Saskatoon by Night APRIL 15, 2000

THE STORYTELLING TEAM

Head Storyteller: : Jill Bell 934-0631 cenobyte@dlcwest.com
Narrator Mitch Haggman 934-0631 mitch@byte-me.org
Narrator Seamus Paterson 955-1396 lord.vader@home.com

Sunrise/Sunset Info: Twi: 5:20am, Sun Rise: 6:09, Sun Set: 8:09pm, Twi: 7:20pm
For tonight, OOC time is 8:00 pm, same as IC time

New Narrator - Welcome!

Seamus Paterson has graciously accepted the yoke of Narrator.  Please welcome him to the ST team.  Seamus will be helping out at games doing rules narration, helping with NPCs, and at the sign-up table.  YAY Seamus!!!  For more information about becoming a Narrator, contact Jill.

Character Sheets

Once again, to clear up any confusion, players are responsible for their own character sheets.  The ST team will not bring up-to-date copies of your character sheets to games.  You are responsible for keeping your own copy of your character sheet up-to-date.  Please do not hand in the only copy of your character sheet. It only takes a couple of minutes to print up another copy.

Busy Busy

As you may have noticed from various postings saying as much, the Storytelling Team have been extremely busy at work.  Please excuse their tardiness in some matters, and their lack of the ability to remember things.  The best way to get in touch with Jill and Mitch about game information is to send them an email.  They tend to forget (mango) to return telephone calls.  Furthermore, Jill’s computer had a bit of a housebreaking setback, the result of which is that her Grapevine files appear to have gone walkabout.  No need to fear; she has a backup of the Master Database at work.  This may slow her down, however.

Influence

As noted on the listserver, Influence requests are to be submitted by e-mail in the following format:
Influence Name:
Level:
USAGE:
[optional – expected result]

Sympathetic Ink

Currently the ST team has been too busy to produce Sympathetic Ink.  Hopefully publication will resume in the near future.  Apologies for any inconvenience.

Roleplaying Games

(From: http://www.hoboes.com/pub/Role-Playing/RPG.html)

     "Cecil Adams (author of the newspaper column, The Straight Dope) said with regards to role-playing games: "a lifetime of Parcheesi does not adequately prepare you for this." He’s right. Your biggest problem will be breaking out of the straightjacket that games like Parcheesi, Chess, and Poker have put you in. There are no “moves” in role-playing games, nor are you confined to any specific actions. You make choices for your character as creatively as if you were writing a book. You don’t need to be worried about whether or not you are “allowed” to do something. The only thing restricting what your character can do is the situation your character is in.
     It is also sometimes easy to get into an adversarial relationship with your Editor. Why? Because you are playing the “hero” and the Editor will be portraying all of the “villains” that the hero meets. It helps sometimes to stop and remember that this is not a competition between the Players and the Editor. The goal is to have fun, creatively, together. If you want an adversarial competition, you can always play hockey.
     Once you realize that role-playing games have rules you might fall into one of two “rules-lawyer” traps. Games have rules that explain what happens when, for example, your character is attacked by a dragon, or what happens when two space vessels race to the same destination. But these rules are almost always there as guidelines. They describe what normally should happen, not what always must happen. The first rules-lawyer trap is to always insist on following the rules, even when there’s an obvious discrepancy between how all of the Players (including the Editor) want the game to proceed, and how a certain game rule says an event should turn out. The overall game should be more important than any specific rule.
     Many times, games will not have a specific rule to cover a rare or odd situation. The second rules-lawyer trap is to believe that there should always be a rule to cover every situation. In this case, you waste time and interrupt the flow of the story by searching through the rule-book for rules that aren’t there.
     A related trap is to consider the Editor to be some sort of omnipotent being in relation to the game, and to consider the game world to be the Editor’s world alone. The game is for all the Players, not just the Editor. The Editor is, however, the final arbiter of game disputes and game questions. There’s no need to waste time arguing when you could be playing!"

Radio Fame

For players out there without Internet Access (God bless you, you poor souls), you will be pleased to know that SbN will now be broadcasting game announcements over the radio, care of the good people at CFCR 90.5FM -- Saskatoon's community radio station. Tune in Saturday nights at Midnight for the latest SbN announcements on Weird Tales, and keep listening for the best in classic horror and Golden Age radio drama.

New Player

Please make sure that sometime tonight you congratulate Anita Amyotte, who plays the Ventrue Ghoul, Elizabeth Locke.  She is the proud host for a brand new zygote.