Dude, you need to tell me when you post – I don’t get Email alerts for this.

* Like hell Sunday was trying to comfort anyone. Comforting I accept. I gave the goddamn eulogy. Sunday was trying to be a lawyer, and if not for his cool name… Ach, in a concentration camp with the rest of them I would put him.

* This is what I get for my efforts? A cold shower hurled at me? With the bottle? Shame on you.

I think we covered the sup’s handling issue on the last session of the game-without-Bo, but this is for posterity so I explain:
Sup’s are cool, remarkable individuals. PC material, the lot of them. Call it super-strength of character. Even dot-gov people can see that, and we are not talking about them, we are talking about an international twenty-levels-of-secrecy-above-the-president task-force sort of thing. These people are relatively enlightened (hell, they could have been founded by sups, which makes them Da-Embassy mark zero), they read comics, they have accepted that comic-books and reality are strangely similar and thus they know what happens when you fuck a PC up the ass (I am Emailing you a fan-boy pic to put here).

So yes, they want them on the records, they want them to take time to read the brochure, they even want the spit sample, but they do not want to fuck with them.

Holds my kind of water.

* Joachim, by me, is usually pronounced JO-AH-KIM, which is as simple as it can get. It is you that suffers from a short circuit in the pronunciation vs. spelling hemisphere. Personally, I think mispronouncing is a virtue.

* Yes, we all agree, you were right. And my version is still way cooler. Give me a couple of weeks to get Bo to sign it and then it will be official.

And yes, Japalienation, cool.

* Dude, why derogatory about drugs? Did I touch a nerve? You have one SACHI player, and the day he considers your “clues” to be anything more than “atmosphere” (and vice versa) I’ll let you know.

In the mean-time it is mostly me that goes over clues and bring them up before the party, it’s just that my conclusions tend to go psychedelic and are mostly ignored by you, SACHI-supremacy zealot that you are.

* You bitch about the system, but the fault is somewhere else. Like we said, it is not the system, it is what we (not just you, although I know you would have loved to take full responsibility so you can immerse yourself in self-flagellation instead of learning martial arts) make of it.

I.

Picks for the nits, just for the record because we discussed most of this face to face:
* It’s James “Chudder”, because I mis-read my own handwriting, where I put down “James Chuffer” (because I can’t spell Chauffer) (look, here’s a weird site for a possibly fictional radio personality called Chuffer Dandridge; “chudder” is a noise made by cats: Tigers chudder by way of greeting one another). I should ask Bo if this is a proper American name.

* Sunday wasn’t just trying to intimidate you while pretending to be innocent, he was really trying to demonstrate to James’ grandmother that he was trying to intimidate you. Giving a devastated woman a touch of hope was his real goal.

* Slade backpedalling: just because you help me with a meta-game thing by playing Slade truer to himself in-game, doesn’t mean that you get a free pass for playing Slade less-truly last session for a meta-game reason. At least not in recap.

This issue of how Slade handles Jack (adopt him as a ward or teach him self-reliance) raises another issue, which is that the way Supers are handled is quite inconsistent in this campaign and other Supes: The (Anti-)Masquerade games. The best example was probably that one game Bo ran for us, that layed out Bo’s vision of how these games “should” work. There we lurched from “A powerful government force is out to capture all supers at any cost” to “OK, sign here, listen to this lecture, and you’re free to go”. What responsible government conspiracy lets Supers wonder around freely?

This is something I should actually think about, and see if I can rationalize. If I can’t, we’ll probably keep ignoring it.

* Joachim – I guess the way you pronounced it made me stick in a ‘q’. When I couldn’t find any trace of “Joaqim” on the web, I went with the Spanish. I’ll fix that.

* Bo’s roll – we all agree that, as far as it went down between me and Bo, I described the aliens going Crinos, he reacted with “Hello!”, and I thought that was a bit of a stretch (unlike Bo, Jack is in a dark alley with a couple of shapeshifting strangers. Although, also unlike Bo, Jack is bulletproof). Therefore, I had Bo roll, and Bo pretty much dictated reality, because of the system: it would be a bit of a cheat if he’d go “Welcome!” and they would ignore that and attack.
So now I have to take these friendly, Japanese-like aliens into my scheme of things. Cool.

* I think last session you clarified what you mean by MIB.

* About keeping you guessing vs. revealing info – the definition of “too soon” in “catching on to my plan too soon” is really “before I think of one”. It’s more fun to run an improvised mystery when one of the players at least is SACHI enough to help, by actually running over clues instead of just demanding answers. Solution is for me to prepare more stuff.

* I note in the third session braindump that fight scenes and the system we’re using don’t fit together very well. Or at least require some attitude adjustment on our part.

* Technology: I really should have mentioned that in the third session braindump: aliens that can trade technology for seed-pods assumes that we can use their technology as, well, technology, rather than magic. So possibly we have no worries, unless you bump into aliens with replicators that can produce obsolete crap that will rocket humanity to technological singularity.

OK, so you did make Bo roll for keeping his cool.

What I saw, from my coffee making cloud, was aliens going into crinos, Jack pulling his superpowers for a fearsome blow and then, with a wholsome heart and a CK smile to match it – from cheek to shiny cheek – saying: “welcome to Earth”.

Call it “2nd unit director’s cut”.

