Where's your RP at?

[Miss Demeanor]

@Gilette See, I have gone through so many characters on so many games... and often end up dropping them from... boredom. Nothing happens. Nobody is willing to risk anything. Its boring. So I'll drop a character and find something else to hold my interest for a short while. Probably one of my favorite characters was Ramona on TR. She would do or say anything... didn't matter. She paid for it a few times, too. But she also ended up Keeper of the only Elysium in town for awhile. It was fun. Running around all one-armed like Paul Reubens in Buffy the Vampire Slayer? Just as much fun as beating someone down. And if she had died (and she would have, eventually), it would have been a HILARIOUS and AWESOME moment that I would remember fondly for ages. Not even because I chose what happened to her, but because I threw her out there and let fate decide.

[faraday]

@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.

For some of us, it takes a lot of work to get involved in a story. I'm not talking about the nuts and bolts of chargen, I'm talking about the work of really, truly developing a character. Their backstory, their personality, their patterns of speech and little tics that make them interesting. (Some people can do this right off the bat; I can't. I know I'm not alone.)

And then you have to build up relationships with other characters. I'm not talking romances, I'm talking real connections that let you do scenes that are more than just "hey how's the weather" or "let me ask you about your backstory".

And then sometimes you have a story in mind. Not the game's story, your story. Some arc that you want to do with the character.

All told, that is a ton of work and investment, and it really sucks to lose all that and have to build it all back up again just because your character got sucked out of an airlock due to a bad die roll. (True story.)

You don't have to knock off main characters left and right to generate tension. Battlestar the TV show was very gritty and interesting - lots of complications, and yet main character deaths were pretty rare.

Now if folks want to run a game that has deaths-a-plenty - that's totally fine. Their game, their rules. I just won't play there unless it's so awesomely amazing I can't resist (like TGG).

[Miss Demeanor]

@surreality Eh. Consequence of using a dice-based system. I'm not going to complain if a roll fucks up my character. Its just part of the game. I've had characters that lasted months or years, I've had characters that didn't last past the first encounter. When you play the game, you make a tacit agreement to accept the consequences of the dice. Yes, it sucks... but you are now free to craft up a whole new character with a whole new story and find all new fun things to do. That is where I don't understand. Why get SO wrapped up in ONE character, that you can't stand to see them go?

Edit to add: @faraday I refer you to the above. You are putting no more time and effort into the character that got blown out of the airlock than the one that got to ride off into the sunset. Sometimes your favorite character dies. This is a fact. When your favorite character in a book series dies, do you stop reading the series? Or do you keep reading and find a new favorite character?

[GangOfDolls]

I'm assuming you're speaking on No Return, which lets not paint lipstick on sweating dynamite, was pretty terrible but I do want to set the record straight(er) on a few things:

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

1. PLAYING HOUSE: that eventually resulted in plenty of scheduled yoga lessons and movie nights.

I played the PC who was "teaching yoga" though 1) I never actually taught yoga in in character because I would have fallen asleep at the keyboard the idea is so fucking boring and 2) that wasn't really what she was doing but the +bb posts maintained a certain atmosphere around misdirection. I guess it worked!

That said, there were definitely a lot of movie nights, indepth scenes about what color to paint the baby's room, and cheerful community building social events that I generally skipped because I wasn't looking for this, either.

2. I GUESS I'LL SCAVENGE?:

The scavenge system was at least better than people tripping over huge cashes of C4, BUK missile launchers, or infinite cans of perfectly good pears. But it also took over the game in a weird, resource dominating way in that it if you had it in your personal stash - there was no incentive to interact with anyone else, which justified people to continue to shack it up and ignore the apocalypse outside. Most of the plot in the beginning had something to do with resources and if you wanted something to do in game, you were going to have jump through the hoops of scavenging 99 pieces of twine to build a dinglehopper. And because staff wouldn't facilitate that any way but obtusely, it was hella annoying to have to go find these things knowing that Ella, Brick, and their NPC child were holed up in their build with all the twine and wouldn't even be bothered to pretend other people on this game existed.

3. HIGH DANGER, LOW MORTALITY: On one such game, cancer was diagnosed, operated on, and eventually cured without much electricity, access to imagery machines, important medicine, and proper tools.

Unless this happened on No Return's failed spin off, I'm pretty sure you're talking about the staff PC who had a brain tumor. The whole concept was pretty terrible, partly because it was a staff PC so it was way more precious than it should have ever been and also in true Phoenix's MO, he just griefed everyone constantly for zero interesting or passingly logical reasons. Anyway, there was talk of trying to operate but the player of the doctor was more sensible than perhaps given credit and decided there was zero chance this was going to be successful and wasn't interested in going through the motions of total failure. And dying on the operating table while a reasonable expectation is also a fairly boring narrative for the dying PC. So instead, it got dragged out even longer and there was an insufferable funeral social scene because ded staff PC ... which many people also skipped.

