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Some questions I wanna ask about a future RP idea
Topic Started: March 26, 2015, 12:56 pm (1,638 Views)
Onime No Ryu
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I'll be your Undertaker this evening
Was just thinking about how since Sin's gonna be leaving soon we'll need something to attempt to be the juggernaut that VoC was. The big thing about Sin's RPs is that somehow they manage to please darn near everyone, and she does a lot of work to provide lots of things that motivate people. I had some ideas that people might be able to incorporate into their own ideas if they wanted, but of course those ideas aren't really worth sharing if the playerbase has no interest in them, so this topic is for that aspect of the discussion.

As for me personally, while I'm still working with AN I do have another idea that's "in the works." AN was something I kind of threw out on a whim to try and get something more free-form going, since VoC was very "go here, do that" kind of storyheavy, but this RP would be a more fleshed out kind of thing with the traditional Main and Side Quests available. A lot of these ideas will relate to my specific idea.


STATS:
I liked Sin's stat system but there were a few things I found to be sort of flaws with it. For instance, Dexterity seems to be the one to rule them all, because while Vitality covers all health and defense in general and Intelligence covers magic defense, with enough dexterity a character can avoid ever getting hit at all. So putting just enough points into Vitality to survive at lower levels and then pumping everything else into Dexterity and whatever your damage stat of choice is would, eventually, result in a character who was too fast to be hit and too accurate to miss even if they were kind of a glass cannon.

Intelligence as a whole also seemed kind of pointless, because Vitality could increase all forms of defense and people got to decide how much damage their magic skills did on their own, without the intelligence stat actually playing any part in it. So rather than having a Magic Power, Magic Accuracy, Magic Defense, Casting Speed, etc stat, we just had a Magic Defense stat that could just as easily be replaced by the Overall Defense stat.

So I tried to design a simpler stat system that had more concrete effects and this was what I came up with:

HP: Any point placed here would be multiplied by 10, and damage would be done during battles.
MP: Any point placed here would be multiplied by 10, and it'd be used up as Skills/Spells were used during battles.
STR: Physical strength, the values here would give bonuses to physical attacks.
SPD: Movement speed, values here would determine the character's ability to dodge and move on a map
SKL: Skill, values here would determine accuracy, give a bonus to defending against both physical and magical attacks, and enable more "mental" types of actions to be more successful, like lockpicking
SPT: Spiritual power, gives a bonus to magical attacks

At first glance Skill seems to be the one to rule them all, but without either Strength or Spirit you wouldn't be able to do enough damage to their HP to kill them even if you hit them more than they hit you. If they have Speed or their own Skill they can defend or dodge, and if they have more Strength or Spirit they can one shot you by getting off a lucky hit.

That said I definitely feel this is lacking and would like feedback on it.


CHARACTER CREATION:
You guys know me, both in the past and present I've been a real hardass about the types of characters people create. But me bitching doesn't accomplish anything, and I thought about it for a while and came up with this:

One of my biggest problems is that, in my opinion, people are always trying to out-badass each other. People want their characters to be strong and special and important. There's sometimes a disconnect between what our stats say we're capable of, what our backstories say we're capable of, what the in-game feats say we're capable of, and what the players think their characters should be capable of. So I tried to bait the hook with things that I thought would help people be the badasses they want to be while improving their characters at the same time: Character Challenges.

The idea behind this is that there's a specific list of challenges posted at character creation for the RP, and people would state what challenges they're going for in their character sheet. Then, the RP leader and some perhaps randomly selected other players would, in private, discuss the completed character and decide if they meet the criteria of the challenge. If they feel the player has succeeded, then the player gets an award of more stat points to put into their character.

For instance:
"Make a character that's different from your "usual" archetype, not only in combat style but in general personality and other traits." For me that's martial artists, for Kaze that's big bulky tanks, for Matt it's generic heroes, so on and so forth.

"Make a character that scores below 25 on any one of these three Mary Sue Tests while being totally and brutally self-honest about your planned story arc for that character."

And so on and so forth.

Another aspect of giving players more access to stat points is to possibly let them use their starter funds--for instance, we usually get something like 100 gold or rupees or whatever at the start of every RP--to purchase more points. I think this should only be implemented at the very beginning of the RP, though, because otherwise currency loses its function as a means to get equipment and items because people could just pump it into getting stat points so that they don't need the equipment or items.

By using these two ideas I think it would let people start out at power levels that, while not broken, might be more comfortable for them--and at the same time, it would force them to make some kind of token, at the least, effort towards making a more well written or at least horizon-broadening character.


WORLD BUILDING AND LORE:
A lot of our RPs come off as being an attempt to do a kind of epic adventure novel series sort of thing. I mean, look at the scale of VotM, VoC, the old CoH, so on and so forth. But in RPs where we're not using an established setting that we know like the back of our hands, players seem to congregate on the railroads of the plotline because, as AN shows, they don't really want to do free-form on their own without someone telling them what's going on. And epic novel series like Lord of the Rings, Wheel of Time, so on and so forth always have tons and tons and tons of lore and shit in their world. That's why fantasy nerds love it, because they can really get into the nitty gritty and feel like they are in that world. For RPers I feel like this is really important, because roleplaying is about immersing yourself, and if you have no idea what the world your character lives in is like, that's harder.

So for my in the works idea, I was thinking about writing up a shitton of lore, just as much as I could possibly think of. After editting it and making it less of a pain in the ass to read, I would also open up any blank spaces to player ideas, so that you guys could create your own lore and we could incorporate it all into the world. Once we really had this concrete feeling of what the world was like, what it was about, so on and so forth, I feel like we'd enjoy playing in it that much more.

But the problem is, that on the PLAYER'S part it would require some actual effort to READ and UNDERSTAND the lore. Like I said, I don't plan to make it a huge wall of text that's overly flowery. But no matter how much I trim it down, you've got to be willing to read it and think about what it means in order to make any use of it. There's simply no other way to do it.


HOW TO MAKE A STRONG INTRODUCTION:
I feel like one area where my RPs are extremely lacking are in their intro scenes. I can almost never get them right or get them to accomplish what I want, and it affects the pacing and storytelling of the RP. Does anyone have some advice about this?


I feel like I had more to write but my train of thought is running out of fuel so I'll leave it here for now and open up the floor to discussion.
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Person A
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Best to sleep on it.
...Alright, I'll try tackling these one at a time and see how that goes...

I'd like to believe it's not just that Sin puts in a lot of work into the RP - which goes without saying, with all those drawings and plans and whatnot - but it's also her personality as a whole. She's patient, goes through everyone's ideas, reasons them out well enough to make them work within her RP's world, all with the lightest snark at best and hardly any arguments. With that and a lot of time devoted to the RP - making original quality stuff, mind you - it's hard to really emulate. The content itself, though, was railroad-y, and I'm going to say that it might be better to do that after all. Sorry for suggesting the "sandbox" idea in the first place :ermm:

See, the thing about Sin's stats in the first place is that it was hardly present in the RP's context, more in the background and out-of-the-way. Sure, you could say X was faster than Y, or A is more durable than B, but at the end of the day it was a rough estimate rather than a completely solid, specific definition. I looked at it as a way to justify certain actions in the narrative, like Aria closing into Xing quickly, or Volke getting shot down with an arrow (Shut up about him, by the way, one arrow hurts a lot), or Sera blasting down so many enemies with a simple fireball spell. Basically, the stat justified the method in the RP. Gameplay justifying the narrative, if it was a game.

In contrast, let's look at your stat system. You're selling it as "simpler" but right away there's a HP and MP stat, which pretty much means that you'll be limited right from the get-go and need to calculate numbers to figure things out. Sure, it's definitely more "concrete" in that it'll affect the RP, but it also gives a hard cap on what you can do. If you're worried about that apparent problem about the age-old "THESE ROLEPLAYERS NEED TO KNOW WHEN THEY HAVE TO STOP BECAUSE THEIR CHARACTER IS RIDICULOUS," I'm fairly certain we've called other people on that. Multiple times. Maybe it hasn't worked in some cases, but those're special cases that shall not be named.

But I digress. My opinion on this stat system is that it's suddenly taking the justification and becoming the method. Suddenly I have to calculate how much damage Volke will take from this next attack, or how much he's suddenly doing. Suddenly, I can't have him getting KO'd immediately for a narrative dramatic point because that wouldn't make sense with the HP system. Suddenly an English major is forced to do math and he's being a little bitch about doing basic subtraction. What I'm saying is, the stats weren't in-your-face about it in Veil of Chaos. Doing so here makes it a pain to keep track of when all I want to do is write a narrative.

I don't like stats that much is what I'm saying, but Sin implemented it just fine.

Volke's a dork that still loves storytime and Ritzea's a proud, incorrigible know-it-all. I think I'm OK in the out-badass-ing category. Because, c'mon, let's be honest, neither of those characters had a moment where they were "badass." :V

With that said, I'm comfortable with characterization being a major focus. Stepping out of it isn't a bad thing at all, true, but then it needs some direction, some familiarity to make it work. Character challenges by itself is a good idea, sure, but I'd say to not go overboard with it. Maybe some minor things, like a different way of writing an archetype rather than a completely different and new thing. Because new things are scary. Conservatives FTW.


Characters and stats, then. Minor suggestion. Keep the "buy stats with money" idea throughout, make weapons add a multiplier to the base stat but much more expensive. That way there's incentive to buy weapons, but it takes longer and you need to save up for it - and suffer in the short term. So make it short term with increasing stats, long term buying weapons and armor.

I can't see anything wrong with that, but there probably is something wrong with it I'm missing. I tend to miss the smallest things, heh.


Lore. Lore lore lore lore lore lore.

Golly geez.

For one, don't make ultimatums. It looks like you don't even care to argue with it, and that makes me A Sad Person. :unsure:

What's the lore we know about for Veil of Chaos? Dragons and elves made a hybrid, one went to sleep to get away from genocide, came back when there was a war going on. That's it. The rest of the history? Stuff in actual characters. So let's add those. Virgin Mary Queen vs Incompetent Necro-King. Since it's a continuation of Veil of the Malfested? Throw in the past bits that happened there...

But y'know what's the best part?

It's not required to know what Veil of the Malfested was all about. It's not in-your-face about it. It's there if you need it. It'll help your experience if you go through it. But other than that, it's hardly presented. It's a need-to-know basis, and when it comes up, it's justified and readily acknowledged by everyone. It helps that Sin had a sort of "wrap-up" in Veil of the Malfested, before Veil of Chaos started.

So let's look at Veil of the Malfested's lore instead.

Continent! Weird black mist that eats souls! Bad Guy Did It! You're a X! Go fight Bad Guy!

Short. Simple. Lore is present, but lore comes up whenever it's called for and needed. It should be like an iceberg, where you see only 10% of the entirety of it. The relevant stuff. The other 90% should be mentioned at best, expanded upon only when it's relevant to the plot or character motivation/development and stuff like that. Whenever it's interesting to the reader at the time. None of this "come up with it as you go" stuff. None of this "one-shot-but-incredibly-developed character" crap. No flowery language. It's presented reasonably, well-written, and in such a way that it isn't a slog to read through. It's shorter and simpler, but it does have a reliance on the GM to have made a good backstory of the world. It also means the participates shouldn't be building the world without the GM approving of it.

With that said.

Sure, write up a shitton of lore. Just don't expect to put it in such a way that everyone has to read it immediately, or anything like that. Get the players invested in the story first, through their characters, their personalities, interacting with others, the plot, and then flesh out all of that with the lore. For example, Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky FC's lore involves (spoilering this...) A war between the Kingdom that serves as the game's setting and its neighboring Empire. They had a war ten years ago, and now there's a sinister plot that's going on. Is it relevant? Yes, but the Empire isn't directly involved in said plot. It's explained as the motive of the main villain, but you didn't have to know about it beforehand. The invention of orbments in the game 50 years ago, which is basically that world's version of the Industrial Revolution? Involved in the main plot, but it's told to you only if you look for it. If you don't? The game tells you when it becomes relevant to the plot. The giant dragon that terrorized the world briefly, but disappeared when airships were invented? A neat backstory, part of the lore, but only exists to build the world. Nothing else.

With that said.

If you want to write up a backstory, build up a world, all of that, it's necessary to do it in such a way that it keeps the reader's attention. Fed slowly, savoring each bite like the sweetest chocolate cake, or the savoriest steak. Not just a constant stream of information just shoved into your mouth constantly, like potato chips or cookies. So, basically, the presentation of all that information is also incredibly important. Once that's done, it shouldn't be an issue for the player to be immersed into the world, because you'll have already done it.

Also don't do infodumps of lore. No one wants to read through it anyways. And it could spoil stuff you have planned for the RP anyways, right?


As for a strong introduction... Well. You want a comparison? Veil of Chaos's introduction jumped people immediately into the fray, got them to test out those weapons and abilities that we hyped up in our heads, got them tried out immediately in a situation that allowed it. (Admittedly, some characters didn't start there because of the narrative. Or because they woke up in a barrel somehow). Astral Novus had... lots of information shoved in about some locations that didn't matter to the players at the time. And probably wouldn't be until later down the line. Followed by the free-form, which, admittedly, didn't work. I'm sorry for suggesting it. Again. :ermm:

So... pretty much just give the amount of info you think the player needs at the time, rather than all the info you want to give out. Bloating participants with information is never the best way to start a RP. I think that's the main issue for some of the RPs. End of Times and Etrian Odyssey being prominent examples... :ermm:


Bonus image!

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Mover, Shaker,
Brute and Breaker.

Master, Tinker,
Blaster and Thinker,

Striker, Changer,
Trump and Stranger.

Worm: Power Classifications
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Kazemitsu
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Assassin
Mk this is gonna be 'bout the stuff I like in an rp. Dunno if anyone else will have the same likes or not but whatever.

Railroading vs free form. I prefer having a definite goal to work towards aside from "get stronger". Normally I don't think of goals for myself because A: Can't be bothered and B: My goals would feel unoriginal. Lastly C: They might go against what the admin wants and getting ideas shot down left and right is extremely demoralizing.

Which is why I'm always a follower and not a leader. As a follower I just follow you guys around and be your meatshield. Not that you need it since you all have demi-god speed and reflexes. You rarely get hurt unless it's from a damn boss (90% of the time).

As for stats. They're fine and all FOR PVP ONLY. A definite cap when fighting another person. None of the hp mp crap. To much stuff for people to think about for something that's supposed to be fun, not a math project. Ranks are fine, they act as a "power cap" for our abilities so we don't split the world in 2 with a megaton fart.

