Created by Captain Toron Pax on Wed Oct 12, 2022 @ 6:51pm

Foundry

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!

Statistics

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.

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