Jedi Dogs recording

[Vaxalon]

I managed to get a clean recording of a Jedi Dogs session.

Warning: It's almost 100 megs.  It'll take a while to download.

http://www.thesmerf.com/vaxalon/Jedi_Dogs.mp3

[lumpley]

I just haven't had time yet to listen to this. Anyone else?

How's the game going, Fred? Fun? Not so fun?

-Vincent

[Vaxalon]

The game is going gangbusters.  The players are engaging with the "passion" mechanic I cooked up, actively handing dice across the table when their passions fire, and generally having a great time.

We had to skip last sunday due to a combination of a minor kitchen fire on the hostess's part and my wife's health on my part, but it's turning out to be a real blast.

[lumpley]

Fantastic!

-Vincent

[Larry L.]

Fred Wookie,

I'm listening to this right now. Hey! This works much better than I expected for sharing actual play.

Technical points:

• The microphone does a surprisingly good job of picking up everyone's voices, and not the music in the background. What sort of mic setup are you using?
• The file sound gross under the mpg123 decoder. Sounds fine under xine decoder. Just FYI.
• It's huge! Have you tried a voice codec like Speex? I'd be curious to find out how this file does under that compressor.

More usual AP comments:

At the beginning (and to a lesser extent during the rest), one thing that caught my attention was the amount of time spent on "exploration of setting" kittitzing, as you get the players up to speed on details of the Star Wars universe. (I assume you're the only SW-EU whiz in the group?) This seems rather differnt from vanilla Dogs, where not a whole lot of details are predefined about the setting.

I also noticed your players doing that funny "player knowledge != character knowledge, therefore, try not to use player knowledge to drive story" dance.

It gets hard to follow the dice-rolling stuff, since it's, you know, inaudible. Explicit emceeing of all dice rolls -- before and after -- would be useful in future recordings.

Vincent! Have you listened to this yet? I gots a rules question. At the first conflict, about half an hour in, I'm curious if Fred's "convince me it's good enough for a verbal conflict" stuff is proper DitV style. I thought it was supposed to be "Say yes, or roll the dice."

Okay, that's the first hour listened to...

[Vaxalon]

I know nothing about microphones, decoders, or codecs.  I just used the file as it came out of my camera.

Yah, camera.  My video camera has a sound-only mode, I used it and stuck the thing on a tripod in the middle of the table.  It used the condenser mike in the top of the camera.

The session didn't exist to do the recording.  It was a sideline, so I didn't do anything to facilitate the recording.  It's just something I could do, so I did it.  It's half-assed and probably not as useful as it could have been, but that's how it goes.  We were there primarily for the play.

Oh, and we had our last session today.

The PC's flew into a nebula to retrieve some senators who were critical to a Jedi-related vote in the senate, and they saved them from an ancient undead Sith lord who had a vendetta against ex-Jedi senator Naos.  They saved the senators, but one of the PC's died, was resurrected by Darth Rot, inhabited by Darth Rot, decapitated, and finally cleansed by a 20 raise when all the dice together that Darth Rot had left added up to 19.

Kick ass.

We play Kill Puppies for Satan in three weeks, then Munchkin, then we're diving into a long-term Heroquest campaign in August.

[Larry L.]

Then your camera is pretty nifty. Technology!

So the undead Sith Lord appeared in session two, or was there stuff before the recorded session? You know some games would take many, many sessions to get to the Sith Lord. Sounds like it played out really well.

The question is, are you doing Star Wars themed KPFS too? (Evil grin.)

[Vaxalon]

There was lots of stuff before the undead sith lord showed up.  Three or four sessions.  I had laid out more plot threads, but noone picked them up, everyone was happy with ending play there, so we did.  Everything was resolved that people wanted to resolve.

KPFS is going to be straight up, as I understand, for the same reason that our first Dogs game was straight up.