4. OMG ASSHOLE CHARACTER

I understand this but I also don't, in part because I RPed with some of the asshole PCs and actually we had a lot of fun because at the end of it, we had other things in game we wanted to do besides obsess over who got a puppy from the NPC dog that had puppies. I can't stress how big of a deal this was for several players- if they got a puppy, what was it named, and what did it look like and and and to the point where the owner of the NPC dog was sorry they'd ever mentioned it as IC flavor. Anyway.

I think though the problem with post-apoc/zombie/dystopian wasteland games is that most of the conflict is not environmental. It's Other Groups who want to kill us and eat our faces. And there is, for a certain fan of this genre a reluctance to want to play with PCs that look way too edgelord for their own good because they are often attached to players who are here to pick lethal PvP conflicts with players who are not here to kick some PC's head in over a cantaloupe. There is a small population attached to these games that does attract the NO RULES, NO RULES, YOUR RUINED FUN IS MY CAKE and many of these games are not good at screening these assholes out or corralling them into being useful in their otherwise terrible motives. Or in the case of NR, passive aggressively encouraging it. Good times.

[Gilette]

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

And then sometimes you have a story in mind. Not the game's story, your story. Some arc that you want to do with the character.

Speaking personally, I've always thought this approach was a very bad idea. Like, anything beyond a very general outline tends to make RP this weird thing where you're just... watching someone develop their own arc.

[Seraphim73]

On topic: I'm getting RP as often as I can manage (which isn't very often with my current schedule) on Fires of Hope, and occasionally on Battlestar Galactica: Unification.

Off topic: I don't necessarily want character death in a game, but I want the honest and very real risk of character death in a game. Without risk, there's no real reward, in my opinion. Even if characters don't die, as long as we're scrabbling and scrambling to keep them from dying then I'm good. On most games these days, however, people are more concerned about the story of their own characters, rather than their character's part in the larger game story. So they get upset when anything happens to their character that they didn't plan to happen.

And when those folks became the majority, that's when MUSHing got less fun for me, because the excitement and risk of the unknown is what kept me so engaged through high school and college.

[surreality]

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

@surreality Eh. Consequence of using a dice-based system. I'm not going to complain if a roll fucks up my character. Its just part of the game. I've had characters that lasted months or years, I've had characters that didn't last past the first encounter. When you play the game, you make a tacit agreement to accept the consequences of the dice. Yes, it sucks... but you are now free to craft up a whole new character with a whole new story and find all new fun things to do. That is where I don't understand. Why get SO wrapped up in ONE character, that you can't stand to see them go?

Edit to add: @faraday I refer you to the above. You are putting no more time and effort into the character that got blown out of the airlock than the one that got to ride off into the sunset. Sometimes your favorite character dies. This is a fact. When your favorite character in a book series dies, do you stop reading the series? Or do you keep reading and find a new favorite character?

I think this is a mindset thing. For instance -- think about the backgrounds thing. You prefer to go in light and evolve things. It's not so much of an up front investment -- and I think that should be supported as a play style.

By the same token, others do things with a lot of work going in, which is also an approach that deserves respect -- or at least enough respect to not dismiss it was 'being so attached to one character they can't stand to see them go', which is rarely the case.

Essentially, it's just a different approach to the game, and probably a little bit of 'wanting something different from the play experience'. Dismissing the folks who do a lot of prep and get disappointed if their work is ended in a footnote as being overly attached and unable to let go is, to me, as inappropriate as it would be to suggest that you 'just don't feel like doing the work and writing an elaborate multi-step background thing'. That isn't the case at all -- in both of these instances -- and unless the game in question is designed to support one of these general approaches exclusively, it's a space that people of both mindsets are going to have to share. The first step to doing that effectively is by listening to what someone is saying and not instantly diminishing/dismissing it as being indicative of one of the red flags in the hobby like 'overly attached' and 'doesn't feel like putting in the effort' both are, and both are not often accurately attributed at all.

[hedgehog]

@Autumn

Me neither. And you missed the guy who came in later looking for maritime coastal maps of Prospect. Because those get filed with the Swell Maps and Paul Schutze's 'New Maps of Hell', or something.

[Gilette]

@Seraphim73

Abso-fucking-lutely. At some point over the past few years, it feels like the MU zeitgeist went from improv theatre troupe to one-man shows.

[Ghost]

@GangOfDolls

For the record, I wasn't critiquing that there WAS yoga, just that as I understood it, the town in No Return became so sheltered at one point that it was getting near Gilmore Girls Star's Hollow levels. I apologize if you felt slighted by the yoga mention. I don't know you, and it wasn't about you. Just about...the setting and stuff.

I'll let the topic get back on track nao

[GangOfDolls]

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

@GangOfDolls

For the record, I wasn't critiquing that there WAS yoga, just that as I understood it, the town in No Return became so sheltered at one point that it was getting near Gilmore Girls Star's Hollow levels. I apologize if you felt slighted by the yoga mention. I don't know you, and it wasn't about you. Just about...the setting and stuff.

