Note:  This is a bonus post.  Hit “Previous” to see the scheduled post of the day.

Read the previous RP post and its comments to see what’s going on here.  I still have room for two players.

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The orientation guide continued with some basics about the neighborhood – the nearest public park with sporting facilities, directions to the largest public library in town, the hospitals, etc – before getting everybody in motion, following her with trudging little steps around the campus.  The names of the different buildings – after this and that donor or trustee – were a wash of meaninglessness to the non-humans among the freshmen.

As they walked down a long hall, where Ms. Selber mentioned some of the classes being taught, many of the freshmen talked among themselves.  Kaldonia kept on.

“What kind of music do you like, Ilmardan?  I could tell you what clubs play it.”  Why were lizard madonnas so interested in the elvenoid species, he might wonder.  The fashions didn’t hang on their bodies right.  The languages were a little off in that mouth full of uniform, sharp, curved teeth.

Some nearby humans looked judgmental about it, a hip aloofness probably inspired by the social terror of being new.  A male nymph drifted along nearby them, feet barely touching the ground, loose sky-colored curls floating around his shoulders.  He wore a stickball shirt, hipster jeans and shoes, and a little backpack over one shoulder.  There was some room to wonder, did nymphs owe their existence to the wild realms like elves, or the higher realms like giants and dwarves?

An orc jock tried not to step on any people and almost failed when a halfling got underfoot.  That little guy was some kind of raging nerdlinger.

Yup, any kind of weirdo might be in this company.

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How about you?  It’s urban fantasy.  You’re in community college instead of the big leagues, for some reason, but it’s a place where you can start learning how to chuck fireballs or wield a zweihander, so … excitements?

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Note:  This is a bonus post.  Hit “Previous” to see the scheduled post of the day.

The last time I tried to do a RP by Comment, I had to shut it down because I only had one player left and it wasn’t my husband, and I didn’t feel like I had the mental resources to devote to other people while my dude was having some particular issue at that time.  Lesson learned – he is not invited this time.  Also, I’m not going to post as rapidly, to save those precious mental resources for my lovin’ dude and other responsibilities.

I’m tempted to do this because it gives me something to write about when I can’t easily think of something else.  In fact, if I’m rolling slowly enough, I can easily do this at the same time as I continue my one-queued-post-per-day thing.  I’ll do my introduction post, we go a round or two of comments, and then tomorrow (assuming I have anyone playing at that time), I do a new post.

Here are the rules:

• Make up your character and introduce them in a comment on this post.
• The first three people to post are the adventuring party; nobody else is admitted unless one of those players taps out.
• You can tap out at any time, and when you do, decide whether your character lives or dies.  I’ll help RP that or either you or I can “write them out the door.”
• If you stop responding without excusing yourself I’ll write your character into a “holding pattern” for three posts, and then if you still are not there, I’ll write them out of the story.
• If you annoy me, your character dies.
• If you really annoy me, you’re also banned and blocked from commenting on my blog.
• Try to abide my two commenting rules in le sidebar: don’t use “stupid,” “crazy,” or their synonyms in comments.  Don’t be a doomer.

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Twas a bright and sunny morning in The City of Romance.  Moss and vines glistened with dew, puffing in every cracked stone and trailing from every untended surface in great green boughs.  The skyscrapers strained mightily into the blue sky, surrounded by more primitive buildings in varying states of decay, by layers of highway freeway tunnel and subway, dotted with parks full of homeless people and deeper crevices still – ruins that fell beneath the notice of the modern, of those focused only on the new and the lofty.

The City of Romance was so named because of its reputation, its storied history, and because the original rulers had named it something unpronounceable in the Elfish tongue.  Now it was just another modern metropolis, inhabited mostly by humans, and ruled by a puppet regent from the neighboring human kingdom, centered in The City of Commerce.

On the highest hill of the city, where once the capitol building stood watch, the neighborhood had been overtaken by college campuses and hip boutique businesses that cater to them, and by further shady characters seeking drugs and other diversions.  You didn’t do well enough in secondary school to go straight to the fanciest of the universities, no.  Your lot in life is enrollment in the Ward Wizard Community College of Arms.

WWCCA is a good place to get a technical education, a quick and dirty primer for a job that needs special skills but not the most sophisticated and prestigious careers going.  Courses in soldiering or constabling, nursing or accounting, video editing or helicopter piloting, etc.  Alternately, you could train in the rudiments of more advanced careers, in preparation to transfer to a more prestigious college.  WWCCA produced no small amount of acolytes and adepts in the magical arts, or disciples of the more mystically oriented martial arts – paladins and great knights, rangers and more.

While the city teemed with humans, the college campuses concentrated diversity.  You might rub elbows there with the elves descended from the city’s original founders, or foreign elves and other international students.  Animal-headed people, ogres, lamias, goblins, leprechauns, dwarves, gnomes, halflings, koneira, crowten, lizard madonnas, sileni, satyrs, nymphs, and more walk those halls.  Of the schools of magic, all are represented to some extent or another in the course catalog: Elemental, Holy, Hexing, Wild, Body, Mind, Death, Binding, Drama, and Alchemy.

You and a few dozen others checked in at an office of plastic chairs and buzzing yellow lights, before being shown to an architecturally dull red brick plaza, wonderfully appointed with flowers and small trees in the planters.  Returning students wander through endlessly, while you freshman mill about, waiting for the person who will conduct your orientation.

