Synodiporia OOC community

For anyone who can't find a way to fit their character into the Lightning Age setting, we'll be offering three possible walkabouts. Please vote on the walkabouts if and only if you intend on participating in one.

As always, voting is weighted - rank the options from favorite to least favorite. Your first choice will receive two points, your second choice one point, and your third choice zero points.

Cursed Kingdom: The Missing Dragon. When an elder wyrm flies north from the Ash Wastes, an embassy of diplomats, dragonslayers, griffon knights, and hedge-magicians heads to the nearby frontier city-state of Misericordia to track it, but finds themselves under suspicion from the moment they arrive.

Ivory Tower: Field Trip. Postapocalyptic scholars attending a conference near an irradiated city find there's more to worry about than academic politics when local warlords make trouble. It may be time to test how much mightier than the sword the pen can be...

Doki Doki: The Exhibition. A select group of students and teachers is selected for an S. Tech performance at a cultural festival, and rampant teenaged drama both threatens the day and is the only hope to save it (as usual).

Voting will close at 11:59 PM CST on September 9th, and a plotting post will go up the next day so long as there are at least four interested participants.

Okay, everyone! With the next post going up today, we're working on figuring out in character who has solved which riddles.

In the screened comments below, please give us the following information, in separate comments for each of your characters.

<b>Your Character's Name:</b> <b>Intended Destination:</b> (mountain, pool, castle, lighthouse) <b>Your Character's Bond Group/Traveling Companions:</b> (because groups can travel together, it's important we know this) <b>Your Riddle Solutions, I-IV:</b> (links to threads or just explanations here) <b>Other Notes:</b> If your group *will* solve riddles, but hasn't had a chance to thread it yet, or ICly should have a solution, but is OOCly lost, let us know here.

There's no hard deadline here, as you're permitted to tag around in tonight's mingle in whatever area you know you end up, but the sooner you let us know, the sooner your character will have shiny garlands to match their shiny bracelets.

Jaunt Alternatives:
12 people voted in favor of walkabout options every Jaunt, presented when the Jaunt was first announced. 4 people additionally voted for mid-Jaunt Liminal Events. Nobody voted AGAINST either option. Therefore, we will be announcing walkabouts with a different tone, theme, & genre from our main Jaunts, at the time we announce our main Jaunts. In this case, see the bottom of the post for more details! Liminal Events mid-Jaunt will be considered for later inclusion, but will not appear in our July-August Jaunt.

Jaunt Order & Tone:
11 people voted to delay Lightning Age. No-one voted against this on the post, although several people mentioned on plurk their uneasiness with the idea. In future SotG posts, we encourage these players to take part in the vote in an official space (i.e. the comments of the SotG post, or alternatively, e-mails to the mod account at synodiporians [at] gmail [dot] com)! Sometimes a group thinks they’re in the minority and doesn’t bother to weigh in, when if they did, they’d encourage a groundswell.

At the end of this post we will be announcing the results of our voting on the replacement Jaunt.

Second Skills:
Six people voted to expand available skills, six people voted against expansion, two people voted tentatively against, and three people had votes which could not be neatly categorized.

That makes adjudicating this vote tricky. We’re going to prepare of list of specific suggestions for next month’s State of the Game that would allow us to address player concerns while still permitting us to expand what’s available to all our players. For now, though, we don’t want to punish patient and active players - this month & next, telepathic & liminal skills are acceptable learned skills in all situations, before we bring in slightly more specific guidelines.

Veteran Apps:
Seven people would like Veteran apps to continue. One person would like them to stop. Five people would like there to be some restrictions on them. Because there’s an overlap between “leave veteran apps open” and “limit but do not eliminate them,” counting is again a bit tricky here. We’re going to try the following:

Players who have never played in Synodiporia before will not be able to app Veterans, but existing players and past players, who are already familiar with the game, may. Additionally, future Veterans will be limited to a tenure of three sequential Jaunts (although if they pick Moebius-Spark-Belljar, they may have been in game before Moebius as well and not remember it). This should address concerns about handwaving 18+ months of CR while still allowing players a decent pick of previous universe skills and a thorough grounding in the game. As there are already plenty of characters who have served as Travelers together for many Jaunts and never interacted, it’s not implausible that veterans might not have CR with certain other characters, so we don’t believe anyone should feel forced to handwave CR if they’d rather not retcon more backstory in.

