Deliria musings.

[kyrielle]

I'm not sure why the subject line for this post amuses me so. So far, I quite like Deliria. I have a few "issues" with the CD rom. It's very cool, mind, and my biggest issue around it has nothing to do with it (it wasn't even in the picture, I was just prepping a connection to a drive to back it up and my computer got snappish about it). But the auto-run bit with the music, and the web pages where you can click on stuff but there's no hand/visual cue that you can, like you get with a link? So not cool! I'm sitting there poking around trying to figure out what to click on. Ew.

But, the CD is fairly well-organized and, once the auto-run what-not is shut down so it's not in the way, it is easy to go find what you need.

Other than that, the CD just needs to be labelled - it's a blank white CD (which is at least not like the blanks I have, but...).

No material that I can find on creating Legacies, but then again, the process of making them up seems fairly intuitive - I'm just curious how you decide/work out what's reasonably balanced and was hoping for some design notes there. None that I can find. Some of the other stuff looks fascinating but so far I only skimmed it looking for that (and who knows, I may have missed what I sought in the skimming). I'll have to go back and read it properly later.

I am struck by a strong desire to run a game. Again. If these impulses ever went anywhere.... Of course, on the rare occasion (all a decade ago or more now, so possibly no longer applicable) when the impulse did go somewhere, I absolutely sucked as a GM. Sigh. Part of that is, of course, not thinking on my feet well enough - and those were face-to-face games. Online games are another ball of wax. But I don't see it as doable. I'll confine myself to jotting idea-lings and creating characters and whatnot for now if I must. I'm much better at that and it is actually just as amusing, perhaps moreso. I already have another character entirely in the back of my head, although I have the sinking feeling she'll turn out to be far too annoying to actually have anything done with her other than be sketched out.

Comments

[mneme]

Yeah, Mystery Meat is really annoying. But people designing things seem to tend to think it's cool.

Making up Wyrds seems pretty easy, though I found myself more inspired once I'd heard the ones off the CD somehow (Marked; a measure of how well you can pass (physically) in human society (which is kinda like Stranger, only different); Favor and Duty (not sure how to price Favor vs Duty -- maybe it should be one level worse, since it's theoretically temporary?), Notorious (which can be either in magical or Everyman circles, but is fundamentally an Everyman wyrd)). Legacies shouldn't be that hard either; I don't think balance is -that- much of a consideration as long as it's not too much beyond the other legacies on that level, and fits thematically -- note that the elemental masteries are very powerful when bought to a high level (but artifically limited, probably too much so; paeryn basically ignored this when he was running, which was a good thing), shapeshifting is at least as powerful on a high level, and that the active magics (whatever they're called) have a high threshold, but are, in fact, stupidly powerful if you have good target numbers, enough to make balance much less of a consideration.

So you're another one of those players who plays just fine, but GMs rarely, if ever? I suspect a decade of play experience has improved this considerably...

I know I was horrible in an aboritive Toon game I ran over a decade ago, but have gotten nothing but positive comments on the one-shots (LARPs and one-shot F2F games, mostly, plus a medium term story I ran in Altclair, which lasted for a bunch of sessions) I've run in the last 6 years or so); sometimes you have to find the right (and wrong) system, as well as players, in order to make things work.

I still don't run that much, mostly because I don't have the patience to do a lot of preparation—when I -do- run, I tend to do it on pure improvisation (except for LARPs), pulling a bunch of image cards in Everway to form the kernel of a story, or taking a few external set-concepts and weaving the PCs into it to form something interesting (what I did in my pickup Gencon Nobilis game 2 years ago, and in the Iron Ref Everway game I ran in about the same timeframe).

[kyrielle]

*grins* Yeah, I probably have gotten better as a GM in that time - though my big weakness is always that I'm a character-based thinker, not a plot-based thinker. With Deliria, that might not be too bad of a weakness, since every character comes with enough dangling plot hooks to make pincushions of unwary players and GMs. ;)

[mneme]

LOL.

I'm actually more a plot based thinker than a character-based thinker (though I do a lot of both), and tend to use it when playing.

For that matter, both nrivkis and drcpunk (two of my favorite and most frequent GMs) are, as far as I can tell, character-based thinkers far more than plot-based, forever coming up with things the NPCs are doing with one another while the PCs aren't looking, and eventually letting the results cascade onto the PCs; seems to work just fine.

And yeah, a game like Deleria (especially if the players get a fairly high number of points in Wyrds, as they probably should in a campaign, although it feels kinda like cheating in a one-shot) makes it a lot easier to yank players around by their plothooks than a game where the characters are, perhaps, a bit less developed (or rather, where development concentrates on different aspects).

[kyrielle]

*grins* Yep. Add in the secrets (and to some degree the obstacles, though those are more a roleplaying aid to the player), and it becomes quite impressive. :)

[mneme]

Yep! It's actually an even more impressive list than OTE's (Secret, Most Important Person, Motivation)!