you have any requests for a particular scene you'd like illustrated? If not I'll pick one that I feel is suitable. Next up, my well-organized rambling and haphazard thoughts on the game from the GM perspective. Short version: I am REALLY happy with how this game turned out. If I get the chance I will happily run it again. Long version: So this game began earlier this year when the CR prize for AG3 was the ability to authorize a non-Sanderson themed game to be run. That got me thinking. I was basically at the top of all 3 GM lists, so I could run a game pretty much whenever I wanted, and I already had a Star Wars themed game lined up, so I could have just run that. I wasn't particularly happy with the mechanics for that game yet, and I had been watching a lot of MLP with my daughter, and I started thinking that a MLP game could be fun. I didn't want to pick between Star Wars and MLP, so I posted a quick concept idea for each game and let the CR winners decide which, if either, they thought would be fun to run, and Madagascar picked the MLP game. I confess that I was pretty happy with that choice. As for the mechanics- I had been tossing around ideas for having publicly-known roles for quite a while, because I thought that could be fun. They had to be something interesting but not game breaking, especially if they fell into the hands of the Eliminators. That's where the Unicorn/Pegasus/Earth-pony abilities came from. I'm pretty happy with how they turned out and how they impacted the game. However, if I were to change any one thing about this game it would probably be the pegasus ability to cast secret-votes. It can be a cool and powerful ability in the right situations, especially if several Pegasi' coordinate with each other, but the general gameplay mentality on the forums here is that hidden votes aren't helpful, so it didn't get used much this game (@Alvron gets special mention here, because he the one player who used his secret vote more than his regular vote!). If I were to run the game again I would probably make the secret vote mandatory for pegasi (but that only goes so far because nothing is stopping players from announcing their secret vote in thread anyway) or come up with a different ability entirely. Because I already had the public-abilities in mind, I wanted to keep the special roles fairly simple and vanilla. I decided to not give the Eliminators any special powers because if you play Mafia or Werewolves you know that (for the most part) they don't have any special roles, and it works just fine in those games. However, I was nervous about making it balanced, so I did several things. First, I worked in flaws/vulnerabilities into most of the special powers: Honesty couldn't tell lies (a huge restriction in these games, as I'm sure you know). If Loyalty got kidnapped their protect target would get kidnapped too, making it risky. Kindness wasn't particularly good or bad as a power, just interesting, and Generosity had no direct benefits- only downsides. And of course Magic had the extra life, but once Magic was eliminated all the other powers went away. Second, I made the Changeling win condition slightly easier by only requiring them to eliminate the 6 ponies with special powers. The main reason for this was to prevent the village's ability to set up a Mayor. In other words, I didn't want (for example) the pony with Magic to reveal herself and get the Loyalty pony to protect her and then just ride out the game with the Changelings being unable to stop her. By only requiring the Changelings to eliminate the ponies with powers, combined with Loyalty's flaw, it made mayoring a very risky tactic. Anyone who tried it risked the Changelings finding and eliminating the Loyalty pony and taking out 2 special powers in one go. Third, when figuring out how many Changelings to have I rounded up to 5 instead of down to 4. I was really surprised by how many people thought that there would only be 4 eliminators this game. Both in the spec doc and in the game most people thought there would only be 4, but I had to just sit quietly and bite my tongue as they were discussing it. But I never at any point before, during, or after this game thought that there should only be 4 eliminators. With all the special powers being in the villagers' hands and with the potential for mayoring (even with the risks involved), the Changelings needed just a little bit of an edge. So I rounded up to 5 eliminators. Now, I admit that that might have created an unbalanced game, except for point number four. Fourth, I chose only new(ish) players to be eliminators. This was done purely by accident. I haven't been particularly active on SE over the past year or so, so I've kind of lost touch with who has played dozens of games and who hasn't. My only real guide stone was who played AG3 and LG32- the only two games I've played in recent months. So when I rolled for roles (heh heh) and saw Ornstein's name, I thought he was one of the "experienced" players. Also, I don't know why, but I thought I remembered Bridge Boy from before so I assumed he was a more experienced player as well. And thus it was that I accidentally seeded the Eliminators with a bunch of players that had each only played a handful of games. But balance-wise it all worked out- remarkably well, as shown by the fact the game ended in a draw. It really could have gone either way any number of times. This