bats are the cutest rabies babies

[socksuke_uchiha]

Rundown: rpanons is an anonymous community for role-play related topics. This place serves as a forum for game discussions, canon discussions, RP solicitations (ATP, game ads, open memes), and advice. The occasional off topic comment is inevitable, but please keep heated social and political topics to their respective communities. Posting them here will only get them frozen. Subsequent threads made to bypass a freeze will then be deleted.

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Do not treat this comm like your personal Plurk or Twitter. Off-topic happens, but it should be open for discussion and not just a play-by-play of your life. No one cares.
Shut up about Tumblr. If it's not a discussion about Tumblr RP it will be deleted.


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Comments

Re: GAME IDEAS

[(Anonymous)]

Speaking as a former mod here, this sounds like a recipe for burnout and complete confusion. Players need avenues to discuss plots and even if you don't want to do it in a centralized place like an ooc comm, you still need something like mod plurks to keep things from turning into a cliquefest where people only communicate plot things with their friends. Having open, centralized places for people to talk about a plot, like an ooc comm or a mod plurk about the plot gives people a place to ask "is anyone up for X with my character?" where everyone can't miss it. That doesn't mean no cliquishness will ever happen but it at least invites everyone into a joint space so those who do want to tag around have an easy avenue for it that makes it hard to miss.

Also, that much intensive npcing is going to kill your interest and cause burn out over time. Every time you get new characters they're going to need info on the setting and background all over again. If you put yourself in a position of having spell out a lot of OOC information ICly anyway, you might as well permanently record anything you'll reuse later and put it in a centralized place so you don't have to keep repeating yourself. It's just much easier for everyone involved to have dedicated plot and setting info down oocly somewhere.

There are problems playing an npc as a PC, too. If they're being played as a PC and have all the answers, you risk them hogging the spotlight when they should be a support character, and you force players that aren't interested in kissing up to the npc to interact. Mods should try to make npcs as likeable or interesting as possible but they still should ultimately be used to enable and support the PCs in ways that players find fun, and need to be avoidable for those that find them a snore. An npc can't be avoidable if it's the only way to get plot info, though, especially if there are no alternate handwaves for transmitting it like an ooc post. That isn't to say that you can't sometimes introduce new information, plots, or settings icly, especially for plots, but people really do need a starting base of information to work from so they're all on the same page.

Also, as far as plots go, usually they have limitations that npcs wouldn't ICly spell out for people. People need to know "are my characters powers able to do X here" or "is my character allowed to disobey the npc's words and try X"? And it's absolutely a given that, at some point, they're going to think of ways to interact with the plot that you didn't anticipate and therefore didn't think to put down. And sometimes these things will be unusual for npcs to spell out for characters, especially if they're enemy npcs. Sometimes these things might be plot breaky and once the action is done you have to play damage control.

If you really want players to play and not just talk about playing, just stick with the right balance of providing enough IC and OOC information for them to work within the plot, but not enough that they can anticipate an ending so they can just handwave what happens. If you put enough unpredictable elements in plots that would definitely influence a character's mental state, and leave the final outcome uncertain until it's played out, people can't just handwave involvement. This also has the added benefit of players feeling they can actually influence the outcomes of plots and influence things in the game world, which makes them more eager to engage.

I've found that the greatest hurdle to getting players to actually play things out isn't just laziness. That's a factor for a lot of players but for many others they tend to feel like nothing their characters do actually matters so they just focus on having their characters react to events they can't control and use it for good CR. Let them actually have some control, give plots high enough stakes to be exciting, and make things variable enough they can't predict the ending, and you'll see more of them actually playing out plots.

+1

[(Anonymous)]

i wish i could +infinity the comment about NPCs played as PCs. i have yet to find a game that did this that didn't eventually result in a discouragingly split playerbase of NPC friends vs non-NPC friends. or that didn't result in PCs sitting on their hands until the NPCs could get them tidbits of plot to play with.

ime too much NPC involvement actually creates less spontaneity and creativity with the game environment because people end up depending on them too much.