I mean, some people ARE assholes about a MU* with a theme or write-up they aren't into (that poor guy who posted about Flights 'n Tights comes to mind). But that's on the assholes. I'm not into anime but I'm generally happy to see anything in the medium up and active and trying to attract players.
@Ganymede said in Where's your RP at?:
See, TGG was fun because it was fast-paced, and there was a high chance of death. It made success feel more successful. I get that. But what if death was optional? What if the point was to win or lose a battle, with consequences based on the win or loss, rather than death? What if the risk were more "global"?
On RfK, if you lost a political gamble, you didn't necessarily die. You probably owed some favors and were constantly worried about getting killed. But you were still in the game, and could claw your way back up. So, you lost the battle, but you don't lose your investment (entirely).
I think this is 100% the right track.
Because TGG was designed to more or less follow actual history (we could not kill Hitler), @EUBanana kept the stakes small-scale. Your squad was just one little part of the evac from Dunkirk, or Winter War in Finland, or any number of battles in WW1, but your individual actions mattered a hell of a lot. You could save your buddy! Or you could stumble into an enemy and get your buddy killed! You could win and lose grid-space 'territory' in what was meant to misrepresent a little section of the larger war effort.
I think you're right that it wasn't the risk that made it bracing, it was the meaningful stakes which that risk represented. I guess this circles back to investment (if you don't care about your buddy, you will not be invested in a scene in which he lives or dies). I definitely think there are other ways to create that than just a high body count (I find the idea pretty damn interesting).
@SG said in Where's your RP at?:
@Three-Eyed-Crow stop editing while I'm reading, I feel like I'm being shunted to the nextdoor timeline.
Lol just cleaning up my typos. They are always legion.
@Ghost said in Where's your RP at?:
@Misadventure A question I have not answered because I think my input is moot. I gave an example in relation to AllFleshMustBeEaten further back, and would rather hear from other people since I have no issues with risk.
I find zombie and zombie apocalypse boring as fuck, generally.
Which just means I'm not the target audience, and there are LOTS of games I'm not the target audience for which are very viable (I feel like my instincts for what I want to play are often counter to what would make a big game). That said, since this was the question, I'll provide an answer.
I gave up on The Walking Dead because it just got boring to me after awhile. I find it to lack a larger 'story,' other than the character's surviving another day and postponing the inevitable. For two or three seasons I was cool with this, but as it went on I just wandered away because hopelessness, at a certain point, isn't an arc. It's just hopelessness. I find the characters shallow and am not interested in their relationships, precisely because they're designed to be somewhat disposable. Ultimately, for all its sins, Game of Thrones' ability to make me invest in new characters like the Viper while still maintaining an ability to pull the rug out from under the audience is what makes me respect the hell out of its writers and keeps me coming back. But this is a high-wire trick that even most professional writers and showrunners can't pull off, let alone most MU* GMs.
Even The Greatest Generation suffered from lack of characters I cared about at various points, and I had far less fun in those campaigns. It worked best for me when people REALLY gave a shit about whether or not their character lived or died. Which, I'm fine with building something up just to have it torn down. That's tragedy, but tragedy can be great drama, and I enjoyed playing it. But some people didn't and idled out when their favorite characters died, and I can't say they were wrong. Not only was their investment gone, I can think of several cases where the campaign was lesser without that character. Not that player. That character. In persistent environments, relationships are what makes this stuff meaningful, and when that's gone it's not easily replaced.
All this is to say, I have no problem with character death. I have zero interest in making a disposable character for a 'hard core' GM who's going to run a Walking Dead-style MU*. I doubt I'm the majority. The Walking Dead is very popular, and post-apoc with a high bodycount in general is enjoying a pop culture moment right now. I won't even argue that you don't need character death in a setting like that. I think you do, because occasional meaningless death is a part of the point. But it ain't my bag and there's why.
If anyone hasn't seen 'This Film Is Not Yet Rated', I cannot recommend it highly enough. Documentary on the American movie ratings system and how f'd up and non-sensical it is. Which I knew, but it gets into the secretive and weird way the ratings are assigned in ways I found really interesting. It's a few years old now, but I suspect most of it still applies.
@lordbelh Really bummed we didn't get to play, as I heard good things (I have been Esoka there for like two weeks or something). Another game, another time.
A lot of the Iron Fist reviews I've read have talked about how derivative the source material is in any number of ways (power set, origin story, plots, etc.). Maybe there was no way to port it well if they were being faithful. Jessica Jones and Luke Cage seemed really refreshing to me but, as I understand it, those stories were strongly based on revivals of the characters that took place in the comics themselves. The white boy ninja thing is grating to me not just because it's more off now than it was when the character was written but because, as @saosmash said, it's one more way Marvel could've made the character updated and just chose not to.
I also have to wonder if a better actor than Finn Jones would take the edge off some of this criticism, but who knows.
I'll still watch. Hoping for some Misty Knight, but the early reviews make me unsure I'll get her. Even if this is mediocre, it won't dim my interest in Marvel's Netflix brand as a whole, and I remain very pumped for The Defenders.
In the early 1850s, few pedestrians strolling past the house on H Street in Washington, near the White House, realized that the ancient widow seated by the window, knitting and arranging flowers, was the last surviving link to the glory days of the early republic.
And then the murders began.
