He had a solid point though. I fully admit that in certain moods, with certain people who I know also enjoy this kind of thing (so not with people who I know are totally bored/annoyed/etc, it's not a punishment on the unwilling) I sometimes will play just to play around with writing, and make flowery poses and put allegory and whatever in there and the actual pleasure of the task is just kind of playing around with language. In other words it may NOT be about these things we all know we love and seek in scenes, like plot pushing and character development and storyline exploration and meta-plot solving as a team and and and etc.

I know I could find other mediums for this but I don't usually want to do it for long enough to be one of the folks who is also writing a novel, or even writing short stories to share online somewhere, or whatever. It's using the already handy medium of the game and the characters to write for fun to unwind and relax. I don't do it all the time (or ever, lately) but I did enjoy it sometimes interspersed with the other kinds of rp, the ones more about the game than the thesaurus cuddling and metaphor dependency.

To bring this back around to the question of what kinds of writers I like writing with, I guess my response is 'it varies a TON'. I obvs love writing with @Coin as we have discussed and he likes brevity and probably puts my poses all through that website that helps you write like Hemingway to dissect them. I also love writing with people who are super spammy and flowery and nutty, because then I can be too sometimes. I've clicked with all kinds, and who I might want to click with on a given night of rp time may depend largely on my whim!

@Pyrephox said:

@Coin said:

@Pyrephox said:

@Coin Yeah, staff would have to be willing to define what an acceptable background was, and give examples for both backgrounds and One Unique Things. It shouldn't be as much of an issue for a D&D game as for, say, the way people play WoD/CoD in MU*s, since ideally it SHOULDN'T be PvP-focus, and PvP tends to be where the most arguments about that kind of flexibility come in.

Yeah. But you'll still get the occasional person who will complain that someone else's Background allows them to do "everything mine does and more". People's One Unique Thing would also be tricky because to keep the actual feel, you would need an ever growing list of unique things that can't be repeated.

You will get the occasional person who will complain about everything. Any version of D&D you run is going to have something that can potentially create an exploit of the rules. That's presumably why staff aren't robots, and it's not impossible to pull someone in even after approval and tell them to Knock That Crap Off.

Obviously. I just think that the level of ambiguity inherent in backgrounds will create more problems than usual; not unmanageable, but more.