FG2 Ouija Board

[PneumaPilot]

Okay, let me just say up front that personally I very much dislike real Ouija boards. Mediumistic practices are one of the last things that anyone needs to be playing with, especially children. However, I tell ghost stories in my RPGs, and it is an accepted part of the genre that sometimes the main characters try to contact the ghost in question with a board.

My question is what would be the best way to implement one of these in FG? I'm thinking of another copy of the image window with a custom frame (the board), with all drawing and tokens locked by default. Then you create a big icon with an alpha hole in the middle for targeting letters, etc. Only the GM could move the thing around. Would it work? Any other ideas to make it better?

[Valarian]

As an animist, I share your reservations and would recommend abstracting it rather than actually implementing a Ouija board. Personally, I'd have the characters roleplay the interaction and treat the spirit as an NPC. This also has the advantage of being quicker and you can put a little more personality in to the spirit as a character.

[PneumaPilot]

Well, I'm not trying to come up with something that actually does the same thing a Ouija board does. I mean, I don't want the players to like all put their hands on their mouses and wait for them to move. I intend to have it as a gimmick FG element that can add some character to some NPC interaction, just like you said. Do you think that the players would actually see the token moving, or would they only see it when I stopped moving it?

[Valarian]

They'd likely only see the puck token when it stops moving, not the actual movement.

[Doswelk]

When my players in a modern campaign had to use a board, I just typed a single letter at a time in the chat window.

We usually use VOIP so this was all that was needed to get the feeling of using one across with out getting to technical.

[PneumaPilot]

Yeah, I figured that with the relative rarity of using such a thing, that simply typing the letters into the chat window would be easiest, but I've started trying to think more about how to use the FG interface to actually tell the story, and I think that creating a whole board, even if for a single adventure, would be quite easy.

[Tenian]

You could do this very easily with just an image and a token for the pointer.

If you lock tokens then the host can hold ctrl and drag, this will create a move line (like as if players attempt to move a token). When the host does the "Accept Move" clients will see the token actually move across the screen (instead of just jumping to a new location).

[PneumaPilot]

Ahh yes. I thought there was something like that (we don't actually use maps and tokens in our game, so I'm not really familiar with how it all works). Thanks for the advice. That's perfect.