Smart Jason

Sundays at 12PM - 4PM PDT (7PM - 11PM GMT, 9PM - 1AM CET) The game map can be viewed here. The players' screen with quick reference information is here. The game is streamed live here. Watch old episodes . Storyteller: Jason Dr. Frank Baldwin: Twig Debra Dary: SuperBiasedMan Maureen Kruze: Lansbury Hank Parris: Fingus New players are always welcome! Hit me up in PMs or (preferably) in the Slack chat!

I just want to thank you guys again for bearing with me all this time. I've been waiting and planning for that point in the story for a long time now and it's been very frustrating for me, and I'm sure for you, to deal with all the headaches of the technical difficulties of streaming and getting the audio to work. And then seeing my connection drop over and over during this crucial moment I'd prepared for (despite how otherwise unprepared I am), it could've been much more heartbreaking for me with another group of players who were more obvious about letting their frustrations show, their disinterest surface, their attentions wander. I appreciate how much you do bear with me: I clearly want this game to be more than I can currently make it (on a purely technical level, at the very least) but having the four of you present is not something I take for granted on the road to ultimately making it a creative project that is compelling to play and to view.

I like doing it room by room because I enjoy this little house rule of giving everyone the same XP but with an additional 10% or so to one party member I think acted with particular acuity in each given scene. So far I think that's been decently spread out (i.e., no one person is getting it the majority of the time - although I haven't been keeping track); and saving XP distribution for the end of a session, a dungeon, anything, would eliminate that. I definitely do hear you, though, about XP only being accrued through kills in this way. I'll absolutely make sure to distribute experience for roleplaying scenes outside of dungeons from now on. Doing some retroactive math, that XP is low, moddy. Slightly low, as in those two sessions we've only technically resolved two encounters, but still low. I'm not sure why. Again, I'd rather not retcon it, just expect me to address it in the future and feel free to bring it up going forward if it remains an issue. I personally don't think level one is that constrained creatively, but I know that's easy for the GM to say.

OK, so similar to the post in the Pathfinder thread I just made: I want to try using Discord going forward in addition to Skype. This is more important for the Hunter game than Pathfinder, because I also think it will easily allow me to switch into private communications with any of you. I apologize for the short notice. Discord can't do video, so we'll still keep Skype open for cameras, however it should be much more elegant for audio and less likely to take it upon itself to adjust my levels on the fly - resulting in players no longer hearing my backdrop audio or getting echoes of themselves. (So, in effect, we'll have a muted Skype video call open simultaneously with a Discord audio call.) Download Discord here: https://discordapp.com/ Once it's installed, run its audio wizard (I normally don't like running wizards, but Discord makes it pretty much mandatory to do so, in my experience). Join the server by clicking on the circled + button on the left and enter this code: https://discord.gg/010a02OQvc33tglZm Hit me up if there are any problems. As of now does it look like everyone will be available come Sunday?

I hadn't considered the experience thing - that's a good comment for me, since I'm unlikely to notice or relate that sort of thing as a GM and having not played Pathfinder before. I'll definitely keep that in mind. And yeah, by all means, I encourage you to invite anyone you think would enjoy or add to the game, no matter where they're from. Please feel free. This might be short notice, but I wanted to try using Discord as well as Skype for our future sessions. If we can't assemble this by tomorrow, it's OK. Discord can't do video, so we'll still keep Skype open for cameras, but it should be much more elegant for audio and less likely to take it upon itself to adjust my levels on the fly - resulting in players no longer hearing my backdrop audio or getting echoes of themselves. (So, in effect, we'll have a muted Skype video call open simultaneously with a Discord audio call.) Download Discord here: https://discordapp.com/ Once it's installed, run its audio wizard (I normally don't like running wizards, but Discord makes it pretty much mandatory to do so, in my experience). Join the server by clicking on the circled + button on the left and enter this code: https://discord.gg/010a02OQvc33tglZm Hit me up if there are any problems.

Always let me know what I can do to improve.

Nah, it's all right, I just wanted to put it out as an option. We'll hold off until next Saturday.

So, like I've said in the chat and wherever, are we all going to be good to go this coming Sunday? It should be (the start of, at least) a big end point.

Just want to let everyone know that I won't be able to run the game this coming Saturday. If we wanted to move backward to Friday that would be fine with me, but that's a lot of people to wrangle, understandably. Otherwise, next week will be set to resume as scheduled. I apologize for the inconvenience.