I'll let the topic get back on track nao

Yeah, that's cool. I felt compelled to say something because nerds. Also, we got kicked out of Stars Hollow by staff because they didn't want anyone having private builds anymore via plot. And then they stuck us in a summer camp. So. Yeaaaaah. Anyway.

[Ghost]

@GangOfDolls Oh god, that sucks. EEek.

[WTFE]

@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?

There's a million possible answers to this question. Here are a few, but first your objections to provide some context.

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 may not want to tell another story. There may have been things I wanted said in that story that just ended that I can't (or don't want to) tell in another way. E.g.: I'm playing a character that's doing the fall-and-redemption cycle. It gets killed shortly after the fall part. How do I do the redemption side? Introduce a new character, have it fall, then more than likely have it killed before the redemption? Lather. Rinse. Repeat?
• It may be that making characters on the game is a pain in the ass. While it's not as much of a problem as it used to be, it's still a pain in the ass to be out of play for several days while going through the pointless hoops a lot of games still throw up for the privilege of playing.
• In games where character "growth" (read: collecting bigger numbers and more shiny things) is slow and difficult, it's disheartening to be faced with that grind all over again.
• Even in cases of real character growth (as opposed to power-mongering) it's a slow, hard climb. All those IC connections you've built? Gone. All those friends you made IC? Time to start over. All those little bits of connection your character had to the setting, the bits that made the character an interesting part of the world? Vanished into nothingness. Time to start it all over again.

That's just a few reasons. I'm sure people here can come up with millions more.

[Sunny]

@Seraphim73

I definitely want the risk -- but I want the risk to have been taken because the risk was significant enough to risk character death and was taken anyway, not some random stupidness over a pickle. If it's an important risk, or it's story related, or any of that? Death is totally fine.

[GangOfDolls]

I'll add one to @wtfe 's list:

• If its not a death you have control over, it rarely comes with much payoff. In the least case, if your PC dies because you horribly botch a roll that results in death it sort of undoes all the IC work you put in (and the actual OOC hours) there's kind of nothing of substance to that death. Random death from above just feels like a big fuck you from above. If its due to PvP conflict, that's even worse because your PC wouldn't be dead at all if the other player hadn't declared that action* and all that work has been pointlessly cut off at the knees.

*Unless you were a real asshole in game and went out of your way to give PCs no other option ever and basically made the game a hell and a half, then your PC may deserve their shit getting pushed in but one hopes staff would deal with it before people literally take up arms to improve the situation.

[Ghost]

Then it's not a game.

I don't say this to sound combative, but there are people who approach this hobby like playing a tabletop RPG, using the tabletop RPG systems, but with more fleshed-out roleplaying features, and others who approach this like RP without the G.

It's just usually best for a game to flesh out exactly where it stands on that spectrum.

Personally? I don't seek to kill off characters. I just believe that risk needs to be actual risk, which means the possibility of failure, and when I GM games, I will allow characters to fail, because games that do not do so tend to become snowflake fests. Bear in mind that characters are not required to risk themselves in all settings, or can rely on other characters to mitigate their risks.

One player, or multiple players, having predetermined the outcome of their story (be it predetermined or decided on the fly that "whatever this is doesn't match what I want for my character, so...no.") means that the decisions of other characters may be met with a wall of refusal. ICA then fails to meet ICC, and it's no wonder why so many people butt heads on these games.

Ram A on a log says: "This is my story"
Ram B on a log says: "Correction, this is my story."
They butt heads.
Both rams say "That bitch is a cunt and I'm not roleplaying with them anymore."

[Misadventure]

How would you (the generic you) carry a survivalist feel on a MU*?

I personally think it can't be done for any length of time.

[Ghost]

I agree with this sentiment. Without occasionally kicking over the sand castles in the sand box and ruining everyone's progress, it's not possible.

In the Walking Dead, they were forced to leave the prison, then Alexandria went from a nice, suburban burg into a tribal war camp.

Maintaining a survivalist feel on a MU is simply not possible while there are players holding the my story attitude. The genre, by definition, requires survival, and survival (as a word) infers that failing to survive is a possibility.

Roleplaying needing to find food to survive is a meaningless effort if you have predetermined that you will find food and everything will be okay until you decide to roleplay a scenario where your character is at risk...but will ultimately be fine in the end.

[Misadventure]

Makes me think of a group/troupe approach where the core is the values and goals of the group, and how various gains and losses affect that core group identity/balance. But I like that idea of a society with values that shifts over time so maybe I see it everywhere.

[WTFE]

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

Personally? I don't seek to kill off characters. I just believe that risk needs to be actual risk, which means the possibility of failure, and when I GM games, I will allow characters to fail, because games that do not do so tend to become snowflake fests.

I think it's hilarious that you think of killing PCs as the only (or at least a major) way to fail. I think this shows more about your GMing style than anything about players being precious snowflakes.

Some of my most excruciating failures in tabletop RP were excruciating precisely BECAUSE my character didn't die.