Cast Caps:
Eight opposed, ten in favor - and fourteen raising various questions or concerns about what specific caps we’d use and how we’d define a cast. In light of these concerns, we’re making no changes at this time, and in our next State of the Game, in early August, we’ll have specific, defined proposals for caps that players can vote on or amend, hopefully eliminating concerns about the vagueness of our current discussion.

Metagaming:
Some concerns here were expressed that the preponderance of Trump appearances might be a contributing factor in metagaming. Speaking to that briefly, the mod team can say: the Digital Frontier was an experiment, and there are no plans to include such a large number of Trumps in any future Jaunt at this time. However, Trumps will continue to appear, not in every Jaunt, but in roughly half of Jaunts, to advance the metaplot arc of this game. We will keep our eye out for troubling player behaviors, and ask that any such behaviors players see be specifically noted to the mods, as we cannot take any action on rumored but unreported, undetailed claims of metagaming.

Jaunt density:
Four people felt some Jaunts were too dense. Three people seemed to think we had struck a good balance. Many people wanted clear opportunities for player plot and initiative. While these answers were simply too small a cross-section to make any long-term game-altering decisions on, this next month’s plot will encourage player plotting and hopefully leave plenty of room for players to sketch their own destinies!

THE NEXT JAUNT:

By a very narrow vote of 16-15, QUESTING COUNTRY will be our next Jaunt! A magical girl jaunt, but NOT entirely or specifically a shoujo anime Jaunt, Questing Country will unite the surreal sense of wonder of Henson films and classical or medieval legends as a gaggle of rival magical champions from across many worlds engage in a competition to make their wishes come true. Friends, rivals, but only rarely enemies, these bold saviors must make common causes with friends new and old to make their way through a surreal wilderness, survive tests and challenges, solve riddles and puzzles, and defeat the occasional symbolic monsters with very literal claws and teeth.

There will be no defined factions this Jaunt, but certain challenges and certain skills that will be easier to achieve if a group works together and forms a bond between them. Players can start out in such a group of their choosing or assemble one along the way, but these groups are NOT in direct competition with one another (or immune from internal competition), and so they shouldn’t interfere with any CR opportunities players desire (we hope they’ll encourage people to reach out, in the magical girl spirit and theme of building new friendships to help save everyone together). This is what we meant earlier by self-selected teams - the mechanic shouldn’t be any more prone to cliquishness than the choice of who to thread with ever is, and we hope to encourage many diverse and growing nakama of champions.

Our walkabout options, by contrast, are:
• The Summer Solstice, a light sci-fi exploration set as a sequel to the Solstice Masquerade Jaunt but halfway across the world.
• The Jack of Spades, an Ace of Spades prequel in Jazz Age Brooklyn when the warring gangs still maintained an uneasy peace.
• Field Trip, an Ivory Tower sequel centered around an academic conference near an irradiated city.

Please rank the walkabout options from favorite to least favorite in the voting thread below, but ONLY VOTE if you’re strongly considering going walkabout. Voting will close at 11:59 PM July 6th. And do keep in mind that with monthly walkabouts, there may be plenty more chances to visit any or all of these worlds at a later date.

This was meant to be part of the State of the Game post, but (like the summary post), that's taking longer than expected, so we wanted to present this as quickly and clearly as possible.

As an experiment, for characters who can't find a place in this Jaunt, we're opening up a more relaxed chance to explore previous Jaunt worlds, the 'Walkabout.' A Walkabout would be a player-driven tour of a previous world, a chance to gain skills or experience from that world, with both infiltration and investigation open - but on a small scale, with no larger overarching plot, simply a further dalliance in the setting. As such, it would probably be slower-paced and less dramatic than a Jaunt. Mod input can be requested to flesh out available options and give ideas for activities, but mingles after the first would be player-posted and run, there would be no objective, no metaplot, and probably no appearance of any Familiar Faces (depending on mod time and availability, as Walkabout would always have a back-burner priority for the mod team).

