(01-03-2017, 03:57 AM)Arvid Greave Wrote: [snip]
-Share the burden, you don't always have to lead. Let other people make events, encourage them to make events. I mean since the last event was about their character, they get to lead the next one and OH MY GOD ARE YOU EVER EXCITED TO SEE WHAT HAPPENS NEXT. YOU'RE SO STOKED. (Well you should be, I usually am.) Share notes later on what happened. Share notes IC, make the information sharing an event. People absolutely love it when events aren't always about one character. Also, YOU CANNOT PRAISE THE PERSON WHO MADE THE EVENT ENOUGH. YES CAPS. CAPS. PRAISE. LOVE. SHOWER. AFFECTION. It's so much work you didn't want to do, and they did it! If you had fun, let them know. Remind them how much fun you had the next day, the next week, next month.
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Not gonna lie I get super excited for others' events -- usually more excited for theirs than my own when it comes to stories... Since when I write stories I need to overwork myself by accounting for everything. I'm not sure how to exactly go about encouraging people to make events though sadly beyond constantly plugging the ones they advertise in our events and announcements channel and encouraging them practically every other breath to feel absolutely free to get stuff going for themselves or even just try to suck the LS in general into whatever they happen to be doing. It's difficult to get stoked and sing praises about people who plan their own things or even help me plan things when I'm only ever the one involved in planning, unfortunately...
Aside: I'll admit I laughed pretty hard at the kidnapping Sasuke thing. I'm not a huge fan of kidnapping RP; I'm not sure what the fascination is and I guess it could work in smaller plots but most of what I heard about it just locks a character in a damsel in distress position... Which needless to say is kind of boring and overused imo. Tropes Are Not Bad and all that, but when it comes to writing... Eh. I've participated in one event with my FC where it worked, but that was mostly because the 'kidnapping' happened as a result of our failure to win a combat instance (and it was NPCvP) and carried weight because of that. And the character died as a result, so I guess it doesn't really qualify because it wasn't and couldn't have ended up as a chronic thing.
(01-03-2017, 05:51 AM)ArmachiA Wrote: On "Stories shouldn't revolve around one person". If you CAN, you should make a story that doesn't really have a main character at all. Nothing from anyone's backstory (Unless it's a shared backstory with more people involved). You can have people who can be integral at the START to get it off the ground (Then let the story be free to go toward whoever grabs for it) but none of them should be the single focus of the plotline. I know this can't be avoided all the time (Hell, we're guilty of this right now) but it's good to START with a more neutral plot line that anyone can jump into without having to know <insert character here>. Once trust is established, you can absolutely branch off into more personal storylines.
On "One-offs are better". I think that really depends on the RPer. There are a lot of people in my guild who really like long, overarching plots and there are some who don't really have time for that and can't participate, and some even still who don't like keeping track of the madness and just wanna punch some baddies sometimes. If you're looking to do the first thing, I suggest actually doing BOTH. It's actually really easy to put one-off plots within your overarcing storyline. Lets say your bad guy uh... We'll call him Bob, is threatening to do SOMETHING with some ancient artifact that may hurt Eorzea! But you don't know much on what that artifact is! What do you do? A one-off dungeon run into the great Library to look for info may be the best bet OR if you have more time - a one-off roll20 into some ancient ruins to find more information. Then you find more info on how to stop Bob, but alas you don't have the right pieces to make thing you need! And the pieces are illegal and hard to find in Eorzea! You can then do a one-off about smuggling the pieces in.
These are all things that would work separately ("Finding info on artifacts" "Smuggle in goods") without a plot, so people without a lot of time or inclination CAN participate, but they also circle back to your overarcing plotline for those more deeply involved. These aren't events you have to run either, if you have some active members they may just volunteer to run it and ask you what they would find when they do. A lot of one-offs my guild does are run by other people who want to help find answers... though you may not get to many people volunteering at the start.
Yep, that first point is basically my philosophy when it regards storylines. Because I have a bit of trouble getting invested in plots that aren't tied to any characters at all (a villain that's just like, a giant space flea from nowhere... Is difficult for me to be invested in so I tend not to write them; when other people write them there's other ways for me to get into the story so I don't concern myself with the antagonist much until I'm in the moment) I tend to use my characters as instigators, but quickly send the story shooting off into a lot of other branching directions, so even if my characters kick-start the story they don't stay in the limelight for very long. XD I've only GM'd a total of one storyline so far on a totally different character and wit ha totally different cast, with an upcoming second, but even in terms of just general RP with my partners that hardly even constitute events, I prefer to play supporting/instigating roles and let others bask in the limelight.
Doing one-off events that build toward the greater story is definitely something I'm going to try, though, because it gives more people the chance to get involved in the story and I can only handle so many people at a time because I'm a beginner at best and a know-nothing at worst but I still want to work anyone who's interested in being in... Well, in, and i think it's important to at least try to be inclusive of people unless they just like, totally won't work with you at all, like they're expressing interest OOC in a very general way but refuse or neglect to get to the more pointed stuff that would help to... Solve whatever issue they have, or the issue happens to have to do with the structure or setting of the story and it's like... I'm sorry there's... There's only so much I can do without re-planning the scenario entirely... (Which I don't honestly even plan that much; mostly I just plan the beginnings and let people go from there, but beginnings usually serve to set the stage, so...)
