rpanons | the masses thirst for the smallest drop of wank

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tossed out what i thought was a perfectly acceptable "here is an allusion to something out of the ordinary happening IC that we're now reacting to! let's riff and work backwards via RP until we've either established what it was, and/or how our characters feel about it! what was the something? that's totally up to you, your preferences and your imagination, topleveller, i am leaving it wide open!" type starter that seemed to fit the meme prompts, but must have fucked it up somehow, because the response i got was prettymuch "no, nothing happened, why are you talking to me?"

re-reading my tagout to look for something inappropriate or offensive that i didn't intend and am drawing a blank on what i did wrong.
given we're both playing from serialized canons that make heavy use of cold opens, i figured it was thematically appropriate to start a thread that way. should i have been less vague and thought of a specific thing to be reacting to instead of putting it on them, or are in-media-res style starters just some kind of collectively agreed upon no-no that i should have known better than to try?

you're good my man. some writers here are just really not great at improv, and some are.

we hear all the time about people responding to (for example) tfln tagins with "? sorry wrong number [no additional hook]," so it's definitely not a just you problem. meanwhile other people get entire psls out of tfln.

you obviously did not tag me because i haven't gotten a tag like that but if you tagged someone LIKE me they may just not know what to do with that kind of open ended response. in that position i would pm the player to hash it out rather than give a bland response, but just wanted to give you another "it's not you, it's them" from the other perspective.

some of us are unfortunately very literal thinkers so that sort of thing may be hard to navigate, especially with a stranger. generally unless i know the person and what sort of hooks they're good with, i avoid anything vague or "off screen".

this is really helpful to keep in mind! next time i try this style of tagout, i'll include an ooc note saying i'm down to brainstorm via pm or re-do the starter with something more linear

+1 to anon below, some players are just not good at ad-libbing, some to the point of not really understanding when other people are even trying to improv

there are plenty out there who are great at it, so don't be discouraged, you just got the wrong person. reuse the idea for someone else.

thanks, i just wanted to be sure i wasn't doing something offensive there. their response seemed really clipped and abrupt, so i figured i'd done something annoying.

aw man, this is my dream. i'd love to come across other writers who were confident and excited enough make up something wonderful on the fly. i'm sorry they made you feel that way, but there are a lot of people out there that welcome these scenarios! don't think too much of it.

ha, well i'm not sure if it was wonderful, but i tried to match the feel of an opening scene in their canon and maybe should've been clearer that i was just trying to offer an open-ended hook, not force them into some complicated history they hadn't agreed to or anything like that.

Some people just don't belong in a creative writing hobby that relies on collaborative storytelling. It's either them being stubborn and passive aggressively shooting you down because they're not actually interested, or they just suck at the very basics of rp. Either way they're not worth worrying about.

if it's a completely cold pitch without any prior IC or OOC interaction, my theory is some people hold off or get skittish with starters like this because

a) there's something in the premise they feel doesn't gel easily with what their character would do and they're unsure how to improv it organically (like, idk, something about haunted houses when that character normally avoids spooky stuff)

b) they're unsure what the assumed CR dynamic is and are vagueposting to get out of taking initiative to establish the vibe, or they're canonblind to your character and don't want to deal with the familiarity of assumed CR, so they're trying to stonewall it into something more neutral

c) they're assuming YOU'RE coming in with specifics to fill in the blanks and afraid you'll turn out to be one of those psycho players who'll get butt blasted if they step on your toes or ruin the scene you have in your head, lmao

like the other anon, sometimes i'll reach out and share some ideas to help get us in an agreed upon direction if i feel like establishing a baseline would help. if they're still not receptive after that, though, it's probably better to cut your losses.

as one who took it that ayrt was overthinking an ic rejection and blurring ic/ooc lines, this is a good explanation and i appreciate your breaking down each point in detail

op here, and i'm very cool with rejection, almost half my tagouts go ignored, which is fine, that lets me file away ideas to refine more and try with someone else later

it just surprised me to get an ic response at all if they weren't interested; it's never occurred to me to end a thread on my first reply, so i wasn't sure of the "why" behind it. i just wanted to be sure tag setups that were left that open were ok and not some common pet peeve, 'cause then i wouldn't bother using it again if i spotted any other characters it might work for.

everyone's replies have been really helpful, and i'm going to save parts of the tag i thought were worded well, and include an ooc offer to edit and/or plot if i ping something like that off a stranger again.

I think c or something like that is the culprit. i think i left it *too* open without making it clear i was trying to hand them control to avoid inadvertently doing a or b.

thanks, this is really helping me re-work a few of my starter ideas!

the masses thirst for the smallest drop of wank

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