Utterly Mad

#UtterlyMad

I'll make the private channel in there. I'll be like, 20 minutes though. I'm in a BoI run right now and there's a possibility I'll finally get somewhere with Eve.

Alright its been busy, but I finally have some fucking downtime. Going to take a break from learning Unity and going to get my shit updated:

1. The Highway's combat report [SPOILERS] you guys win, and Jove gets offered the chance to harvest organs from raiders for a quick buck.

2. The Database, I'm adding in the story of Los Angeles, a modern-day Atlantis that holds a treasure trove of Old World culture and technology... that's also full of androids fake plastic pumped people that are out for your blood. My sister helped me come up with a Silent-Hill esque mutant monster called "Zatoichi" (if you know your Japanese movies, you'll have a good idea what its like). Also adding some stuff about the war and why the US was terraformed so heavily (other then the reason to have jungles in The Four Corner states), along with some Highway vidya game stuff. Also I sent Furaotic some stuff about the lore to see if he'd want to include some of his Icarus stuff in there.

3. Finally updating the Terminal, and feel free to talk amongst yourselves. Like RP and stuff. The Terminal is going to be a kinda slow burn thing, so feel free to flesh out your characters with idle chatter while you wait for my dumbass to update.

Reputation, dedication, and quality. The three ingredients to making a successful RP.

Thank you Super Level Furaotic.

I was worried about you Hibou-Kun but I'm happy to know you're alright. Come back when you're ready and we'll be waiting. Nyan~!

Originally for the GMs Wanted thread:

Its not that we need more GMs, its that we need players that will actually RP. Its easy to say that you'll participate until you realize how active life is getting, that's why I'm saying that I'm on the update schedule of: "Whenever the hell I get to it."

And also the reason why I'm going to stop saying, "OH YES! THE UPDATE WILL BE OUT BY TOMORROW!" When I should say, "It might be out sometime soon." Everyone seems busy, which is why I've been doing the streaming thing, you can just put my screaming, accent making, BS on in the background until I run out of energy and gusto, or until I finally call it quits and head to bed. Its a lot easier than posting up a 5 paragraph long essay with descriptions of environments, how your beans and pork tasted, and how you just wasted the 12 guys in a couple of dice rolls.

That and most of the players aren't really in the mood to RP with a new setting unless there's enough there and you actually have a plotline to go with it. I've realized why The Highway is so popular, its because at the base level, the plot is just about a road trip, everything else just adds to that or fleshes everything out a bit more. It acts as an anchor and as a main goal for the players, so when things get batshit silly and they ask, "Wait what were we doing again?" They can just remember, "Oh right were going to Sacramento for some plot-important muguffin."


Among Gods failed because there wasn't a basic plot, and despite what the poll said, no one really did anything with it. It was a few sentence posts and BAM! It was over before it even started.

Terminal is going the same route as well with the lack of any real updates for everyone, even though only two of the players are actively doing something that requires a GM to post something. The players are free to do their thing, I mean you can go chat with other players or make up impromptu dialogue. The only reason I was pissed about players doing their own thing, during the meltdown, was mainly due to GTAGUY trying to fucking break something again; so I kinda got pissed and tore into everyone.



But from what I've learned, you need to take a simple concept and expand around that. I was planning on doing a Mafia inspired RP until I thought about it, no one's going to play it, sure they can talk, talk, talk all they want. But when it comes down to it, if they don't have a plot to go with their character or enough silly shit to mess with, its pointless to write it.


I love everyone here, but the RP stuff is mostly lacking due to players, GMs, and the forum alike not giving enough shit to put forth the effort. The players don't get, or get a lackluster update. So they post something lackluster and barely thought out. So the GM gets discouraged by the lack of good posts from people, so they start playing favorites by giving the good effort put forth updates to the people that put forth the effort. Until they write themselves into a corner.

Everyone is tired, busy, and writing is most likely more a chore then something fun. I love writing for The Highway, but sometimes I miss waking up and finding 5 new pages added to The Highway because some of the players were up late at night and decided to talk amongst each other about what is going on, speculating on what items do, and generally fleshing out their characters so that we actually give a damn about them.

You have to treat the RPs like D&D without rules here, its just the way the community is. You have to give them a "quest", some end goal to actively work towards, they may or may not know what it is, but they'll constantly shoot for getting to there, and with each post they get a little bit closer. It could be as simple as, "Go graverobbing in this tomb" And then have it spiral out of control, or something more complex like, "Survive WW1 in any way you can." Allowing them to just pop into existence with or without some background text, and then you write some situations for them to last a couple of months until you call it quits or you move on.

And honestly, I might update Clearer Pines for the sole reason of what happened being the craziest fucking thing ever. It went from tracking down some commies and shooting them, to the blank slate becoming some delusional creep with a fetish for putting his shit in little baggies made of organs, skin, and bunny rabbits. I might just rewrite most of it for the character to go all Rambo First Blood and hold off waves of "commie sympathizers" and actual Commie spies.

