Last night saw the second of my hangout games broadcast in the Reign of Winter campaign. We had three new players join and one of the existing players could not make it. I had spent most of the day preparing everything on roll20 so things would run smoothly but things proved to be a little bit of a comedy of errors from my standpoint.
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| Next hangout will be on air so it will get recorded… |
Firstly, I had organised another area to have games from so +Cam Mcloughlin and I did not have to sit in the same room together and cause echo. Once I arrived at the new destination I realised I did not have the keys I needed to get in and I only had 9 minutes until game time! I rang Cam and ended up at his place, arriving just in time to open my macbook and open the hangout as scheduled!
I then noted that the hangout was not going to be recorded as I had hoped. Someone had told me I just had to hit a button when opening the hangout to do this. This is true if you are setting up the hangout from scratch but when it was already set up as a part of an event it needs to be organised with the event which I failed to do. So next week will be the first week that the hangout gets sent to you tube.
It took us around 15 minutes to get everybody to a point where we could start after a bit of mucking around and a recap of what happened the week before for the new players. I had made the decision that I would not be giving reasons as to why some characters arrived and disappeared due to personal schedules, just that the players should assume that they had all been travelling together regardless of the company week by week. So I had just started to get into the game when one other player joined a little late (she had said she would be a little late) and I switched mode to discuss hero points.
I had decided to allow the use of hero points as outlined in the Advanced Players Guide with a twist as a trial. I had never liked the addition as hero points as written as there was no balancing to it and the players could use them freely so I decided to add my own twist to them. I have been playing an online hangout game of Fate Core recently and I really liked the concept of “Aspects” that they use so I decided that I would use a similar system in this game where the players came up with some aspects for their characters and that they could use hero points whenever their actions were tied to the aspects for the character. By doing this I hope to encourage a stronger sense of character in the roleplaying that the players get rewarded for by being able to use hero points. The aspects the players chose were;
- An aspect that represented the core of their character concept;
- A trouble aspect, or an aspect that causes concern to the character (to build drama); and
- One of the other players linked to the characters story and gave their character an aspect to use.