I’ve started a project in the past couple weeks developing a scenario for Call of Cthulhu that I mean to playtest and eventually publish. It’s a thing I plan to work on throughout next year but hope to get playable in the next month, maybe. Coming from a background in literary studies and fic/non-fic writing, the difference between writing a scenario with a plot and writing the plot for a book are obvious to me but proving challenging to develop different practices around. I’ve spent a lot of time thinking how to organize my notes and ideas into actually useful documentation for characters and relationships or scenes and mysteries. Obsidian may be proving to be the most useful thing for this, in my case. There’s a post in me about this meant for the Devlog thread or the Tabletop RPG Making Thread for sure.
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I just heard of the idea that custom emotes can be useful when running PBP games via discord for players who don’t want to or can’t send a message but still want to participate and show others they are participating. Imagine the group is possibly accepting a quest from some Lord dude. One member of the party is doing most of the talking. It looks like everyone else is AFK, but is that true? Emotes that mean stuff like “No Objections” or “NAY!!!” could be useful for interjecting or showing up in more ways than typing a message.
Maybe like those little notifications you get in RPGs where it’s like “Spock Hudson will remember this…” or “Meager disapproves” that don’t stop a conversation but provide some insight into what people not actively participating in the conversation feel and want people to notice. In PBP games it feels like having visual proof of activity is good for the morale, since they move so slow. I know that I can start to feel anxious and then self-conscious without activity, interpreting it reductively as people have lost interest or are confused. I think this is a good idea.