[SEASON 2] Stalkers RPG General Chat Thread (The Secret Clubhouse!)

[The Nonexistent Tazz]

I will be totally frank, Velo: Don't blame yourself. By the time we get anywhere with this and even get starting having actual leads for more than two Stalkers, if even that, the Stalkers will have killed half the town, and that's the optimistic perspective, which I do not share. THIS is what I meant by Many Paths To Nowhere. The game is so huge that it's actually fundamentally flawed: By putting in so many places and forcing the use of so many things the game becomes hard, not by any actual difficulty but because we sincerely do not have the resources to search all of these places in any conceivable measure, which forces reckless action, which forces the 2nd Dark Event to rise when someone inevitably forgets that the Stalkers are trap-happy, lose all their SAN/HP and go insane/unconscious. I have absolutely no idea what either Suicune or Neo was expecting of us, but it feels kind of like that we're failing to do something really obvious that actually isn't obvious at all. It does not help that every mechanic makes it just sound like a really bad, cost-inefficient option to actually search areas, which thus far has proven to be the most valuable use of time period and the most common action we have, simply due to how many trapped areas there are. No-one wants to go mad.

Hell, if these rules were imposed on us back when we were trying to save Serenity Town, we would probably have lost half the town before the Sin Purge Ritual occured, if we even did, as opposed to finishing it with three kills. It says something that I believe that we may not have even won with half of our workload. Realistically, if this pattern continues and we fail to get real leads we won't be able to have gotten leads on even half of the Stalkers before this game is out.

I'm terribly pessimistic about our odds, yes.

I think we do have a way to counter this, though. Next round, we are not going to talk about Stalkers in general. We are now going to nail down specific Stalkers. Namedrop Philter and Embalm to anyone we talk to for questioning and see if actually forcing them to respond to a question about those Stalkers specifically helps at all. It may not, but we sincerely have to start forcing responses to be relevant to the 'cases' that we already have going for us rather than be the general infinitely-branching hints pointing everywhere that we have gotten.

I swear if Uru has nothing other than a location for us I'm going to preemptively say that we seriously are going to lose because of that Last Lousy Point. There must be more ways to get at Stalker evidence than this.

[Pokemon Trainer Sarah]

I think the thing we've gotta remember is that it's not feasible to get a kill rate of 0 here. We were lucky in Serenity Town that we managed to figure it out so fast and that only a few people were killed. Finishing before the kill count gets to 40 = a win here, even if it doesn't feel like it cos lots of people will be dead. Saving EVERYONE or almost everyone is just not how this iteration of the game works and is not a reasonable goal. As long as we get there before that count gets to 40 or the other one to 100% is a win. We should try not to feel too down about it because it can't be helped and is part of the game this time around. I feel like everything is gonna come together at one point and the whole thing will be blown wide open, you know? At least I hope so xD Until then we just keep doing what we're doing. :)

[Spiderc]

I think the thing we've gotta remember is that it's not feasible to get a kill rate of 0 here. We were lucky in Serenity Town that we managed to figure it out so fast and that only a few people were killed. Finishing before the kill count gets to 40 = a win here, even if it doesn't feel like it cos lots of people will be dead. Saving EVERYONE or almost everyone is just not how this iteration of the game works and is not a reasonable goal. As long as we get there before that count gets to 40 or the other one to 100% is a win. We should try not to feel too down about it because it can't be helped and is part of the game this time around. I feel like everything is gonna come together at one point and the whole thing will be blown wide open, you know? At least I hope so xD Until then we just keep doing what we're doing. :)

I 100% agree with Sarah and I think that's because a lot of people are looking at the game from the wrong perspective. It's really not a traditional roleplaying game and it's not even a table-top RPG, it's more like a cooperative boardgame like Pandemic or Flashpoint. In Pandemic you're trying to cure 4 diseases before any one of the diseases becomes too rampant and in Flashpoint you're trying to rescue people from a burning building before it collapses. In both of those games there's a clear win condition (cure 4 diseases/rescue 7/10 people from the building), but multiple lose conditions. At the beginning of the games you have most of the people deal with the initial things that have gone wrong when the game started and then slowly transition people into working towards the victory condition. At the end of the games, often you see the world overrun by disease or the house is basically collapsed, but you win anyway due to hitting the win condition.

We're still in that initial stage of the game and while there's no initial things for us to deal with like in those two games, we're instead learning about the city and even the game's rules. We didn't know that dropping to 0 sanity caused the Doom Tracker to go up, but now we do so we can easily play around that. Even now we're only an eighth through the game and that's assuming that they're not accounting for our diminishing action economy and that the number of night kills won't decrease as we eventually catch stalkers. I fully don't expect us to make any meaningful progress with our kill count until around turn 20, because there's still a lot that we have to learn. Actually, the one major difference is that as opposed to those other games, this one actually gets easier as time goes on because our suspect list will continue to shrink.

