That new game energy can carry you far, so you really have to ride it before it fizzles out. It can give you the energy to finish an app and even reach out to strangers, which, if you’re lucky, creates a snowball effect.
The only really long apps I can remember are from Transformers 2005 for OCs where you had to dedicate a portion of it to justifying your goofy ass robot name. I don’t know how I got anything through.
Glad to see we’ve squared away that Yes, And & No, But are the same fundamental concepts.
@Ashkuri said in "My Guy Syndrome":
- Sorry for disrupting this town meeting, but it’s what my guy would do.
help im crashing out again
Ok let me be productive, I more often see people making subtle but socially hostile decisions in RP without considering the results or how it looks, buckling down on their own character’s principles, as opposed to anything truly blatant. I think most folk generally know enough to avoid openly saying “it’s what my character would do” these days. Maybe.
Threading that needle of doing what your character would do while ensuring it results in fun for others can be tricky, and requires a measure of thoughtfulness.
R&R discussion dipped into the fun topic of house rules for WoD games. I’m curious about your thoughts.
How much deviation would you tolerate before deciding that the game is no longer a “WoD” game? And how would you gauge this metric?
How would you approach a game that actually billed itself as “inspired by” WoD but not actually WoD, but perhaps gutted an entire system like the pledge system? In which almost everything else about the theme is identical to WoD theme. Would it matter to you? Do you prefer knowing before hand that a game may have altered large chunks of the rules?
These rules could be fundamental. Removing a werewolf form or the glamour harvesting system or something. Adjusting how social doors work. Is it still WoD? And if it doesn’t call itself WoD, would this accurately inform you of anything useful?
A while ago I was perusing the policies of oWoD games and I was heartened to see that most of them are at least attempting to get with the times! There’s that extra effort. That extra work you have to put in. Naturally this involves deviating from the theme. You have to house rule a bunch of shit.
It also showed that a lot of staff were tired of dealing with the bad actors that certain splats attracted. Like… this tension exists! People try to work around it. To what effect, I’m not sure. But the theme invites it, and to insist otherwise seems a bit odd.
Like if I was deciding on a theme for a new game and I wanted MINIMAL work and stress and chaos between friends and enemies, I think I might just go for a custom theme as opposed to WoD. WoD is hardmode. It’s fun, but it’s fkn hard.
I do not think saying you generally have your work cut out for you when running a game with very, very dated social mores is lazy and reductive.
While I agree that many genres have similar issues, I do kinda think oWoD has a unique brand of chaos thanks to allowing a certain kind of player to gesture to the sourcebooks and go “it’s thematic for me to be a raging asshole”. Most players don’t do this. Some do. Some buckle down hard. The older books have a lot of sexually charged lore as well, and that particular player may latch onto that with some… colorful manifestations that everyone gets to deal with.
I say this as a wod player who loves wod, though I prefer newer stuff.
Sure there’s probably star wars/star trek/lords and ladies sourcebooks that give players carte blanche in this regard. But man… wod has a secret sauce or something.
For the sake of finding or shaping tools for the mechanic here, let’s assume that a hypothetical game has enough players that warrant occasional large meeting scenes that people might get real cranky about missing, or that some people may even look forward to.
It’s true, you don’t need to show up. But some people want to. Naturally bbpost updates are a good idea in general. The whole concept of larger factional scenes or even events could potentially be its own thread.
Table talk! Places! Mechanics where if you go to an event, you can slip into one of these locations/items/settings and have your local conversation contained in some way, whether it blocks out the rest of the scene chatter from other locations except purposeful text from the GM, or it simply applies a label to make it clear text is coming from your specific location… or maybe there’s a different variant you’ve seen?
I want to know what you’ve encountered, what works for you, what doesn’t, etc.
@Trashcan Damn! 75% of all scenes. I wish I could dig this data up on my old ares games.
@KarmaBum said in RP Safari - Pacing Styles:
@Yam said in RP Safari - Pacing Styles:
I definitely agree with this, which is why I’m always baffled about why people declare no bar RP/no social fluff.
Hm. Are you equally baffled by people who declare no smut? Or no lords and ladies?
Nope, that doesn’t confuse me at all. The subject matter there is crystal clear, whereas what counts as plot versus… well, anything else seems hard to pin down. What if the characters briefly talk about some vague plot related thing and then decide to go drinking? Like, I’m trying to figure out where the line is. What’s the threshold for the right amount of plot? I feel like I’m missing something.
@Wizz said in RP Safari - Pacing Styles:
there are a lot of people who are just bad at this period
I definitely agree with this, which is why I’m always baffled about why people declare no bar RP/no social fluff. All RP has the capacity to be bad (or GREAT). I can trust @Ashkuri to make mail sorting somehow entertaining, heart-wrenching, and character development rich.
I suppose in the end there are MANY factors that feed into “good” or “bad” RP… but that nuance is too confusing to talk about. <<; Or maybe just less fun to talk about.
Lol man, I really tried hard to craft an intro that didn’t imply ares was the sole creator of async. Forums existed! It’s just that this setting firmly didn’t permit it, or at least much of it, and now it does, and that does have an effect in some manner.
I MUSH because this is one of those few places that I can find live RP that’s not MMO. The way that I had to beg people to give me a single paragraph of detail in MMO RP, instead of just pure dialog… Like, they wanted to RP with me! But I had these pesky conditions. I need meat!
But I’m not blind to the future, and Discord is full of async/long format style RPing. This is clearly what most younger (and some older) RPers want. If you sense any rankling, it’s because someone’s favored style may be dying, which means less people to RP with. It’s the nature of the game.
@Ominous I think the very nature of large, multi paragraph posts (presumably with actions beyond fluff within them) doesn’t quite lend itself to the kind of flowing granular exchange most RP interaction needs.
In my experience with novella, at least in the recent years, what happens is people don’t want to wait another week for their turn, so they pack as much as they possibly can into a post, interacting with other characters and then presuming vague responses, so you get a kind of backed up out-of-order situation. If people play on the safer side, they opt to do a bunch of thought-posing, which I think is actually something that at least part of the crowd appreciates or is pleased with, in style of “Yay someone is thinking about my character”.
I’m unsure how it was decades ago, but at least presently, there is no controlling a portion of the scene. JUST your character. I got pretty severe responses when I indicated another character may be able to see some headlights or something entirely innocent like that, something to just move the scene along.
I’m actually unaware of any RP setting in which you are basically writing a book together and you aren’t controlling your character. This is the first I’ve heard of it. @Faraday is Storium something like that?
@RightMeow said in Does Anyone Even Care?:
Leaving just tends to be that I respect they can run the game how they see fit and I respect myself to know when it won’t work out for me.
An understated fundamental skill. Anyone that knows how to do this is the real MVP.