As of right now, plan on 11AM PDT, 6PM GMT, 8PM CET, then? And we'll probably finish early as well so Lansbury doesn't have to drop suddenly near the end.

It's fine for me, how is it with everyone else?

So I'm only just getting into the McElroys and I really need a way to know which videos on the Polygon YouTube account are going to be them and which are just going to be standard game site videos. There are only so many in the Monster Factory playlist.

Shit man, go for it. Can you make all the changes to your Roll20 sheet on your own, foxy?

Most definitely; everyone feel free to hit me up about mechanics any time. Keep me sharp too.

Look at my Steam games. There's no Call of Duty, no Battlefield, no Tom Clancy's The Division. There's a lot of Team Fortress 2, but not since like 2012. I'm not a multiplayer gamer. I'm not a first person shooter guy. Payday 2 is my exception, in spite of or perhaps because of the fact that you can engage with it so deeply. This next part is gonna sound super FUCK CASUALS, HARDCORE GAMES FOR LIFE, DRINK MTN DEW: I don't know what games you play, but Payday 2 far from the only one about which I could write such a detailed post concerning its strategy, advancement, and community. (Next time make a post asking for advice about any Metal Gear or Final Fantasy.) That's not a part-time job for me, that's just how I enjoy engaging with a game. It just happens that this one is an online game. Doctor's Bags aren't finicky, they just want flat surfaces without anything clipping them. It sounds like you're either trying to put them on tables with a bunch of assets whereas the ground (behind cover if you're playing with real people) is always fine, or you're literally trying to throw them - in which case, yeah, I guess the game would say anything out of your immediate vicinity isn't an appropriate surface. You place them; same goes for all equipment (ammo bags, ECMs, body bag containers, and so on). I understood that the difficulty probably sounded daunting. My point was that when it comes to Normal to Very Hard, the difficulty leap isn't so oppressive compared to the rewards you're going to earn. You need to really grow your character in this game (another reason it probably suits me idiosyncratically among other multiplayer shooters) - better weapons won't become available to you until you reach higher levels, and intelligently specializing your skills is vital especially if you're aspiring to playing online. People much more practiced with the actual mechanics of game design could talk about why exactly there are some games you start on Normal and work your way up on and some games you just go full medicine ball on. This is the latter. Pay attention to what I said in my last post (well, one of the things - you should pay attention to all of them, but this is one of the things I said which you should pay attention to, among the rest of the things to which attention should also be paid): when you play alone, you should be playing in stealth. I don't know what level you are right now, but respec. Stop using doctor bags. Get an ECM. Do all quiet missions. When things go loud, go to the Menu, hit Restart. Don't rely on AI teammates for loud missions because, yes, then you'll be confined to Normal and you'll be making pennies for every mission you happen to blindly succeed at, going nowhere, and learning nothing. Do solo stealth. You will learn the systems of the game this way instead of just shooting your way to the objective. You can play at higher difficulties and get more skills. This is the way to play online. Metal detectors aren't going to go off before you're masked up as a concession toward casing mode (i.e., your gun isn't out yet) so you can walk around the level and get some visual information. It's generally not a good idea to do this inside a crowded room like Jewelry Store, though, since it's very easy to just walk into a security guard while casing and immediately get caught. There's only so much you can learn from going inside the store anyway - once you're good enough to reliably dance around roaming security guards, you won't even need to bother casing. Shutting doors would be OP.

