Where's your RP at?

[Cupcake]

@Astrid There was The 100, and it was Camelot for a while before eventually going sour. But post-apoc would be kinda awesome.

[Sunny]

@faraday

While I am sure there is an audience for it, I'm with @faraday on this. If character death is heavily on the table, I don't care what genre it is, I'm not interested. It's not about how easy or not it is to make a PC, but the engagement and investment that go along with a character. There are plenty of other story based things that can be done -- kill swaths of NPCs if you want, whatever -- but if the only way you can think of to create the right kind of tension is to take my character away, no thanks.

[Ganymede]

@faraday said in Where's your RP at?:

I love post-apoc, but I wouldn't play on a game where you could lose your character due to fickle dice or staff whim.

In the game I'm planning with TweedBoy, getting taken out in combat doesn't mean death. You can elect this or not, but you just lose the combat encounter. As winning or losing affects whether a mission is successful or not, there is always an incentive to win.

[Ghost]

Be careful what you ask for. There have been post-apocalyptic and zombie-themed games that have come and gone. These games were plagued with four major issues that, IMO, eventually caused them to go belly up:

1. PLAYING HOUSE: Since these games tend to run the theme of "everything has gone to shit", the logical direction is to "make things not shit". The result was less a survival scenario and more of a "community building RP sandbox" that eventually resulted in plenty of scheduled yoga lessons and movie nights.

2. I GUESS I'LL SCAVENGE?: Problem two. When everything is shit, you don't have shit, but after 10 or so scenes of picking through houses, gas stations, and Wal-Marts, you end up having shit, and players who have shit are not often keen on losing shit. Refer to problem #1. When they've based their character around being some kind of sheltered post-apocalyptic horse whisperer, having zombies eat their horses has a negative effect on their RP.

3. HIGH DANGER, LOW MORTALITY: Why should we let a setting filled with a severe lack of medical supplies, flesh eating undead, and lack of sanitation impede the survival rate of our characters? On one such game, cancer was diagnosed, operated on, and eventually cured without much electricity, access to imagery machines, important medicine, and proper tools. In this case, the game took place 20 years after the fall of mankind, and the surgery was performed by someone who didn't have such specific training. Unfortunately, the setting, in itself, is a massive Miley Cyrus wrecking ball to the 4th wall. The suspension of disbelief simply will never allow these settings in a MU format, with players having such an avoidance to character death, to make any form of sense.

4. OMG ASSHOLE CHARACTER: The last, is something I've seen first hand. With characters like Negan and the Dixon brothers from Walking Dead being so popular, players inevitably make characters that are designed to be hard to get along with. Ten seconds later comes the roleplay response of "I don't trust him, he shouldn't be here" followed twenty seconds later with "my character wouldn't spend time alone with that person, so I can't RP with her/him". When the logical concept of survival means excluding people who are "edgy" from the survivalist community, due to a logical assumption that dangerous people are bad for survival, then you end up with whole groups of characters excluding people who don't follow the "nice guy/girl, doesn't cause problems" flow. Then, refer to problems 1-3. People get excluded from roleplay, are shunned because of the larger community ideal that argument roleplay isn't fun, and then they're left with...more scavenging scenes.

Not to rain on the parade here, but when it comes to these genres, be very, very careful what you're asking for. Unless the status quos of MY STORY or I DON'T WANT TO LOSE MY CHARACTER loosens up a bit, I wouldn't suggest a survivalist/post-apocalyptic/zombie setting for the community as a whole.

[Misadventure]

I have to admit, it seems like almost all RP settings become something like set dressing on yet another a wealthy twenty something dating sim.

Hard to tell stories when the referred to complications of the setting aren't actually important in any way.

[surreality]

@Ghost I agree that it isn't a great choice for folks who want full control over their character's fate, but I don't think the other extreme -- random capricious PC kills to show that shit just got real guys! -- is viable, either, for an enjoyable play experience.

While there are some players who will whine and bitch up a blue streak about getting a hangnail or oh my god my character could never be intimidated!, they're fairly rare.

The sort of deaths people are averse to, for the most part, are the capricious ones. "He sat on my favorite barstool!" was, for a long-ass time, considered a perfectly reasonable cause to turn somebody's PC into a greasy red smear by someone having a crappy day RL and wanting to flex their muscles IC to feel important somewhere, and I'm pretty sure most folks these days agree that's complete bullshit.

