Just talking

This:

Azlanek wrote:

Yes, I am getting kind of nostalgic too every once in a while. What though do you miss in particular? Is it just its place in the timeline and therefore the Setting, or anything mechanic wise? Because while I would agree to the first, I think 'A Kingdom divided' is run much smarter and with a ruleset better fitting the events that take place.

I think what I personally miss most was the initial feeling of being part of something that mattered and that would shape a part of the future of the history of Pendor. I think I had the most fun in the beginning, when everything was new and exciting and everybody was just thrilled to be a part of it.

Inspired me to make this:

With the PoP RPG projects slowing down, and with the realization that the stories and kingdoms we created during the past three years might, sooner or later, enter oblivion and gradually fade into nonexistence, I came up with an idea to turn fiction into something palpable.

I propose we take a dense A5 paper, sign our characters' names on it, and send it to the others until we have it all filled: name, order, and a brief saying of us former Aftermath and AKD players. The result should be a nice piece of paper with something from each one of us.

The last receiver will be Laisha. Who'll then make a HD scan for the rest of us and who will keep the original, as one should expect.

There should be no worry about sharing addresses and such. Since we will only be receiving the letter from one person and sending to another, in case one of us turns out to be a serial killer he'll only be able to kill two of us tops.

I think this is cool thing to do, and pretty easy to make too. What do you think?

Ahoy there, friends!

I wanted to remind myself of all the fun I used to have here, and so arrived to read up on the latest roleplaying. But it seems like this site is dying now.

In any case, I am back and willing to help in a rejuvenation if one is possible.

We had quite a few different projects over the years: Aftermath, A. Reborn, A. Renewed and Kingdom Divided

For several reasons, I only actively participated in the initial Aftermath project. Somehow the other projects did not have quite the same allure to me, maybe my energies for this kind of endeavor merely had been spent, I don't know. I sure as hell was fed up with it after leaving Aftermath . But I am curious about the impressions people have. My personal impression is that by now most people would actually like to go back to Aftermath and continue with it, despite all the flaws, conflicts and high-maintenance it had. Most of it is (at least with me) the nostalgia-aspect mentioned before, but is it all? Did you guys like the later projects better? Or were they just more manageable, but if given a choice you would have preferred Aftermath? And if so, what was it that made Aftermath special. Was it just new and the first and therefore exciting? Was it the setting? For most people it did not appear to be the metagaming. What was it for you?

For me it definitely was the freedom you had in solving IC matters. Usually in roleplaying games you only have a finite number of possible approaches foreseen by the game masters/programmers, and they will usually prevent you from doing anything else so as to keep the story in line with their plans.
Here, however, you could do anything and the story would develop accordingly, with nothing but logics and creativity restricting the range of your actions. Being able to choose whether I wanted to do a one-character stealth mission or bring a 1000-men army to solve a problem is what hooked me up here.

It was the freedom. Plus, how tense things would get. I would go back to the original aftermath definetly

Ditto what Iskar said. We all put so much thought into our characters here that I never really felt in the other RPs. Celdiur was the only character ive made that I felt bad about leaving behind with an unfinished story.

Heh. Maybe its just wishful thinking, but there does seem to be a lot of us coming back here now. Aranor, Iskar, Azlanek, Marcus, Saeros, DrSane, Myself. Could this be a sign of the community reforming I wonder?...

You'd have to wake up a lot more people than that to get it going, I'd dare say. Then again, people visiting here rarely is probably a result of nothing relly happening here.

Sir Celdiur Moriendor wrote:

Heh. Maybe its just wishful thinking, but there does seem to be a lot of us coming back here now. Aranor, Iskar, Azlanek, Marcus, Saeros, DrSane, Myself. Could this be a sign of the community reforming I wonder?...

The thought both excites and appalls me at the same time. In a way it would be nice, of course, but there are also reasons why the project ended the way it has, and up until now, I never managed to come up with a formula that would deal with Aftermath's many problems without utterly changing the way it was played. It is sad, but I am leaning towards the wishful thinking option here.

Azlanek wrote:

Sir Celdiur Moriendor wrote:

Heh. Maybe its just wishful thinking, but there does seem to be a lot of us coming back here now. Aranor, Iskar, Azlanek, Marcus, Saeros, DrSane, Myself. Could this be a sign of the community reforming I wonder?...

The thought both excites and appalls me at the same time. In a way it would be nice, of course, but there are also reasons why the project ended the way it has, and up until now, I never managed to come up with a formula that would deal with Aftermath's many problems without utterly changing the way it was played. It is sad, but I am leaning towards the wishful thinking option here.

Also, Im back Unfortunately, i must agree with what has been said, and I think it is a bit difficult to restart this.

Well, welcome back anyways, Righteous Ranger . But Curanthir? Don't scare me like that. I thought I was going crazy for a moment because I could have sworn that it was Caranthir. But I checked, and it definitely was at some point!

