[OOC] STOMP Remembrance Project

[CoffeeHorse]

I had an idea for a Halloween mini campaign in which one player would be a secret changeling and we'd have to figure out who it is. But then it turned out that we really did have a secret changeling and I dropped the idea.

 

[Copper Bezel]

Craziest thing about it is I originally vetoed the idea of secret changelings. In other words, we almost didn't get Maple as a character at all.

I remember at one point you had to stipulate that no future players could be adults without cutie marks, unicorns with broken horns, secret changelings, etc. XD I don't remember if pegasus ponies that couldn't fly were on that list, but we seemed to have the spectrum of tricks that work once covered XD

 

[Zamuel]

I think the main reason why Maple worked is that she herself didn't know. The secret changeling reveal was just as much of a surprise to her as the other characters. The whole situation would have been really different if Maple was deliberately sneaking around.

 

[CoffeeHorse]

It was brilliant because Maple was trying to do Changeling things. She had this uncanny sense for what other characters were feeling, and some latent changeling instinct was telling her there was something she was supposed to be doing about it. She acted on it as best she could make sense of it, but she got the details backwards. She noticed when ponies had a void inside and thought it was her job to fill it with love, usually in the form of hugs and candies.

She had a feeling it's what she would want.

 

[Zamuel]

Huh. Guess you have a point.

This arc also features my deliberate attempts to make Anchors Away weird and somewhat alien. Honestly, without Barometz and the OOC thread blowup the "Barometz arc" had a ton of good to it. We had fun NPCs, exploration, Maple hints, Anchors quirks, Invisible Castle's hilarious nat 1s that led to the wasps, insights into Dazzling Midnight's personality, and the horror of the manorspace.

 

[CoffeeHorse]

The results of our post-wasps heal session:

Amber Spark loses 10 Fatal Damage and now has 5 Fatal HP.
Snowy Skies loses 10 Fatal Damage and now has 5 Fatal HP.
Misty Monsoon loses 5 Fatal Damage and now has 0 Fatal HP.
Light Fantastic loses 5 Fatal Damage and now has 0 Fatal HP.
Night Cap loses 5 Fatal Damage and now has 10 Fatal HP.
Static Signal, Maplejack, and Rhapsody have 5 Fatal HP.

 

[Caldwin]

And to this day Gramps is still scarred by this memory. I can't tell how many times I've heard about the infamous "such capacity is typically fictional."

 

[CoffeeHorse]

Night Cap probably has much fonder memories of the event since it was his one impressive moment in battle ever. So naturally it was a foe we weren't actually supposed to fight.

Even his victories are tainted.

 

[Copper Bezel]

Amber's "Well I never" attitude here is one of my fave moments for her as well. She's pretty much ruined from here out, but it's a good moment.

 

[CoffeeHorse]

Amber has tons of good moments ahead.

 

[Copper Bezel]

Thanks

 

[Zamuel]

Hindsight is 20/20 but the scene is an interesting circumstance of GM knowledge versus player knowledge. Ranging from accidentally setting up a moment where half the team felt like they had to defiantly protect the other half (which would have been good if I was intentionally aiming for that) to creating a wand in the opposite situation but players have only had experience with a wand that's dangerous on its own and that coloring player opinions.

GM inexperience was on full display. At least things got better.

 

[Copper Bezel]

Yeah, that's fair!

 

[Zamuel]

In looking at it, I did at least manage to keep GM knowledge and NPC knowledge separate. Though I'm not sure how good Anchors looked after this. She was level headed but didn't truly come off as prepared as a team lead should be.

 

[CoffeeHorse]

We were at our best and worst here. The expedition was very much a disaster. We got fractured before we even started. We got humiliated by wasps. By the time we got to our destination our hearts were hardly in it. But when half the team thought we needed to save the other half we gave it everything we had.

Anchors was very Rodimus Prime here. She felt less prepared than she probably was. She knew what to do when we were in crisis mode.

 

[CoffeeHorse]

Us misunderstanding the intentions of a monster that it's still not clear how we could have understood any other way, getting into a big fight that ends in a draw, suddenly doing a 180 and making a deal with it, then settling down to have a picnic, is the most G1 thing we ever did. I kinda love it when I think about it like that.

 

[Zamuel]

*violence*

...why do I find this quote tag so humorous?

Anyway, someone used the Element of Kindness so that's a lost spoiler tag. I think it was Light Fantastic.

 

[CoffeeHorse]

"If we are making changes, shouldn't Maple and Light be exchanged? That way Amber's team has a pegasus and we have a magic user so the teams are a bit more balanced? I've no real problem with the who's on which team, but the doubling up seems odd when we've more or less got an even split between the tribes."

In today's episode we see that Rhapsody does have leadership qualities besides being the serious one. This mission was a disaster but had more good stuff in it than we appreciated at the time.

"Good, so we can finish the bucking mission now?" Maple said, not so much asking any pony in particular...

I binged Breaking Bad this year and nothing hurt like Maplejack learning to talk like Static.

 

[Shadewing]

I always felt the Swamp was where Rhapsody really started to shine as a potential leader. As soon at they learned a wand was involved she quickly pivoted and tried to contain the situation as best as possible; she knew it wasn't the best solution but considering just how many times the jive kept hitting the fan durring that mission, she was gonna take any win she could get.

 

[Caldwin]

Nothing against Zam, but I was just totally, completely and thoroughly aggravated with Baromets. It's like, one round in battle clearly showed we couldn't touch it while one more round would kill the entire party. So fighting was obviously not what we were supposed to do. But trying to negotiate with it was just aggravating brick walls and circles. By the end of the day it almost felt like (I'm not saying this is what it was, but this is what it felt like) Zam ended up going "Okay, this is going nowhere. Shortcut to next scene."

I mean, like I said, nothing against Zam. The STOMP story over all was a big part of my life for those years that I was a part of it and I really enjoyed it. But this particular mission...I really was just as frazzled as Static was.

nothing hurt like Maplejack learning to talk like Static.

Static didn't like it either. I think you'll notice that's about the point he really started to try to clean up the language...some...