The husband goes on about what his tabletop games have dubbed 'the PC aura'. And I think it's relevant here. NPCs are -- generally -- fine for that kind of show of force. You are not ending another player's story on an OOC hangry mood whim, then, and yeah, that's relevant. This goes to something bigger, though, and that's that the hobby has -- for the most part -- grown up and opened its eyes to the fact that it's shitty to smash up someone else's shit they invested time and effort into just because you can or just because you wanna smash some shit to get an RL bad day out of your system.

While there's a fair age spread in the hobby, I'd still think the majority of us who have been at this a while are between about 28-45 or so. It used to be mostly high school, college, and maybe a handful of just-recently-graduated college folks -- yes, we all got old.

I'm not throwing the 'growing up' term around for the sake of mere metaphorical language here. Not only do most folks have less time to invest (which means people want more quality out of that time, however they define 'quality'), we also collectively have a much better understanding of what investment of time and effort means as rent/mortgage-paying adults with jobs and responsibilities, so, yes, you're going to see a lot more resistance to the party kid/rebel 'just burn it all down ha ha ha fuck it smash all the things' mentality that's a lot more common in high school and college. When you know how much work shit really is to build up yourself -- in reality -- you get a lot less inclined to smash other people's shit up for sport. It's an empathy that translates to other aspects of life, games being no different (usually in subtle ways but sometimes much more consciously).

[Gilette]

I haven't actually been finding much RP anywhere. Partially due to just being on a bit of a MU break, but also because the big places I used to really burn my time and energy on are really floundering due to serious issues (attempting a reboot with not enough staff and allowing everyone to keep their characters and groups while drastically altering character setups and profiles, for example) or have just petered out.

[Bobotron]

@Gilette
What game is this, out of curiosity?

[Doozer]

@Astrid
Below was

No Return is a zombie apocalypse role-playing MUSH for those who are interested in role-playing in a post-apocalyptic world where undead occasionally try to eat them.
http://noreturn.closetgamers.com/
noreturn.closetgamers.com 2250

I didn't make it past cgen but it was pretty much a gatherer, hunter type mux where you had to roll to get supplies, craft and it was pretty interesting from what I saw. I wish I was able to play there.

I recently started watching Wayward Pines and you know that may be a good setting. New characters are 'unfrozen' and put into the neighborhood i.e. grid. At some point their happy little town will collapse and well... fend for yourselves!

[Gilette]

@Bobotron

MCM.

Basically, staff wanted to do a full reboot of the setting. The two big factions have been turned into four factions that are less good/bad and more based around ideals. Basically you have your absolutist lawgivers, your at-any-cost vigilantes, your knowledge-seekers and your self-interested morally-dubious alliance. It's actually a really good change that's been a long time coming because the old system was totally stagnant. There's also a new smaller, more compact grid, which is also a good thing.

The big problem is that, at around the same time, they decided to drastically alter the system for characters, too. MCM used to be very freeform and allowed for no real upper limit on character skills and abilities. This, of course, meant that breadth would always trump depth, particularly as there was a big push by players to ignore the coded combat system. It got even more ridiculous when PCs would bring their NPCs to a scene and insist that they could basically have double the spotlight.

The new system essentially allows you to designate two things your character is really good at, four things they're pretty good at, and any number of things that they have but generally can't use to solve anything but the most basic conflicts. This, again, is a good change. It makes it obvious that someone's punching skill isn't necessarily able to stand against, say, Superman's Super Strength. It makes players think about the niche they want their character to occupy.

This new character policy started in January. As of today, only 14 of 429 characters have been made 'compliant'. Part of this is because there are only three active staff members (some have retired, others have apparently gone AWOL). What's more, it'll apparently soon be only two. The other part of is that the new system hasn't really been adequately explained and there are a fair few current characters who simply can't fit into it without shaving off big things. There is a deadline for characters to be made compliant, which is three months from now. Unless progress drastically quickens, they won't get even 100 approved by that time.

Any characters who aren't compliant at the deadline can not be played, by the way, and staff have been pretty insistent that this is not negotiable. I don't know if staff have said what they'll do with the characters who are unapproved at that time. I assume they won't be deleting them. Or maybe they will?

So, two or three staff members handling hundreds of upgrade submissions, plus any new players, plus any issues arising in game...

They really should've just wiped the slate clean and started a new timeline. As it is, with this sort of half-and-half approach, well... As a wise man once said: "It's all in the numbers." I know players who aren't even attempting to upgrade to the new system. Basically, it'll be interesting to see what happens come July.

