TSoY irc games & die roller program?

[Chris Geisel]

Hi folks, my apologies if this question is not appropriate, but after reading the TSoY Wiki examples of play, I'd like to run my own TSoY game over irc.

Which die-roller bot did you use, and is there a #tsoy somewhere I could use the same bot? My irc-fu is not what it used to be (been over 10 years since I was on irc regularly).

[J B Bell]

Hi Chris,

If you use the magicstar network, there is a built-in bot there.  If you do (I think) #roll 2[1d6], you'll get what you need.  The square brackets are necessary in order to see each die result individually (otherwise, you get a sum, which doesn't work when you want the highest 2 of 3 or more dice).

Magicstar is reachable as irc.magicstar.net.  You may find volunteer players on the indie-rpgs mailing list indie-netgaming.

--JB[/b]

[James_Nostack]

Hi Chris, as the Storyguide for "A Very Brief Engagement" I hope my comments will be useful.

1.  Jot the rolls down.  If someone manages to do something that will give bonus dice later on, jot that down too.

2.  Try breaking each action into three phases: the initial roll, spending points from a Pool (remember, unless they have certain Secrets they can only spend one at a time), and gift dice.  I found it was difficult to manage this with everything happening at once.  You can either have all the actions happening at once, or all these phases happening at once--but both drove me crazy.

3.  Read the Zeitgeist method of bringing down the pain.  Use it when you have more than 2 PC's involved.  Otherwise it's a nightmare.  The example of play does not reflect how thorny that final fight with Chenard got.

[Chris Geisel]

Thanks, both of you! Much appreciated.

I definitely need to re-read the Zeitgeist method over again, because BDTP is still a little confusing to me, and even the example of play seemed a bit crazy. Thanks for the tips.

[Per Fischer]

We played the third session in an IRC on Magicstar yesterday, and it was sweet. We had a BDtP where a player character escaped within inches of his life after challenging a Ratkin gang leader :)
It was a prolonged affair, but I cut to and from the BDtP scene to a more quiet interaction scene, which worked super, and the player and I narrated each blow/round, sometimes for each other's characters.
We decided to have dice rolls in a channel of their own, so we have an actual play/narration channel, an OOC channel and a dice/SL channel.
I am considering using the Zeitgeist method the next time. We had a lot of circling around due to the same SLs for the combatants, and Zeitgeist would speed that up I believe.
The system works a treat in IRC mode, great stuff :)

Per