29 - Connect
I got online in August 1999. Before that the little text-based gaming I’d done was play-by-post with actual post, with stamps and everything. After that, I got onto forums like RPGnet and into games like the official World Of Darkness chat New Bremen. I’m still involved in the RPGnet play-by-post subforum over twenty years after it started. I’ve made friends for life through online RPG spaces.
And some thoughts on players and characters connect. Some games offer more advice than others, and some systematise things like how each PC in some Powered By The Apocalypse games feel about the others. And this on top of NPC connections like allies.
And on PCs being in constant contact. Being reachable by phone lessens the instinct not to split the party, and PCs can talk in and otherwise affect a scene they’re not physically in - see Steve D’s thoughts on this in Leverage and how it affects play in modern settings.
And I’ve seen this feature retroactively in modern media, like the importance of walkie-talkies in Stranger Things compared to their rarer key appearances in original 1980s Kids On Bikes stories, and the extreme example of Sending Stones in Dungeons & Dragons: Honour Among Thieves. Some things made now only work with a phone in your pocket, even if it has to be brought in by magic.
And due to the phones in out pockets usually being connected to the internet, how to solve the problem of PCs looking everything up. Sadly these days Google solved that problem themselves.
29a - 3, 2, 6
Where, Nostalgic, Art
The PCs find an old letter, seemingly placed for them to discover. Does it reveal a secret from someone’s past? Or is it addressed to them from a hundred years ago, a la Back To The Future?
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