Best posts made by TMR

@devrex said in The Desired Experience:

And then the shopkeeper is going: "I can't get any RP around here."

And I'm thinking: What the hell do you expect? Nobody's taking your shopkeeper to the Dungeon o' Doom...why'd you even make a shopkeeper? You're free to make a shopkeeper but why wouldja do it???

What also happens (ask me how I know) is that a player asks "what kinds of characters are needed?" because they have no fixed preference. Then the staff says, "well there's an important shopkeeper role in town we've been wanting to fill" so the player does so.

And then gets no RP.

And then complains about not getting RP.

And then quits the game for lack of RP.

So while all the advice about making clear what you want is very good, sage advice, keep in mind, too, that this only works as advice if you don't lie to the players (and likely yourselves).

@arkandel said in The Desired Experience:

@tmr I feel like that's not (entirely) on staff.

We can agree to disagree then.

What is the expectation here? You can offer someone a role for their character and provide them with some hooks into that role.

The expectation here is that if staff says that a given character is, and I quote, "an important shopkeeper role" that there might be something about that shop that brings RP there and gives its proprietor a little bit of the thin end of a wedge into the game's RP.

In this specific case I'm thinking of it wasn't. The shop was never visited by anybody (including the staff's own characters—the same staff who recommended it as an important role). Hell, most of the characters were off out of the town the shop was in doing things and almost nobody was ever actually in the town. Where the "important shopkeeper role" was.

That's on staff. They're the ones who said the shopkeeper was an important role specifically in the context of a question that boiled down to "which characters will best be able to find RP?" What really happened, I suspect, was that they wanted to expand on the town-side RP so thought suggesting a townie was a way to do that. Only it wasn't because smart people (or at least people familiar with the game) knew that the town was Deadville in RP terms. Only stupid newbs who actually asked got shafted.

(This was well over a decade ago. Maybe even two. Yes I'm still bitter over it.)

Being a shopkeeper is one additional reason for other PCs to interact with theirs that someone coming in 'blind' wouldn't otherwise get. … But as a business owner others have a reason to go to them.

They just didn't.

@jomomomo I would do anything for love … but I won't get vaxxed!

@il-volpe said in The Desired Experience:

I will even notice that the area is deadsville and yet be extra naive about it, assuming that staff's attempt to grow that area will include making it attractive.

I have been this sucker an embarrassing number of times.

Later, if I bother to inquire, I'll learn that staff feel there aren't enough players for them to bother giving the ones who exist something to do, and are mystified that players walk instead of waiting indefinitely.

And I've seen this lack of all capacity for rational thought an infuriating number of times.