To Boldly Roll welcomes you to the Potemkin
Posted on Wed Oct 12, 2022 @ 5:59pm by Captain Toron Pax
Table of Contents: This report is an effort to clarify and to summarize the operation of the USS Potemkin as a sim. The Potemkin, or ‘To Boldly Roll’ (abbreviated TBR) is a multifaceted endeavor that utilizes a number of online platforms. Our chief endeavors include: All other endeavors surround or support these. At its heart, To Boldly Roll is primarily a tabletop RPG that utilizes Discord stage, which enables us to play in real time even though we represent several countries. Essentially the play style is akin to Dungeons and Dragons dice rolling with character stats and story challenges to be rolled against. The Bridge Crew segment of the Potemkin is using the Star Trek Adventures 2D20 play system published by Modiphus. Because we host the game online, we rely on a virtual table top in place of a physical table and dice; the system we currently use is called Foundry. While the sessions are played, they are simultaneously recorded by a bot in discord, where the players are all logged in to a voice stage, and also live streamed and recorded on a twitch channel by the GM. In this report we (Primarily Matt with contributions and review from the leadership team of TBR) will endeavor to explain and detail the main aspects of TBR to the best of our ability. The core of the live play sessions has changed very little since we first began, but the surrounding sim community and management is constantly being grown and refined. We expect to continue to adapt but presently find the current arrangements and functions stable for TBR, making this an ideal time to assess and share our current simulation play and support format. We’ll be looking at the leadership structure used throughout the sim and detailing the duties of each one: for this part of the report Nikki has volunteered to enlighten about the GM/aGM roles. The next section we’ll detail is that of our Discord Server and how this runs in relation to the game play and community we are building for the Potemkin. Following this will be our public site, a website powered by Wordpress, Nikki does the bulk of the work here, formatting and setting up templates, with Matt updating and adding on a smaller scale to keep it up-to-date. Then the report will move on to the player site, this is powered by Anodyne Productions program Nova 2 (we look forward to Next Gen). Further to this we will speak upon our social media presence and our plans for the future. The seventh section of our report is that of Foundry, a virtual tabletop program which, as the name suggests, is our group ‘table’. Almost everything we do while playing a session happens in Foundry. The last key section will be statistics, where will try to explain the way we make content and how we keep track of said content. By learning through trial and error, Matt and Nikki have worked for long months to try and create a system that both captures needed information and is easy to read and update! Matt: GM - TBR’s GM is Matt. The sim is rooted in his vision. He plans everything, prepares the story to tell, organizes the schedule and communicates concerning upcoming sessions, and of course executes all of the sessions with very rare exceptions. He does the lion's share of recruiting and he manages the many resources. He oversees the schedule and files the reports. He handles the population of traits, equipment and NPC’s into the Foundry (these are the playing stats necessary for the dice rolling). He has also procured all the rule books and supplements of the STA system, reads through them, and uses these to build an entertaining and engaging story. Using the STA materials as a basis, Matt spins custom encounters and stories tailored to the players and the existing backstory of the Potemkin as played so far. He ensures that everyone is welcome and works with each player, new or current on their character and concept. Matt makes sure new players have a basic grasp of the rules before they even start playing, and then walks them through the rules as they come up during play and when relevant. Because TBR has some other facets as a game, there are three aGMs with distinct roles and each of these works together under Matt’s direction. The leadership team shares a private discord channel for problem solving and deliberation as necessary. Nikki: aGM/ Production assistant - Nikki is just a player when it comes to the voice game itself. Her key involvement is in post production of the podcast and assisting with the Wordpress site and some of the graphics. But she does not run or manage much of the IC game aside from sometimes being a soundboard for Matt and advising on OOC management. She also helps with tracking game metrics. For the sake of the Fleet’s CO/ XO concept, Nikki fills the OOC role of XO, although she plays the sim’s Chief Engineer/2XO In Character. Sometimes Matt refers to Nikki informally as co-GM, since she understands what’s under the OOC hood— bonnet?