With all these caveats, we're still excited to give our players more options and let them get acquainted or re-acquainted with older worlds.

Sign-Up and a Voting on what world should be visited are in the comments below. If you have not signed up for walkabout, your vote will not be counted. Once signed up for a walkabout, you are committing to not participating in the main Jaunt, even if you lose interest in the Walkabout. Investigators in a Walkabout will still have access to the psychic network, but they will not be able to reach Investigators in the Jaunt; only one another. Liminal Space will likewise be available but separate.

First: Jaunt voting results!

Our next plot will be Marches of Purgatory, the espionage/noir/afterlife drama; by an incredibly narrow margin. After that, in midsummer, we’ll be visiting The Lightning Age, a postcolonialist steampunk Jaunt that, unbeknownst to the Travelers, some of them have visited before, long before Moebius.

We definitely understand player concerns on voting on two Jaunts at once, and wouldn’t typically do such a thing - however, in this case, Matt’s going to be unavailable for a week in May and a week in June, and making sure ducks were properly in a row for the summer’s jaunts Trumped (ha ha ha) our other priorities. Still, we wanted to let we know we heard you on this one.

Second: there were some player concerns this Jaunt about finding non-combat ways for their characters to engage with the plot and the Wasteland. With the gigodaemon attack past, while the combat element isn’t gone entirely it will be minimized for a couple weeks. And with several squares’ worth of ruins recovered and explored, more archaeology, crafting, and purely exploratory options should be opening up this Monday. If this does not address your concerns, please let us know & we’ll try to work with you further on ways to engage with the Digital Frontier, and thinsg we can do to make it more accessible

Third: Skills! As of May, all characters who make sixty comments are eligible to learn a second skill if that skill is learned from another player in a thread, or that skill is a Favor Skill from a Trump. More advanced favor skills may be pending, and starting next Jaunt plot infiltrators will have plot-exclusive skills to pick from as well. If this works well, we may further expand the possibilities for two skills a month, but as it is, this seemed to best match the consensus suggested by the poll. As always, feedback is welcome!

Fourth: Schedule! Saturday there will be a CR/Skill meme. Sunday, plotting for week 5 & the introduction of new characters will go up. Monday, the week 5 mingle will go up.



The next State of the Game post will fall sometime between May 10th & 20th, & will tackle such subjects as what options we want for incoming Veterans, how we handle dungeon & walkabout handwaves for new characters, & ideas for ways players can spend jaunts they don’t find engaging other than backtags, hiatus, or handwaves.

Questions and comments are welcome.

 Another mingle is going up soon with some exciting new twists and turns - but in order to make it work just right, we need input!

If your character is involved in any sort of romantic shenanigans this Jaunt - whether your own, or interfering in someone else's love life - please go here and let us know how it's gone so far and what you have planned for the rest of the Jaunt!

If you'd like romance shenanigans but don't have any yet, please plot them in the comments below!

Just a quick check-in, Fellow Travelers, and a poll about Things To Come! from the feedback we’ve seen, it looks like the Cosmic Horror jaunt went pretty well - there will be comment threads below for discussing the fallout from that plot, and offering concrit about what we did right/what we could have done better. Now we’re into Doki Doki no Gakuen, and it seems to have started off with a bang - but we have seen a little more confusion than usual as well, so there will also be a thread below for airing questions and concerns about the Jaunt. As always, players are also welcome to email, private message, or PP the mod team with questions or concerns, but we like to foster open discussion whenever possible.

Next up! After this plot wraps in late March, we’ll once again have a Liminal Event. Since the timing on this plot would make it awkward to open apps mid-Jaunt in early March, we’ll have apps open in time for the Liminal Event in late March. One of the suggestions that’s been made is that we have a combination Liminal Event & Testdrive - a 4th Wall event, where players can come in for a week or two and test the waters, see how things work out, and possibly have a tangible effect on the game before they decide to app in. The first question on the poll below is whether you’re for or against a Fourth Wall event! Let us know, & we’ll go with the majority’s preference.