Character challenges, aka a quest, all well and good. No complaints until you try to get people out of their comfort zone. We all have a comfort zone and we've all experimented. I've made my assassin types, a mage at one point, a nimble warrior, and of course my juggernauts. I get more joy from the juggernauts and they make more of an impact, to me, when they fight. Whenever I played ANY of the others...their stuff was brushed off or completely avoided. Which is why I play my juggernauts. You avoid one thing, counter, and I rip you in two, or would if people didn't auto-dodge.

Lore was covered pretty much by Person so I don't really have anything to say about that. Even if it's all thrown out there I pick away at it slowly when it becomes relevant to what I'm doing.

A lot of our rps flop because we try for an intro that isn't exciting. Sin's tend to get us right into the nitty gritty. The rest of us...well we try to build up to that and the rp's start slow and stay slow because we had to slog through a bunch of bs to get to the face mashings.

That's all I got. Read my ramblings if ya can.
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Sin
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Slow and steady...
Let me start by saying that my RPs being held as the standard is certainly VERY flattering and I'm glad that everyone was able to look forward to my RPs and get so hyped and pumped for them. It tells me that I did a good job in bringing you guys something that you really wanted to be a part of! :)

Now, I'll try and explain my method when making RPs and I'll do my best to keep it in the order that I actually do things.



To start, the honest truth is that my RPs often stem from a single, very simple idea. The idea changes between the RPs, but it's usually only one or two different things that start the whole process rolling.

The first run of "The End, The Beginning" that I did with another community started with a single character. I'd always had a fascination with Norse Mythology and really enjoyed reading about the characters and what they did. I had bought a game called Valkyrie Profile 2: Silmeria and had played through it, loving every second. For those that don't know, that game and the one before it are based on Norse Mythology. One of my favorite characters in the game was Freya. I loved everything about her from her attitude to the way that she moved (she floated around and thought very highly of herself and for those who know, those are two of MY Freya's major character traits). So "The End, The Beginning" came from my creation of Freya. She was a contrast to the game's Freya as my version appeared much younger, behaved in a much more juvenile fashion and was more unpredictable. From Freya, I started to mull over ideas for a whole world containing my own versions of these characters. Odin was a suave fellow who wore a suit and was generally apathetic to all things. Frigg was his quite, docile wife. Thor was the massive hulking remnants of a man contained within a mechanical suit with a gentle heart. Loki appeared more kingly and, while still chaotic in nature, had a method and reason for his madness. Hel was a vain, narcissistic demonic entity who stole the bodies of beautiful young women to occupy until age or injuries forced her to seek out a new one. Heimdall was an android who acted as the experienced master who trained the next generation. Tyr was a mass-produced cyborg created by Heimdall and twisted by Odin. Beowulf, Weyland, Siegfried and and original character Reyme were a wandering band of fighters.

As I came up with these ideas for characters, the world just naturally grew and grew and as I talked to the members of the site about it, they became more and more enthusiastic about turning it in to something. It wasn't an RP site, but "The End, The Beginning" ended up being the first RP the site ever hosted and it ran for a very long time.

"Veil of the Malfested" came from my trying to come up with an idea with an open world, but not too big. So I came up with the idea of an otherworldly miasma that kept everyone on a single continent. That gave me the freedom of a large established world without having to fill the whole world in. So, characters could come from the outside (before the miasma settled obviously), and they wouldn't be out of place. Once the world was made, I began filling it with characters and ideas that helped to build the lore up within the world without actually allowing access to places outside of Etella.

Atlas was the first character I finished for the RP. Atlas' portrait was actually originally a re-draw for Loki waaaaay back for the first "The End, The Beginning" on that site I spoke of above. The RP died before it was implemented though and I went on to use the portrait, renamed to Atlas Molgrave, for a character in another RP I ran there called "Memoires of Atlantis" (which was Atlantis' first appearance as well). That was when I first discovered the group I'm with now. Onime joined "Memoires of Atlantis" and I changed sites shortly after that because the admin of my old site became bitter because I was visiting both.

So anyway, back to "Veil of the Malfested"...

Honestly, the Night Heralds of that world only came to me at about the time Tel was destroyed. I hadn't any solid ideas as to where Atlas' power came from. I only knew that I wanted him to be something beyond human. So the Heralds came in to play and I decided that he was one of them that found a way to escape the Night World. During his escape, the Miasma that came to encircle the continent escaped with him.

The idea of killing everyone's characters came to me at about that time as well. I had always tried to keep ideas flowing concerning new occurrences in our RPs. Some of us have been RPing together for so long that the idea well had pretty much dried up. Killing everyone off and introducing them to the Night Heralds just seemed to fit perfectly. I was able to explain Atlas' origin, give everyone a bump up in power and a new overlying goal that could push them forward and it all fit together nicely and made sense.

With "Veil of Chaos", another idea about something new came to me in the form of allowing people to carry characters over because as far as I know, while many of us re-use characters we've used before, it's never been done in a way that actually maintained continuity. The characters were always molded to fit the new setting and not the other way around. So the people who participated in the first were able to bring their characters over and have them venture into a new setting that continued from the old one. That to me was a big reason there was so much hype about "Veil of Chaos" starting; the prospect of characters carrying over and the appearances of some favorites from the past (and trust me, I still plan on having EVERYONE I mentioned in that thread back at the beginning make an appearance).

So, the first finished idea that really got me moving on "Veil of Chaos" was Ferraah. I wanted to build an idea about a super race created from two powerful existing races. Elves were obvious because they were so much more magically inclined than anyone else. The second was dragons because of their power and it let me add a lot of raw power to Ferraah both in appearance and ability that I don't think I would've been able to convincingly explain any other way. The fact that she can shoot massive beams of energy out of her mouth or that she can consume hearts, grow scales all over her both or roar and debilitate those around her can all be explained by an Elf/Dragon hybrid and to me, it seems like a fresh idea. Having her able to instil so much fear in to ally and enemy alike just made it all the better.

After she was finished, I needed an opponent who represented everything opposite Ferraah. I had always loved Atlantis as a character and other than "Memoires of Atlantis", she's never really gotten to stretch her legs, so to speak. She came to be the natural foil and once those two were established, it just came down to filling in the gaps.

The way the RP worked was another point that I dwelled on for so long. I wanted to make something new again that would allow everyone to potentially have powerful characters and FEEL like it without overshadowing Ferraah. So it came to me that a Dynasty Warriorrs-esque set up would be best since it allowed people to mow through hordes of enemies yet still meet their match against others capable of doing it as well (and in all honesty, even at this early point, most characters have killed more enemies than RPs that have run for hundreds of pages).

The Night World was something that I wanted to make a return appearance because the lore behind it was just so exciting to me. Plus the return of Noel, someone who people seemed to like, seemed like an emotional event that just couldn't be passed up.



Now... statistics.

This is something I always do in my own RPs; it's just as simple as that. To me, it adds another layer of character building that gives players a chance to build something beyond who their character behaves. I never complicate it; simplicity is a must since no one wants to have to become a physicist in order to participate and as mentioned above, it typically isn't the be-all end-all of all things within the RP. My statistic systems more often than not only act as a fence to keep things from getting too ridiculous. If your character lacks dexterity but keeps dodging everything, you'll eventually get called on it since it's outside of your character's boundaries to avoid everything.

Binding weapons and equipment to statistics was something I first started with "Veil of the Malfested" since it added yet another layer of character building to everything and from feedback received thus far, it was greatly enjoyed.

You guys seem to like all of these things so I make sure to bring them back each time. Being able to take the points you have and determine right from the start exactly what kind of character you'll have is a treat. Looking through all of the available items and choosing what you want now and in the future is a lot of fun to do. "Oh, if I get two more levels I can put five points in to my strength and finally get that sword I've wanted!"

All of it adds to the experience and it makes it easy to give out rewards within the RP as well. RPs without such things just never seem as rewarding. If there are no stats, no items to buy and collect and no levels to grow, beating a big bad boss just doesn't seem as thrilling. Going up against something big and terrifying and fighting it seems more exciting when you're wondering what the reward will be on the other side and I believe that that's a VERY powerful push to keep people interested. You're always wondering what's coming next.



When I populate my RPs with characters (an continue to do so as the RP keeps going), I try to make as diverse a cast as I can to try and fill the standard tropes that people have come to know, love and hate. Atlantis, for example, is the very definition of benevolence. Everything she does is to make the world as good as she can for when her daughter takes over. Those she protects come first. Adrien is someone not ready or fit for leadership and goes about everything in as selfish a manner as he can. When Onime said that he lost a lot of respect for Adrien the first time I posted with him that delighted me more than I can even explain because that's EXACTLY the feeling I wanted him to give to everyone. He's NOT someone who should be ruling. He's a snivelling snake that stole his position and commands no respect so he has to force it. Mercury is supposed to seem vulnerable and she's supposed to seem weak but there's also supposed to be a glimpse of power there. You all are supposed to see what her mother and Angelo see. She WILL be Queen one day and she WILL fill her mother's shoes.

I try my best to keep my characters unique within the world but I'm not ignorant enough to think I succeed every time. Some are better than others and some will be more appreciated while others won't. That's just how things work. But, if I set out to impose a particular feeling toward a character (Adrien for example) and you all actually FEEL what I want you to, then that to me is a success.



When it comes to lore within my worlds, I tend to do exactly what Person A said we should aim for when we make our RPs. No one wants to read pages upon pages of lore and backstory for an RP that hasn't even started yet. I personally aim to provide just what's needed. A short build up to establish a setting or to get the story moving. Most of the rest is filled in as we go along by characters or by discoveries made within the RP itself.

With "The End, the Beginning", the only information provided was a battle between Odin, who was a good but elderly man who spoke with confidence and fought with skill and Loki who took the visage of a seemingly decrepit old man before revealing himself as the trickster he actually was. The battle went back and forth before Loki escaped. When the RP started, Odin was a very different person. He was much younger and more malevolent in his behavior while Loki was much quieter and more reserved. It was explained that Ragnarok was something that occurred every one hundred years and at the climax of the battle, most participants were destroyed. Then, the world was "reset", all of the Norse Gods who participated were "reincarnated" into new beings and everything started over again. There were a few who survived and they were the ones responsible for continuing the pattern. As the RP pressed on, the players would be found responsible for ENDING the cycle and freeing everyone from a never ending war that never had a victor.

All of that information (apart from the fight at the start) was revealed throughout the run of the RP and it was more engaging and more easily absorbed because it was all given within context and not just paragraph after paragraph in the first post before anyone had even made a character yet. So it was all learned for the first time when it came up within the RP and because of that, it was more interesting and helped to push everyone toward the next clue.

"Veil of the Malfested" and "Veil of Chaos" were both presented in a similar fashion. Small bits of information relevant to the plot were presented beforehand and everything else was (and will) play out as the RPs progressed (progresses).

Onime and NT both have bad habits of just bombing everyone with information that, quite frankly, isn't needed for us to get engaged with and enjoy the RP. When it comes to backstory and lore before we've even started; less is more.



At the end of the day, I aim to make something fun, engaging and something that you guys enjoy talking about. The amount of banter about "Veil of Chaos" in the chatbox before the RP even started had me so delighted I could stop talking about it to my husband. It warmed my heart to see my friends so interested in something I worked hard on and it kept driving me forward even on days where I felt crappy and didn't want to. I want you guys to be happy and to have fun and that's the core objective in everything RP that I make. If you guys are having fun, then I'm having fun. It's rare I see anyone so attached to their characters like they are within the worlds that I've created.

Someday, Veil 3 will come to exist and I can only hope that you're all willing to experience it alongside me.

:)
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Shiny
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I'm out of title ideas
Tossing in my sack of change.

I'd say just don't have a stat system at all. If it's like Persona's saying VoC's system was, where it's just kind of a background thing that gave rough estimates of someone's strengths/weaknesses and occasionally served to justify something IC, it seems kinda superfluous. Whereas if it's more concrete, then it's making things more complicated and giving us a bunch of extra manual bookkeeping with things like HP/MP numbers and the like. And yeah, there's also Persona's point about it limiting narrative options and all that, don't really have anything to add to that though.

For the character challenges system, I sort of like the general idea there, encouraging people to experiment a bit, but a few issues. First being the question of, okay, extra points work if stats are a thing, but what else would there be to offer as incentive if they aren't? Though admittedly that'd depend on where the majority support sits/how set you are on them to know if it's even an issue. Second, also sorta dependent on the stat system, is that if the rewards are big enough to matter, it seems kinda heavy-handed. "These guys over here, they decided to do something new or jump through some specific hoops like the Sue thing or whatever. Their reward is being Better Than You because you stuck with what you know."

Third, the archetype thing seems kinda...subjective for some cases. Like in some cases it's obvious, for how little I've been in/read outside Pokemon here even I can tell Kaze has A Type, and I'll take you at your word on you and Matt, but like. Persona, say. Does he have as easily peggable an archetype (other than DKC Plagiarist, I mean)? Or Ygg, is there a particular blatant thread running through her character concepts that I'm missing/failing to remember? Or, from a different angle, me. I've been in two things here, one of which died early, and only Persona and Emin (and KOG, but he barely even comes around here so eh) have RPed with me elsewhere for any major length of time. Short of handing off judging duties entirely to them or something, how do you tell what's experimental and what's me recycling an old mainstay?

Would also ask how the Sue one works, exactly. Is it scored by you and/or the other reviewers from information given? Does the guy making the character go through and run the numbers, and it's honor system that they'll quote what they got and not shave bits off? Do they make a list like "check 1, 5, 5a, 13, 34, 34b, 53... in the first one" for you to punch in? Something else? Seems like there's a way for it to get skewed to some degree no matter how you slice that.

Last up, Lore. Persona's said a bunch on how to handle it I mostly agree with and I don't have much to see to expand on his points, but I've got some other bits to toss out.

First, wondering how the building works under your model. Like, do you post your giant pile of lore beforehand and have people fill out the blank spaces before it starts, or do you put up yours before/when/shortly after start and have people fill it in as they go?

If it's the former, it might work, if you could avoid being horribly infodumpy, but it also seems like it'd bog things down a bit with people having to fill in all the blanks and having to figure out what bits to go with if people have ideas that contradict each other (or the original lore).

In the latter case, not sure how compatible extensive lore and players filling in stuff would be, at least for an original setting under a single GM. If you've got extensive lore, then people might be inadvertently contradicting spoilery stuff if they just drop details in, and then you have to stop and hash things out. If you want them to be able to easily just toss ideas in as they go, you'd probably be better off going in the other direction entirely and making a bare bones setting with just enough defined for a plot to happen and let the details get built along the way. I have seen the balancing act more or less work before, but it was usually when the setting was something pre-existing, like Hyrule, where everyone already knew and/or could look up in 15 seconds all the setting info and lore and stuff so we all knew what the baseline was before we took it off the rails by making up more. And either we had no one person running things, or the GM role was more focused on enforcing the basic rules and occasionally setting some large scale stuff into motion and had no more importance than anyone else re: defining the fiddly details of things.