Nymeria did throw thinly-veiled shade at S&S and some other GoT MU*s on Second Life/her own blog/probably other platforms. Thinly-veiled shade from Nymeria is not exactly a thing I'd view as a deterrent, though (heck, depending on how unhinged it is, it's a weird kind of endorsement of any alternative).
A lot of this stuff goes from being a non-issue in a free-to-play game to a major issue when you start charging money. I know this is one of Storium's issues with the content/gaming systems it supports, since the creator is trying to make a little cash off it.
One of the things I like about my MU client actually is the sense of separation, weirdly enough. I generally play with Firefox open and a bunch of tabs going but I can also...not. I can just cut myself off a bit, like I do when I'm playing any other sort of video game, and open nothing but the client. It's kind of nice and feels less busy.
I'm not sure if this is what @Monogram is talking about and I can certainly just use my browser for less BS at any given time. This is one of those things that's the fault of the user rather than the fault of the thing itself. But it is one of those ephemeral things that makes me rather like having a separate piece of software that I play on, even if I recognize that clients are alienating to newbs.
ETA: That said, I'm still excited about the idea of a game that's entirely web-based. It feels like the way forward and absolutely would cut down the barrier for entry that's keeping new players out of the hobby. I'm just trying to put my finger on why I like my MU client, in addition to all the centralization for real-time RP stuff I think telnet games do quite well.
I'd love to see it tried. The main hurdle for MUing for a lot of people is the need to plonk yourself down in one place for 3 hours to play. And the horror that is trying to MU on a mobile phone. Something that mitigates those would be really exciting.
I'd be curious about the logistics (how do you handle a GM'd scene when you need to call for rolls, and such?) but I'm honestly surprised there's not a more streamlined platform for this now, given the popularity of text-based RP on platform like Tumblr that're DEEPLY unsuited for it.
Love the idea, love the prospect of a game with structured arcs. It's not for everyone, but if you're upfront about what you're doing and get a handful of players who buy into it, it can make for great stories. I like FS3 just fine.
@cupcake I'm sad you missed it! It was good times. I died a lot. I also was involved in a mini-plot where a few other players and I smuggled George Orwell out of Spain during the civil war. Still stands as about my favorite damn thing I've ever played.
I log most of my RP. Like @Sparks, I just like having a record, and sometimes it's actually easier to refer to RP than to wade through mails and posts. I also really like revisiting logs on benders of game nostalgia. This is why I adore wikis. No need to wade through 5-year-old text files (though I still have the text files, ephemeral internet being what it is). I likes ma stories, and sometimes things come together more coherently than I noticed in the course of play.
I rarely log OOC communication. Mails and posts and things I'm going to need for plottage are generally more easily stored in a gdoc or something than the aforementioned text file. And I agree with the flimsy nature of logs as 'evidence.' But, with the rise of wikis, I also rarely edit my text files anymore. So I generally HAVE a log of OOC stuff if I need it.
ETA: This is a personal thing. I am aware of this. But nothing gives me a better idea of the general level of activity on a game and what kind of RP I can find there than player logs. They really help me engage. I don't really care if other people log or not (I sure as hell don't read everything other people post, and if my partner doesn't want something posted I'll respect that).
Rebound guy having access to a KEY after a week would freak me out a lot more than anything else in that scenario, maybe even more than him randomly hanging out. YOU ARE RIGHT TO BE ANGRY. I would hit the goddamn roof.
That's so awesome, @Misadventure. I've got a couple of friends who've been through Nursing school, and the NCLEX seems like a beast.
I think it can help drive activity as long as it's reciprocal. Even with stuff like MSB, I hear about new games from people I play with as often as not. Especially with how unreliable MUDstats has become (used to be my go-to for random game searching, but it just doesn't seem to update regularly enough anymore to be useful).
I've never seen it cause a problem, other than kind of annoying Guests who swoop in, post, and don't reciprocate on another game, but meh. There are bigger problems in the world.
@ThatGuyThere said in Roleplaying writing styles:
@Arkandel said in Roleplaying writing styles:
This reminds me. How do you feel about revealing things about the character through narration and not in any visible ways? For example: "Bob sits down and grows silent. Ever since he returned from the war he's been reserved in social settings with people he doesn't know well. He lifts his glass and...".
I am absolutely in favor of this sort of thing. Mainly because human communication is mostly non-verbal on a much we are forced to just use verbal because all we have as tools are words. If someone is really good at posing body language this can lesson the issue but body language is not constant across cultures so things that would absolutely be understood ICly get lost OOCly.
I don't do this kind of thing with new people, but with players who're supposed to know my PC to some intimate degree? I use a little more narration/meta. And OOC communication, though sometimes sticking things in a quick line in a pose feels less disruptive to the RP. I try to stress body language/tone more and make the cues more subtle than that (idk how good I am at subtle, sometimes not), but your friends and family pick up on a lot of shit rando strangers don't.
I also try to play my PCs differently around people they're close to versus people they're not. Not radically, but I think we all have a private face and a public face (and a face we show our family versus our friends, etc.) to some degree, and feeling that out gives me more colors to RP that keeps it fun for me.
I'm honestly not sure what my writing style is when I RP. I feel like I'm a medium poser? I've asked people I play with on the regular before and gotten variable answers. I usually do 5-ish lines and get length-abusive mostly from dialogue rather than prose. I'll take a shorter poser who gives me a response in under 10 minutes to someone who takes 20 minutes to pose a screen at me any day (I usually don't got that kind of time), but if I'm one-on-one with somebody I care a lot less as long as I'm getting something engaging.