The second question, very briefly, is what other sorts of Liminal Events players would like to see. The third question is if there are any Jaunts players would like to see, or to help run in conjunction with the mod team, and if so, when they’d be available to do that.

Fourth - last time we asked players about skills, there was an overwhelming demand for combo skills that let characters work together and empower one another. This is a fantastic idea and we’d like to do it - can you give us some examples of what you’ve got in mind? We’ll listen to other skill suggestions, too.

Fifth, last, and most importantly, we are, as usual, voting on the next Jaunt! Rank the three options in order, from most desired to least desired. Votes are weighted - your first-choice Jaunt receives two points, your second-choice Jaunt receives one, and your third-choice Jaunt receives zero.

The options this time are:

Compass Fell: a team amnesia plot. Dropped onto a hex-grid of wilderness terrain with no tools and no memories, the Travelers must find a way out and determine just who or what has hijacked their Jaunt - or what the Trumps really have in mind for them. A popular option in our last vote, which lots of people insisted they’d love to see later, we’re offering a chance right away - but don’t worry, if now’s not the time, we’ll offer it again later. Both infiltrators and investigators will have the option of total or partial amnesia, and some investigators will be able to avoid memory loss altogether if they wish, but this is a jaunt that will blur that investigator/infiltrator line - whether that sounds cool or terrible to you, please keep it in mind.

The Digital Frontier: A jaunt set in a strange and wonderful cyberspace, the Digital Frontier is a land of sentient, anthropomorphic computer programs, driven by purpose to recover a grid of corrupted data. On the edge of synthetic civilization, a labor force of programs is forced to sift and correct the data, uncovering weird and wonderful things, but living a dangerous life, little better than slaves, with their only other options being gladitorial combat in deadly video games, or open rebellion against the Operating System that holds their social order intact.

The Ark: a cyberpunk dystopia on a harsh alien world, all that keeps this fragment of humanity alive is a massive Arcology, or Ark - a self-contained, overcrowded urban environment, full of unimaginable technology that’s slowly running out of power under the strain of population pressure and a populace that’s not as well educated as its predecessors were, before an event they call The Fall. Rich in metaplot, dangerous crime, survivalist themes, social revolution, and subtle dangers, the Ark is by far the heaviest of the three suggested plots - not quite as dark as Harrogate, but close enough in places that we want to warn folks who’d rather not get quite so grim, so soon afterward.

The poll will be open through the end of February, & results will go up March 1st!

<b>1. Should we do a 4th Wall event in late March?</b> <b>2. Suggested Liminal Events?</b> <b>3. Jaunt suggestions/Jaunts you’d like to run:</b> <b>4. Combo Skills/New Skills you’d like to see:</b> <b>5. Vote on the April Jaunt:</b> (rank your choices from 1st to 3rd)


Harrogate Discussion & Questions | Doki Doki Discussion & Questions | Other Discussion & Questions | Poll

Hello Synodiporia! A few very quick things, mostly just to touch base with everybody:

1) January's Activity Check is up, and you can find it here.

2) ATP is this weekend, at the very tail end of the month! Please check and post your wanted characters by the 31st so that we can update the roster, and post up our ad to bring more players into the game. Which leads to the next point...

3) The Test Drive Meme will be going up sometime later this week, probably within the next day or two. Tell your friends!

4) The next app round will be February 1st to February 7th. We will not be bringing characters immediately into the game, due to the tail end of the Jaunt, but they will be able to join and participate in time for a small Liminal Space stop (but NOT an event by any means) before we move onto our next planned Jaunt, Doki Doki no Gakuen.

5) Speaking of the end of this Jaunt, we have realized that there will be a need to stop briefly in Liminal Space and we have not accommodated for that appropriately in the schedule. A revised schedule should be up as soon as Matt is feeling a little less sick (and please send him your good thoughts)!

6) Finally, the next plotting post will be up very shortly, sometime tomorrow at the latest.

If you have any questions/comments/concerns, please feel free to post them in the comments below!

Hello Synodiporia! A few things for everyone:

1) Due to the stress of the holidays on everyone and the mask guessing game we have planned, Activity check will not be due until January 7th at 11:59 PM CST. Activity Check will go up sometime on the 3rd of January. This means that you can focus on tagging this last week of December and not worry about posting AC until we reach 2015!