There are other issues that could be exacerbating the two big ones, but that's more of a Hog Pit thing as it's not much more than informed supposition.

[Sunny]

@Ghost

The attitude presented is why I have absolutely no interest in playing in a high-PC-casuality game. Because 'character death' seems to be the metric that people like to use to create the appropriate tension, and equate a lack thereof to playing house or being conflict-averse. I don't mind if a character dies as part of the story, but it actually has to be part of the story. Killing player characters to show how dangerous the setting is is lazy, unimaginative, and absolutely sucks donkey balls for the people whose time, effort, and investment is pissed on just to set the tone for a game.

[Catsmeow]

I would love a post-apoc game, but I also admit that I'm not fond of character death. It's more because I get excited to form the character. Then I'm excited to see how it works. If It was literally a rocks fall, your char dies - I would be less inclined to do that.

Also, if I'm 100% honest. If I played a game that my char could die at any point due to a dice roll or to make an example how horrible the world is; I would get super anxious OOC and not enjoy it IC. It would be like (not to bring it here) but the Firan birth death rolls. You would have this story and then boom. It's over and you are like WTF and you are stressed the entire time. That would be, for me, the game the whole time.

If I wanted that, I'd play a console game or something.

But I'm down with the post-apoc if anyone makes it work.

[Gilette]

Character death is nice when it's on the table and people can see good times for it.

However, I just watched a RP group disintegrate literally over night when someone suddenly decided to kill a PC. The reason given was much the same: I wanted to create tension. But it wasn't passed by anyone and, so, there were suddenly 3 or 4 very unhappy players who had ideas go up in smoke, lost an IC friend, or OOCly felt it was basically a slap to the face because the player in question was unhappy.

It's gotta be discussed.

[Sparks]

@Catsmeow said in Where's your RP at?:

I would love a post-apoc game, but I also admit that I'm not fond of character death. It's more because I get excited to form the character. Then I'm excited to see how it works. If It was literally a rocks fall, your char dies - I would be less inclined to do that.

See, I think a post-apocalyptic game works best if you make it invite only and keep it to maybe 15-20 people at most, ideally folks who already know each other and won't be jackasses to each other, with a semi-active GM team to run world events.

Basically, run things more like a tabletop campaign ("Here is your party. Here is your world. Attempt to make the former survive the latter."), rather than a traditional 'Come on in, make your character, go nuts' game.

Of course, that's a huge chunk of work to make happen right.

[hedgehog]

@Autumn

I quite enjoyed your RP. For one thing, it was refreshing that you actually read the desc of my fucking shop and got what I was going for. I should +nom you just for that.

[Autumn]

@hedgehog I couldn't tell if the woman who came in wanting a Carpenters album was being intentionally ironic or not.

[Thenomain]

@Sparks

I don't think it would be hard to keep a game population down to the low 20s, really. Sadly.

[Miss Demeanor]

Why are people so afraid to have characters die? Why is death such a terrible thing in a game? Yeah, its the end of a story. Not the only story, just one of many. You can make a new story. Stories don't have to stop just because one person dies. The narrative continues under a new voice.

[Gilette]

@Miss-Demeanor

Because characters are name-recognition. Characters are a list of cool things you have done and can do. Characters are things you circlejerk with and build cliques around. Characters are things you identify with just a touch too closely because your life sucks and you need an escape.

Killing them or retiring them, even when they are well past their date to do so, kind of stops that sort of thing. I've always been a firm believer in retiring/killing characters once there story has been run out. When I find people who've been playing the same character for, say, more than three years... it just blows my mind.

[surreality]

@Miss-Demeanor said in Where's your RP at?:

Why are people so afraid to have characters die? Why is death such a terrible thing in a game? Yeah, its the end of a story. Not the only story, just one of many. You can make a new story. Stories don't have to stop just because one person dies. The narrative continues under a new voice.

I don't think it's actually the dying that's an issue for most. It's dying pointlessly or without time and attention to the narrative, which can be pretty rare in most events (there are definitely exceptions). If you get ground to a pulp with a bad roll in a huge combat where your character's story ends in a half-line footnote of red mist after you've been playing them for a year is a pretty shitty ending to have, pretty much, but sometimes it's the best you're going to get out of a combat event death even with a really great ST, depending on what else is going on in scene.

Being random-smote to just prove shit just got real, that so-and-so really is a badass/means business, is really a fate best reserved for NPCs.