rpanons | maybe we should try communicating through interpretive dance

maybe we should try communicating through interpretive dance

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does anyone else feel that the bar for rping in games (not dressing rooms) is just too high now? brought to you by yours truly looking for a nice game to play in that doesn't make me wait until 2050 to app or requires me to read a tome to even understand what we'll be doing. and don't give me shit about ~it's a reading hobby~ either cause some of y'all's faqs could be 500 instead of 50k words

who's up for a lowkey jamjar in the style of paradisa, polychromatic, etc where all you really need to know is you're on an island/in a city and sometimes weird things happen that encourage character interaction

everyone claims to miss those kinds of games but when people make them nobody joins.

thanks anon, that's helpful to know. i'm just so sad that i thought of returning to rp now that this quarantine means i've got the time but all the games are making me wait a century for the chance to even app

this. the real trick is getting people to actually app to these places when they open. i've seen at least three doa not because of wanky mods or cliques, but just because only a handful of people actually app.

I wouldn't mind something like this, but while a lower bar's not a bad idea, there should still definitely be some sort of bar.

i would. i have ordinary characters that i want to play.

i ran some number crunching on game premises or FAQs and to put it in perspective if they were written in a word document many games would average 6-12 pages long, prismatica's being the current longest. it's a lot of pedantic padding and (to be fair, players ask a lot of pedantic questions but i digress--) super wordy games are not a great trend.

also sadly yeah i want a chill always-open game but they never seem to last. i'm super bummed. things i'd look for though:

- banning known wankers with impunity
- no apps but "claims", or mini apps (like one paragraph) with more emphasis on samples, open all the time. either review daily or every 3 days or once a week depending on the size of the game. this way the bar can stay low but not might-as-well-not-even-be-there kinds of low.
- maybe assigned-at-"app" housemates or factions or something
- no AC but check-ins required
- duplicate characters, and obscure, "minor" characters, or AUs or CRAUs, or fandom OCs allowed because of that
- no caps so even squatting/activity lulls won't prevent someone else from apping in another version
- open to player-made events but once monthly mod-structured events should happen too to keep players engaged with the setting
- no network but a one-for-everything IC community
- maybe some kind of old school crack/meme/art side community for the game too?

personally i wouldn't care about power/ability caps, take em or leave em, but personally i do care a lot about game freedom and engagement. let my character start up a business, go adventure ~beyond the city walls~ or fight monsters, get their ass kicked by said monster, die and come back to life, whatever. don't tell me "you can't do this this or this or if you do this nothing exciting or interesting happens". tell me, "if you're interested in doing [thing] so many other things can come out of that, what direction would you like to go in?" i hate bloated faqs too so the more you can leave me to do things and make my own adventures the less i'll have to ask to make sure i'm not stepping on anyone's toes. i know other people really prefer a lot more guidance and that's okay too. freedom to make something fun come out of it either way is key, i think.

(i also don't want to play in a totally stagnant setting either where that freedom doesn't come without ic consequence and game changes but idk if that'll be as appropriate in a chill low stakes game!)

if not a jamjar, maybe something like everyone stays in their own worlds but shares a universal internet and can hop around through each other's canons or a shared dreamspace where everyone stays in their own worlds but when they sleep they all dream together might work well?

>- no AC but check-ins required

lol congrats you just killed your game

hm...maybe then just a 3-comment only ac? really low but still something? seems to work fine for prismatica

(deleted comment)

take your prismatica shit-stirring back to wg where it belongs

No.

And before you go and cry about how the mods are freezing dissent and negativity, this is the game ideas thread. If you want to give feedback on the ideas presented, go for it. If all you want to do is shit on Prisma, that's what the game discussion thread is for.

Edited 2020-03-30 17:30 (UTC)

3 comment ac + ask what your character did for the month with a link to it, preferably.

i'm finding that a lot of games these days have weird standards in general, in addition to overly difficult/complicated ones. age requirements in particular are really annoying and you can't even say anything about it without someone accusing you of completely off-the-wall shit. it's part of the reason i stick to psls now.