Any Masquerade threads you link with your mask will count, so feel free to link those anon threads for AC! All comments must be from December, however, to count for this AC. You may, of course, still tag any threads you link after the fact, but we will not be counting those comments for activity purposes. This will also be the first AC we have with the new AC rules in effect, so be sure to familiarize yourselves with the new rules!

2) The mask guessing game will be posted sometime on the 1st of January. It will close the 3rd of January, just in time for Activity Check (so no cheating)! Remember that the three folks who guess the most number of masks correctly will get an extra skill for their trouble!

3) A new test drive will be going up sometime today! Be sure to tell your friends and invite them to post!

4) ATP is this weekend, so if there are characters you want to see in the game, please drop a mention of them on the Wanted Characters page! We'll update the ATP post with our current roster and wanted characters list in time to post it tomorrow.

Feel free to leave any questions down below in a comment. Thank you all and have a happy week!

First, some housekeeping: with Aaron stepping down from her mod position, Meta, previously list helper mod, is now assuming the full mod position of Queen of the Lists. All hail to your new overworked overlady. Please let her know when a list isn’t up to date, and she’ll attack it with new data as soon as possible.

Second: starting next Jaunt, plot-important infiltrators will receive a bonus skill if they make extra Skill AC (60+ comments). We really can’t stress enough how important it is that the people committing to plot-important roles be active and communicative and take initiative. We’d really like this to be a way that PCs can be involved in shaping the structure of plots & events, and so that NPCs will need to be used less often for plot hints & resolutions.

Third: after discussing the matter for the last few days, the mod team has arrived at the conclusion that this Jaunt has misfired to the point where it doesn’t make sense to try and salvage it in the available time, nor does it make sense to extend it. Instead, we’ll be concluding the plot early and beginning a Liminal event that will stretch until the next Jaunt begins in early December. Given the inactivity and lack of communication problems we’ve had due to health & scheduling issues, we want to make absolutely certain there’s plenty for players to do during the Liminal Event, so we’re tying it into the metaplot.

There’s going to be a glitch with the Jaunt. As of a post going up later this evening, there will be a sudden telepathic babble of voices, the sky will go white, all non-Traveler people, animals, and zombies will vanish, and time will apparently freeze. Falling objects will stop where they are. Liminal Space gravity rules will apply. Technology that was operational will remain operational (lights that are on, motors that are running, etc.) but flipping switches and turning will change nothing - what’s on stays on and what’s off stays off.

After a moment, the telepathic cacophony will fade, but time will remain frozen. Infiltrators will be restored to their investigator selves, and it won’t take long to realize that everyone is now within about sixteen square blocks of decaying cityscape, and the white sky beyond is in fact an impenetrable barrier. Everyone is once again in Liminal Space, cut off from the rest of the world. However, there will be a few important differences.

1. Every object from the jaunt will retain object permanence, which will make finding food and water for the next two weeks a little more doable.

2. Certain areas of the cityscape will experience time distortions. In minor distortions, people can watch everything around them speed up, slow down, or reverse. In major distortions, age up/age down effects will apply, allowing characters to temporarily interact with past or future versions of one another. If you’d like a future version to incorporate hints or details of upcoming jaunts, send an email or private plurk to Matt & he’ll see what tantalizing details he can hook you up with.

3. Other areas of the city will have spatial distortions - selective gravity, teleportation, impossible spaces that loop around one another… or size distortions that temporarily grow or shrink characters, so that we may temporarily have Godzilla-sized or ant-sized Travelers.

4. Characters with the Questing Sense or Fool’s Favor skills may also email or PP Matt in order to receive information at this time.

For those of you who were enjoying the Jaunt setting; there’s a chance we may revisit it in a retooled format after a few months have passed, but right now we have plenty of other Jaunts in the pipeline to focus on.

Make plans, ask questions, or leave us feedback as usual in the comments below! We really appreciate your understanding, and we hope the sudden change of pace isn’t too jarring - things obviously weren’t working as they were, and this is the best solution we could come up with.

Glitch Plot Plans | Questions | Feedback