Really, if you want a partly player defined setting, simplest, smoothest, least-infodump-needing way to do it'd probably be like. Ask people what broad strokes or key points they want in a setting/story/etc. in advance and just write it all up from there on your own. Maybe with some small window of "here's the cliff notes of what I've got, last call if there's anything people want to argue for changing" before starting or something. And then just give us the (potentially revised) cliff notes to run with and then do the slow feed of the details later.
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Primera Espada Yggdra
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I'm not the best at answering complex questions, but I'll answer the best I can.

Stats... I prefer from very little stats to simple stats like Sin's. Persona and Shiny have already stated the drawbacks of having a complex stat system. Pokemon for example. While your Pokemon can train to become stronger, generally it is simple enough that you can narrate how your Pokemon performs within reason. The dice system is used to calculate status effects while making note of an increase in a Pokemon's combat capability like physical attack and speed but it helps on the narrative in regards to how a Pokemon battles. As I stated before, the combat system was going to be like a fusion of the anime and the games.

For my future roleplays after Pokemon, I plan on implementing a stat and weapon system inspired by Sin and perhaps Niroth as well.




Character creation... I've been trying to experiment with a lot of different archetypes lately. Zoey for example, is perhaps the rudest character I've created. She lives her life lying, stealing and cheating and as you can see, she's trying to exploit from the other characters. Ammy on the other hand is an honest and well-meaning girl. She tries her best to be polite and surprisingly for me, she's ended up keeping certain characters together and of all people, was the one who ended up stopping a fight.

Being badass, everyone on the site's wanted their character like that, heck I'm guilty of this myself, and we don't like it when our characters end up falling behind usually. I'm guilty of this too. Character challenges sound interesting though.

I usually tend to do an in between of guiding characters and giving them opportunities to explore, I'd say in the middle with Sin on one side and Onime and NTNP on the other. To be honest, I'm not used to doing free form roleplays (I'm still waiting for Persona to post).

I agree with Sin on revealing information gradually though, as much as I do get tempted to spoil stuff, and hopefully I can learn from this and create an interesting roleplay in the future for everyone, because Pokemon doesn't appeal to all members here simply because it's deemed kiddy.

Intro scenes... can't help you here. Sometimes I feel like my intro scenes suck too and even if someone disagrees that it doesn't, I don't have the confidence to agree to the disagreement. XD

I just miiiiiiiiiiiiight copy Sin in some way. Or NTNP. Or Persona. Or myself.


Now at the end of the day, I like to do my best to make roleplays enjoyable for people. As Sin once told me, I can't always say yes to everything and I agree with that, but I also want to help players... roleplay their characters to the fullest possible. Similar to how Sin felt, I was happy enough that people did join my roleplay and it made me happier when I saw that people were having fun and had ideas in mind for their characters in the future (The Pokemon group has submitted a lot of ideas to me via PM and Skype. Shiny is helping me out as a sort of book keeper). I'll admit that I do feel like shit sometimes and this can slow down activity in addition to tons of homework and essays. I've always wanted to do my best to finish roleplays, and when I see other people carrying on, it gives me motivation.

In the future, I have two different roleplay ideas that I want to implement and I'll let people choose... either a modern spiritual fantasy roleplay or a medievalish to early modern fantasy roleplay. The modern one is the one I presented in my files while the medieval one has only been seen by Sin and to a lesser extent, Jaina. I'm just hoping that at least one of them will appeal to the community in the future.
Edited by Primera Espada Yggdra, March 27, 2015, 1:02 am.
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Because...


My Imagination When talking with you. - Person A

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Person A
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Primera Espada Yggdra
March 27, 2015, 1:01 am
Being badass, everyone on the site's wanted their character like that, heck I'm guilty of this myself, and we don't like it when our characters end up falling behind usually. I'm guilty of this too. Character challenges sound interesting though.
No, not really. Apart from maybe joking, haven't really considered making "badass" characters since... Gryphon Wing. Or The End of Times if we want to consider mini-RPs like that. I consider that and EO and Austin's RP to be the mini ones that hardly count.

Having a character fall behind would honestly be pretty damn great if you ask me. Gives you so many opportunities to branch out and develop your character. Vulnerable state to help shed some backstory. A desire to become stronger. Being the comedic butt monkey sort of character. Be the dramatic traitor who suddenly becomes dangerous. There's a lot of ways to go from it, and these four were just off the top of my head.

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(I'm still waiting for Persona to post).


No offense, but, uh, who's still invested in it...? All the plans I had for it went down and then to the ground. And, uh, that stupid fiasco. It sort of sunk my motivation for it.

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I just miiiiiiiiiiiiight copy Sin in some way. Or NTNP. Or Persona. Or myself.


I... don't think the intro to Etrian was any good. If I could go back and change somethings I probably would. Like insisting on a large group... Onime's old idea about a duo group thing could've worked wonders since I was already doing that with some NPCs I had planned...

...Er, but yes what are you copying anyways? And how do you copy yourself? Posted Image

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In the future, I have two different roleplay ideas that I want to implement and I'll let people choose... either a modern spiritual fantasy roleplay or a medievalish to early modern fantasy roleplay. The modern one is the one I presented in my files while the medieval one has only been seen by Sin and to a lesser extent, Jaina. I'm just hoping that at least one of them will appeal to the community in the future.


Never hurt to have a co-admin help you out with these things. If Onime here is doing the Mega Man Legends 3 thing (having the community help develop it), can't hurt to try something else too. I don't think I've ever seen co-adminship of a RP here yet. Officially, at least.

No I'm not asking you to tell me your ideas, they're just suggestions.
Edited by Person A, March 27, 2015, 2:12 am.
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Mover, Shaker,
Brute and Breaker.

Master, Tinker,
Blaster and Thinker,

Striker, Changer,
Trump and Stranger.

Worm: Power Classifications
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Onime No Ryu
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Yay so much useful feedback. Thanks everyone. I'll try to get to all of your responses but for right now here's the response to the first response, which means Persona.

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I'd like to believe it's not just that Sin puts in a lot of work into the RP - which goes without saying, with all those drawings and plans and whatnot - but it's also her personality as a whole. She's patient, goes through everyone's ideas, reasons them out well enough to make them work within her RP's world, all with the lightest snark at best and hardly any arguments. With that and a lot of time devoted to the RP - making original quality stuff, mind you - it's hard to really emulate.


You sayin' I ain't patient and reasonable? You callin' me snarky and argumentative?

:V

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See, the thing about Sin's stats in the first place is that it was hardly present in the RP's context, more in the background and out-of-the-way. Sure, you could say X was faster than Y, or A is more durable than B, but at the end of the day it was a rough estimate rather than a completely solid, specific definition. I looked at it as a way to justify certain actions in the narrative, like Aria closing into Xing quickly, or Volke getting shot down with an arrow (Shut up about him, by the way, one arrow hurts a lot), or Sera blasting down so many enemies with a simple fireball spell. Basically, the stat justified the method in the RP. Gameplay justifying the narrative, if it was a game.

In contrast, let's look at your stat system. You're selling it as "simpler" but right away there's a HP and MP stat, which pretty much means that you'll be limited right from the get-go and need to calculate numbers to figure things out. Sure, it's definitely more "concrete" in that it'll affect the RP, but it also gives a hard cap on what you can do. If you're worried about that apparent problem about the age-old "THESE ROLEPLAYERS NEED TO KNOW WHEN THEY HAVE TO STOP BECAUSE THEIR CHARACTER IS RIDICULOUS," I'm fairly certain we've called other people on that. Multiple times. Maybe it hasn't worked in some cases, but those're special cases that shall not be named.

But I digress. My opinion on this stat system is that it's suddenly taking the justification and becoming the method. Suddenly I have to calculate how much damage Volke will take from this next attack, or how much he's suddenly doing. Suddenly, I can't have him getting KO'd immediately for a narrative dramatic point because that wouldn't make sense with the HP system. Suddenly an English major is forced to do math and he's being a little bitch about doing basic subtraction. What I'm saying is, the stats weren't in-your-face about it in Veil of Chaos. Doing so here makes it a pain to keep track of when all I want to do is write a narrative.

I don't like stats that much is what I'm saying, but Sin implemented it just fine.


Well, if I took HP off (I feel like I should keep MP because it's one of the few ways to limit magic I can think of) and let the rest of them stand as "comparisons" instead of concrete values that give bonuses, would that make it better?

I just feel like, if we're going to have stats at all, they need to really matter. Everything Sin says about how she uses them and why she uses them that way stands, but at the same time I just felt like, with Lee, that his stats didn't really seem to matter because the narrative seemed intent on making him inferior to anyone who had magic.

Calling people out when their characters do ridiculous things often leads to a discussion about the whole thing, which means that there's a chance that discussion could go sour and someone gets mad or hurt. The chances of that happening are pretty low, but why have that chance at all? Concrete stats that are hard caps remove any and all need for arguing and for calling people out. They would FORCE those that "shall not be named" to fix the problem, where calling them out never does. People who don't do ridiculous things in the first place wouldn't have any problems. People that only occaisonally do them wouldn't find themselves making those accidental slips. Concrete stats are a little more effort, yes. But they're not something that should completely break a person's ability to enjoy the narrative and they're such a LITTLE thing that saves so much time in other capacities. I mean, I'm not trying to discount your opinion, because I can totally see what you're saying. Yes, they do take some attention away from the narrative. Yes, they do force some math, and I agree that math totally sucks. But to me they just seem like they save us so many problems that NOT using them for those reasons sounds like petty whiny nitpicking. Again, no offense, just stating honest feelings.

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Characters and stats, then. Minor suggestion. Keep the "buy stats with money" idea throughout, make weapons add a multiplier to the base stat but much more expensive. That way there's incentive to buy weapons, but it takes longer and you need to save up for it - and suffer in the short term. So make it short term with increasing stats, long term buying weapons and armor.

I can't see anything wrong with that, but there probably is something wrong with it I'm missing. I tend to miss the smallest things, heh.


The problem with weapons being a multiplier is that multipliers, percentages, and such as that are exponential constants. Sin actually explained this one to me when I was trying to figure out some of Lee's moves, and I hadn't really realized it until then. If you have a sword that raises your attack poiwer by 25%, then at 10 Strength you get +2.5 bonus. At 20 Strength you get 5 bonus. At 100 strength you get 25 bonus. The bonus you get keeps going up--you don't HAVE to keep upgrading weapons and buying new stuff because this one sword is gonna give you more powerups the more you level up naturally. The only way to counteract that is to either set the multiplier so low that it seems pointless--for example, Iron Sword gives 1%, Steel Sword gives 2%-- or to make higher tier weapons give much larger multipliers, such as a jump from 25% to 50%. The problem with the former is that, as mentioned, it makes it seem pointless to upgrade tier by tier, and the problem with the latter is that it's such a huge jump that it will completely destroy the balance between levels because a Level 1 character who saves up enough to get a 50% multiplier weapon will just utterly annihlate anything within like, 5 levels of them.

That's why I think it'd be better to let the Buy Stats thing be a one time dohickey at the beginning of the RP, and then go to normal "Iron Sword of +3 Strength" type stuff.

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For one, don't make ultimatums. It looks like you don't even care to argue with it, and that makes me A Sad Person. :unsure:

What's the lore we know about for Veil of Chaos? Dragons and elves made a hybrid, one went to sleep to get away from genocide, came back when there was a war going on. That's it. The rest of the history? Stuff in actual characters. So let's add those. Virgin Mary Queen vs Incompetent Necro-King. Since it's a continuation of Veil of the Malfested? Throw in the past bits that happened there...

But y'know what's the best part?

It's not required to know what Veil of the Malfested was all about. It's not in-your-face about it. It's there if you need it. It'll help your experience if you go through it. But other than that, it's hardly presented. It's a need-to-know basis, and when it comes up, it's justified and readily acknowledged by everyone. It helps that Sin had a sort of "wrap-up" in Veil of the Malfested, before Veil of Chaos started.

So let's look at Veil of the Malfested's lore instead.

Continent! Weird black mist that eats souls! Bad Guy Did It! You're a X! Go fight Bad Guy!

Short. Simple. Lore is present, but lore comes up whenever it's called for and needed. It should be like an iceberg, where you see only 10% of the entirety of it. The relevant stuff. The other 90% should be mentioned at best, expanded upon only when it's relevant to the plot or character motivation/development and stuff like that. Whenever it's interesting to the reader at the time. None of this "come up with it as you go" stuff. None of this "one-shot-but-incredibly-developed character" crap. No flowery language. It's presented reasonably, well-written, and in such a way that it isn't a slog to read through. It's shorter and simpler, but it does have a reliance on the GM to have made a good backstory of the world. It also means the participates shouldn't be building the world without the GM approving of it.

With that said.

Sure, write up a shitton of lore. Just don't expect to put it in such a way that everyone has to read it immediately, or anything like that. Get the players invested in the story first, through their characters, their personalities, interacting with others, the plot, and then flesh out all of that with the lore.

With that said.

If you want to write up a backstory, build up a world, all of that, it's necessary to do it in such a way that it keeps the reader's attention. Fed slowly, savoring each bite like the sweetest chocolate cake, or the savoriest steak. Not just a constant stream of information just shoved into your mouth constantly, like potato chips or cookies. So, basically, the presentation of all that information is also incredibly important. Once that's done, it shouldn't be an issue for the player to be immersed into the world, because you'll have already done it.

Also don't do infodumps of lore. No one wants to read through it anyways. And it could spoil stuff you have planned for the RP anyways, right?


Ultimatum? I mean, I've pretty much decided that I want to create a lore heavy RP, but I don't really see it as an ultimatum...

Yes, characters' individual lores and histories should play a big part in it, I totally agree there. But that's stuff that builds up as the RP goes on, and stuff that doesn't necessarily help with immersing oneself at the very beginning. What I want to achieve is a world that, at the very beginning, is understood in a large enough capacity that players can say "Okay, I understand not only everything I NEED, but I also had a chance to look at some things I was INTERESTED in and it gave me an even better understanding, so now I feel completely prepared to jump in and start doing stuff!"

I do understand the stuff about Tip of the Iceberg Presentation. That's what I plan to do. Inside of the narrative, the information won't be too in your face or over the top. The idea is that there's going to be a separate Lore Topic, much like there are Equipment Topics and Important Announcement Topics and all that. Within that Lore Topic, the Lore will be separated out so that players can easily find what is relevant to them. For instance, if we start in the big capital city, all they have to do if they're interested in finding out more about the city is find the Locations spoiler tag, open it up and find the Capital City spoiler tag, and then read that one chunk of info. If they're not interested in anything else, they don't have to read anything else. But I want it to be THERE so that people who do find it interesting can read it, and so that if anyone is confused about anything that pops up in the RP, they can go to that topic and do some research and then they'll understand it. And by research I don't mean devoting hours to studying, I mean reading a paragraph or two. It's not that hard. I don't see why so many of my ideas have so much opposition based on "BUT WE HAVE TO DOOOOO STUFF FOR THAT TO WORK." Again, no offense, but a lot of the time I feel like people are honestly objectively lazy when it comes to these types of things.