I really miss classic jamjars. I've been kicking around ideas for a while trying to hammer out what would make my perfect ideal jamjar, but it's more a thought experiment than anything because there just doesn't seem to be an audience for it anymore and I probably have no business trying to mod anyway.

For whatever it's worth, personally, the number one thing I care about is the quality of events and similar mechanics. Metaplot is overrated, but I still look to a game to provide me with interesting things happening that I can build off and play around with and challenge my characters with. No matter how SoL you are, you can only do "here's a party plus the food makes you act a little funny I guess" so many times. However, having fun events is hard to advertise, since obviously anyone can say theirs are good, but the only way to prove it is by getting the game running for a while. Still, when it comes down to it, I'll put up with any premise, any setting, any AC, any size, if that game is offering toys I'm excited to play with.

hi anon, what do you mean by quality of events sans metaplot? i've found the best events need a metaplot to hold it together, but what you're suggesting is interesting if i could just wrap my head around it

Okay, admittedly that's a very subjective thing. And like a lot of this kinda stuff, it can be hard to really pin down and put into words what makes an event good. I'm having a hard time coming up with a useful answer that doesn't just drift off into long-winded essaying about events in general, but I've tried. I guess if you can expand on your own thoughts about needing a metaplot to hold things together, we can talk about that more too if you want. But this is absolutely all just one anon's personal opinion and IDK, I'm probably getting up my own ass a bit here, feel free to roll your eyes.

I think that at the end of the day, the importance of events is to push characters outside their comfort zones, making them adjust to new situations and interact in new ways and just deal with things they normally wouldn't. That's the appeal for players: events help you push your character in different directions, play on sides of them that don't often come up, kickstart CR that wouldn't happen on its own, and just... do things that you'd have a hard time doing otherwise, that might not ever arise naturally.

There's no reason a metaplot should be required for that, IMO, standalone events can do it perfectly fine. There is a lot of grey area between "total plot focus" and "pure crack sandbox", though. Actually, mission-based games can verge into this territory if the missions stand well on their own, and jamjar events can look a lot like missions, if you're doing things like setting changes and giving characters a goal. I guess you could say that a metaplot is kind of one huge overarching event, in the sense that it's similarly challenging characters in a more long-term, pervasive way; but a jamjar does still have continuity too, and characters still have arcs and build on things that happen to them over time.

Anyway, a lot of the classic crack event material honestly does serve the basic purpose above -- putting characters into weird new situations they have to respond and adapt to. And so a lot of the old standbys became standbys because they're effective at it. Like, forced honesty got popular because it's VERY good at bringing things to the surface that might not easily come out otherwise and can give CR a dramatic push in a particular direction. It's not changing anyone into a totally different character, but it's bringing out different parts of them. Likewise, there are many, many, many ways to place characters together and get them interacting, some of which are more effective than others but also effective in different ways. There are many ways to bring about h/c, or opportunities for cool badass moments, or make characters confront their personal demons, or challenge the way they communicate, etc etc etc.

Though all that said, above all probably the best thing anyone can do with events, with or without a metaplot, is variety. Give people options and make them flexible enough to run off with in different directions. The bigger trick then is managing that while also keeping things cohesive, and still having enough structure to provide a push without forcing it.

status change events, monster of the week, missions, quests, mini-npc arcs. basically any event you can opt into that doesn't require back-reading other events that built up to it or requires prior metaplot to understand.

imo, as a former mod, i find people who don't do well without a lot of structure frequently are the type who don't pay attention to the long-running metaplot anyway, so these isolated micro-plots or stand-alone events work to the same exact purpose.

quality = you will get out what you put in, with rare exceptions

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maybe we should try communicating through interpretive dance

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+1

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ayrt

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da, +1