Tech Night - World Transcript

As i (Trevor) was going through the screen recording from Tech Night, i was attempting to paraphrase everything into short little blurbs. When i got to the section where we were talking about what kind of world we wanted the campaign to take place in, before i knew what was happening, i was just transcribing everything that was being said. Not quite word for word, much of it is paraphrased, but it's actually pretty close, because i type really fast and sometimes my brain just disengages (it's how i've managed to stay sane in a data entry job for a decade). Anyway, i didn't want the transcript cluttering up the Tech Night article anymore, so i wanted to delete it out of there, but i also saw no reason to just throw it away. So it's presented here, in all its glory, for some reason.

The Transcript
What kind of world do we want? What kind of things would we like to see in the world? What would we be excited about, what would make our eyes roll?

Andy: Would like to see states, cities, establishments that we can travel to which would have different political things going on that we could get involved in, or choose to ignore. other than that, more or less a standard D&D world.

Cassie: Ok with a run-of-the-mill atmosphere, where you travel from village to village, and there are civilizations, caves, and wilderness, and you do things in them.

Trevor and Amanda: We're really "go with the flow" here, as long as Amanda can stab things.

Christi: How modern are we?

Shayne: The typical D&D world involves an age after there were great empires, but something happened that ruined it, and they have fallen, and now it is the dark ages. Technology is low. We are sliding into, or out of, the dark ages, a la Lord of the Rings. There won't be electricity, there won't be guns, there won't even be muskets. Most advanced thing you will find is an aqueduct.

Cassie: Since we're learning the playbook and whatever, getting used to weapons and equipment, it makes sense to tie into a regular world.

Christi: How common is magic?

Shayne: Typical level of magic is that you're used to seeing things like minor healing spells and herbs, the occasional cantrip, low-level magic things like producing light, even seeing wizards who can float a few books in the air. High-level magic, like our Druid can do, or potentially if we have a wizard or sorcerer, is a lot less well known and could be feared, or worshiped, or respected, or outlawed. Higher-level magic, even first level, is not common and the average person is not used to it. Low-level magic is not a big thing and the average person is cool with it. Humans, Dwarves, Elves, Halflings are not a big deal; everybody's used to those races. Half-elves, Dragonborn, Half-orcs, Gnomes are less known races, and Tieflings are the bottom of well-known and understood, highly distrusted, lots of people are scared of them and don't like them. Slightly above them are Half-Orcs, and slightly above that are Half-Elves. Half-elves are fairly uncommon.

Cassie: My character background, i kind of left open. When you're a half-orc, you have to decide kind of how that happened. She has not really been around anybody since she was 11 years old; when she was a child, she was around humans, so she trusts them and is ok with them, but other people might not have that toward her.

Andy: Milo hates discrimination, especially toward halflings, which doesn't happen often but he thinks it does. That's good incentive for him to join this group, since it's so diverse. It's good inspiration, it'll be a good story.

Christi: I have an irrational prejudice against games where we start out with, oh, do i know or trust these people. It's the thing i hate the most in games. Have we talked at all about how we start the party?

Cassie: We haven't.

Andy: I feel like if you guys were together, i would walk up and say, hey, can i join you?

Trevor: YOU SEEM TRUSTWORTHY

Andy: I am!

Cassie: I feel like if we're all kind of misfits, aside from Andy who takes pity on us, even Christi would fit in because of her criminal background, i guess us all being like, nobody likes us, maybe we go kill some shit to prove we're not bad people, maybe that's the way we take that? I'm Chaotic Neutral so i just kind of do everything for myself, but i could be talked into things.

Christi: Did you just propose that we go kill people to prove we didn't kill people?

Cassie: I said "Let's go kill some shit." I meant, like, evil.

Andy: I feel like if you just put yourself into that position, you go out in the world and you're like, well i need money, like becoming a mercenary would be the quickest way to do that. Like, hell, i have to be with these people to do this thing, but at the end we're like, hey i like these people.

Christi: It's just been my experience that playing a game with characters that you're not sure you can trust is not a lot of fun.

Andy: So maybe we should just jump in already knowing each other? Otherwise i'm not sure how we get around that.

Christi: That's an option.

Cassie: If Carey chooses the knight he was thinking of playing, our backstories already have something intertwined, like we met in the woods once. I'm totally okay with skipping the part where we all meet, if Shayne wants to just say we've known each other for a while we can go from there.

Amanda: I think if we use that "bond" thing from DungeonWorld would work out really well, if we go through that with each other, we already know each other because we have a bond. It works better, because we have a reason for knowing each other, rather than, "you're all in a room, go do a thing!"

Christi: Yeah, if we could work something like that, at least for your character, that would be awesome for me.

Andy: I think some of us should have connections with the others.

Christi: Yeah it does make the game more fun, and at the end you say to the GM, "Hey GM, i did this thing, can i have a reward?"

Cassie: I can has XP?

Shayne: So i think the two options are, a mercenary company, like you all joined a mercenary company, it sounds more horrible than it is, but it's along the lines of you're joining a contractor. It's well-established that this mercenary company is at least lawful neutral; you do a job and they pay you, if they don't it's a huge deal and you're well within your rights to...deal with them. But at the company you guys are sort of put together, and it's understood that you're here to do jobs and get paid. Therefore, you all have the same basic goal and you should all be doing the thing, and if you're not then there will be consequences. In Pathfinder there's the Pathfinder Society, which is, hey, we're all doing things for the betterment of the land, you signed up, do your job. It's just well established. The other thing we can do is, there's another game we played where you have bonds. You agree with another character that X has happened, and you explore that, and it has an in-game effect that helps when one character aids another, but in accordance with that it gives you a reason to know each other and have a relationship that's not immediately adversarial.

Andy: That last one. Sounds good.

Amanda: I like the bond.

Cassie: I like the bond, too. Is that something you just make up, Shayne, or are we involved in that?

Christi: In DungeonWorld there's a series of questions, you pick one, and pick someone in the group, and be like, "Hey do you want to be the person i think is dumb?" and if they have low intelligence, they say "Yeah sure."

Shayne: It's not always positive for you, sometimes you're the butt of the joke or sometimes you're the person being saved, but at least you always have a relationship with someone. The worst possible thing is that you think someone is untrustworthy, and you're watching them, but it's never that you hate them and want them to die. My thought is that we can just do that next session, probably, because Amanda and Trevor don't have their characters done, and Carey's going to slide in at the end. We'll do it at the beginning of the next session.

So what we're going to do is, say we start with Amanda, she'll make a bond with at least three characters, at least two have to be positive, one can be negative. Amanda would decide that with the people. She would be like, hey i want to have a bond with this person, i'm a Dragonborn, i'm cool, and Christi would be like, "Hey i'm a criminal, let's make a bond like that." I don't want to just use the DungeonWorld bonds, that's not interesting to me, but we can lean on them as suggestions. And in game, if you have a positive bond with someone, you can give them a bonus. If it's a negative bond, there will be no bonus, but if you want to turn on them, their roll will be bad.

Christi: Would we literally want bonds where we hurt each other?

Shayne: It's part of DungeonWorld.

Andy: Sounds like...life.

Christi: That sounds awful.