Greetings

See, guys? My advertising pays off. It just takes a year. And nets us potential players that aren't native to an English-speaking country.

Radek, eh? Welcome. You must be one of those guys that goes by a different name on every corner of the internet. Well, I wouldn't worry about your language skills. From what I've seen so far, I know a lot of Englishfolk who can't write as well as you can. And, while you're the first Polishman here, you're not the first person here that isn't a native English speaker. While we're on the topic of insecurities, this forum is also a first for me on several levels; first multi-user website administrated, first time roleplaying on a forum, first time playing overly-relaxed game master (or at least rule maker...? Rule borrower?) for any kind of role-playing group and first time pretending I know how to do any of those things. But it's important to be confident. That way, no one suspects a thing.

All in all, those of us that are left are a pretty forgiving bunch and I don't think you'll have a problem fitting in if this community survives long enough for you to decide you want to be a part of it.

On the topic of revival, I don't have a whole lot to say that I haven't already told you. Just for the sake of restating it here on the forums, I'm totally in favor of our story doing a phoenix impression. But there's more than one caveat. Sure, we need more players. That one's a given; it's always been a problem and it's proven harder to remedy than I thought it would. But the main thing I'm obsessing over is what to do with the story so far. We've got a good thing started here and, even with how direction-lacking our first few posts were as we figured out what the hell we were doing, I really don't want to give it up. But as it stands, there are half a dozen characters whose players have gone missing and there just isn't a perfect solution for it. What do we do? Start over? Rewrite sections of it? Try to fill in for the missing players by putting characters up for adoption or adopting them ourselves? Or just keep going and find a cheap deus ex machina to smooth out all the wrinkles? None of these solutions are foolproof or easy, some of them aren't going to look pretty and one is a total cop-out, which is why I've been shying away from the decision and childishly hoping people would just magically come back. Now it's getting to the point that the forum's starving from the indecision. And I don't think it's a choice I can or should make alone.

So the point in all that almost motivational-sounding stuff is, what do you guys think? Where should we go from here? If we can agree on something, then I definitely don't see why we can't round up a few hostages and apply torture or blackmail until they agree to slave away on the forums for our enjoyment like Radek here has.

... Yeah, I'm a terrible person. But I probably don't need to point out all the sarcasm by now. You guys know where to look. So. Thoughts? Opinions? Better solutions? I know it's off the topic of this necrothread from almost two years ago, but post 'em, seriously. I can shuffle things around later to make the board more organized if I have to.

Well, I mostly use 2 different nicks - one for stuff not related to climatic things (which you meet with on MAL) and one for almost every RPG-oriented. It just I won't be peaceful if I'd barge here with that other nick so I used this one which I'm fond of.

I'm happy to see that I may be able to not slow you guys down. Ofc I'll try my best to sound as english-like as I could but if anything would pick your interest just PM me or something - I'll explain it/rewrite it. In other RP I've battled with other peoples' characters a lot - they were rather fight oriented games - and while I can post a certain tactic for my character in battle I won't be so sure about explaining it well in english so as I said up there, just ask for any uncertainities.

About what you said about revival - first of all, if you'd like to keep your story so far we can simply cut off characters which players are not responding for the time being. Of course, not roughly - we just had to think about some climatic excuse like they were possesed for long time or they were under some spell which forced them to sleep about something else while someone else took their place in Grail. We just can keep playing on from the moment you guys were just before becoming inactive and go on. I know it's not a perfect solution but if you won't like to play something entirely new I think that this would be for the best of each of us - both active and inactive players.

And what about when someone will "revive" from his spell (meaning he'll come back to play here)? That depends on how much you guys try to keep original FSN mechanics. F.e. if we mustn't have more than one of each Servant's types? Do we need to keep original number of Magus? Can we tamper a little with some rules? Do we allow to change something canon in game? I dunno how you've played until now so I'm just asking that out of curious. But if we can change mechanics a little/a lot we can gain some results.