— of TBR. Should Matt ever need to take an extended leave, Nikki would be capable of communicating reports to the fleet, overseeing the discord, managing sites, and organizing general membership, but not of running the live sessions. Tom: aGM/ Voice “The Bridge Crew” - Tom actually has the capacity to run the live session voice game as a GM if we should ever need someone to fill in for Matt. He also plays the in game role of XO for our live sessions. He keeps the notes for our sessions and is active in chat. Tom is very well minded for using our gaming system (the ST Adventures manual) and is detail oriented. While he is playing the first officer of the Potemkin in game, he is serving as 2XO as far as it is accounted for for Fleet purposes. Steve: aGM/ Writing “The Night Watch” - We have been building up an interest in growing the sim as a writing game in addition to voice play and Steve has a very good approach for gathering writers and directing posts together. This effort is nascent, but Steve is taking story direction from the GM and turning it into prompts and tags for Night Watch members of the Potemkin. This will help with sim growth opportunities, since the tabletop format is limited in player size per session. It will also explore the story of the Potemkin in areas live sessions don't focus on and therefore expand the experience. The Night Watch equates to something like Lower Decks in that it will share an experience that isn’t always seen by the Bridge Crew. Steve has the directive writing chops to make this happen, although we are realistic about how long it may take to gain interest and grow this aspect of the sim. Potemkin’s GM team has a very good working rapport with one another and they coordinate very well. Each aGM serves one of three primary aspects of the sim, as laid out in our introduction, these three primary aspects being: The Bridge Crew/ Voice, The Night Crew/ Writing, and the TBR Podcast. Each aGM is needed in their individual capacity and works directly with Matt concerning the responsibilities they attend. Having the responsibilities divided up as they are ensures no one aGM is overwhelmed and each has some freedom to creatively expand the aspect of the sim they are responsible for. Like much of the fleet, TBR makes use of its own Discord server. We have three primary categories: Announcements, To Boldly Roll (Public Channels), and Member Channels (Private Channels). We do also have an Admin channel but this one is boring, and the bots are in it, and only the Command Team has access to this one! The first is the announcement channel, here we post; using RSS feeds all of our news items and story posts from the Nova site as well as the news items that are posted by Obsidian Fleet. This channel is viewable to everyone and we also use it for announcements about sessions/episodes that are about to start. We just started using the events section for special events, this is new to us and frankly could have been used much sooner, if anyone had thought about it! The second category is To Boldly Roll. This is our Public channel, it is here that the majority of the interaction between the players and the listeners happens. It is also here that my Co-GM; Nikki posts the outtakes from her editing of our sessions into shorter, easier to laugh along with audio clips. One of our venerable players, Will also has a music channel here and when the mood takes him he will link to a Spotify playlist for a ‘party’. We also have a ‘Question of the day’ discussion channel. Here a question is posed and debate encouraged! In all the To Boldly Roll category is maybe our most active channel and we all encourage free discord (within the rules) and everyone is welcome to come and comment. Our third category is a private, members only place. Here the voice players and writing team can gather and talk about the RPG— all that behind the scenes kind of stuff. We have a number of channels here which help us to organize our game play, toss up resources, tease one another, and plan our schedule and many other behind the scenes sundry that you only get access to if you join! Our live chat sessions take place on the server stage channel. While the Bridge Crew have admin access in order to speak on the stage, anyone else can come and listen to the show as it happens. The Live play is audible to anyone either via listening into the discord voice channel where the “Bridge Crew” voice members log in for the session or by following Matt’s twitch account which also logs the session for later viewing. Our public facing site makes use of WordPress to create an easy to navigate and easy to use website. We keep links to all our podcasts in easy reach on the front page, Player and character profiles along with awards given to said players and characters. The simple nature of the site means that while there is data on there much of our game play data and information is also linked out to our other sites, we try to keep too much duplication from overloading our viewer/listeners. The WordPress site will be evolving and simplifying to carry mostly news and information of interest to friends and listeners like podcast news, show notes, and featurettes- everything to be added there will