You can either turn the switch box off in the back of the Jewelry Store (or the Ukrainian Job, which uses the same map) or kill the guard standing directly in front of the security cameras in the back right hand room (this is useful for when you're rushing the store in stealth and unsure if the power box has been hit - so long as every guard is down, the metal detector is nonfunctional - on that map, at least). It's hard to give general tips for playing online since each mission has its own idiosyncrasies that you might be expected to know and some strangers will just kick you automatically for not following. Typically, it's safer to join heists that can only be run loud when you're playing public games, so there's less of a chance of messing something up. These would be Mallcrasher, the Transport Heists (DLC), Watchdogs, Hotline Miami (DLC), Hoxton Breakout, White Christmas. Of those I particularly recommend Watchdogs, Hotline Miami, and Hoxton Breakout: they're not heavy on minutiae and they pay quite well in cash and experience. Typically, once you join, gauge the vibe of the team and see if it's cool to just say "Hey, I'm new" or "This is my first time running this mission." Watch out specifically if they say they're going for an achievement. It might be tempting to only play on Normal or Hard, but that's really never worth it. You should be playing on Very Hard at a minimum as long as you can shoot a gun and understand the basic equipment of at least one skill tree. Even the best missions won't pay enough to advance on Normal or Hard (especially considering the likelihood of just disconnecting "randomly" from a pub game). But also, playing Payday 2 on your own can be a lot more vibrant than you might be crediting it, given what you said about "no real teamwork." Solo Payday 2 isn't a coop shooter, it's a first person stealth game, and when you play it as such there's no reason not to play missions on the highest difficulty, Death Wish, for maximum payoff. If you're stealthing, all the difficulty will do is possibly influence a few random mission factors, and the number of guards on patrol - but if you're solo, you're just going to retry anyway once you're spotted in a way you can't handle or for a fifth time (if you don't know why the fifth time matters, start reading the basics of stealth on the wiki or the Long Guide below). Good solo stealth missions in the base game are: Bank Heist (Cash, Deposit, Pro, Gold - don't mistake this for GO Bank, which is a much harder mission), Jewelry Store, Ukrainian Job, Nightclub, Diamond Store, Shadow Raid, Election Day, Hoxton Revenge, First World Bank. I particularly recommend running Bank Heist until you can do it in your sleep. There are four different versions of it, all essentially the same map. I have a build that's purely optimized just for this mission, it's the bread and butter of the game - on good days you can be in and out in five minutes (I mean, there's an achievement for being in and out of the Ukrainian Job in thirty seconds, but Bank Heist actually pays like a real heist). Don't ask me about bad days. Shadow Raid, Election Day, Hoxton Revenge, these can all become second nature to you eventually and get you levels and cash by the plateful without any need for dealing with asshole strangers. But of course, these being stealth, you'll need to learn the strategies for them; they're naturally going to be harder than just shooting your way through. It's up to you whether or not you want to look up YouTube guides (searching "payday 2 ____ death wish solo" will always be more than enough) or puzzle it out yourself. If you find a mission you start feeling comfortable with, stick with it until you get experience penalties. Use the Payday Wiki to look up more information about it and go from there. Now, I'll just quote myself from a couple years ago back on page six of this thread, most of which (official Steam group, HoxHud, Long Guide) is still pertinent today: Hahaha, look at those last couple of sentences! So, I haven't actually played the game since last November after the extremely controversial addition of lock-and-crate style microtransactions (and the subsequent posts I made in this thread and others saying "I still really enjoy playing the game, though!"). To update my thoughts about the DLC, let me say a few things: 1. Payday 2 (Overkill, Starbreeze, 505 Games) would no longer qualify in most people's eyes as having a "very ethical balance" between free and paid content support. Although, if I'm appealing to "most people," I'm also reckoning all the Steam users who respond to every update with "fuck u overkill" or "payday 2 это хреново петух" or "comment on my profile with +1 rep and I'll comment the same on urs." 2. The game's received several DLC packs since I left, including (about fucking time) a free one today. (Which includes a playable character voiced by Sharlto Copley, so this might actually be what gets me back in.) I think it's gotten a UI overhaul, and they're currently beta testing a total redesign of the skills system. (You might know more about this than me, as someone currently playing.) 3. So including these system-level changes, today's Hardcore Henry update, my blind spot also entails the Yakuza Pack and the Chivalry Pack (both of which I could have purchased before I stopped playing but just couldn't put money toward the company after they unveiled safes), the Point Break Heists, the Goat Simulator Heists, and (although I own it automatically for owning the original Wolf Pack for Payday: The Heist), the Wolf Pack. 4. Having said all that, they did finally put a sniper rifle in the base game. And if you don't have grenades, you can throw playing cards. The gaps in functionality have been eroded pretty ubiquitously and which DLC to get is now a much more subjective question. 5. If, while playing single player games, you're the type to run around looting for items, I still recommend the Gage Mod Courier. You'll pick up the little colored packages around every mission and after a certain amount of each have been collected, you'll get an assortment of weapon mods. Every other type of weapon mod you can unlock is capped at either two (for a random drop) or one (for an achievement unlock). These are unlimited as you collected the packages, and free to assign (other mods can cost in-game money to attach). Many of them will be worthwhile just for the sake of their quantity, while a few (the Competitor's Compensator, the Funnel of Fun) are genuinely among the best in the game. 6. There are two weapon packs that still offer functionality you essentially can't get otherwise, however. The first of them is the aptly named Completely Overkill Pack. It has some modest gestures toward stealth but for the most part this is where the game's power creep goes full blast. If, when you were first learning Team Fortress 2, you just played Heavy and shot at everything and hoped you were helping, then you should put all your skill points into Enforcer, join loud heists, and use the weapons from these packs. The Overkill has (and only needs) two: the Vulcan Minigun for your primary slot and the HRL-7 for your secondary, an RPG that does the highest single shot damage of any weapon in the game. It can load one rocket at a time and holds four total, so you'll need to save it for the worst enemies (or, with its large splash damage, the most threatening groups seized up in a choke point). You can't even pick up ammo from enemies for it, only replenish from ammo bags (and, you should read about the mechanics of ammo bags from the Long Guide to understand that just refilling four units of ammunition may be more detrimental to the team than it seems initially). Still, it's a rocket launcher. 7. The Butcher's BBQ Pack (second of the aforementioned two) is more restrained by comparison. It comes with three primary weapons and a throwable - a Molotov Cocktail which does much less damage than the standard DLC grenade on impact but burns enemies (and allies) in its splash zone over time. Least interesting among the primaries is the Steakout 12G, a decent shotgun. The DLC pack shines, though, and gets its name, from the Flamethrower (whose strength is, counter-intuitively less in killing and more in holding off groups and special enemies) and the Piglet, a multi-shot grenade launcher. 8. If you were to ignore weapon packs entirely, which I think is totally viable, you could focus on just picking up one heist DLC. Even if you don't own a heist DLC, you can play it in lobbies run by those who do, but the DLCs themselves typically also come with the standard pack items - a mask set, patterns, materials, unique weapon mods, and at least one firearm and melee weapon of their own, although generally not as notable as those from weapon packs. I personally like The Alesso Heist and Hotline Miami for public loud. (Alesso can be done stealth, even solo stealth, but it's not as fun.) If you want something you can stealth on your own (remember, Death Wish stealth), The Diamond is great to run again and again. 9. The most important thing, of course, is to wait for the next sale. Then you pick them all up without having to make any kind of concerned decision (besides whether or not your purchase is implicitly endorsing sweet weapon skins with stat-boosting effects). Uh, that's it. What the fuck, why did I write all this?