makes me very happy, because the first two games I ran ended up having some major balance issues. Let's see here, what else. Oh, I mentioned this in the Spectator doc, but in case anyone missed it, as the GM I noticed a number of potential strategies and tricks that could be employed based on the flaws I built into the special powers. To name a few: Loyalty can be used to protect other players, OR (especially if you think you might be kidnapped soon) you can use it to target players that you're suspicious of and potentially take them out with the built in dead-man's-switch. I would have loved to see the Changelings find and kidnap Loyalty only to have Loyalty take one of them down with him. Really, I'm sad that Loyalty was eliminated so early on. Such potential there. The Element of Generosity's rules allowed for a couple different ways you could use it to pseudo-scan players. Props to @randuir for discovering one of them- probably better than the one I saw before the game began. The version I saw worked like this: pass generosity to a pony you think you can trust, and tell them to hold on to it for 1 full cycle and then pass it back on the 2nd cycle. Changelings automatically pass it the first chance they get, so if someone holds on to it for a full cycle you know they're not a changeling. My method was probably a little safer than Rand's, but much slower, so probably not as useful as Rand's method ended up being. On the flip side of things, if the Changelings (or anyone else) were thinking about it and paying close attention, they could have started narrowing down who held Honesty. Honesty can't lie without losing their powers, so they can't claim to be any other role. So if the eliminators paid attention to who claimed roles (whether true or not) and perhaps encouraged a little role-claiming, as well as looking for any other statements that would have been untrue for Honesty to say, they could have started narrowing down the possibilities for who Honesty could be. Lastly, this game is really set up to encourage making role-claims (whether true or not) if your head is on the chopping block. I'm really sad that nobody really did that- especially the two ponies with powers that got lynched early on. If you're about to be lynched, you might as well tell everyone your role and hopefully get a cycle or two longer to live and help your team. And even if you don't have a power, if you're up to be lynched, why not fake having a role? I would have loved to see one of the Changelings who was on the chopping block use this tactic and claim to be the pony with Magic- yeah, it will probably backfire on you in a cycle or two, but if you're going to get lynched anyway then what have you to lose? And there's a good chance you might be able to ferret out who really holds Magic (or one of the other powers) in the process. Anyway... what else... The cosmetic roles and RP were all fantastic! Thanks to everyone who ran with their role and had fun with it, it sure made it an enjoyable game to watch/run. Along those lines, the write ups were a lot of fun to do, too (especially when I was able to find suitable pictures online to inject into them). I really loved when I was able to run with a player's RP and work it into the write-up in fun and interesting ways- which was true for most- if not all- of the writeups And I'm happy that for the most part people stayed at least somewhat active. We had a couple players drop off, but overall it went really well I thought. I had considered working in some sort of incentive to stay active / disincentive to go inactive directly into the rules, but I didn't want to make them too complicated so I ended up not doing it. But I think it turned out just fine in the end. Last of all, let me just thank you guys one more time for playing this game. It was a lot of fun, and you all made it that way. Thanks for the fun RP, thanks for participating and playing, thanks for all the patience and kind words and encouragement when real life got in my way, particularly with my cat getting lost. You guys are the best, and it has been an honor to be your GM!

Sorry, real life has been taking priority. I'll try to get the promised post up tomorrow or Saturday.

FWIW, if it was me, I would have each different weakness include a different method for killing the epic- and yes, I would roll the weakness and the kill into one, just to simplify things. For example, one epic might have the weakness that if 3 other players RP'd that they threw a pineapple at her in the same day cycle then she would die immediately upon the 3rd pineapple being thrown. Another epic might have the weakness that if someone created a PM that included everyone in the game EXCEPT the epic, then he would die at the end of the cycle. Those were just off the top of my head. Obviously you'd have to create some sort of power/method for finding out weaknesses. That or somehow make weaknesses that players could figure out through the course of the game, but that would be hard.

Turns out I spoke too soon. :(

Apparently I spoke too soon. It turns out that the cat we found wasn't our Rugby, but a different cat named Zombie. He could be Rugby's twin though, or well, maybe his dad, since Zombie is several years older than Rugby. The good news (if there is any) is that we located Zombie's proper owners and returned him. He was happy to be home. Now back to searching for my kitty.