(01-05-2017, 12:16 PM)ExAtomos Wrote: Yes... SOMEHOW I missed your sig completely. lol XD
Ok, so from the inside (albeit only very recently)... I'm struggling to find a way in. I can't yet tell what direction y'all are steering the boat, especially since lately there have been a couple "we're doing it this way now" posts. You also have... quite the mixed bag of members. I certainly appreciate your struggle to try and change the RP style of the LS from lore-breaking silliness to actually dark RP with substance while still keeping members that you've had the whole time.
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I'm actually feeling a bit of the <Hmm.> with the LS recently. You have put so much work into these upcoming plots and I was really impressed with the google doc you created. But frankly, this structured, planned style of RP isn't for me. As an aside, back on my old JP server, we had two hardcore rpers and a few interested in the concept in my FC. Unfortunately, me and the other rper had vastly different styles of going about it. He preferred the structured sort with a definite beginning and end, pulled in specific tasks that exist in game (and we had to do them), and created these beautiful websites to go along with it. There was little chance for character development. I wanted a more natural, 'met by chance', 'let the plot happen as we talk' style of rp interaction. Most importantly in this case, as soon as I see "we are using X roll/character sheet system", I stop reading and move on. I would expect folks who prefer structure to feel the same about my more fluid way of setting up scenes.
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This does make me wonder though... in amongst the dozen Discord channels y'all have, do you have a space for members to give a brief run down of their character(s) so we can potentially find reasons to meet each other?
eta now that I've quit being lazy and read all the comments (including the above which made me laugh since I have an 'evil artifact' plot in the wings. XD ):
Some things I've learned:
- I think most players want you to be Netflix. They don't want to be an active participant in a plot, much less a proactive one. They want to WATCH the damn plot unfold. They just want everything handed to them. And when you finally give up the IC nudges and ask them OOCly what their character is doing; they respond with "Oh, I'm supposed to tell you?"
- Piggy backing off that... Annoyingly, my most successful plots have centered around my character(s) just due to the fact that I can keep the story moving instead of logging in and praying that others will contribute to a group RP plot so that it keeps going.
- Some folks just ain't gonna like the plot. ; ; And none of you may know this until things get rolling.
- There are a lot of RP styles between pure SoL and structured events. I vastly prefer nuanced dark themes and, while my RP appears to be more casual like SoL encounters, there's a heap of potential plots that I pull from to toss into the conversations with my RP partners. The story will unfold as we continue to interact. If they move on or show little interest, I pocket the idea right back and will adjust it or use it in another way some other time. Flexibility is key.
Hahah, it happens! I should probably think about sprucing up my sig now that I'm trying to actively participate in forums and stuff but... Meh.
Ahah, seems our styles are pretty opposite then. While I definitely don't enjoy plots that are completely and totally planned out from start to finish, I really really hate trying to make anything meaningful out of the little social interactions and characters more or less just getting to know each other; most of the time it feels more like trying to pull teeth than writing a story that would ever have a logical conclusion. So I tend to plan beginnings to try and hook people in and give the story event a general direction and turn people loose. It's mostly because of preference; I find it a lot easier to get invested in plotlines when my ideas are laid out in a semi-logical order and the 'background lore'/justification for the event happening is established, because participating in others' events I know I've had trouble getting invested specifically because I went in blind and ended up never really getting a reason for my character to be invested in the story IC or a reason for me to care OOC... so I dropped it and retconned it, because my character ended up never finding a reason to be there and I don't like having a lot of fluff lining my stories.
We didn't used to have a channel for that because it doesn't seem like something most people are totally interested in; most of the applications we get don't link to a tumblr or RPC page and they don't tend to talk about it a whole lot so I assume that's because people don't want any information about what their character does to be public for whatever reason even if it would help OOC with figuring out how characters fit into the grand scheme, just as a general thing. But I made one anyway just now because it seems like a good idea because being able to easily refer back to character information is important!
But yeah, I'm definitely feeling a little bit like Netflix given that even though the upcoming story is the only one I've gone out of my way to plan... The various socials we've held have borne no fruit with regards to stories or connections, even when one of the ones long before the Holiday season began was framed as a chance to basically sell your skills and get jobs out of the network because... IC, that's what it's for. the nature of the network isn't strictly insider info or anything. (Maybe 5 people showed up outside of myself, despite scheduling it about two to three weeks in advance. A tavern night held by one of our members later that same month rounded up about 20 of our members in the same room. Gee, I wonder where their priorities are...)
Aside: I'd debate that we've ever broken lore to a major degree as a group; the main issue in my opinion lies in social RP since in my experience social RP has hardly done anything to further a plot or make something happen. It probably goes better for other people in general but all it's really gotten for me is naptime, screwed up character arcs, and talking about the weather... Mostly the latter, especially when it comes to the social events I've tried my best to organize. Events which make me feel as if people have not read up on the lore of the LS at all, which is kind of saddening.