Another thing I plan on doing for the Lore is the implementation of this text that will be applied to anything that's of extreme importance. Is knowing about the agricultural industry of the city important? Maybe not, if you don't have a character who's backstory says they come from a farm or something like that. But is knowing that there's a big haunted farmhouse where ghoulish creatures come out to eat the neighbors' sheep at night important? I mean, it sounds like it'd be important to me. And that haunted farmhouse would probably be explained somewhere in the same few paragraphs where that agricultural aspect is being talked about. So if players just want to skim for the colored text, and then read the bits around that text, that's fine too. Some little tidbits will hopefully get stuck in their head and continue to flesh out the setting for them.

As for implementing the lore as we go along, only revealing it when the characters need it, I plan to do a sort of mishmash of that. Like I said, there'll be a separate topic. They don't have to read everything at once. When the RP starts and they're in the capital city, they can read about the capital city. After a hundred posts if they've reached Podunk Village, they can go look at the entry for Podunk village. At the same time, am I going to be introducing new settings and giving a "super condensed lite version" for things as we encounter them in the RP? Yes. So they will get info as they play, obviously. If they want more, or they want fleshed out stuff, or they just want to be reminded of stuff, then they can go to the topic and find it there. You know a bit of how I write by now. I try not to be too flowery, I try to keep things simple. I'm not going to halt the pacing of the RP to tell you a ton of shit, or if I do, I'm going to make it optional the way it's been in AN--you know, that stuff in the spoilers that explains things about the City Watch and what Bioptimus has done to the city, but that isn't necessary to understand what's happening in the post.

When you say "don't do infodumps," how else am I supposed to do it? If there's a lot of information, even if I divide it into chunks, those chunks are going to be sizable in themselves. There's only so far I can chunk it down. At some point, people do have to put in their own effort and actually read things. I can't instantly make them know it. It's give and take, and in my opinion, not enough people are willing to give their time and effort to match up to what RP leaders and admins give. I mean, if everyone put as much care and focus on their characters and writing as Sin does, don't you think that would have made everything we did in her RPs like 10 times better?

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As for a strong introduction... Well. You want a comparison? Veil of Chaos's introduction jumped people immediately into the fray, got them to test out those weapons and abilities that we hyped up in our heads, got them tried out immediately in a situation that allowed it. (Admittedly, some characters didn't start there because of the narrative. Or because they woke up in a barrel somehow). Astral Novus had... lots of information shoved in about some locations that didn't matter to the players at the time. And probably wouldn't be until later down the line. Followed by the free-form, which, admittedly, didn't work. I'm sorry for suggesting it. Again. :ermm:

So... pretty much just give the amount of info you think the player needs at the time, rather than all the info you want to give out. Bloating participants with information is never the best way to start a RP. I think that's the main issue for some of the RPs. End of Times and Etrian Odyssey being prominent examples... :ermm:


The thing about Astral Novus is that it WAS free form. I didn't have any idea where the players were going to choose to put their characters. I didn't have any idea what they wanted their characters to be doing or planned for their characters to do. So I put down what was happening in several different areas to give them a CHOICE of where to start off and what to do. And of course everyone chose the one location where they saw the most potential for "badassness."

I had Bioptimus waste a ton of fodder at the beginning because I thought it would say "these are some boss level characters, if you're not part of their faction it might be best to avoid them." Instead, what 3/5 people saw was "OH BOY I CAN GO GIT SUM GUNZ" so they immediately rushed over in hopes of overequipping their characters and being as badass as possible. So instead of having Vincent dispose of the guns off-screen, I had to have a completely random character come in and steal/break as many of the guns as possible while also coming up with a completely on the fly method of handing out loot because otherwise the players would feel cheated if they got absolutely nothing.

I do try to get people straight into the action or media res or whatever you call it whenever I start an RP, because that's one of the principle ways to start a story. You want people immediately invested. But the problem I so often run into with that is that people, at the start, are like "I DON'T KNOW WHAT TO DO OR WHAT'S HAPPENING I HAVE NO IDEA WHAT'S GOING ON" and so then I have to explain all the basic, obvious, "why didn't you see this or make this implication on your own" shit to them. Over time I eventually figured I might as well start doing basic info dumps at the very beginning of the RP because that was what I had to do every time anyway. People LOVE their hand holding and refuse to try anything for themselves. Again, no offense, this is just my personal opinion and honest feelings on the subject.

That cat is not nearly sexy enough.
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Person A
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I don't even know why I'm still awake.

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You sayin' I ain't patient and reasonable? You callin' me snarky and argumentative?

:V


If you want my blunt and honest opinion, yes. To the argumentative part.

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Well, if I took HP off (I feel like I should keep MP because it's one of the few ways to limit magic I can think of) and let the rest of them stand as "comparisons" instead of concrete values that give bonuses, would that make it better?

I just feel like, if we're going to have stats at all, they need to really matter. Everything Sin says about how she uses them and why she uses them that way stands, but at the same time I just felt like, with Lee, that his stats didn't really seem to matter because the narrative seemed intent on making him inferior to anyone who had magic.


Having only had light stat RPs at best, I'd really rather not even go into a RP focusing heavily on stats. Hell, take out the stats entirely is what I'd say. There has to be a certain amount of trust that everyone's going to be reasonable with what they do. Sure, there're some limits that some people here don't think about, and then there are some people who are just outright terrible about it, apparently? I still don't believe that, because all it really takes is someone to slap 'em upside the head and tell them to stop that.

I'm not going to argue about Veil of Chaos characters here.

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Calling people out when their characters do ridiculous things often leads to a discussion about the whole thing, which means that there's a chance that discussion could go sour and someone gets mad or hurt. The chances of that happening are pretty low, but why have that chance at all? Concrete stats that are hard caps remove any and all need for arguing and for calling people out. They would FORCE those that "shall not be named" to fix the problem, where calling them out never does. People who don't do ridiculous things in the first place wouldn't have any problems. People that only occaisonally do them wouldn't find themselves making those accidental slips. Concrete stats are a little more effort, yes. But they're not something that should completely break a person's ability to enjoy the narrative and they're such a LITTLE thing that saves so much time in other capacities. I mean, I'm not trying to discount your opinion, because I can totally see what you're saying. Yes, they do take some attention away from the narrative. Yes, they do force some math, and I agree that math totally sucks. But to me they just seem like they save us so many problems that NOT using them for those reasons sounds like petty whiny nitpicking. Again, no offense, just stating honest feelings.


For the record, I didn't name anyone in my post specifically. I wasn't saying that, in general, we don't talk about those problems or those people. I mean, seriously, if I instead said, "Like the time Yggdra kept insisting that Ammy could take on the Will Stone despite all that shit I said about it," then that would've just turned my semi-professional post into a pretty damn rude one. If I wanted to offend people, I could've done that easily enough. I don't, but it came up and I addressed it. It's not that we don't talk about it.

So, why have that chance at all? To discuss what they did wrong with that character? And then lead it into emotions? Because then they'll have to face the fact that they did something wrong narrative-wise. That they had a bad idea, or something that's frowned upon. They may not like it, but it's the ugly truth. Instead of having to lean on something that'll just sidestep the problem entirely. "Oh, that problem X has all the time? Yeah, with this system it won't even come up anymore!"

...OK, but how does that improve them as a writer? At this point they're just playing a game and following the rules because that's all they'll do. Soon as those limits drop, they'll go back to doing what they like to do, which the rules stopped in the first place. Take it to the root instead of awkwardly shuffling around it. All in all, hard stats really just sound like they're a crutch, and all of us (...OK most of us) are able to stand up on our feet well enough without it.

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That's why I think it'd be better to let the Buy Stats thing be a one time dohickey at the beginning of the RP, and then go to normal "Iron Sword of +3 Strength" type stuff.

Sure, OK. That's not sarcasm. Literally, sure, OK.

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But the problem is, that on the PLAYER'S part it would require some actual effort to READ and UNDERSTAND the lore. Like I said, I don't plan to make it a huge wall of text that's overly flowery. But no matter how much I trim it down, you've got to be willing to read it and think about what it means in order to make any use of it. There's simply no other way to do it.


Said ultimatum. No, there are other ways of doing it. Like I said, if you have a good enough introduction and dip into the story - THE story, the plot, the characters, not the stupid background - then the lore should just slide in easily enough. It shouldn't be an effort to read and understand, because that's like... say, trying to read an essay instead of a novel.

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Yes, characters' individual lores and histories should play a big part in it, I totally agree there. But that's stuff that builds up as the RP goes on, and stuff that doesn't necessarily help with immersing oneself at the very beginning. What I want to achieve is a world that, at the very beginning, is understood in a large enough capacity that players can say "Okay, I understand not only everything I NEED, but I also had a chance to look at some things I was INTERESTED in and it gave me an even better understanding, so now I feel completely prepared to jump in and start doing stuff!"


And you're going to write it all yourself, going to make an original world with some blanks for other people to fill in.

And they'll just have to, y'know, figure out which parts they want to fill in. Because shoving a part down that you left intentionally blank and saying, "Finish this," is sort of... Y'know. Not original to them anymore.

If you want a "world that's understood in a large capacity," I have the perfect answer for you:

Posted Image

If you want to make it all original?... Good luck. Because then everyone's going to have to read an infodump to figure out some context... and then, bam, already dead before it began.

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I do understand the stuff about Tip of the Iceberg Presentation. That's what I plan to do. Inside of the narrative, the information won't be too in your face or over the top. The idea is that there's going to be a separate Lore Topic, much like there are Equipment Topics and Important Announcement Topics and all that. Within that Lore Topic, the Lore will be separated out so that players can easily find what is relevant to them. For instance, if we start in the big capital city, all they have to do if they're interested in finding out more about the city is find the Locations spoiler tag, open it up and find the Capital City spoiler tag, and then read that one chunk of info. If they're not interested in anything else, they don't have to read anything else. But I want it to be THERE so that people who do find it interesting can read it, and so that if anyone is confused about anything that pops up in the RP, they can go to that topic and do some research and then they'll understand it. And by research I don't mean devoting hours to studying, I mean reading a paragraph or two. It's not that hard. I don't see why so many of my ideas have so much opposition based on "BUT WE HAVE TO DOOOOO STUFF FOR THAT TO WORK." Again, no offense, but a lot of the time I feel like people are honestly objectively lazy when it comes to these types of things.

Funny thing... Veil of the Malfested? All the cities had a short description of what they were. That's all the lore that was needed, and it got to 2010 posts. I'm sure it's not a linear thing, either, probably more like a parabola. After hitting peak info, it'll just be a damn slog and no one'll want to read it.

Also, every time you say "no offense," uh. It feels like you're taking it personally, not me. So... no offense to you, not to me.

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Another thing I plan on doing for the Lore is the implementation of this text that will be applied to anything that's of extreme importance. Is knowing about the agricultural industry of the city important? Maybe not, if you don't have a character who's backstory says they come from a farm or something like that. But is knowing that there's a big haunted farmhouse where ghoulish creatures come out to eat the neighbors' sheep at night important? I mean, it sounds like it'd be important to me. And that haunted farmhouse would probably be explained somewhere in the same few paragraphs where that agricultural aspect is being talked about. So if players just want to skim for the colored text, and then read the bits around that text, that's fine too. Some little tidbits will hopefully get stuck in their head and continue to flesh out the setting for them.

So what you're saying is that you'll have an agricultural lore part of a city.

That just gives me, like, the entire perspective of what you're doing.

Please do not write lore about every little thing about how each city operates and runs, because then it'll probably be a big paragraph that no one reads.

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When you say "don't do infodumps," how else am I supposed to do it? If there's a lot of information, even if I divide it into chunks, those chunks are going to be sizable in themselves. There's only so far I can chunk it down. At some point, people do have to put in their own effort and actually read things. I can't instantly make them know it. It's give and take, and in my opinion, not enough people are willing to give their time and effort to match up to what RP leaders and admins give. I mean, if everyone put as much care and focus on their characters and writing as Sin does, don't you think that would have made everything we did in her RPs like 10 times better?


Your implementation is seriously just "TOPIC FULL OF INFO HERE." No one is going to read it. No one. Instead? Show, don't tell. Let's use Veil of the Malfested's Dragarde as an example. Instead of dumping info on it, like this:

Spoiler: click to toggle


Do this:

"As you enter the city, the sight of the massive Colosseum steals your vision, with the nearby buildings surrounding its walls being a far cry from the slums and farms in your vicinity. Warriors with all sorts of weapons - swords, axes, lances, bows - and scars line the street, along with the odd beggar. It would not be hyperbole to say the wealthy and strong sit 'pon the less fortunate here..."

Anything else that you need to know about it? The reader can fill it in with their imagination, and it probably wouldn't be too far from the original interpretation. And that's all that's necessary for the participants to know about Darude. If anything else pops up, plot-worthy or character-wise then sure, have it come up... but later. Instead of just having a giant grimoire of knowledge, just trickle it down slowly to the players.

Now, if there really is such a concern about the players not putting in as much time and effort to the world as the GM does, uh. Maybe the GM is doing a horrible job in the first place? I mean, there's a difference between immersing people into the world and slamming a 50-page document onto someone and demanding that they read it to know what's going on. Because, let's be honest here, did Sin ever do that? Nope. That's because she immersed the players in the world. Any info that was necessary was presented reasonably and well enough. Not through a "lore topic"

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I do try to get people straight into the action or media res or whatever you call it whenever I start an RP, because that's one of the principle ways to start a story. You want people immediately invested. But the problem I so often run into with that is that people, at the start, are like "I DON'T KNOW WHAT TO DO OR WHAT'S HAPPENING I HAVE NO IDEA WHAT'S GOING ON" and so then I have to explain all the basic, obvious, "why didn't you see this or make this implication on your own" shit to them. Over time I eventually figured I might as well start doing basic info dumps at the very beginning of the RP because that was what I had to do every time anyway. People LOVE their hand holding and refuse to try anything for themselves. Again, no offense, this is just my personal opinion and honest feelings on the subject.


Let me, as a reader, tell you what I saw with Veil of Chaos's introduction, and what I saw with Astral Novus's introduction.

