On roleplaying

So it's now a month later, and I'm finally making the beef barley soup I said I was going to make. It was a busy month. First the science paper, then the two cruises, then that new game I'm running.

The primary GM never did come back, so I finally moved the Dark Ages Werewolf plotline out of his game and into a new one. My players (all two of them :p) both wanted to continue, and I do have enough interest in the plot premise that I think I can do it. It's a fairly simple plot premise. Basically, a major caern has fallen to the Wyrm (the really evil bad guys), and the PCs are going to need to form a pack and win it back and restore it to its original pristine condition. Since the game is a play-by-post, though, this all by itself is enough material to keep the game going for at least a year - and that's not including how complex and interesting the character interactions will probably end up getting.

I'm planning to screen pretty heavily for good players, so there should hopefully be minimal morons in the game. The tome of submission guidelines alone should scare off the vast majority of people I don't want to play with. The ones who aren't scared off will be easy to spot because they won't have read the guidelines in the first place, and are therefore the bottom of the barrel. Hence, I'll end up with good players with good characters who interact with each other and develop intriguing and wonderful relationships.

That's the plan, anyway. This is going to take a while. Weeding the gems out of the muck requires a lot of patience. (Then when you're all done finding them and putting them into the game, they suddenly develop offline lives and stop playing. :p)

I'm also planning to take a serious left turn away from World of Darkness canon, now that the game is truly my own and I can do whatever I want with it. I've never much cared for a good chunk of the published material, though Werewolf bugs me a lot less than most. At this point I've decided that the manifestations of the Wyrm will resemble the Zerg from Starcraft. That should give me all sorts of bizarre creatures to describe for them to kill. :) Obviously, a good chunk of combat might end up being more freeformed than anything else, since there aren't exactly any published stats on zerglings.

Anyway, if anyone is interested in following along to the story, I'm planning to keep everything in public threads. It's here.

I love running play by posts. It means that I don't have to figure anything out until the last possible minute. ;) And even then, I have hours to think stuff up. I've never been a fast thinker and there's no way I could ever run something tabletop. I'm hoping I can run this game about like the last one I did (Stargate). It's a plot-directed game, in that the PCs have an actual end goal to work toward, but they can get there any way they want. Things that they do will have consequences in the setting and to each other. If the players are good, I'm mostly just sitting there as a referee, playing the bad guys based on the very simple motivations that they have (defend this desecrated caern :p). Any new setting detail that gets developed will be when a PC needs to ask a question about it, at which point I'll make stuff up on the spot. The trick is to keep it all consistent with whatever I've made up before that point, and the farther in the game goes, the more complex it'll get. Should be fun if it works. :)

It worked very well for Stargate for almost a year. Eventually that game ended, just before the conclusion, because the number of dorks reached my breaking point and I just couldn't take it anymore. There were also some other OOC issues with players who were formerly friends. Plus the fact that most of the best players had wandered off due to circumstances in Real Life. By the time I called it quits, I only had 4 players left, and they weren't positioned well to continue the plot. So I just ended up writing a bunch of fast-forward conclusions to get them to the end. Which they were pretty much there already anyway. If anyone is really bored and feels like reading the Stargate game, it's here [2009 Sep 26 - long gone now]. :p It's been deleted but not yet wiped from the rpol database. Despite all the OOC problems associated with the game, we wrote a lot of good stuff in there together.

I guess I should mention that Stargate worked best when there were around 10 active players going at any given time. I'm hoping I can build up the Werewolf game to be around that same size as well. I'm hoping that there's enough interest on rpol for a Dark Ages Werewolf game at all :p - I'm the only one, as far as I know, so they would at least all have to come to me.

Play by posts are nice in that you can have more players than you can in offline games. Offline, you have to deal with separate groups one at a time, while everyone else sits around waiting. Online, you can post for all of them at once. The dynamic is entirely different.

Slower, but no better or worse. You do have to have a lot of patience, as you don't often get a response to your post for quite a while. Sometimes your entire group is online at the same time, and then everyone can post pretty fast - which averages out around 10-20 minutes between each post. Most of the time, though, you have to wait a few hours or days.

I was in one game for a while, a Vampire, that had a meteoric life. The first two in-game days took us only three months to play - not because we were fast-forwarding through everything, but because we really were playing that fast. One GM, around 10 players, and at our peak we were doing 70-100 posts per day, every day, most of them between 10pm and 2am U.S. east coast time. For three months. And these were not one-liners, these were good quality posts. We were insane.

Needless to say we burnt out. That game sucked up most of my time outside of work, and *cough* some of my work hours as well. I was obsessed. The GM was obsessed. 5 months later it just wasn't going to work anymore. The GM had serious issues that came to a head, and I was the one taking the brunt of her venting because somehow we had become friends-like. It kind of died a slow, agonizing death for the following 5 months, until finally we just couldn't do it anymore. It never did come to an official end. The GM just stopped coming back. I still have the game on my sticky list, mainly because I haven't gotten around to archiving it yet, and at this point I still don't know whether I would want to finish playing out the plot. It's been over a year since it stopped. I know that several of the players still don't want to even think about that game again. But the ride, at least the first part, was fun while it lasted.

Hmmm. And here I thought I would just talk for a little bit about my roleplaying to indulge PoetMage's curiosity. :p Guess I can really work up a rant when I get going on something. Which parts did you most enjoy reading about? I can rant about that more than the other parts next time. ;)

In other news... August is looking like it'll be more quiet overall. I'm going to need all the time I can muster to work out Stranger on a Bus. Especially if I do cough up the $50 to enter it officially.

At the moment I have a very sparse plot outline for where it starts and where it ends. There's a bunch of possible scenes in the middle, and I have a list of locations that the bus will stop. I have no clue what exactly will happen at most of those stops, except that it will probably involve Alan (God in disguise) doing something incomprehensible. I've also decided that the bus driver, Ned, is going to drive the bus personally the whole way. He's going to inexplicably not need to sleep or rest, as well as inexplicably be scheduled by Greyhound to do all of that driving. He's not going to understand that at all, but that's okay, he doesn't need to.

I need to work out names for all the places, and maybe some of the minor characters. In my mind it sort of resembles a roleplaying game. I have two key characters (two PCs) with fairly straightforward motivations and abilities, the key obstacles to overcome and antagonists with motivations and abilities, some helper minor characters (friendly NPCs), a point A and a point B, and some vague setting info for the bus trip along the way. That's all you really need to start a roleplaying game. Not sure how well this'll work for a novel - especially a novel that's to be written in 3 days.

I think I can I think I can ...

I've read through the Survival Guide on the 3-Day Novel website too. There's actually a whole discussion thread buried in there, where you can get a play-by-play of a bunch of people doing it. Before, during, and after. I didn't read all of it, but got enough of a flavor that it looks like the crack version of Nano's cocaine. ;)

And now I'm enjoying my beef barley soup. It tastes pretty good already, straight after cooking it, and it'll be marvelous tomorrow. I always eat a bowl of my soup right after it's done, even knowing it isn't done done yet. Call it my personal soup-making tradition.