Azlanek wrote:

Well, welcome back anyways, Righteous Ranger . But Curanthir? Don't scare me like that. I thought I was going crazy for a moment because I could have sworn that it was Caranthir. But I checked, and it definitely was at some point!

Yes it was, however Caranthir is directly ripped from Tolkien, Curanthir is a similar name that I created thats slightly more original

And I'm back. This is something that I would like to see continue.

Wowowow, even more people coming back Maybe we should start a discussion on what we liked and did not like about Aftermath, what seems necessary and what can be left out, so as to fathom whether any kind of reactivation is even possible (and delve into nostalgic memories of the glorious past ).

Yes, I thought about it. The main issue might not be something inherent to Aftermath or AKD themselves, but just the amount of effort every one of us had to make for it to work, and how unstable it all became if anyone stopped doing their part (be the GMs, be the players). We started this three (or four?) years ago and, being realistic, our lives change a lot in that much time, and we find ourselves unable to spend much time writing or crunching numbers.

The solution I had at the time was to change venues so as to minimize effort and increase fun.
One idea was to create a Civilization IV PBEM in which each one of us would play a faction/order. Seems pretty cool and would fit perfectly, but the downside is that it's as slow as a PBEM.
The other idea was to port as much PoP as we could to another online game. The only one that I think would fit that is Haven and Hearth (www.youtube.com/watch?v=v72vZb2FL5M). It's fully interactive and allows many customizations, but it wouldn't be Pendor canon, as we're not in control of the map and story. Lorewise it could be, like, Pendorians stranded in a distant land and figuring out what to do after that.
I have no other ideas.

As some of you know, the meta-game was in fact based on a D&D ruleset for kingdom building. Back when the gms started to realize that the orders would not risk simply going to war with one another to expand and needed to be kept busy with plots and the massive workload for gms associated with that particular playstyle, I already toyed around with the idea of sticking much more strictly to the P&P ruleset, and use it to simulate a conflict between actual factions/kingdoms. Like AKD, the idea was to do something that seemed more manageable at the time, but in this case rather moving towards the metagame and large-scale conflict rather than towards individual roleplay as AKD did. This is still something I could imagine to explore.

Damn, that's a lot of familiar names suddenly popping up.

The most interesting question is: why do we keep returning to this website in the first place?

It's rhetorical by the way.

I guess we just miss it thats all.

Was the meta game really all that bad? I had nothing to do with it so I cant really comment on it.

For me the metagame is still the only way to decouple the assets available to the players from the whim and will of the event hosts, as the latter - no matter how good willed they are - tend to force the players along the lines of their often pre-planned story by imposing restrictions on player assets or creating overwhelming odds for the NPCs.

It has always been my hope that it would be possible to decentralise the GM-tasks, and I think we went a bit in that direction towards the end of Aftermath and Kelredan, with many players rotating as hosts for different scenes and transparent decision making using dice.
The only problem for this was that in Aftermath a number of players liked secrecy a bit too much, so one could not let everyone see and host everything...

Maybe a widespread return to just the events in terms of roleplay?

And what D&D ruleset was the meta-game based off in the first place?

A book called "Fields of Blood" by Eden Studios. http://rpg.drivethrustuff.com/product/691/Fields-of-Blood-The-Book-of-War?it=1

There is also a more frequent one built on the slightly changed Pathfinder ruleset and introduced in "Ultimate Campaign". I am actually kind of curious about this one, especially about the combat system in it.

And for me the biggest problems of the metagame were that for every order basically just one player was really involved in it, that it seemed often to be completely disconnected from what was going on in the events (especially because of time-issues), the problems with the resource production and the fact that it only applied to the orders, but not to the rest of Pendor.

I did notice that near the end of the roleplay.

I think it may partly be due to the emphasis of the gm's focus on the meta-game. The meta-game had an incredible effect on inter-order politics.

If we are ever to attempt this again, perhaps we should have a dedicated team that works with transparency and non-partisan. There were some issues of trust with the gm's being usually grandmasters and in positions of high power.

Since there are always RL issues and being burned out, we could also employ a method of switching out gm's as much as necessary.

We need to make more interaction amongst orders, plus other events and activities if we want to see members be incredibly involved.

Maybe to replace the influence gaining we get, we make bi-weekly events of knights interacting with npcs or people in power to gain influence. Maybe even mini-adventures if you understand.

For a roleplay like this to work, we need that meta-game to set the roleplay confines on order operations. We should intertwine every part with role play so we can get rid of the feeling that the meta-game is so different than the roleplay

I know I sure as shit miss the place, although I got overshot what I was really willing to do by taking on Voice of the Nobility stuff and disappearing into school and exams and house parties. Such fun as a Griffin Knight, roleplaying with you guys. Still got this forum on my front-and-center bookmarks. Never had the heart to delete.

As do I Hetzau, it's always on my toolbar.


Also Azlanek, that was an amazing story. You are an amazing writer

Thanks a lot, Aranor. It means a lot to me. I really did not expect anybody to read it through this soon. In fact, I was worried there was anybody left interested in it all. Glad to have been wrong.