Veil of Chaos
 
There's a battlefield! And the most adorable person is watching! Posted Image
The Queen's fighting out there too?! NO TIME TO LOSE, LET'S GET IN THERE AND KICK ASS! Posted Image


Astral Novus
 
Some guys are fighting some guys! Posted Image
Posted Image Oh god so many characters that don't have names ugh
Posted Image OK more background establish-y stuff.
....Oh, yay, I guess we can finally do stuff... Posted Image
...What do I post now oh god. Posted ImagePosted Image


...OK, that's misrepresenting because you said "Free-form," but I know you acknowledged that people didn't like it. And I'm not here to argue about Astral Novus anyways, I'm trying to prove a point with specific examples. Veil of Chaos just gave the bare minimum, revolving around characters we already knew about, and invited us to jump in. There was a character leading by example, and everyone else followed suit. What did we know about the world before that?... Just those character's backstories and the reason for the war. Which, as it so happened, was the basic plot information that people were looking for in the first place.

Contrast the nameless, faceless blobs of people that take down random people with guns, some other nameless, faceless blobs of people that discuss some traitor, some other other nameless, faceless blobs of a person that's ~ominous~, and Kaze against some nameless, faceless blobs of people.

I'm sorry, but that's seriously what it felt like to me, as a reader, putting in the effort to read and understand what you wrote for your introduction. Posted Image

Anyways, it's just presentation of all this. I mean, why the hell would anyone actually want to bother reading through pages of original world lore stuff when there's probably another person that can make a RP and present things better? If you're going to go through it like in Astral Novus, uh. Slight problem with that, it's still incredibly boring and an infodump. It's telling, not showing. And how can you immerse anyone into a world when it's just Posted Image?


Also anyways I've been up all night I really just want to sleep at normal hours instead of at 7 o'clock.
Posted Image
Mover, Shaker,
Brute and Breaker.

Master, Tinker,
Blaster and Thinker,

Striker, Changer,
Trump and Stranger.

Worm: Power Classifications
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Onime No Ryu
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Okay look Persona what I'm really hearing from you in all of this is basically "don't do whatever you're planning to do because it sucks." Just gotta be blunt and honest there.

"I'm going to try and give players an optional topic with Lore, so that if they are interested they can read it. At the same time, when things are introduced in the RP, I'm going to give a cut-down version of it. Everyone will have enough to go on, while also having the option to read the other stuff."

What I'm hearing from you is:
"Literally no one cares about any of that. No one is going to read it. Don't do it. Please do not give us any information at all about the world because we don't want it. We don't want to know what the kingdom is like, we don't need to know how the city is so that we can write our narratives about it, it will be perfectly fine if one character writes "Bob walked through the broken down ruins, looking at all the poor homeless people who lay on either side of the street smothered with fleas" while another character writes "Alice walked through the orderly streets, taking care to avoid the bustling city folk and the occasional carriage carrying nobles dressed in their finery." Both of those things are fine because who gives a shit about narrative consistency and established setting. All anyone ever cares about in any RP ever is just the bloodbath so you should just get to the fighting and the sex and the looting and the badass parts and let us be badasses who do badass things about badassery with our badass characters because it's badass. All this other stuff is dumb so don't do it."

Yes, that's an exaggeration. Yes, I'm taking it personally. But goddammit this is what I honestly feel like so instead of just telling me YOU ARE ILLOGICAL AND EMOTIONAL AND THEREFORE WRONG give me some goddamned help.

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Primera Espada Yggdra
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Over time I eventually figured I might as well start doing basic info dumps at the very beginning of the RP because that was what I had to do every time anyway. People LOVE their hand holding and refuse to try anything for themselves. Again, no offense, this is just my personal opinion and honest feelings on the subject.


Hmm to be honest for AN, I guess you could say that I didn't want to do something that might end up pissing off the mod (you). I think I could say... that's the biggest thing that would hold me back? But granted, I should have went yolo and given it a try anyway.



And dammit Persona. Nuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu. :(
Posted ImagePosted ImagePosted ImagePosted Image
Because...


My Imagination When talking with you. - Person A

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The big thing with stats is that I'm fairly certain the only people here right now who are actually concerned about the competitive nature of character strengths is you and maybe Kaze, Onime. Even after having that one side-battle between Aria and Volke, neither me nor Person were concerned with who was going to win, we just wanted our characters to spar in the way we wanted them to spar. It was character building and interaction, not just some dick-measuring contest over who had their character spend more time doing unrealistic amounts of push-ups.

And to say again, there are only a couple people here that are actually attempting to out-badass each other here, and it's kind of a minority. A lot of us have grown to the point where the characters we're trying to make are a lot less us trying to make super-cool-ultra-strong-guys and more us just trying to make believable characters that are interesting to read and write, and that we can relate to in some way. My excitement in VoC has not been for the battles (those have been done good, though). It's been for the character interaction and how we've all been wanting to develop our own characters.

Heavy lore is a BAD thing, Lord of the Rings were NOT good stories (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/film/11289765/The-Hobbit-How-the-clomping-foot-of-nerdism-destroyed-Tolkiens-dream-and-the-fantasy-genre.html). I've seen so many friends get all jazzed about making their own fantasy setting that's totally original; get the history, cultures, languages, geography, everything worked out and have it all be realistic besides the magic and races. A LOT of work goes into something like that, and the fact of the matters is the majority of everyone is not going to care or even look at most of the information because A LOT of it is going to be irrelevant to the stories at hand.

From Ashes was lore-heavy for ME, and even looking back at my lore topic, I had like three sentences for a town and two short paragraphs for a faction. The reason the story feels so lore-heavy to me is because so much of that lore is actually important to the plot and story I had planned. A reader only needs to know what they need to know. Thing is, nobody wants to read extra lore. Did anyone read the Mass Effect codex stuff? Very few I bet. I sure didn't. Does anyone read the Grimoire for Destiny? I highly doubt it! Taking the time to make tons of lore and backstory the reader doesn't actually need to know for a setting is a waste of time, and all it does is make the whole thing a lot less accessible for anyone to jump into when they realize they probably need to dive into side-stuff with a lot of pretext and context for the story they actually want to read.

And finally, a strong introduction for an RP is just like any introduction for any story. You need to ease the reader in, you need to establish characters and important details of the setting. I started FA in nomadic marketplace of my character getting swindled on stuff, and Exo was just going to start in some backwater town. It may seem like a great idea to start with the real action-heavy attention-getter, but in the case of RPs and even a lot of stories it's better to get the first impressions with the characters and the setting than starting with a big gunfight.
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Onime No Ryu
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March 27, 2015, 11:40 am
The big thing with stats is that I'm fairly certain the only people here right now who are actually concerned about the competitive nature of character strengths is you and maybe Kaze, Onime. Even after having that one side-battle between Aria and Volke, neither me nor Person were concerned with who was going to win, we just wanted our characters to spar in the way we wanted them to spar. It was character building and interaction, not just some dick-measuring contest over who had their character spend more time doing unrealistic amounts of push-ups.

And to say again, there are only a couple people here that are actually attempting to out-badass each other here, and it's kind of a minority. A lot of us have grown to the point where the characters we're trying to make are a lot less us trying to make super-cool-ultra-strong-guys and more us just trying to make believable characters that are interesting to read and write, and that we can relate to in some way. My excitement in VoC has not been for the battles (those have been done good, though). It's been for the character interaction and how we've all been wanting to develop our own characters.

Heavy lore is a BAD thing, Lord of the Rings were NOT good stories (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/film/11289765/The-Hobbit-How-the-clomping-foot-of-nerdism-destroyed-Tolkiens-dream-and-the-fantasy-genre.html). I've seen so many friends get all jazzed about making their own fantasy setting that's totally original; get the history, cultures, languages, geography, everything worked out and have it all be realistic besides the magic and races. A LOT of work goes into something like that, and the fact of the matters is the majority of everyone is not going to care or even look at most of the information because A LOT of it is going to be irrelevant to the stories at hand.

From Ashes was lore-heavy for ME, and even looking back at my lore topic, I had like three sentences for a town and two short paragraphs for a faction. The reason the story feels so lore-heavy to me is because so much of that lore is actually important to the plot and story I had planned. A reader only needs to know what they need to know. Thing is, nobody wants to read extra lore. Did anyone read the Mass Effect codex stuff? Very few I bet. I sure didn't. Does anyone read the Grimoire for Destiny? I highly doubt it! Taking the time to make tons of lore and backstory the reader doesn't actually need to know for a setting is a waste of time, and all it does is make the whole thing a lot less accessible for anyone to jump into when they realize they probably need to dive into side-stuff with a lot of pretext and context for the story they actually want to read.

And finally, a strong introduction for an RP is just like any introduction for any story. You need to ease the reader in, you need to establish characters and important details of the setting. I started FA in nomadic marketplace of my character getting swindled on stuff, and Exo was just going to start in some backwater town. It may seem like a great idea to start with the real action-heavy attention-getter, but in the case of RPs and even a lot of stories it's better to get the first impressions with the characters and the setting than starting with a big gunfight.
If no one else is concerned about keeping other people in check, why does anyone bother calling out anyone else for doing ridiculous things? The fact that you do means that you CARE. Yes, you CARE. With EMOTIONS AND THINGS that aren't logical. Gasp. Unlogic. Un-composed-ness. We can't have that oh no.

Yet there people are calling out Yggdra, or Kaze, or me, or whoever it happens to be, whenever someone steps out of line--AS IT SHOULD BE.

To answer what Persona asked earlier about "Why remove the need to call them out, when you could talk to them about it and help them improve?" The answer to that is that talking about it with them 9 times out of 10 DOESN'T help them improve, it just starts a fight and makes them mad. Why? Because they don't want to accept that they might be wrong and unlogical. Being wrong is a mortal sin, you guys. It sends you straight to hell to be dickraped by goat demons. So why argue with them about it when you could just say "Rules say no, doesn't matter your reasoning, rules say no. So No."

Obviously we DO care about keeping people in check and making sure things don't get too crazy. Not everyone can be THE ULTIMATE COOL CALM AND COMPOSED LOGICAL HUMAN COMPUTER WHO NEVER THINKS ANYTHING WRONG EVER, Niroth.

You keep saying "I'VE GROWN AS A WRITER I'M BETTER THAN THIS STOP MAKING ME FOLLOW RULES" but you're missing the point. The rules aren't meant for YOU, if you're really doing things the way they should be done already. So you literally have nothing to worry about or fear from them and should stop being concerned about it.

The fact that nobody wants to read lore ties into a lot of other things people "don't want." Certain people "don't want" to step outside their usual methods of character creation and writing. People "don't want" to ever have their characters experience a single negative thing. People "don't want" to have their characters proven wrong, so they just keep arguing and arguing and arguing COUGHNTNPANDKAZECOUGH beyond the point where anyone else even cared about whatever they were arguing about.

There are a lot of things people "don't want" that, if they were present, would ACTUALLY IMPROVE THINGS. You can see real life analogies to this by watching toddlers have to be forcefed their vegetables.

And as for your suggestions about a strong introduction, I've now got two different sides of it that are telling me conflicting things.

DON'T TELL US ANYTHING ABOUT THE SETTING JUST GET TO THE ACTION
NO DON'T START WITH THE ACTION YOU HAVE TO EASE US IN
WAIT NO WE STILL DON'T WANT LORE THOUGH EVEN THOUGH I WANT YOU TO START BY GIVING OUT INFORMATION

If I'm really the only one concerned with all of this, tell me what part of my brain I can cut off so I can be like you guys.
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Onime No Ryu
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Finished the response to Kaze, thankfully it was short.

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Railroading vs free form. I prefer having a definite goal to work towards aside from "get stronger". Normally I don't think of goals for myself because A: Can't be bothered and B: My goals would feel unoriginal. Lastly C: They might go against what the admin wants and getting ideas shot down left and right is extremely demoralizing.


A: So what you're saying is that it's laziness.
B: How do you know if you never bother thinking of them?
C: Again, how do you know? Most times when someone asks me about an idea even if I don't initially approve of it, instead of telling them to scrap it I try making suggestions to make it better. Like when I was Zeroth and Yggdra asked me some stuff about the Gryphon Wing RP, a lot of it wouldn't have worked, but I spent a lot of time with her and worked it into something that could have worked had the RP gone on.

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Which is why I'm always a follower and not a leader. As a follower I just follow you guys around and be your meatshield. Not that you need it since you all have demi-god speed and reflexes. You rarely get hurt unless it's from a damn boss (90% of the time).

As for stats. They're fine and all FOR PVP ONLY. A definite cap when fighting another person. None of the hp mp crap. To much stuff for people to think about for something that's supposed to be fun, not a math project. Ranks are fine, they act as a "power cap" for our abilities so we don't split the world in 2 with a megaton fart.

I get more joy from the juggernauts and they make more of an impact, to me, when they fight. Whenever I played ANY of the others...their stuff was brushed off or completely avoided. Which is why I play my juggernauts. You avoid one thing, counter, and I rip you in two, or would if people didn't auto-dodge.


Having concrete stats would fix the bolded parts and prevent them from happening. It would also add a layer of unpredictability to PvE fights because you wouldn't know if your character would survive everything by default.

Everything else about this section is just "I don't wanna do it cause then I'd have to think to put 2 and 2 together and that hurts my brain squishy."

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A lot of our rps flop because we try for an intro that isn't exciting. Sin's tend to get us right into the nitty gritty. The rest of us...well we try to build up to that and the rp's start slow and stay slow because we had to slog through a bunch of bs to get to the face mashings.


Because the face smashing is literally the only thing anyone ever cares about, OF COURSE WHY DIDN'T I SEE IT BEFORE.
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Onime No Ryu
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March 26, 2015, 6:58 pm
Let me start by saying that my RPs being held as the standard is certainly VERY flattering and I'm glad that everyone was able to look forward to my RPs and get so hyped and pumped for them. It tells me that I did a good job in bringing you guys something that you really wanted to be a part of! :)

Now, I'll try and explain my method when making RPs and I'll do my best to keep it in the order that I actually do things.



To start, the honest truth is that my RPs often stem from a single, very simple idea. The idea changes between the RPs, but it's usually only one or two different things that start the whole process rolling.

The first run of "The End, The Beginning" that I did with another community started with a single character. I'd always had a fascination with Norse Mythology and really enjoyed reading about the characters and what they did. I had bought a game called Valkyrie Profile 2: Silmeria and had played through it, loving every second. For those that don't know, that game and the one before it are based on Norse Mythology. One of my favorite characters in the game was Freya. I loved everything about her from her attitude to the way that she moved (she floated around and thought very highly of herself and for those who know, those are two of MY Freya's major character traits). So "The End, The Beginning" came from my creation of Freya. She was a contrast to the game's Freya as my version appeared much younger, behaved in a much more juvenile fashion and was more unpredictable. From Freya, I started to mull over ideas for a whole world containing my own versions of these characters. Odin was a suave fellow who wore a suit and was generally apathetic to all things. Frigg was his quite, docile wife. Thor was the massive hulking remnants of a man contained within a mechanical suit with a gentle heart. Loki appeared more kingly and, while still chaotic in nature, had a method and reason for his madness. Hel was a vain, narcissistic demonic entity who stole the bodies of beautiful young women to occupy until age or injuries forced her to seek out a new one. Heimdall was an android who acted as the experienced master who trained the next generation. Tyr was a mass-produced cyborg created by Heimdall and twisted by Odin. Beowulf, Weyland, Siegfried and and original character Reyme were a wandering band of fighters.

