rpanons | but my main character syndrome

but my main character syndrome

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Agreed. Reincarnation should really just be seen as a separate genre from AU at this point. It has its good points, but it's not what I come to AU games for.

maybe

Agreed. Like steampunk and dystopia, I feel like the urban fantasy genre has been unfairly tainted by mediocre YA romance novels to the point where nobody wants to touch it, even though there's still a lot of potential.

If the "fantasy" part is interesting, the "urban" part can be left mostly to player discretion. Like, "modern NYC but there are vampires and werewolves" isn't much of a hook, but if there's good vampire/werewolf worldbuilding and a story that characters can really get involved in that just happens to be set in a modern city, it could be a lot of fun. Or ditch the vampires and werewolves and use witches or elves or youkai or espers or angels or something else instead. Build up some original lore instead of trying to throw together a dozen generic tropey fantasy races, because "all myths are real" has been done to death.

The advantage of using a modern setting that players can just google for details is that you don't have to bloat the game info with lots of setting and NPC descriptions. You can focus on worldbuilding the fantasy side of things and let players handle the Starbucks. Recent history, near future and modern-with-an-alternate-history-twist settings are easy, too.

i don't know

With an open testdrive.

Build up some original lore

No, don't do this. No one will read it, no one will care and no one will join the game.

If you can't get a quick idea of what your AU will be within minutes, you won't app.

da +1

some players want tons of lore but generally players need a "back of an envelope" idea of the world at most. apping involves a lot of reading and understanding game rules and mechanics as it is without asking your players to get through multiple paragraphs of something that won't be interesting until they're fully in the game.

show don't tell, then trickle in worldbuilding and lore using game events. way more fun.

LIKE:

- Historical fantasy, royalty/nobility, horror, urban fantasy. I'm not big on cyberpunk/sci-fi but that's entirely my personal preference, nothing wrong with the genre as a whole.

- A reason for PCs to interact. If it's a big open world or a huge city where everyone is just living their daily lives, it can be a struggle to come up with reasons for our characters to get together.

- A focus on player plots or a plot that progresses with player actions instead of having set monthly events like jamjars do. Mod-run events are also fine but for AU games I prefer events that progress the plot, change the status quo, or otherwise need player action to resolve them rather than jamjar style "things happen for a week and then they stop" events.

- Different groups and some PvP elements. Doesn't have to be factions or a war game, and given the smaller size of AU games I'd also take care not to make the divisions too sharply defined or restrictive (consider that each group might only have a handful of players in it), but some pre-existing tensions and allegiances that players can build on is nice. Something like different noble houses in a historical fantasy game or different types of monsters in an urban fantasy game.

- Building on that, regardless of if there are defined groups or not, I prefer conflict to be player-driven at AU games. Jamjars often default to either environmental threats or NPC enemies while PCs are encouraged to work together, and that's understandable because it's difficult to create a conflict that randos from another world are invested enough in to fight each other over it. AU games have the benefit of characters having a history and a stake in this world.

DISLIKE:

- School as a setting, whether it's high school or university or whatever. Even if you come up with a reason for characters of all ages to attend, I'm just sick of school. That's not to say you can't have any characters who are students, but I'd rather the game not be centered around school.

- Premises that are too "jamjarry". As in, games where most of the characters will be strangers to each other, or where they're new arrivals in a strange land. I've played that and can still play that in jamjars. Exploration tends to fall flat for me in AUs for similar reasons. If I join an AU game it's because I want my character to have pre-existing CR and be entrenched in the world itself, not play the same old fish-out-of-water stuff.

- Agreeing with the people who don't want memloss or reincarnation. When I go AU, I want full AU.

- AUs based directly on specific canons. I'm sure there are some canons well-known enough for it to work, but I personally would prefer an original setting even if I know the canon it's based on.

When it comes to jamjars I agree with this, but is that really the case with AU games? In jamjars, mods can reveal information this way because the characters are discovering it at the same time as the players. With an AU you're playing a character that is already established in the world and you need a good base to be able to create your AU with.