F.e. if we allow to have more of same classes' servants and more than 7 magus we can just go on without worrying about the people who are inactive in a moment. Even if someone took their place while they're inactive that won't mean a thing - they'd just come back from their comatoses and play on (after describing how they got wrapped up in something for such a long time - you know, it won't have to be this sleep thing I just made up). Than even if we'd have two masters with same servant we'd just say that rules of war have changed and made up something on spot (well, it's a roleplay so we might do it). That's what I think about inactive players' issue.

But tbh - I'd be very grateful as a new player if someone would do a little summary about what happened until now. It'd be a great help for every new player who would want to join story in a certain moment. I know - I can just go on and read all of history you have created but it might take time (yeah, I know, maybe I'm just lazy ;_; ).

On the other hand I was thinking about something other for a while - you guys are doing every fights in manner of talking to each other and agreeing on how duel should goes. I don't have anything against it but wouldn't it be more interesting if when two or more of us start fighting than some, not involved in fight, would judge what happened in each turn? You know, system like:

A attacks (describe what he'd like to do to his opponent, ofc no PG)
B defends (likewise)
GM/Person designed to judge fight estimate combat movements effects and describe what happened - if A has done anything to B, or maybe B had defended himself, or maybe even B had done something to A while defending.

This way we could focus on thinking about our movements while fighting and we will be more engaged in it. This also means that someone'd had to try being fair and square for both of fighting players but as we all want to have fun here I don't think anyone in position of judge would particulary favour any of fighting people. Strategy used by player and evaluation of GM would be a way to gain victory in fight.

That's just an idea from newcomer so if you think that this isn't good then it's no problem for me. I just happened to play that style for a long time, that's why I'm writing about this. I'm not gonna force it here if noone want it, I'm just mentioning possibilities.

That's all for now \o/. For new gaining new players I don't have any idea but I can always grab some stick and beat someone up to the point of him wanting to play here for his own pleasure. Or I can use tsundere nagare's charm and maybe someone will come here (i-it's not like I want you to play here, you know?!) \o.

You've pretty much described the deus ex machina method I mentioned, Radek. It's kind of a cheap way to keep a story going and I try my damnedest not to use it in my solo writing projects, but it may well be the smoothest way to continue here. I'd like to see everyone else's opinions on what to do about missing doods, though, so I won't say much else about it yet. Consider this a post just to answer your other questions.

As far as how much we follow the Nasuverse or F/sn rules, there are a lot of them we stick to and a few we bend. I'm cool with having more than one of one or two Servant classes if they carry over from older wars (a maximum of maybe nine or so, potentially with Masters for each), but I'm pretty set on leaving the rules of the war the same as they were in the original media. Magus count I don't care about so much, we can have as many wizards and witches of all flavors jumping around as we have players for. If we do wind up ever getting to the point where we need more Servant-strength characters (or if someone just wants to be something else, frankly I want to see a vampire in this war anyway), I'm open to other Nasuverse creatures being created as well. But even though there are only Berserker (sort of) and Saber open at the moment as non-duplicates, I don't see us hitting that nine cap anytime soon regardless of which method of plot hole filling we use.

For combat, I was originally tossing around the idea of incorporating a die-roll system into the forum and generating actual statistics for attacks and abilities and such... But I honestly think we're doing fine the way we have been, either by getting together with the player we're fighting and co-authoring large posts or just posting one action at a time. The die system would be a lot more useful if this was a large group of people and combat with five or more participants was an everyday occurrence. The use of a judge, which is essentially the same thing but circumvents having to numerically quantify everything, also isn't really necessary here for the same reason. But again, it's not entirely my decision. What do the rest of you think? Either way, it's a good suggestion and constructive criticism is always welcome.

Now, I could PM you a summary of things you need to know (spells that are currently active, important landmarks, where everyone currently is) for convenience, but you really should go back and read all of it when you get the chance. Aside from fully understanding everything, there's honestly some seriously good writing in there for a bunch of amateurs like us. Mostly me on the amateur part; there are several posts I've made that I'm still not entirely happy with.

Anyway, that's it from me for the moment. The rest of you need to get off of your lazy asses and greet this kind fellow instead of just goofing off in the shoutbox. :p

Nobody had said a word about fighting system in this topic so I'll say a few words once again, just to make things little more lively (yeah, I'm stuck with creating my chara profile, that might be a nice way to find more inspiration).