It's Friday! Is everyone confirmed for this weekend? Has everyone read the (as of moments ago) recently updated Players' Screen?

Link me to what you mean! You could also use a bow and arrow? I've been going through everyone's sheets sweeping up now, just seeing what else I need. I was too excited to sleep. I never even got to ask what time works for people. I assume Saturday is OK for you and Korax?

Awesome!

Anyone up for Pathfinder should get in touch with me here or on Slack. If we could do a character creation session tonight, I'm up for that.

I hear you, but I'd really like to run every week, which is one of the big reasons I'd like to get more people involved, so that it's easier to meet the three player minimum on any given Sunday.

Yeah, uh, April 3, oops.

Ah, damn. Well, I consider our quorum to be three players, so it sounds like we'll postpone again until next week. How is April 2 for everyone?

A lot of people have probably seen me talk about this a lot by now: I've been running a World of Darkness tabletop game for some Idle Thumbs readers (now consisting of Twig, Fingus, Lansbury, and SuperBiasedMan) for about a month. I'd love to get one or two or three more people involved (the more people playing, the less pressure on each individual member of the group to make every consecutive week). If you don't happen to wander into the Slack chat or the Multiplayer Networking forum, this might be your chance to join. The previous sessions of our game are . They're somewhat crude now but I'm looking to improve the production with each week. As you can see, we play over Skype via webcam as I broadcast over Twitch. The sessions are Sundays, noon to four PDT. It's an open world, character-driven, semi-serious campaign set to go long term. If this appeals to you, there's some more information in the thread here, or you can PM me on the board or (preferably) in the Slack chat to talk about making a character. Tabletop RPGs are really fun. If you're reading this and you have the time and the means to play, I implore you to give it a shot. If you contact me we can talk about any questions you might have.

All right, so currently: Twig, Fingus, and SBM are good for this coming Sunday. Lansbury is busy. Coax and Cleinhun are unfortunately out. The map is here. The quick reference players' screen is here. If people have time, please peruse the latter and learn some things you may not have known about the game system before we continue next session. I'm going to make a post in the Plug thread as one last call for players before we say that's it for the time being.