As I came up with these ideas for characters, the world just naturally grew and grew and as I talked to the members of the site about it, they became more and more enthusiastic about turning it in to something. It wasn't an RP site, but "The End, The Beginning" ended up being the first RP the site ever hosted and it ran for a very long time.

"Veil of the Malfested" came from my trying to come up with an idea with an open world, but not too big. So I came up with the idea of an otherworldly miasma that kept everyone on a single continent. That gave me the freedom of a large established world without having to fill the whole world in. So, characters could come from the outside (before the miasma settled obviously), and they wouldn't be out of place. Once the world was made, I began filling it with characters and ideas that helped to build the lore up within the world without actually allowing access to places outside of Etella.

Atlas was the first character I finished for the RP. Atlas' portrait was actually originally a re-draw for Loki waaaaay back for the first "The End, The Beginning" on that site I spoke of above. The RP died before it was implemented though and I went on to use the portrait, renamed to Atlas Molgrave, for a character in another RP I ran there called "Memoires of Atlantis" (which was Atlantis' first appearance as well). That was when I first discovered the group I'm with now. Onime joined "Memoires of Atlantis" and I changed sites shortly after that because the admin of my old site became bitter because I was visiting both.

So anyway, back to "Veil of the Malfested"...

Honestly, the Night Heralds of that world only came to me at about the time Tel was destroyed. I hadn't any solid ideas as to where Atlas' power came from. I only knew that I wanted him to be something beyond human. So the Heralds came in to play and I decided that he was one of them that found a way to escape the Night World. During his escape, the Miasma that came to encircle the continent escaped with him.

The idea of killing everyone's characters came to me at about that time as well. I had always tried to keep ideas flowing concerning new occurrences in our RPs. Some of us have been RPing together for so long that the idea well had pretty much dried up. Killing everyone off and introducing them to the Night Heralds just seemed to fit perfectly. I was able to explain Atlas' origin, give everyone a bump up in power and a new overlying goal that could push them forward and it all fit together nicely and made sense.

With "Veil of Chaos", another idea about something new came to me in the form of allowing people to carry characters over because as far as I know, while many of us re-use characters we've used before, it's never been done in a way that actually maintained continuity. The characters were always molded to fit the new setting and not the other way around. So the people who participated in the first were able to bring their characters over and have them venture into a new setting that continued from the old one. That to me was a big reason there was so much hype about "Veil of Chaos" starting; the prospect of characters carrying over and the appearances of some favorites from the past (and trust me, I still plan on having EVERYONE I mentioned in that thread back at the beginning make an appearance).

So, the first finished idea that really got me moving on "Veil of Chaos" was Ferraah. I wanted to build an idea about a super race created from two powerful existing races. Elves were obvious because they were so much more magically inclined than anyone else. The second was dragons because of their power and it let me add a lot of raw power to Ferraah both in appearance and ability that I don't think I would've been able to convincingly explain any other way. The fact that she can shoot massive beams of energy out of her mouth or that she can consume hearts, grow scales all over her both or roar and debilitate those around her can all be explained by an Elf/Dragon hybrid and to me, it seems like a fresh idea. Having her able to instil so much fear in to ally and enemy alike just made it all the better.

After she was finished, I needed an opponent who represented everything opposite Ferraah. I had always loved Atlantis as a character and other than "Memoires of Atlantis", she's never really gotten to stretch her legs, so to speak. She came to be the natural foil and once those two were established, it just came down to filling in the gaps.

The way the RP worked was another point that I dwelled on for so long. I wanted to make something new again that would allow everyone to potentially have powerful characters and FEEL like it without overshadowing Ferraah. So it came to me that a Dynasty Warriorrs-esque set up would be best since it allowed people to mow through hordes of enemies yet still meet their match against others capable of doing it as well (and in all honesty, even at this early point, most characters have killed more enemies than RPs that have run for hundreds of pages).

The Night World was something that I wanted to make a return appearance because the lore behind it was just so exciting to me. Plus the return of Noel, someone who people seemed to like, seemed like an emotional event that just couldn't be passed up.



Now... statistics.

This is something I always do in my own RPs; it's just as simple as that. To me, it adds another layer of character building that gives players a chance to build something beyond who their character behaves. I never complicate it; simplicity is a must since no one wants to have to become a physicist in order to participate and as mentioned above, it typically isn't the be-all end-all of all things within the RP. My statistic systems more often than not only act as a fence to keep things from getting too ridiculous. If your character lacks dexterity but keeps dodging everything, you'll eventually get called on it since it's outside of your character's boundaries to avoid everything.

Binding weapons and equipment to statistics was something I first started with "Veil of the Malfested" since it added yet another layer of character building to everything and from feedback received thus far, it was greatly enjoyed.

You guys seem to like all of these things so I make sure to bring them back each time. Being able to take the points you have and determine right from the start exactly what kind of character you'll have is a treat. Looking through all of the available items and choosing what you want now and in the future is a lot of fun to do. "Oh, if I get two more levels I can put five points in to my strength and finally get that sword I've wanted!"

All of it adds to the experience and it makes it easy to give out rewards within the RP as well. RPs without such things just never seem as rewarding. If there are no stats, no items to buy and collect and no levels to grow, beating a big bad boss just doesn't seem as thrilling. Going up against something big and terrifying and fighting it seems more exciting when you're wondering what the reward will be on the other side and I believe that that's a VERY powerful push to keep people interested. You're always wondering what's coming next.



When I populate my RPs with characters (an continue to do so as the RP keeps going), I try to make as diverse a cast as I can to try and fill the standard tropes that people have come to know, love and hate. Atlantis, for example, is the very definition of benevolence. Everything she does is to make the world as good as she can for when her daughter takes over. Those she protects come first. Adrien is someone not ready or fit for leadership and goes about everything in as selfish a manner as he can. When Onime said that he lost a lot of respect for Adrien the first time I posted with him that delighted me more than I can even explain because that's EXACTLY the feeling I wanted him to give to everyone. He's NOT someone who should be ruling. He's a snivelling snake that stole his position and commands no respect so he has to force it. Mercury is supposed to seem vulnerable and she's supposed to seem weak but there's also supposed to be a glimpse of power there. You all are supposed to see what her mother and Angelo see. She WILL be Queen one day and she WILL fill her mother's shoes.

I try my best to keep my characters unique within the world but I'm not ignorant enough to think I succeed every time. Some are better than others and some will be more appreciated while others won't. That's just how things work. But, if I set out to impose a particular feeling toward a character (Adrien for example) and you all actually FEEL what I want you to, then that to me is a success.



When it comes to lore within my worlds, I tend to do exactly what Person A said we should aim for when we make our RPs. No one wants to read pages upon pages of lore and backstory for an RP that hasn't even started yet. I personally aim to provide just what's needed. A short build up to establish a setting or to get the story moving. Most of the rest is filled in as we go along by characters or by discoveries made within the RP itself.

With "The End, the Beginning", the only information provided was a battle between Odin, who was a good but elderly man who spoke with confidence and fought with skill and Loki who took the visage of a seemingly decrepit old man before revealing himself as the trickster he actually was. The battle went back and forth before Loki escaped. When the RP started, Odin was a very different person. He was much younger and more malevolent in his behavior while Loki was much quieter and more reserved. It was explained that Ragnarok was something that occurred every one hundred years and at the climax of the battle, most participants were destroyed. Then, the world was "reset", all of the Norse Gods who participated were "reincarnated" into new beings and everything started over again. There were a few who survived and they were the ones responsible for continuing the pattern. As the RP pressed on, the players would be found responsible for ENDING the cycle and freeing everyone from a never ending war that never had a victor.

All of that information (apart from the fight at the start) was revealed throughout the run of the RP and it was more engaging and more easily absorbed because it was all given within context and not just paragraph after paragraph in the first post before anyone had even made a character yet. So it was all learned for the first time when it came up within the RP and because of that, it was more interesting and helped to push everyone toward the next clue.

"Veil of the Malfested" and "Veil of Chaos" were both presented in a similar fashion. Small bits of information relevant to the plot were presented beforehand and everything else was (and will) play out as the RPs progressed (progresses).

Onime and NT both have bad habits of just bombing everyone with information that, quite frankly, isn't needed for us to get engaged with and enjoy the RP. When it comes to backstory and lore before we've even started; less is more.



At the end of the day, I aim to make something fun, engaging and something that you guys enjoy talking about. The amount of banter about "Veil of Chaos" in the chatbox before the RP even started had me so delighted I could stop talking about it to my husband. It warmed my heart to see my friends so interested in something I worked hard on and it kept driving me forward even on days where I felt crappy and didn't want to. I want you guys to be happy and to have fun and that's the core objective in everything RP that I make. If you guys are having fun, then I'm having fun. It's rare I see anyone so attached to their characters like they are within the worlds that I've created.

Someday, Veil 3 will come to exist and I can only hope that you're all willing to experience it alongside me.

:)
Thanks so much for all you've done for us, Sin, and for just being here and being active in general. We all love you and what you do very much and we're all extremely grateful, even if it does take time for us to show it sometimes.

I'm very happy you chimed in, and I greatly enjoyed reading how you do things for your RP and I'll definitely be implementing as much of it as I can. Starting off with something simple is how I try to do a lot of things too, even though it seems like I'm a stickler for complexity--for me, that complexity only comes later because even though I keep an idea simple, I also try to flesh out every aspect of that one idea until I have something I feel like I could make an entire story out of. Your take on it has shown me some shortcomings, though, that I can definitely work on improving.

Your description of having the story evolve out of characterization is something I haven't really considered before--I've known for a while now that good plots come about because of what characters do, not because of what the story simply pulls them along to do, but your way of doing it is different from plopping characters down in an established setting and seeing where their interactions lead them. It seems like you actually did the opposite, letting the setting come about as a result of seeing what the characters would do and what they would need to facilitate that.

Your methods of establishing limits on the world, building it up, and expanding it over time were all great. I think it'll be a bit harder to implement them in the future now that the magician has shown us the secret, so to speak, but this is definitely stuff we can use in the future.

I'm glad that our reactions to what you've created have brought you joy, and those feelings are something that I understand very well because that's always been my own purpose when I try to create RPs. I want to make worlds where people can have fun, tell exciting stories, and enjoy themselves...unfortunately, whenever I try to create something I think would be cool, people seem to fight me every step of the way :(

Whatever it is you have that inspires divinity and complete followership, I'm extremely envious.

But anyway, again, thanks so much for everything you did and everything you do, and even though we're sad you have to leave us, we're all happy that you're doing something you love and we wish the best to you and your family.
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Shiny
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You're missing something here, Onime. "Being concerned about the possibility of people doing ridiculous things" and "not wanting a system of hard stats" are not incompatible positions. Someone smashing down a gate with a couple giant hammerblows from a huge buff dude or having their young mage spam bigass fireballs for half a dozen posts with no sign of running out of juice are potentially objectionable. This does not, however, inherently necessitate having hard numbers saying the gate has 300 HP and Sledgehammer McSwole's Str + weapon bonuses have him doing 27 damage a hit, or that Bigass Fireball costs 7 MP and Teen Mage has 25 Max, no mana potions, and can't regen MP in battle, or whatever.

Yes, being unable to shut down all arguments by pointing to those hard numbers and saying "Nope, no fourth Bigass Fireball for you, sorry" means arguments will result. Yes, some people will be angry because they don't like being wrong, and sure, maybe no improvement will come from it. But let's run with your figure, say 1 in 10 arguments actually results in the party who went overboard actually learning something. Welp, there goes those odd few gains because you've tossed out arguments entirely. No one really learns and improves, they just, if inclined to be problematic, get restrained by the system for the duration until they're back to something that doesn't have one.

Also, there's something to consider here with your comparison to toddlers being forcefed their vegetables. See, parents can do that, because the toddlers don't really have a choice. A toddler can't wander off and go join a family that doesn't insist on vegetables, or even offers candy for all three meals. They can't go start their own family, with their own rules (or lack thereof). Etc. RPers, however, can do all that. We can sit out RPs, pitch ones to our own liking, etc. Like, I'm agreeing with you that yes, experimenting and having bad things happen to characters and being wrong and all of that would be good for the people not already inclined to do those things, but. If you get too heavy-handed about forcing restrictions and prodding people for innovation -even if it's only with incentives- and all that, problem is, at the end of the day you can't sit there and stare people down until they open their mouths and let you shove a spoonful of change in there. The dynamic is different.
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Onime No Ryu
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Responded to Shiny, did not notice Shiny's new response until I clicked Full Reply Screen. Will work on that momentarily.

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I'd say just don't have a stat system at all. If it's like Persona's saying VoC's system was, where it's just kind of a background thing that gave rough estimates of someone's strengths/weaknesses and occasionally served to justify something IC, it seems kinda superfluous. Whereas if it's more concrete, then it's making things more complicated and giving us a bunch of extra manual bookkeeping with things like HP/MP numbers and the like. And yeah, there's also Persona's point about it limiting narrative options and all that, don't really have anything to add to that though.


I'm of the school of thought that Sin was talking about though--I feel like when players can see how strong they are as a number, and how good their weapons are, and then they can watch those numbers go up and get new weapons and stuff like that, I feel like it's a good way to show progress in a more literal way. It's a carrot at the end of the stick--it is sort of manipulative, but I mean, I personally enjoy leveling up in games or getting new, cooler weapons. I don't mind that the game is manipulating me in that way because it's still cool.

Stats also have the side effect of helping curb godmodding, autododging, and other things. I understand that this isn't a problem with the MAJORITY of the site--but why have it be a problem at all, if stats could very easily solve it in a simple manner?

Another side effect that I'm REALLY itching for, though, is this: Unpredictability. Our RPs are, in some ways, a little bit boring because they are very much a foregone conclusion. Characters are going to survive and eventually win. Characters aren't usually going to be mortally injured or die. Sin was able to subvert some of those conclusions, and her RPs were better for it. If stats could effect things like whether or not we are successful in numerous situations--battle, picking locks, solving puzzles--it would add a much more unpredictable element to the whole narrative. It would force us to deal with situations we weren't expecting or weren't prepared for. And if we could balance that goddamned magic so that it wasn't an instant win button for every puzzle (aka make it so wind magic users can't just fly across a bottomless pit when the idea is to figure out how to make a bridge) I think that would help a lot too.