And everyone is getting bummed out with their shit due to lack of feedback on anything. Like a simple, "Yes I read this chapter, and you had a misspelling at page 8." would be fine. But no one wants to read anything, hell I don't even read anything. I forced myself to read Furaotics PULP and ended up liking it. We've just kinda fallen into a slump of wanting everyone to solely look at our shit, but when the time comes for someone to hop up and write something, no one wants to read it.


Like I said I'm guilty of this too, but I'm trying to figure out when we went from being a community that supported each other, to one that just kinda exists. Tomorrow (along with everything else I gotta get done) I'll sit down and read your guys's things and see what could be improved, whats really good, and what should be changed... if at all possible. But we really need to start showing support for each other through the medium of simple communication.

This is a very good discussion and I have a lot I want to say about everything you said, AJ and Vulnus.

First of all, if we are going to be supporting each other, we have about fifty people. I say this gets thrown up in the announcements section and we start a discussion with everyone because I don't think any of us here are necessarily a family. We are close knit and we are party that left C:DDA together, mostly, and I feel like this is a discussion for all boards and not just this one so we can grow closer. Generally, we need to talk about an entire revamp in my honest opinion, but for now I'm going to keep it strictly Creative Endeavors and Rec Room related. I'm listing the problems and then we can talk about solutions.

As for the Rec Room,

About an average 20 people log on a day. I'm going to make that rough estimate and anyone of you can clock me on it if you care so much. We have about... eight people dedicated to RP which is funny considering a large movement of us came from the Rec Room with other people tagging along. (Not shaming that or anything, just saying that's a huge ratio.) And maybe only three of those eight even come on in a day, and if they do come on, they might not even post.

That's eight people who may or may not give a shit about the RPs that happen here, and three people who have the chance to. I do not think it's a matter about enough people giving a shit, it's just not enough people. I'm going to get real and say we do not have enough people to create a very strong RP community. Especially since most of us already know each other and are, frankly, kind of sick of each other in that aspect. I'm sure some of you are sick of me and I don't awfully care that much about what anyone thinks of me, it's the fact that our small group of eight people dedicated are getting tired of RPing with the same people because we all flatline in a certain way. We cannot keep up with just that. We're all flaky, we're all busy, and it's just not enough people. That's just it. It's not enough people and that why shit won't be taking off like it has in the past. Plain and simple unless anyone has a rebuttal for that, then go on ahead.

Now, for us GM's, me being one, I find that it doesn't really matter how well put together the RP is. You can make it open as fuck, closed as fuck, or anything and sure you can get the ball rolling with characters and then they can create five pages of straight dialogue, but at the end of the day there's got to be a GM who's going to care just as much as a player. It's an even effort and both have to pull weight. If the GM doesn't get posts from players who care, a GM can't make caring posts. GMs and Players thrive and bounce off one another and we don't have enough of any of those. Like what, four or five of the eight dedicated are GMs themselves. The numbers just don't work and that's the issue. I'd dare say it's not always about dedication from the GM either. You can have a dedicated GM but people who don't want to post/too busy/aren't interested anymore. I've been flaky, I've been busy, and I've dropped things. But if I'm going to use an example, I came back to Sunken Harbors and tried to continue that. It got close. But people left. People got busy. That's the nature of that situation. We are all fickle people.

There's a lot more variables and shit to talk about when it comes to Rec Room, but at the end of the day here's the major issue and if we could solve it, everything would works itself out I guarantee.

We need more people. We don't need the few that we have to care more. Just more people.


As for the Creative Section,

To sum this up very quickly before I briefly elaborate:

"Actions speak louder than words."

Don't promise anything. I haven't promised to read anyone's anything and I haven't gone out of my way to read anyone's anything. I fully expect that what I put out I will get back. I haven't gotten feedback on anything that I've posted besides AJ's feedback. I expect that. I've reached out, I've offered, and I haven't gotten anything in return. It's a mutual care thing and I agree, in order for people to care about you, you have to care about them. I don't believe in excuses like "I'm too busy..." or "It's just really crazy right now..." Because I guarantee those are the same people watching AJ's stream or just sitting around hitting refresh until an update on an RP comes out or something new happens. Everything that I have glanced at is relatively short and anyone can read it in a short time with the excuse of PULP which is 70 pages long. I suppose it's a matter of just doing it, and I can't really say much because I could be doing that too. These examples are coming from what I personally do, and I'm sure i'm not the only one so I hope no one feels personally attacked by what I'm saying here.



That's all I have to say for now.
You can't make anyone care about it and you can't make anyone do it. It just takes one person's initiative to get the ball rolling. I believe I will take AJ's and make like a stone and roll.