eventually be streamlined to auto update to our social media. Much of the detailed playing entries and logs we used to keep on the WP site before adopting a nova sister site will be phased out. We decided to make use of a Nova site several months ago, before we had our own we had been guests at Obsidian Command. The choice to move was more out of a need for our own space than anything else. We had wanted to start a written component to our gaming in the form of the Night Watch, a ‘Lower Decks’ inspired game that would be set (timeline wise) during the year that the Potemkin was in repairs. This is now just starting to take off after much planning and proponing. The Nova also houses the bulk of our lore database, the Character Bio’s and their Star Trek Adventures (STA) character sheets. We have a strange mix of STA stats, following the rules set forth within the Modiphius 2D20 system; and the stats, rules and lore of Obsidian fleet. SO, for each vessel we have as NPC in our game we have two sets of stats for! At times it is difficult to align the two very different systems into something that is acceptable. An example of this is the Potemkin herself, following strictly by the rules of STA the Excelsior class is a very different ship within Obsidian Fleet’s databases. It has taken 3 years in universe time and three refits after massive damage to come close to the stats of Obsidian Fleet. To try and give as much depth as possible to the Potemkin we have created a set of Wiki pages that help to inform the player so they can better play their character. As you can see from the image below we have the Star Trek Adventures character sheets for those NPC ships we make use of as well as the ‘Ships of the Expanse’ section, which links to the Obsidian Fleet Specs for some of those ships. Our social media presence is still being developed. We have accounts for Twitter, TikTok and Twitch; so far we are using Twitch far more than the other two platforms. We are looking into creating an RSS feed link between our discord channel and our Twitter account. Much the way we have done between our Nova and our Discord. This will mean we will be able to keep twitter up to date with the discord with as little needed input as possible. The more we can do in this manner the better we feel our presence on that platform will become! It is our aim to use the TikTok account for our outtakes, posting these short (normally less than 3 minutes) posts will hopefully generate interest and encourage people to visit our other sites for more information. We also have an official Linktree site with our links in one handy place! The VTT Foundry is a program that works in a similar way to Roll20. The benefits of Foundry are seemingly limitless. Once the STA system was uploaded we had access to the STA system. This included character sheets, dice roller and so very much more. Once a character is inputted you can select aspects (skill rules) and roll and the foundry will work out the success rate ect. It allows for dynamic maps, tokens, NPC and ship sheets and information pages that can either be open for players to read, or reveleved as part of a story. The only problem is that foundry doesn’t come preloaded with all the items, traits, skills ect and so a lot of work is needed to add it all into the system so that the game runs smoothly. As anyone who has ever done data entry will know, these kinds of tasks are not hard, just time consuming and tedious! From our first sessions in March of 2021 Nikki and Matt along with the Fleet Council have been trying to find the best way to record our successes. The rest of the fleet using a tried and true method of every 500 words equals one standard post. In this a good idea of measurement between the different sims in the fleet can be made. However, as this report has said a few times throughout this report we are not a ‘standard’ RPG, not only is the majority of our content voice but a byproduct of this means that we speed through our mission, plots or episodes; however you wish to call them at a rate which outstrips any other sim in the fleet. On average we finish an episode once a week, and each episode or small set of episodes can cover events that would take months to write as posts. It is the nature of the format. So with this in mind to start with, our metric of use was 60 words per minute, with a standard session being 3 hours but an average podcast of the same 3 hours would be around 90 minutes or less. This wasn’t inclusive of the prep time the GM needed, nor the editing time Nikki needed. In fact, if using the podcast-produced minutes as our measure of time, the more work put in for editing the less word count the sim would be credited, making a disincentive to edit. So we put that to one side for the time being. We are now using Player Hours for voice chat metric and word count of our written work (posts, logs, session reports). As an example of Player Hours, if there are 7 of us playing for 3 hours this is 21 player hours for that session! (similar to “man hours” on a job). This metric is easy to log even if there is no post production podcast and