I said that I won't force you in changing your style of playing but hell, I'd say some more anyway. I think that even simple diceroll with d6 and then comparing results with your opponent to determine which actions were succesful would be good enough here. It's just I can think of situation where two players would like to win a battle and they won't agree to anything besides that.

Afterall this is war, right? What about main question here - who will win this war? Will everybody be kind enough to step off from stage without even actually trying to win? I find it hard to imagine and kind of sad.

I know, I know, you were playing here for a long time and it was working for you just fine. I imagine that it was like writing a book, while there wasn't single author but there were many of them. But like every book, this one would need ending eventually and when that will happen I think we may come to a deadend (for everybody). It'd be unbelievably sad to witness fighting in our arms.

I had said that even d6 would be fine. There isn't a proper way to play while eliminating an other human part in deciding the victor. We had a bunch of stats here like mana recovery or mana pool and etc. Adding a few simple stats like strength or speed and others maybe wouldn't hurt as much. If we would implement (FSN visual novel likewise) numberbased strength, endurance, agility, luck, (magical energy and noble phantasm fall for other category) we can just add score from dice and from our skill to determine effect.

For example:

A has 5 strength, B has 3 agility.
A attack B with axe (using strength = 5).
B tries to avoid axe by rolling to the side (using agility = 3).
A and B rolls dice - A = 4 B = 2
which means
A attacks = 9 while B agility = 6
A hits B

Now:
1. Someone unrelated to the battle, who agrees before to judge outcome would just summarize what happened.
2. PlayerB is allowed to describe what happened to him after being hit (which means he would describe his own injury).
3. Or we can agree that both of players have 20 HP. Everytime when dices are involved the difference between A and B's action would equal to points of HP being taken from defending player. If defence score is higher than attack score, than defender wins but no harm is being done to attacking side. Defender becomes attacker after this turn, no matter how hard was he injured.
+
My friend just suggested to me that "Luck" can be a type of special stat - Luck would become some kind of pool from which we can get additional stat point to our attack/defense before throwing dices. If we have 5 luck points, we can reassign them to other stat - in beforementioned situation B can assign 3 points of luck to his agility and survive A's attack. He'll be left with 2 Luck points for the rest of battle though.

Well, that's what I had think of. I think dice system would be really helpful for people who wouldn't want to just talk about fighting but actually tries to fight. And I know that this system is full of drawbacks. I dunno about servants and their noble phantasm - how to incorporate them to this system. I dunno about magic. There's more "dunnoes" here and it's seems that longer I think about it more problems appear in front of me. But after writing this much it really would be a waste to just throw it to bin and forget about it. If someone find it interesting and want to comment about it then go ahead, even if we won't use it it might come in handy later or in other game.

And I still think GM would be perfect for us xD.

Radek's got a point I think, but I don't believe any of our battles so far have been serious enough to warrant the use of dice or even statistics really. We've really only had small scuffles (I think I'm the only one to actually be wounded so far), but as time goes on and the war goes into full swing I can see implementing something like this to get a solid victor.

However, I'm assuming what was posted before was just an idea as relying on only statistics like strength and agility would put me at a pretty steep disadvantage since Caster is rather lacking in both. We'd also need systems for spells and what-not. All of this would have to be implemented without over-complicating the gameplay.

As far as how to continue, I'd rather not nuke what we have so far, but if only 4/9 of the magi took part I don't see another option. Especially considering all of the characters that'd need to be recast. We could try something like the grail deeming them unworthy and removing them or something like that. Honestly I'm probably the wrong person to speak on this since everyone I've interacted with is still here.

Oh and welcome to our humble little shoutbox forum Radek.

P.S. Don't listen to Ferios' modesty, he's far from an amateur.

I just felt like doing some archelogy work right now, don't mind me and take care of yourself guys~!

^^

Well, isn't this a blast from the past. How's it going Nagare?

Pretty good actually, though at the moment I'm ill and still have to do some (minor and major) fixes to my essay for a degree (and the deadline is drawing near). At the moment I'm not doing anything though and I'm just relaxing since we have some free days from University right now. Gonna storm through my work later I guess ^^.

How is it for you? I hope you're doing fine~!