I.

OK, this time you were pretty thorough, but still some nitpicking and general emotions:

You don’t get “backlogged”, you just stop. And yes, you really should recap.

James has a last name, remember? Chowder or something, no?

Sunday tried to scare me. He was pretending to be a dangerous guy pretending to be innocent. It’s the same tone you use when you try to scare us out of doing something silly. But Slade is not impressed. I don’t care how major-NPC his name sounds, I will not be bullied. I hum the theme from The Man from Atlantis and call my lawyer. I also made it clear that I do not appreciate him doing this at the funereal. Time and place, there is. I guess this is what you called “cool farewell”.

Slade does not back-pedal! The only job offer he made last session was to that Daniel geek. You must be confusing him with another character. Besides, if anyone back-paddled it was only in accordance with your wishes from last recap, you bastard. Why are you punishing players for helping you out? Is this part of that TFISA LEUMATIT that you are so keen on?
http://roleplay.org.il/phorum/read.php?f=1&i=47179&t=47164

Also note that Jack would make a good test-pilot not because he is the resilient one, but because of his feminine intuition. Pushing the envelope, remember?

Jack’s drinking buddy, Ivan, the widower, he has a kid, remember? Well, don’t forget.

On the way to dinner you went to converse with NPCs some more while Jack and Winston had a long talk about technological singularities and such. It sort of ended with “..and this is my goal in life, wanna make it yours?”

I just thought you should know.

Joaquin? What is he, a Spic? Joachim! Old German dude, he is! Probably leftovers from operation Paperclip. And he now has the alien Mechano construct.

You never made Bo roll for keeping his cool. You made him roll for his first move in the fight. It is Bo who rolled real high and instead of using it to kick their asses just put on a smile and took us all by surprise. Non-violent dude that he is. “Welcome to Earth”.

And the aliens were not taken aback, they were genuinely relieved to find someone civilized on this hell-hole. They gave him their cards almost immediately and prodded him to give them a card back. Very enthusiastic. They are not just aliens, they are Japanese, and I think this is brilliant and will really not appreciate you back-pedaling out of it.

Also, these aliens seem to consider the other sex to be a different species (seed-pod producing species?). Many wild possibilities came up here – more than two sexes, separate sexes on separate planets, baby-eating shape-shifters and so on.

Now, what’s with the “some embassy or hostel for aliens”? Like hell you were not paying attention, we are founding the MIB, bitch!

I call Malamud to let her know there is a leak, not to confirm anything. I call to chastise her.

In dream I converse with Alex, making sure that he is well, and I set up a meeting with him (tonight, 2230). As you say, I remember nothing.

In the Jersey factory, let it be noted, Slade asked the bastards a whole bunch of clever questions about possible flaws in their terraforming plans. I did a fine job, too. However, instead of playing it straight with me and telling me “listen, these people are obviously not into terraforming Mars” you just sort of stuttered and pulled out that self-replicating paint crap. It’s like I checked for traps, rolled high, found nothing and still ended up trapped.

I think this is your fear of being to blunt that always fucks us up. You have to get over this shit. We never know what is going on. Bo remembers nothing, Ging and me are high as kites, and you are sitting there, giving us tiny hints and sweating about us catching on to your plan too soon. FUCK THIS. What’s wrong with us figuring stuff out before they happen every once in a while? Trained by the world’s greatest detective, no?

Devereux said nothing about the launcher. All coincidence, he sayz. Which is were our instincts should have kicked in and lead us into a cool fight-scene with Devreux’s army. Or he could have told us the truth, since we figured it out ourselves, and give us a chance to join him or just order our execution.

I told you three times during the game, Slade does not drink coffee. I also told you that I assume the drug was in the mineral water they gave him, but one of us was too high to pay attention – and I wasn’t that high by the end of the game. And late hours are no excuse for heavy hands. Better to cut in a stupid place then go on playing into a stupider place.

All in all a really cool session (albeit low in action) up to the Jersey fiasco.

Thoughts:
Sure, fight scenes are not always needed, but this session would be much better if it had at least one fight scene (no, the Jersey scene was definitely NOT one). They keep the pace of the game, and this is one place where you need all the help you can get. You are a brilliant DM, but you doubt yourself and this throws the game off pace. Fight scenes are your friends. They give you time to think. They give you time to see happy players and figure out everything is cool.

The weirdness was great, but why do you always want to keep us guessing? Finding out stuff is good for us. Is big fun, esp. in your games where the found-out stuff is… To my taste.

I did not say that it felt like D was trying to get caught, I said that *in retrospect* this is a very acceptable motivation to invite us (both!) to the plant and tell us about the warehouse (which he knows I can link to him). I wish it would have felt that way during the game too, because the only other option I could think of at the time was that he was trying to push the plot forward at his own expense which is the source of the uneasy feeling I had with this whole thing.

Fighting mundanes can be a great challenge if they are well armed or just come in great numbers. You didn’t just fade the bodyguard, you faded all of D’s security force – if you hadn’t done that we might have had a good fight scene to end the session with.

The campaign has much shape. Too much. I think we need to talk this over. For example, trying so hard to build a spaceship seems kinda stupid if we are constantly visited by aliens who give us their phone numbers and who would gladly trade technology for seed-pods.

This we talk tonight.

I.