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For the character challenges system, I sort of like the general idea there, encouraging people to experiment a bit, but a few issues. First being the question of, okay, extra points work if stats are a thing, but what else would there be to offer as incentive if they aren't? Though admittedly that'd depend on where the majority support sits/how set you are on them to know if it's even an issue. Second, also sorta dependent on the stat system, is that if the rewards are big enough to matter, it seems kinda heavy-handed. "These guys over here, they decided to do something new or jump through some specific hoops like the Sue thing or whatever. Their reward is being Better Than You because you stuck with what you know."

Third, the archetype thing seems kinda...subjective for some cases. Like in some cases it's obvious, for how little I've been in/read outside Pokemon here even I can tell Kaze has A Type, and I'll take you at your word on you and Matt, but like. Persona, say. Does he have as easily peggable an archetype (other than DKC Plagiarist, I mean)? Or Ygg, is there a particular blatant thread running through her character concepts that I'm missing/failing to remember? Or, from a different angle, me. I've been in two things here, one of which died early, and only Persona and Emin (and KOG, but he barely even comes around here so eh) have RPed with me elsewhere for any major length of time. Short of handing off judging duties entirely to them or something, how do you tell what's experimental and what's me recycling an old mainstay?

Would also ask how the Sue one works, exactly. Is it scored by you and/or the other reviewers from information given? Does the guy making the character go through and run the numbers, and it's honor system that they'll quote what they got and not shave bits off? Do they make a list like "check 1, 5, 5a, 13, 34, 34b, 53... in the first one" for you to punch in? Something else? Seems like there's a way for it to get skewed to some degree no matter how you slice that.



So are you saying that people SHOULDN'T be rewarded for making an extra bit of effort to improve themselves or their characters? I mean, yeah it's heavy handed and people who don't do it will be "at a disadvantage..." but that's like someone in the ghetto who sits on their ass and waits for their foodstamps being mad at the person who goes out and gets a job because "YO MAYN YOU GOTS MO MONEY DEN ME AN'DAT AIN'T RIGHT I NEEDZ EQUALITY UP IN HEAH."

I don't intend for the extra points to be like, +100 or anything. More like +2, +3, around that value. But yes, doing character challenges could definitely give people some advantages. And I think that's fine, because they put in the effort to earn those advantages.

There are gonna be way more than just those challenges, though. Like the archetype thing, you're right, some players are diverse already. But if they can't really undertake that challenge, maybe they try two or three others. I plan to try and cover as many bases as possible. The two I gave were just for the purpose of example.

The Sue one would kinda be just honor system I guess. But I mean, if you were gonna undertake that challenge in the first place, that implies you'd be serious about improving your character. Surely none of you are just such complete scumbags that you'd lie for the purposes of getting just +3 on your stat sheet.

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Last up, Lore. Persona's said a bunch on how to handle it I mostly agree with and I don't have much to see to expand on his points, but I've got some other bits to toss out.

First, wondering how the building works under your model. Like, do you post your giant pile of lore beforehand and have people fill out the blank spaces before it starts, or do you put up yours before/when/shortly after start and have people fill it in as they go?

If it's the former, it might work, if you could avoid being horribly infodumpy, but it also seems like it'd bog things down a bit with people having to fill in all the blanks and having to figure out what bits to go with if people have ideas that contradict each other (or the original lore).

In the latter case, not sure how compatible extensive lore and players filling in stuff would be, at least for an original setting under a single GM. If you've got extensive lore, then people might be inadvertently contradicting spoilery stuff if they just drop details in, and then you have to stop and hash things out. If you want them to be able to easily just toss ideas in as they go, you'd probably be better off going in the other direction entirely and making a bare bones setting with just enough defined for a plot to happen and let the details get built along the way. I have seen the balancing act more or less work before, but it was usually when the setting was something pre-existing, like Hyrule, where everyone already knew and/or could look up in 15 seconds all the setting info and lore and stuff so we all knew what the baseline was before we took it off the rails by making up more. And either we had no one person running things, or the GM role was more focused on enforcing the basic rules and occasionally setting some large scale stuff into motion and had no more importance than anyone else re: defining the fiddly details of things.

Really, if you want a partly player defined setting, simplest, smoothest, least-infodump-needing way to do it'd probably be like. Ask people what broad strokes or key points they want in a setting/story/etc. in advance and just write it all up from there on your own. Maybe with some small window of "here's the cliff notes of what I've got, last call if there's anything people want to argue for changing" before starting or something. And then just give us the (potentially revised) cliff notes to run with and then do the slow feed of the details later.


Like I said before, I was planning to have a very organized and easily navigatable topic put up where each section of Lore could be read as the player chose to do so. I mean, I guess that's an infodump, but hell is there actually any other way to provide a lot of information than to just TELL someone the information? Show not tell is an easy phrase to say, but not many of us can actually do it. I've read enough of various people over the years to know.

I don't think asking people for their input would cause too many contradictions because I plan to have everything already there by the time I do that--if they come up with something that doesn't work, I can point to a specific piece and say "These two things would contradict each other." But like I was saying with Kaze, it's not often I see a player idea that I just outright shoot down. I'd much rather make suggestions to help modify the idea so that they can still use it, just without whatever pieces were causing the problem or by changing those pieces so that they no longer cause problems.

Also, most of what I would be asking for would be things like "What kind of locations do you guys wanna explore" or "is there anything interesting you wanna tie to your character's backstory, like, would their grandfather have been well known as a pioneer of new magic?" and stuff along those lines. I don't think that would contradict too much with the lore of like, locations and how the world's society works and stuff.

The thing about making a bare bones world, I've found, is that most times people don't know enough to even get started. And, as any attempts at freeform ever since or before Calatia's Throne have shown, people do not like having to take their own initiative. So it's much better to have a well established world that has its own "rules" that the players can use to figure out what would happen if they took a certain action. That way they can start writing instead of just twiddling their thumbs waiting for the admin to hand out their RPstamps.
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Onime No Ryu
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Shiny
March 27, 2015, 12:41 pm
You're missing something here, Onime. "Being concerned about the possibility of people doing ridiculous things" and "not wanting a system of hard stats" are not incompatible positions. Someone smashing down a gate with a couple giant hammerblows from a huge buff dude or having their young mage spam bigass fireballs for half a dozen posts with no sign of running out of juice are potentially objectionable. This does not, however, inherently necessitate having hard numbers saying the gate has 300 HP and Sledgehammer McSwole's Str + weapon bonuses have him doing 27 damage a hit, or that Bigass Fireball costs 7 MP and Teen Mage has 25 Max, no mana potions, and can't regen MP in battle, or whatever.

Yes, being unable to shut down all arguments by pointing to those hard numbers and saying "Nope, no fourth Bigass Fireball for you, sorry" means arguments will result. Yes, some people will be angry because they don't like being wrong, and sure, maybe no improvement will come from it. But let's run with your figure, say 1 in 10 arguments actually results in the party who went overboard actually learning something. Welp, there goes those odd few gains because you've tossed out arguments entirely. No one really learns and improves, they just, if inclined to be problematic, get restrained by the system for the duration until they're back to something that doesn't have one.

Also, there's something to consider here with your comparison to toddlers being forcefed their vegetables. See, parents can do that, because the toddlers don't really have a choice. A toddler can't wander off and go join a family that doesn't insist on vegetables, or even offers candy for all three meals. They can't go start their own family, with their own rules (or lack thereof). Etc. RPers, however, can do all that. We can sit out RPs, pitch ones to our own liking, etc. Like, I'm agreeing with you that yes, experimenting and having bad things happen to characters and being wrong and all of that would be good for the people not already inclined to do those things, but. If you get too heavy-handed about forcing restrictions and prodding people for innovation -even if it's only with incentives- and all that, problem is, at the end of the day you can't sit there and stare people down until they open their mouths and let you shove a spoonful of change in there. The dynamic is different.
I personally don't think having 1 in 10 positive results justifies having 9 other stupid arguments, that's just the worth of it to me. It's like how I don't think a pair of shoes should be worth $200, and how I have the opinion that the children who do want to spend that much on shoes should be beaten with a 2x4 for being so ignorant.

I just don't think the honor system is worth near as much as the stat system for what it brings to the table. Stats bring control over unruliness, they bring unpredictability, and they bring the motivation of being able to see growth in characters and their equipment, and they bring the ability to make comparisons that make aspects of character strengths and even certain parts of the narrative easily understood. That's worth way more than "total creative freedom" in my opinion. Besides, you're not actually losing any creative freedom because of the stats.

And if people honestly want to leave because they can't have their super OP godmoding mary sue, we didn't need them here anyway.
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NTNP
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Firstly, Onime: You sayin' I ain't patient and reasonable? You callin' me snarky and argumentative?, yeah you are argumentative, impatient and unreasonable at times and probably need to ask yourself if all this animosity is going to help you here. Not so much snarky because most of the time you don’t pull off snark as effectively as others. Snark is best done by Person A, without question as shown in this topic. With that being said, both of you guys really need to go take a nap, get a drink or something because both of you are really having some issues keeping it friendly. Calm down, or stop posting in this topic or something before it becomes an actual issue site wise.

Now to the first question of worth: Stats and their trappings. Personally, I am of the opinion that I like stats, EXP and leveling up within a storyline. I enjoy math (being a math teacher in SPED who specializes in addition, subtraction, multiplication and division, who would have ever thought?) and I feel like it helps from an admin point of view. Stats make it where I have something to manipulate for balancing. It makes it easier to motivate others by increasing stats via rewards for doing what I want others to, and punishing them for not doing what I want by keeping their stats lowered or not letting them level up by not awarding them EXP for stuff I don’t agree with. I will use Pokemon for this: I’ve taken some flack recently for the fact that Trevor and Joseph don’t move fast enough for certain other authors. It’s a reasonable complaint, they take about twice as long to go anywhere and do anything than the A team. But do you know why I know Ygg doesn’t mind us doing that: She gives us EXP for it, grants us level ups for fighting PvP duels against each other. When I decide that Proto and Beat are going to fight the entirety of Trevor’s crew over a scarf, which is literally a pointless endeavor over an accessory that could be granted for free. But I wanted to write it, and guess what happened in response… my team received EXP for it. Going further, she gives us EXP and in fact reward items for making up our own storylines involving a Pidove Flock terrorizing Route 2, after Trevor was a prick to them and had to get Joseph to fix it. We get NPCs to pop up from Ygg to help us out whenever we go into areas that we weren’t supposed to yet, like Route 17 where Jerkass and Jerkasmon appeared. All those events are described as “unimportant, stupid and useless” when describing it from their point of view- but to tell you the truth, I enjoyed them. Ygg apparently did too, or at least was fine enough with it to reward us for it. Without levels, stats, EXP etc I would have less of an idea about where Ygg’s personally stance was about what our characters did. I would have to gauge it based on other’s opinions. Case in point, I doubt if I decided that Trevor should open his own Poke-store and travel around, selling to NPCs various poke-items that Ygg would rain down EXP and money on him, and instead she would just leave me alone until I figured out a better plan. Same if I tried to spend the entire time talking to all the NPCs I could create in a town without ever fighting a pokemon or engaging in a plot, there would be no EXP raining down and as such a clear sign that she’s not content with my actions.

And another area discussed: Lore. I’m the sort of guy who loves history. I’ve been studying up on it in order to get my qualifications to teach it in school directly instead of as a special education teacher. If you want to go with red, go for it. If you want to do in character introductions to an area- go for it. If you want to make a separate topic for it- go for it. Most of the time, as authors though we do both. I’ll go with the example of Drakenguard. Most of the time I’d post an info dump about the town being coliseum based, might makes right focused etc AND the first time someone wanders in I would describe it for the same reasons. Just because I offer it up first in an info topic and you chose not to look at it doesn’t make a dimes worth of difference to me. I offer it so you can look it up if you want to. Moving on, I also have an opinion that simplicity is great unless you want to do something else. Sure minimal settings work for some people very well, like Sin. For others we like pre-established settings like BO and Hyrule. Others want to make something unique and as such, in up adding more information to try to equal it out. In truth, it’s more of an issue for the Narrator than the RPers though. How you like to do things is up to you and it is entirely dependent on how YOU make a better RP.

I’ll give an example: I decide that tonight, I want to go with something highly nostalgic like in the Imprisoning War. I’m going to make a Hyrule based RP, something we know a lot about. Because of everything we know about Hyrule- I wouldn’t really need a giant topic about lore. We all get the general themes, settings etc. It’s relatively easy to run and understand what is expected in the early stages. Hell, as a matter of fact I posted links directly to the wikia page for those who wanted to know more. Was that a good way to deal with it- at the time no one complained so I’m saying sure. Is it perfect for everyone? Probably not- but at the end of the day, it’s meant for things to be EASIER to ME! If you are taking on the mantle as leader of the RP and lore topics make it easier for you, awesome. If they are cumbersome, ignore them! It’s honestly just preference, if you ask me.

As far as the general “Dick Measuring Contest” (tm), it’s stupid. If you want to out badass each other- awesome, good for you. If you are the admin and you don’t like that, don’t reward it. I’ll use VoC for example and look at it from Sin’s perspective. If she wasn’t OK with say Angelo taking out 6 mooks in a single turn using his previously mentioned single/short target attacks- she could have easily said that they didn’t count and take a notch out of his EXP gains to say “do this a different way.” If she didn’t like say Aran being able to hold down Darion because his strength wouldn’t be high enough, she could always post in bold “Aran almost had him pinned, but then Darion shifted his weight and sent the boy onto the ground with a broken pinky” and, to me as the RPer, that would say “stop” in clear, concise ways. As always, the Narrator IS THE LEADER OF THE RP, AND THEIR DECISION IS LAW FOR THEIR STORY! I will paraphrase one of the rules of my classroom- “You aren’t going to like everyone, in fact there will be people that piss you off and make you want to punch them in the face. There are people I want to punch in the face, but guess what, it won’t help. They annoy you with how they do things, awesome either ignore it or avoid it. You don’t like the way they act, stay away from them or tune them out. All fighting is going to do is make it where you are tying a rope around your own neck and dropping the anchor in the ocean.”

