It's a cold November night, but the Mish Mash tavern is warm and full of alcohol and silly games. Some people congregate here for other reasons as well--the tavern is a classic way for adventurers to join up with some strangers and find quests to embark on.
One questgiver finishes her karaoke number and walks back to her seat. You know that she's a questgiver because she's now brooding in a shadowy corner, wearing a hood to cover up her pointed furry cat ears. This mysterious cyborg has heard rumors of a strange kind of magic, where simple invocations shift and change until they are unrecognizable, previously undiscovered by mages--and yet still every bit as potent, if not more. The key is hidden in 20 lost artifacts, but when they've all been retrieved and reunited...who knows if they'll be what our heroes expected?
Telephone Pictionary (also called Eat Poop You Cat, Fax Machines and probably also a lot of other names) is a game of silly miscommunication. The results of the most recent game can be found here, and they'll give you a better idea of how things work than any description I can type. Drawing--and drawing under 72 hour deadlines--is required, although talent isn't necessary. (Effort is still appreciated!)
My main account is Ether, and I can be contacted on AIM at CaffieneDeity. If I disappear off the face of the earth, PJ and Amrun know this account's password, so they should be able to track down the data.
tl;dr: Fast chains get fast reveals. Slow players get replaced. And your chain had better not corrupt any innocent 13-year-olds.
Game Flow:
Everyone signed up should start by PMing me with a sentence. It shouldn't be incredibly long, but it can basically be as silly as you want it to be. Some good examples can be found in these chains, but please don't copy those exactly.
When the game starts, each of these sentences will be sent out to a different player.
This player will have 72 hours
to portray that sentence in picture form and send me the result.
Once the picture is drawn, it will be sent to a third person as soon as that person has also sent its picture in. When you get a picture, you have have 48 hours to send in a sentence summarizing it.
I'll send you pictures to summarize as sentences as I receive them, even if you already have other things to draw/write. Please send in sentences promptly! It shouldn't take too long.
You'll only have one active picture to draw at a time. I might send you sneak peaks of future sentences, but you won't be under any deadline obligations for those until later. (But feel free to complete them early anyway!)
Each chain will continue for 13 of these rounds: 7 sentences and 6 pictures. Chains will be posted on the wiki as they are completed, which will probably vary wildly.
The thread title probably isn't going to change much, since lots of you will be on different rounds at the same time.
If you cannot meet a deadline, please notify me as soon as you've received the sentence (or picture)--or, better yet, tell me before you receive one. I will find somebody else and send it there. I will also do this automatically if you have not drawn it in 72 hours. In this way, it is possible for one player to have more than one sentence to draw (or more than one picture to summarize, or one of each) at once.
Somebody who consistently fails to meet deadlines will be kicked out of the game at my discretion. Especially somebody who doesn't announce V/LAs beforehand. So don't do that!
Picture/sentence standards:
Any drawing program--Photoshop, Flash, MS Paint--will do. Drawing pictures by hand and scanning them will also do. Making a diorama with paper cutouts and silly putty and sending a photograph of that will do. The sky is pretty much the limit here. In fact, if you can get your hands on one of those airplanes that draws pictures out of fake clouds, then the sky is literally the limit here.
Having said that, please draw everything from scratch. You can use Google Images as a reference, but don't paste other people's pictures into your own.
Words are completely banned. English letters used to denote words, and codes (camel octopus dinosaur eagle snake), will also be sent back with a stern warning, although if it's relevant you can use them to portray the alphabet. Numbers and symbols and math are all fine.
Please don't intentionally mislead anybody--do the most accurate non-legalistic picture that you can. The chain will find a way to mutate anyway.
Pictures should be 800 pixels wide by 600 pixels tall. Please don't go too far over that; some of us have tiny laptop screens. Photographs are best saved as JPGs; otherwise, if in doubt, you should probably save as a PNG. Do not save as a BMP under any circumstances or I'll have to ask you to reformat it before sending it onward, and nobody wants that.
Please be mindful of where you upload your pictures to. Tinypic deletes its pictures without warning, and anything uploaded to the wiki is accessible by other players. Most people use Imgur these days. Photobucket's also a good bet, if you have that--but make sure that the album that you put your pictures in is private.
When you upload, don't save it under a name that will hint at its origins. This is something else that you'll need to reformat over.
Okay, on to sentences. Keep it to one sentence and don't be too legalistic about what you are summarizing. If you don't think the picture is about the fourth wall, don't break the fourth wall.
Please don't break the site rules. Keep it reasonably safe for work.
I am one of those spirit-of-the-game type hippies. If I'm forgetting a rule, I'll let you know. You might be asked to resubmit in light of this.
Miscellaneous:
Please don't talk to other players about the sentences/pictures you got. If somebody tells you anything about a chain you haven't seen yet, please let me know.
I will note in-thread if somebody is behind.
If you haven't sent a link in within 48 hours for a picture or 24 for a sentence, I'll send you a prod. Other actions may be taken if you're inactive for the full round.
Have fun! If you aren't having fun, you should talk to me about it, and I'll do my best to find you a replacement. You can also talk to me when you are having fun, of course.
Last edited by Telephone Cat on Tue Nov 04, 2014 5:55 am, edited 2 times in total.
I was thinking one of these was due to happen again soon. (i was even considering going to mod it myself)
/in
Holder of the Longest Continuous Weekly Mafiascum Post Record. 1 July 2012 - 16 Feb 2023
*It may be held by someone else if you discount the major downtime in 2012 and 2014, I'm not doing the research.
Paraphrasing a role PM takes seconds, fabricating a good fakeclaim takes an eternity.
"Metadiving DGB is like playing Roblox" - T3
"She's sort of like a quantum computer, her reads exist in multiple states at once. u have to take into account the other dimensions." - Morning Tweet
"I, too, would prefer to know the Xalxe of my demise." - Felissan, 2022
- On this day in history: mundanity, and terror, and food, and love, and trees -
Um...I'm not sure if I'm comfortable with that activity rate. If you did reliably have Internet access at least once a day, fine, nobody has to be online as long as they're drawing. But if you can't even send or receive PMs for half the week, that bodes really badly.
Unless you think you can get around that, or these signups take so long that the point's rendered moot, I can't put you on the list.
All the best for your first time PV.