You don't have to write a novel's worth of original lore, but if you're going to have supernatural elements then you need to explain how they work in the setting. A lot of shitty urban fantasy novels are just "vampires and werewolves exist in this world, but somehow normal people don't know about them" and there's very little worldbuilding that considers how the fantasy elements would affect the setting or society. If I'm working my AU character into this world, I want to know (for example) how vampire society is structured, which humans know about vampires, how human governments/organizations deal with vampires, what conflicts exist between different groups within vampire society, etc. I don't need to know the details of vampire tax policy, but I need more than a paragraph of flavor text. What kind of stuff would my character realistically know if they grew up in this world? What would my character know if they were in a position of power? How do my character's canon history, status, relationships, job, powers, etc. fit into this world? If I just wanted to plunk my character into a random world where they only interact with the setting during events, I'd play in a jamjar.

But yeah, I agree that there's such a thing as too much lore. I think that's especially common in canon-based AU games where the mod has to explain the backstory of a whole series to the uninitiated. Players don't care about the chief exports of the game world's 6 largest cities, or the minute details of the combat system, or the backstory of the NPC coffee shop owner.

44 more icons to go 🙄

it depends on the au i'd say, but i think the key is making sure the game and mechanics and the world are interesting before concentrating on writing down all the lore

it's pointless to have pages of deep history if it's too dense for anyone to actually use to come up with an idea. think of the difference between describing lord of the rings to someone who has never read it (which i expect you can do fairly quickly) and going into the appendices for all of the lore

i've always been told a good thing to do with creative projects is to describe your idea to someone out loud and if you can't do it succinctly and clearly then it needs to be reworked

I guess, and I agree that having too much lore can be unnecessary and off-putting, but I disagree with the original anon that people will be put off if they can't digest the entire game's lore within a few minutes. You can make an interesting and fleshed-out game world without bogging it down in pages and pages of lore, but imo AU games do need some lore and history to be able to build a character off of.

AU games need LESS necessary to know original lore because you need to know all of it before you can app. you need a snappy concept players can pick up and run with, do what they want (within reason) and be creative with. its not a tabletop RPG where you can put the characters through a series of preset variations.

I guess we're just going to have to agree to disagree here. Quick and snappy is not at all what I'm looking for when it comes to an AU game and would be a turn-off. There's a such thing as too much lore too, of course, but I need something I can sink my teeth into and create a character that feels like they belong in the setting with. I like a good mix of allowing for player creativity while still having enough boundaries that character concepts feel cohesive despite coming from a patchwork of canons.

Original lore is important to an AU game. What puts people off is if they can't see their character in the world. Build original lore, but make it vague enough and spread wide enough that it's applicable. Maybe you have a town with a secret war between wizards, but you want to include people who might app nonhumans, so you add havens of werebeasts and magical familiars and stuff like that.

i've had this happen to me before and it's just bad luck, because sometimes i end up with an overwhelming number of threads

definitely no fun though sorry anon

I thought an opt-out post on your journal was just for if your character/canon involved common triggering scenarios (with options for "don't talk about/thread this with me" or "don't tag me period") or if they were from a fad canon that gets a lot of backlash (I remember all the Homestucks who had to have opt-out posts), but a few people in the character advice thread advised to make opt-out posts for children and animals and to expect them to be used because people won't want to thread with them or will think the player is weird and after the dreaded unsolicited caretaker/family CR. What's the general climate now for what kind of character or canon needs an opt-out post?

all characters, so people can also use them to opt out of you as a player if they want to

i guess we have to disagree, but my point is if i see an au lore page which is 'the hoomoos of glooghadh have a 20 millennia history which i will now recount' but it actually boils down to 'elves exist and now run this town, fight the demons attacking it', which it invariably will, id rather a short lore like 'elves exist and now run this town'

da but this made me realize that my own interest in AU games, or games with a ton of lore, boils down to: if i need a glossary to read the info, i won't app. if i don't, i might.

depends, really. did you volunteer for the thread? did you make a lot of plans for it? did you let your thread partner know you're dropping it? have you dropped a lot of things with this partner? did you get a a decent length thread going? is this a psl thread, meme thread, or a game thread?

it's never wrong to drop something you aren't enjoying, as long as you aren't habitually agreeing to start things that you won't follow through.

Pro wrestling federation where you have to actually play out the matches, join factions, get into rivalries with other characters, fight over championship belts, turn on your allies, etc. etc.

I assume this would bomb because nobody would wanna lose and unlike real pro wrestling, you can't pay people to do it.

stony died with civil war all hail stucky

yes

don’t call your werewolves the moontouchedkin or your demons scalaydiyon or whatever

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Ayrt