easy to count immediately after any session. It directly reflects attendance and participation as simply as possible. Unfortunately, this still doesn’t really allow us to measure our successes with any other ship in the fleet. While this is somewhat confusing and at times frustrating there is no simple idea, and to our knowledge we are the only online RPG of our nature, within a fleet! The Table below shows our totals since we began playing. The first column, wrd # indicates the number of words we have posted in each given month. We would like to again stress that our main form of play is voice. Our written work has been supplemental to the live play (session summary logs and occasional posts). The second column, player hrs shows the number of player hours for each given month. As you can see we collectively play around 20 to 40 hours a month. These numbers reflect game attendance time only and do not reflect all of the OOC work that the Admins put into preparations for a live session or into editing the resulting podcast. At least another 10 hours per week could be added to this, maybe closer to the 15-20 mark. Lastly, the two larger numbers are the conversions to OF standard posts.As mentioned before we’re not actively counting our playing hours in this manner but it is rather striking when seen in that light. Foundry VTT is the tabletop that we use to play the game. It is a powerful program that can be filled with a great deal of information, items and NPC’s. The creators of Foundry VTT have done a great job and are always updating the core program to make it more stable and generally better at handling all RPG systems and adventure modules and quality of play modifications that are used. Matt bought a license for Foundry and paid for the server (Foundry Server) to run Foundry. Discord is a very familiar program to us all, it is our primary means of communication between players and our community. It is a wonderful program that we are only now starting to take advantage of. Without discord and the recording bot Craig we would have found it much harder to do what we do! Anodyne Productions has been a mainstay of the RPG community for so very long now it's hard to consider another format as good. Potemkin uses a Nova 2 program for our player site. We fully intend to swap over to the Next Generation Nova when it has been released, until then a few members of the command team subscribe to their Patrion! Wordpress is the service we use for our public facing site. It is a versatile program that can be quickly and easily tailored to the needs of the host. Will, one of our venerable players, pays for the webspace that TBR’s website uses and looks after it if it goes down. Stormy Hosting provides the webspace for our Nova 2 and houses the rule books that the players use when they are needed to be disseminated. Obsidian Fleet is where we call home. Without Obsidian Fleet we wouldn’t have even gotten started let alone gotten such a good start. Obsidian Fleet is a multinational collective of Role Playing Games that share resources and ideas to help better each individual sim! In particular we would like to recognize the help and support from Becca and Sep who both helped a great deal at the start! Modiphius, well without them we wouldn’t have the very gaming system that we use to play. It is a wonderful system which has given a feel for Star trek in the tabletop world that no other has come close to replicating. They have worked tirelessly to create many supplements and story campaigns that give the feel of being in Starfleet! TBR Potemkin has garnered the following recognitions: 2021 OF Day ‘21 OF Outstanding Newcomer Award OF Annual ‘21 Best 2XO of the Year Carl Hedley) 2022 March ‘22 (Q1) JFC Award: Best Website June ‘22 Silver Unit of Merit OF Day ‘22 Golden Padd Award: Creativity Overall Ship)
(No aGMs were harmed in the making of this report. ~nikki<3)
The Potemkin has been running for almost 19 months as of the writing of this report. We started small, at the time having 7 players and using Obsidian Fleet’s Discord for our voice channel, being guest writers on Obsidian Command for our post writing, and using Roll20 as our ‘table top’. Our biggest supporter and the person who helped us the most is Becca, a member of the Joint Fleet Command (JFC), she offered a great deal of encouragement that was vital in those early days. Thanks to everyone’s encouragement and support, the Potemkin grew and needed to fly the nest! As such we moved to our own discord and started to gather listeners. Although we continued to write on OC for a time, and we are grateful to Sep for allowing us to infiltrate his sim, we likewise grew up and moved out to our own Nova site. Our next big change came when Matt realized that Roll20’s limitations were not helping him to tell a story the way he wanted to. So, a license for the VTT program called Foundry was bought and was then hosted on a server.
OF Day ‘21 the 2020-21 Spiky Heart Award
2 21 Tournament of Sims: Innovation Award
OF Day ‘22 JFC Award: Best Website
Category: General News
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