If the Narrator doesn’t care about what a particular character and RPer is doing, then you should butt the hell out of it. It’s the same reason why if you don’t agree with a particular RPer’s philosophies about stories, you shouldn’t join their RPs. Take me for example- you know a few things going in if you join one of my stories. There will be stats and a relatively complex character creation system focused on balance. You will have to do addition, subtraction, multiplication and division in the story to keep track of your HP, MP etc totals. You will have limited options creating your own storylines and I’m going to put you on some tracks that can lead to multiple places but do nothing for you if you wander off of it. Say if I was running Pokemon- all the mons would have pre-selected moves, stats and growth rates along with an active EXP system. Your characters would, functionally, have a pair of rails for storyline A, B and C going on. A is dealing with the evil organization storyline. B is about taking on the major plot battles such as gyms. C would involve legendary pokemon wandering around and wanting to see it’s influence in the world. At will, you can jump between the storylines and land between them, but if you aren’t doing what I wanted- like say you decide it would be a good plan to explore say, the starting town in detail I would basically ignore you and not give any EXP. Alternatively I would probably give a bonus EXP boost to the first character who challenged a gym leader and granted a TM for the first group that defeated Cypher’s goons. That’s MY style of narrating. You’d have a GMPC with each party, who would help you as needed and would be facing very relatively challenging encounters, often with incremental rewards greater than usual.

Lastly, let me say that after reading the last spiel from Person A about Megaman Legends 3, made me really excited about the idea of using that as a basis for an RP. Something about us going around various islands, exploring technological ruins and eventually awakening ancient machines of genocide programed to purge the world baring a certain number of carbons just sounds awesome. Also it’s making me become increasingly excited about doing a remake of CoH from my perspective, since I’ve got a PM I made with BO a long time ago that might be really enjoyable…
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I'm of the school of thought that Sin was talking about though--I feel like when players can see how strong they are as a number, and how good their weapons are, and then they can watch those numbers go up and get new weapons and stuff like that, I feel like it's a good way to show progress in a more literal way. It's a carrot at the end of the stick--it is sort of manipulative, but I mean, I personally enjoy leveling up in games or getting new, cooler weapons. I don't mind that the game is manipulating me in that way because it's still cool.

Stats also have the side effect of helping curb godmodding, autododging, and other things. I understand that this isn't a problem with the MAJORITY of the site--but why have it be a problem at all, if stats could very easily solve it in a simple manner?

Another side effect that I'm REALLY itching for, though, is this: Unpredictability. Our RPs are, in some ways, a little bit boring because they are very much a foregone conclusion. Characters are going to survive and eventually win. Characters aren't usually going to be mortally injured or die. Sin was able to subvert some of those conclusions, and her RPs were better for it. If stats could effect things like whether or not we are successful in numerous situations--battle, picking locks, solving puzzles--it would add a much more unpredictable element to the whole narrative. It would force us to deal with situations we weren't expecting or weren't prepared for. And if we could balance that goddamned magic so that it wasn't an instant win button for every puzzle (aka make it so wind magic users can't just fly across a bottomless pit when the idea is to figure out how to make a bridge) I think that would help a lot too.


For the first two points, I'm thinking our perspectives might be too different on this stuff to really see eye to eye. Seeing numbers go up and fancier equipment pile up in the inventories and all that doesn't really hit a chord for me RP-wise. Like, I get the attraction to higher numbers and all, but if I just want to see numbers go up on a status screen and accumulate increasingly swordier swords, I've got a stack of video games for that. Like, if the new stuff actually functioned uniquely/opened up new options/etc. it might be one thing, maybe, but "your new sword stabs 5% harder" isn't something I can see myself getting super excited about in this context.

As for the second issue, I'm guessing we've got different experiences there? I'm in favor of ignoring stats, leaving it to the honor system, and just calling out people who overstep because in my experience it's generally worked alright. Like you get the occasional jackass like Frenchy who'll stubbornly keep overstepping no matter how many times they get yelled at and smacked down, but for the most part, people can usually be talked into being basically reasonable, with a bit of effort. On your side of things, it's sounding like that's worked out...not great, in the past. So we end up here, where you see them as necessary to try and preempt a problem that seems inevitable with some minority portion, while I see the problem as something basically manageable and thus stats as pointless at best.

For the third bit, I'm not seeing how most of that is dependent on stats, exactly. I mean, yeah, I guess you can force losses and deaths that way by tossing a flat out numerically unbeatable foe at the party (though if you're aiming for deaths, not just losses, that's the sorta thing you'd probably want to work out in advance with the dudes about to be shanked, which'd make it less of a big unexpected surprised. But you don't need stats to toss curveballs or put people in a situation where they can't just take the obvious "optimal" move and move along. For magic in particular, that's simple. Your RP, your rules for magic. If you don't want wizards screwing up all your carefully planned obstacles by flying around them, you can just not make magic flight a thing and voila, problem solved. Or on the other end, if you do leave in flight, just account for the fact that it's on the table and if a PC's capable of it they're probably going to at least consider the option. But if you make magic flight available to the PCs and design a puzzle that flight is a totally viable alternate solution/bypass to, then you don't really have a lot of room to get annoyed if they ignore the intended puzzle and just fly past it.

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So are you saying that people SHOULDN'T be rewarded for making an extra bit of effort to improve themselves or their characters? I mean, yeah it's heavy handed and people who don't do it will be "at a disadvantage..." but that's like someone in the ghetto who sits on their ass and waits for their foodstamps being mad at the person who goes out and gets a job because "YO MAYN YOU GOTS MO MONEY DEN ME AN'DAT AIN'T RIGHT I NEEDZ EQUALITY UP IN HEAH."

I don't intend for the extra points to be like, +100 or anything. More like +2, +3, around that value. But yes, doing character challenges could definitely give people some advantages. And I think that's fine, because they put in the effort to earn those advantages.

There are gonna be way more than just those challenges, though. Like the archetype thing, you're right, some players are diverse already. But if they can't really undertake that challenge, maybe they try two or three others. I plan to try and cover as many bases as possible. The two I gave were just for the purpose of example.

The Sue one would kinda be just honor system I guess. But I mean, if you were gonna undertake that challenge in the first place, that implies you'd be serious about improving your character. Surely none of you are just such complete scumbags that you'd lie for the purposes of getting just +3 on your stat sheet.


+2-3 seems like it might go in the other direction of "is this reward even worth the effort of going out of your way to earn it?" but. You've only really laid out the tentative skeleton of the system and the general idea of converting chunks of starting cash into stats. Without knowing how many starting points you get, how much starting gold, what limits or conversion rates or whatever are involved in gold -> stats, how much you get from a level, etc. it's sort of hard to tell how valuable +2 stat points would be. So uh. I guess stick a pin in that as a potential issue to revisit if this becomes an RP and the stat system is still intact in roughly the way you're imagining it, then.

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Like I said before, I was planning to have a very organized and easily navigatable topic put up where each section of Lore could be read as the player chose to do so. I mean, I guess that's an infodump, but hell is there actually any other way to provide a lot of information than to just TELL someone the information? Show not tell is an easy phrase to say, but not many of us can actually do it. I've read enough of various people over the years to know.

I don't think asking people for their input would cause too many contradictions because I plan to have everything already there by the time I do that--if they come up with something that doesn't work, I can point to a specific piece and say "These two things would contradict each other." But like I was saying with Kaze, it's not often I see a player idea that I just outright shoot down. I'd much rather make suggestions to help modify the idea so that they can still use it, just without whatever pieces were causing the problem or by changing those pieces so that they no longer cause problems.

Also, most of what I would be asking for would be things like "What kind of locations do you guys wanna explore" or "is there anything interesting you wanna tie to your character's backstory, like, would their grandfather have been well known as a pioneer of new magic?" and stuff along those lines. I don't think that would contradict too much with the lore of like, locations and how the world's society works and stuff.

The thing about making a bare bones world, I've found, is that most times people don't know enough to even get started. And, as any attempts at freeform ever since or before Calatia's Throne have shown, people do not like having to take their own initiative. So it's much better to have a well established world that has its own "rules" that the players can use to figure out what would happen if they took a certain action. That way they can start writing instead of just twiddling their thumbs waiting for the admin to hand out their RPstamps.


There is, actually. It's giving it out in chunks as it becomes relevant. If you mean dumping large piles of info all at once, no, there's not really a good non-infodumpy to do that that I can think of.

All right, so basically just getting the broad strokes of what we want and what sort of backstory bits we want to tie in and hammering that out into something that fits. Works.

The bare bones thing was less me seriously advocating doing a bare bones world and more me just saying "if you're gonna have tons of lore, there's not necessarily a lot of room for players to add in major stuff, if you do want a lot of room for that, you kind of have to go bare bones with a bunch of blank space if it's an original setting." Kind of a moot point now that you've laid out more clearly what you've got in mind there. The bit about "get the broad strokes of what people want, write up your giant pile of lore, then give us the cliff notes we actually need to do stuff and get started, optionally after a last call for tweaks and such" is the part where I'm actually advocating something. Really does sound like you could just keep the bulk of the lore behind the scenes to dole out bits as necessary and just start us off with the basics and whatever other bits we're actually involved in.

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I personally don't think having 1 in 10 positive results justifies having 9 other stupid arguments, that's just the worth of it to me. It's like how I don't think a pair of shoes should be worth $200, and how I have the opinion that the children who do want to spend that much on shoes should be beaten with a 2x4 for being so ignorant.

I just don't think the honor system is worth near as much as the stat system for what it brings to the table. Stats bring control over unruliness, they bring unpredictability, and they bring the motivation of being able to see growth in characters and their equipment, and they bring the ability to make comparisons that make aspects of character strengths and even certain parts of the narrative easily understood. That's worth way more than "total creative freedom" in my opinion. Besides, you're not actually losing any creative freedom because of the stats.

And if people honestly want to leave because they can't have their super OP godmoding mary sue, we didn't need them here anyway.


See first point re: presumably different experiences calling out people going overboard, resulting failure to see much value in stat system, being eh on +1s as a major motivator in RPs, etc. Not a lot to add to what I've already said up there.
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Onime No Ryu
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Primera Espada Yggdra
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I don't really have preferences, but to throw in ideas... industrial (if there are factories), banking, and perhaps a place they make commercial goods?
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Onime No Ryu
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Primera Espada Yggdra
March 28, 2015, 10:52 am
I don't really have preferences, but to throw in ideas... industrial (if there are factories), banking, and perhaps a place they make commercial goods?
when you say industrial, is there anything specific you think they should be making? It's gonna be fairly standard fantasy stuff so I mean, they wouldn't be making manufactured steel for railroads or steam engines or whatnot just yet...I'm thinking that the tech level might be whatever the next stage above "generic Middle Ages" would be realistically, considering that I'm building this world with the idea in mind that it's NOT in the "medieval stasis" kind of setting that a lot of fantasy is where things have been the same way for thousands of years.
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Onime No Ryu
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Okay so here's a more in-depth explanation about STATS

I know a lot of people will probably groan and eyeroll when I say this, but I think this system will work very well with DICE. That's because I've basically stolen and simplified the Dungeons and Dragons' way of doing things. Now, because the dice roller on the site kind of sucks, I have two OTHER options for those that CHOOSE to use them.

This site is simple and provides many types of dice, although for our purposes we will, 90% of the time, only be using the d20. It does NOT, however, allow a player to record and link their rolls for others to see.

IF you guys are worried that cheating will be a thing--I really don't think it will be, but IF we can agree as a community on whether we want to use the honor system for rolls or use a system that can be verified to help prevent cheating, then there is also This site, which allows you to type the Name of the Character you're using, add your Bonuses to the roll, and then Link Back to that roll so that you can post it. It ALSO keeps a LOG of what was rolled, so we'll be able to tell if someone just rolls repeatedly, picks the best result, and then links that one.


HP: Health Points. When they reach 0, the player is KO'd. For every turn a player is KO'd, they must roll one dice. 1-10 causes them to go into the negative values by -1 point. 11-20 causes them to rise from negatives or zero by +1 point. If a player reaches -10, they can no longer make rolls or perform any kind of action. If an enemy attacks a player in this state, they will DIE. If a player manages to restore themselves to 5 HP, they are no longer KO'd and may resume play as normal.

MP: Magic Points. Spells, as explained later, will cost MP to cast. When this reaches 0, Players can no longer cast spells.

Strength: A value that determines physical strength. In this world, an Average Normal Person will, at the most, have a strength value of 5 and be able to lift ~150 pounds with effort. At 6 Strength, Players receive a +1 Bonus to Melee Attacks and Strength-based actions (like pushing open a door or lifting a treasure chest). Every two values afterwards another bonus is added. 8 is +2, 10 is +3, so on and so forth.

Speed: A value that determines physical speed and agility. In this world, an Average Normal Person will, at the most, have a Speed value of 5 and be able to run ~10-15 miles an hour at top speed for a short distance, or run for about a mile at half that speed without stopping for rest. At 6 Speed, Players receive +1 Action Point, and every two values after another Bonus is added. Action Points, starting at 3 Before Bonuses, determine how many actions a player can take in their posts, much like Stamina in Sin's RP. Attacking is 1 Action. Stepping forward/leaping forward/running forward and Attacking is still 1 Action, but "leaping off a wall" or "charging across the field" and then Attacking would be 2 Actions. Action Points are recovered by spending a post doing nothing but Resting, again like Sin's RPs, but Resting only recovers 2 Action Points at a time. This is because, as one can imagine, higher levels of speed will give much higher levels of Action Points, so recovering them all at once after only one turn would be a bit much. Your Speed Bonus is also used for any speed based action (outrunning a boulder trap, slipping through a door before the guard notices).

Skill: A value that determines coordination, fine motor skills, and other things. An Average Normal Person will, at the most, have 5 Skill and be capable of all the usual skills like threading a needle or drawing basic art. At 6, Players receive +1 Bonus, and every two values after another Bonus is added. When making an Attack Roll, your Strength will help determine damage. What determines your ability to actually hit is Skill. When attacking, you roll a d20 and add your Skill Bonus to it. If that number equals or surpasses the enemy's AC (which will be explained later) you will hit. Then your Strength Bonus and Weapon Damage will be added together and subtracted from the enemy's DR (also explained later) and HP. It works the same way for Magic Attacks. Your Skill Bonus will also be added to any roll that determines the success of a skill based action (picking a lock, defusing a bomb).

Spirit: Exactly the same as Strength, but for Magic based actions and attacks.


Does anyone have ANY problems or suggestions for this system?
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Kazemitsu
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No. No more stamina, action points, whatever. That was the worst thing to appear in Sin's rp, aside from charisma that really didn't do anything except eat points. Let the dice do the talking if you decide to use dice, they'll dictate hits or misses like in dnd.

I'd also prefer no hp counters. No it's not an excuse to be "lazy" but they only work in certain things and it's a hassle for everyone. You'd have to figure out how much damage the monsters do. Each and every monster type. Which would put work on the players to see how much this monster does to us, minus armor or whatever lowers damage. Hp just makes more work for everyone involved.

Mp is fine though. Maybe make a type of point for special melee attacks as well? Since not everyone will be having magic or rely almost solely on magic to do anything.

For mages who need MP to attack, maybe put a limit on their potion usage as well. Like...overdoses of the stuff will knock you out? I don't know...
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Systematic made by Phaede of the SZ..