@MisterBoring This was me at one point. Did the prep, did RP about the thing in advance, did the request. I was excited to play it!
Completely flaked on the event. Why? Forgot about it. Completely spaced the time and date until after it had passed.
I was so embarrassed by myself I ended up vanishing off the whole game after that.
SOMETIMES THERE’S NO REASON AT ALL.
@SockMonkey After a decade+ of working in child welfare law and finally escaping, this is exactly the kind of feel good story that makes me tear up. Thank you for sharing it.
I flaked off my last game and I guestimated a year ago. I am waiting in the wings to pounce on a couple that I know are in process of being built, but nothing in the intervening time has caught my interest enough to overcome my inertia.
I definitely had some very cool interactions at those giant Arx scenes where a lot of the RP was in tabletalk and then we interacted with what was going on in the wider scene. Not just on Arx either. And one time at a hatching an impression from the stands that wasn’t me but was very cool to interact with that would have been impossible without the places.
Or like-- party scenes where stuff from flows smoothly from tabletalk in and out, can totally happen. I can remember a couple of cool things like this from olden times. It just requires people not to be assholes.
I see both ways on the issue of scene disruption. Sometimes a scene should be disrupted because there’s a story reason to do so and it absolutely makes sense to Aragorn those doors open and smash your way in to what’s going on for drama and impact, and other times, I’m officiating a three-legged race for silly prizes and someone has shown up to be very angry at me because my planned event scene that has been calendared for weeks tonally clashes with a GMed emit from two hours ago where someone died.
I think it can absolutely be fun to do tabletalk about a large event scene, I do think that speaking in low voices about what is happening in the broader scene can have value and develop story in and of its own right, and I don’t want to either spam the main scene with my amazing jokes OR feel compelled to try and throw a grenade in order to disrupt the flow of what’s going on. I’ve had a lot of fun playing a smaller scene inside a larger scene! I would have been super self-conscious being on my bullshit in front of all 50 people that were in the room as opposed to the 7 who were at my bench!
@Yam I like them when there is a scene going on that it is my IC role to watch. Watching by itself is boring but kibbitzing privately with people at the same table as me is fun. It is a pain in the ass to log though.
I don’t find it very useful when all it does is put stuff at the beginning of a pose, though. I get why it exists but my brain is inherently cluttered so it doesn’t work well for me.
I’m partway through the Inevitable Ruin right now. I’ve got to drive across the state for work in a couple weeks and am a little worried I am going to run out of books before the next one comes out.
@junipersky a friend of mine recently recced that and I have been listening to the audios a lot. I LOVE DONUT
I also don’t like movie night scenes but that’s just conceptual because it is inherently uninteractive to me to rp about watching a thing. RP that took place AFTER a movie night with a big dumb pillow fight or that interrupted a movie night with rocket launchers would be fine.
I can think of several ways to make mail sorting impactful or fun especially if there’s a war on.
I either stick forever or flake and wander off. I’m not sure the conditions around these things are definable even to me.
@KarmaBum Yes! That is the only way I ever found anywhere on Shattered while I existed there, because at that time I was no longer using a client much for a variety of reasons.
@Trashcan I used to do it all the time specifically so that I could avoid having to come up with the required location name. Physically go to place, scene/start. Sometimes, I would start the client, go to the place, scene/start, then RP the whole scene on the portal via web.
Otherwise I would do whole scene and try to post and realize I didn’t have a location set and it wouldn’t let me because apparently knowing where you are in rp is critically important.
One time I was rping with @roz and she gave me the perfect setup for my character to say, “I am Cerberus at the gates and you are on my goddamned front lawn,” and I will never forget how much joy this gave me, and I am literally building a character concept for a game that doesn’t yet exist based on that old character and this moment in my heart.
I’m such a drama queen.
I pay for D&D a couple of times a week. My brother is a professional DM and I am a sucker & I both want to support him and genuinely enjoy his GMing, so.
I agree with Pyre tho. I’m not generally averse to paying for products I enjoy but if the MU I am playing on is a product it’s going to change my expectations. Then again I’ve probably spent more money for less satisfaction by buying stupid shit on phone games over the years, so… who knows.
@Ashkuri This is why I will always start scenes in media res now and never put a closed door in between my players and action. I have learned.
@Yam don’t let the assholes win, honey. Learn to thrive on spite
Yeah if there’s something to figure out, I like going in with a few potential pathways in mind and then dropping them all and rolling with whatever the players come up with in terms of how to get there. Having a set solution to a problem is a way to frustrate yourself AND your players!
@Gashlycrumb Different requests take different amounts of time and energy and skipping one for awhile because you aren’t feeling it is an extremely reasonable thing to do.
It is definitely possible to go to the other extreme and it is extremely draining of player enthusiasm to set and wait forever for a response. I have waited forever for responses. I am not going to go into the specifics, but I get it. I just don’t think it’s fair to assume X staffer hates me or that there’s some other player favoritism reason why this one request is a pain in the ass while others are not.
And if you really feel like you can’t trust the staff in a game, stop playing there.