Who are you and what did you come to learn?  First three answers below are in.  If only one person bites, fuck it, we ball.  If nobody bites within 24 hours, I guess I will not be game mastering…

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I actually wrote this ages ago, just finishing the last bit and posting it because I have nothing else at the moment, going bonkers working on everything.  So tired and wired and yarded out…  Anyway, classic flavor me.  Enjoy.

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What happens when a tough cool guy that don’t take no guff meets another tough cool guy that don’t take no guff, and one of them gives the other one guff?  Something that is not cool, guy.  Something like the opposite of fun.

In real life, we often have to accept affronts to our dignity, minor and major, in order to avoid destructive conflicts.  So when we play RPGs – when we create a cool character to identify with – many people want their character to be a badass punk who takes no shit.  The problem is that an RPG is not a truly consequence-free environment.  Yes, you won’t necessarily die or end up unemployed or jailed if your character insults the wrong person.  But you can ruin everyone’s fun – including your own – and harm real life relationships.  RPGs are collaborative entertainment.  Your fun should not detract from that of others.

And this becomes much worse when more than one player is a hardcase.  Any disagreement can grind the game to a halt or destroy it altogether, if neither character is willing to back down or even disagree with civility.  It also serves no purpose dramatically.

When you see a character of this type in a movie, they get away with it because the Universe created by the writers is full of unreasonable people who can be put in their place verbally by the Eastwood type and his snappy comeback.  When two PCs draw swords or break up the adventuring party over a trivial matter, what does that mean, from a literary or dramatic standpoint?  Only one thing: both characters are assholes.

Neither of them can be the wisecracking guy who just keeps it real in a world of weak-willed phonies.  It was a questionable aspiration in the first place, dependent on all other PCs and NPCs to support the idea by diminishing themselves.  And once it’s put to the test, the illusion shatters.

Think about it.  Very rarely is there more than one Eastwood type per movie.  Recall times when it’s been attempted and how that went.  I haven’t seen The Expendables or its sequels.  But I can remember some cringe-worthy writing when this is the idea.  When the writer wants both of the show’s heroes to be unstoppable badasses, some plot contrivance must keep their rivalry forever unresolved.  Badass Cop One is arguing with Badass Cop Two, when their fight is interrupted by the Hardcase Police Chief, and so on.  The best way to keep this from going sour is to write both characters with a reasonable limit to their ego.

A variation on this is the snarker whose feelings are easily hurt by snark.  One of my best players had this problem to some extent in real life and imported it into (and even exaggerated it in) their characters.  I think they’re from a culture where everyone insults everyone else constantly, and they all imagine everyone’s cool with it, but inside of human heads, that culture has produced a jacked up pile of sad.  But my sample size is one, so maybe it’s just them.

The following list of traits are not necessarily bad traits in any given character, if you take off the “never” and “always” from them…  Eastwoods never take guff, always get the last word, never stop fighting, never submit, and are never afraid.  They always have someone to blame for any plot occurrence which was on any level humbling, and are aeternally spiteful about it.  They dish but they can’t take.

Anyway, this kind of shit is why I do not miss GameMastering.  I do not have to collaborate with bad writers to make my story happen.  Eastwoods, yer attitude bores the hell out of me.  It’s so played out.  Noli me tangere.

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I may have given the idea, by way of some cheek, that I am an inflexible taskmaster as a GM.  I think it’s possible to have standards in player behavior while also adapting to what the players want to do.  Observe the comments on this old post, where I GM’d a little adventure, wordpress style…

RP by Comment

If the whole thing is too much to read, the teal deer:  In the end I had one player left.  He wanted to cut jeezis some slack, which is not what I’d originally set out to do at all.  But he was being a good player, writing a story that worked, so I let it happen.

Maybe consistency isn’t the thing I’m desiring the most.  Maybe I just want to see players write characters that I would ever want to see in media.  Hero, antihero, villain, joker – just be entertaining.  Not to yourself alone; consider the audience of people you are playing with.

That includes the GM.

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On my previous post, I suggested an alignment system – a declaration of a character’s moral inclinations – could be a useful tool to avoid some of the annoyances I’ve had in players having wildly inconsistent characters.  But why does that bother me?

On one level, the obvious.  Hard to plan the overarching path of a story if you have no idea how a character will respond to it.  But there’s something more.

I can’t help but see TTRPGs as an act of creative writing.  I’m bothered by shit characters because they are shit writing.  If I could just get with players on their level I’d be ok, right?

I can’t.  I can’t see it as disposable fluff time, a meaningless jackoff session.  Why not?  If it is, I’m just the fool distributing handjobs for free.

I would literally rather hold the unhygienic penii of strangers in both hands and tease them to climax on my t-shirt than GM for bad players.

Does that make sense of where I’m coming from?  heh.  coming.

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I don’t have a computer right now (composing this on cellphone) so I can’t type well enough to really write.  But I’d like to start a little discussion.  Alignment systems in TTRPGs:  yea or nay?

For the longest I wasn’t going to include one in my home brew RPG, but as I reflected on my annoyance with inconsistent player morals, I think, yeah, I want that.  I want to be able to point at that entry on a character sheet and say, what are you doing now?

Wanna change that “nice” to “naughty”?  Again?  Why don’t you just start your next guy as naughty and save yourself the trouble?  Why do you keep doing this to me mothafuckas?  This was supposed to be a fun game, not a morality play, not a psychodrama.

I don’t want to make that alignment have metaphysical reality / game effect to it, just want a guardrail for player behavior.  Assuming it would even work, I dunno…

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