On a somewhat related note, if people would stop complaining about the size of the game that would be fantastic. The game might be large, but we have a solid amount of time to deal with it and all you're doing is (indirectly) insulting all of the work that's been put into this game. Cooperative games are supposed to feel harsh, because it ends up being that much more rewarding when you finally succeed. And if you lose...

[Morzone]

I completely disagree with Tazz's outburst as well, but I'll save it for the feedback thread.

ANYWAY.

I have a thing to say and a question.

First: If you want to be useful in looking into the stalkers, you could try bringing that DEPTH password to Oblivion's locker, which no one ended up doing this round despite everyone saying it was important.

And second: on the trapdoor in the substation, one of the "locks" is apparently a bleach stain? What kind of thing are we looking for for that? Bleach cleaner?

[VeloJello]

First: If you want to be useful in looking into the stalkers, you could try bringing that DEPTH password to Oblivion's locker, which no one ended up doing this round despite everyone saying it was important.

Short answer? Sanity. I need to basically keep myself at 3 or more (so that I can rest back to full quickly) in case we find a Stalker and the other exorcists can't make a post, and something tells me Oblivion's locker isn't going to be conducive to that. I'm mentally kicking myself for picking Science; it's so far the most underused perk in the entire game and liable to lead to SAN damage on use anyway. "Shoulda" isn't gonna help us right now, but man am I wishing I'd picked Security; I'd be sniffing around these areas like no one's business.


Plus, I thought Elton was actually going to help instead of confusing the issue. I'm not mad at anyone involved, just... frustrated at how it feels like we're going nowhere fast.


I agree with Tazz's plan of namedropping the crap out of Stalkers, though. It's not like the Stalkers think no one knows about it, so it shouldn't have any effect on mission disclosure. I'm thinking of basically pulling another Velo (noun: the act of recklessly throwing Stalkers' guilt in their faces for questionable reasons with an outcome which will probably bite the interviewer in the butt) and throwing all of our Embalm stuff at Rabukan tomorrow, but we'll see.

[The Nonexistent Tazz]

Perhaps I am reading this game wrong and need to just relax on the speed issue somewhat, though I'm still rather annoyed, as the mood of the game doesn't really encourage any sedated feelings, or such. It doesn't help that it feels like there's something obvious we should be doing but aren't, or that the kill messages basically feel like we're making some kind of mistake.

[Morzone]

Well, we are trying to save the entire population of a city from mysterious killers whose methods involve going to the farthest extreme possible in torture and fear. Not exactly a situation for sedateness.


Also, sorry if it felt like I was targeting you Velo, I didn't mean for it to sounds like that. I was just trying to suggest that it was something important we needed to do.

Actually though, on your comment on wishing you'd picked security, could there maybe be a pokemon out there that could Teach us security? It could be INCREDIBLY useful if most of us learned our 2nd skill as security. I know Ironrock apartments likely has a lead toward some instructor (since we got that lead early on and with another lead that lead us to an instructor) and maybe we could ask some of the instructors we know about who else could teach us some skills.

[VeloJello]

Well, we are trying to save the entire population of a city from mysterious killers whose methods involve going to the farthest extreme possible in torture and fear. Not exactly a situation for sedateness.

Also, sorry if it felt like I was targeting you Velo, I didn't mean for it to sounds like that. I was just trying to suggest that it was something important we needed to do.

Actually though, on your comment on wishing you'd picked security, could there maybe be a pokemon out there that could Teach us security? It could be INCREDIBLY useful if most of us learned our 2nd skill as security. I know Ironrock apartments likely has a lead toward some instructor (since we got that lead early on and with another lead that lead us to an instructor) and maybe we could ask some of the instructors we know about who else could teach us some skills.

It's all good, and sorry if I came across as snappish at you. I'm not upset at you at all; I just feel like we're making little headway and I'm sort of limited in what I can do.


I wish someone could teach us Security, but...

Perks are like proficiencies that characters can use to accomplish objectives and gain access to areas. Using a Perk works the same way as using an item or a Pokémon Attack. Your character starts with one of these Perks, and this is the only one they can get during the course of the game.

[Morzone]

Oh right... It's a perk...

*grumbles inaudibly*

[The Nonexistent Tazz]

We could in theory find a Security-perked civilian who we can Escort to places to defend us during the daytime, but that's unlikely. I'd say that we ought to count ourselves lucky that we found the Exorcism teacher so fast just by chance.

"Oh, hey, whaddup?" "I HOLD THE DIVINE POWER OF EXORCISM!!!" "Oh cool!"