@ELGainsborough Ah, got you. That was my suspicion. And I have to say, I agree. Here, you have to trust that players have the skill to separate IC and OOC knowledge, and a lot of times OOC knowledge can spoil the feeling of a surprise. Surprises are fun, and getting rid of them is not. However, how much or little is needed in terms of setting and characters is largely up to the DM and to some extent the players. I will almost never turn down information offered me, and I love discussing details and knowing things, but at the same time, the only things I really absolutely /have/ to know are the governing rules of the setting, the things that I need to be aware of as I shape a character and format their actions and reactions, and the things that character would know. Everything else might be helpful but it's not required. Granted, things that would affect how a character acts in a given situation can be a gray area. And I have some trouble with things that don't make sense or appear arbitrary, as I've had bad experiences where DMs said "this is so and there's a good reason" and then the reason was not good at all. But in the end, I like a bit of mystery.

Really, my favorite DM has me spoiled. The group I'm in with him -- and two other new groups we're both in as well, to some degree -- have loads of lore that we've build up over the course of the campaign. Everyone started off knowing next to nothing about everyone else and just the essentials of the world (though it was a familiar setting for many of us, just moved forward 200 years or so to after a nuclear war and recovery). So we were comfortable in the setting, familiar enough to be comfortable in our own characters, and could feel out other characters as we went. And when it comes to surprises, I trust him absolutely -- and with my characters' lives and well-being. I know he'll ask before doing anything too terrible, and so if he wants to do something and doesn't specify, my usual response is "is this going to cause drama and character development? If so, let's do it."

Unfortunately, finding that sort of group, and that sort of trust, is not easy. And because it takes rping with someone to see they are capable and to build that trust, a lot of threads here and other places require exhaustive details. C'est la vie, I suppose.

Well, today we DM'd a small attempt at the D&D adventure Curse of Strahd. Our players, all of them low level _{(three level 2 players, one level 3)} eventually got into a church wherein a vampire spawn had been locked into the cellar. Despite being told that the vampire spawn was down there and being made aware of the fact that it was starved, they decided to enter the cellar. As even a vampire spawn is far beyond the reasonable challenge level for characters of their levels, that in itself is rather foolish.

Then, for some reason, the party's rogue decided to "feed" the vampire by holding his arm over the vampire's mouth and slashing the wrist so it would bleed.

As it turns out, vampires do bite the hands that feed them. In one attack, that character went from full hit points to zero.

A few rounds later and even with the vampire spawn being nerfed somewhat on the spot, first one player died, then soon afterwards a second one. By this time, the third second-level character wisely realized that being upstairs was safer. Naturally, even with the vampire generally rolling poorly and with disadvantage, the third player died. The final player, who had closed the trapdoor to the undercroft with the vampire (and his now-dead friends), fixed the lock magically and ran off.

Not quite a TPK (total party kill) but still close enough. And they would never have been attacked if they had listened to the priest who didn't want them to go down there, or not tried to feed a blood-starved vampire without even considering things like restraining it first.

Lesson the players learned this day? "Don't feed the vampire."



We of course had no choice about letting them down there, as they rolled a natural 20 on persuasion upon the priest to let them go down there.

@Ellri they probably tried to go all helsing ultimate on that vampire.

Or they were simply being players, @boomlover.

Players always do stupid things. Stupid things that occasionally spark of genius.

@Ellri Haha, yeah, depending on the group you may or may not be able to count on someone pullinyour bacon out of the fire, and if they do, there should be lasting effects. Ough how much anything other than permadeath affects a char in a D&D game, as there's varying levels for how much actual rp oa there, as opposed to just tryung to get "winning" rolls and beat the baddies.

Indeed, @shylarah. Problem comes when nobody is around to pull out that bacon on account of the players going where they really ought not to go.

@Ellri Well then you have someone show up. Or divine intervention. Or dawn. Or a trap. Or maybe the guy gets distracted? A terrible accident...yeah okay it's a bit of a stretch. ^.^;; I guess you can only do so much to counter player stupidity and contrariness.

Indeed.

When players have set a goal, no matter how suicidal it might be, discouraging them can be nigh impossible.

I hate doing this but eh.... bump.

I'll never forget the time when I first started out roleplaying and this very advanced roleplayer became my friend and mentor to help me be a better writer. It was pretty cool too because I wanted to improve more on my vocabulary and he wrote short stories about a character I drew for him, it was awesome. I found out years ago that he became a teacher so I was really happy to hear that. I always think about him and can't wait to get back in touch with him.

My favourite RP moment has got to be one that was almost entirely Player Driven. I remember it quite clearly. My character followed someone else (a rich mafia princess, is essentially what she amounted to) to a bar. She went in and sat beside her, and they ended up talking to each other. They drink and get a bit tipsy each, and it ends up with them kissing each other then the Mafia Princess inviting my character to her room to sleep (only sleep. Separate beds).

To this day, no other piece of character interaction has felt as natural as that one. The fact that they were two strangers who peaked each other's curiosity, and acted upon that, makes it easily my favourite moment. We hadn't talked about anything like that beforehand. We just... wrote, and things happened.

@Darcs (I saw her write a bit in here at some point) will know what I'm talking about :P

I remember back then like around one or two years ago, when I hadn't been really long in the world of RPing, I was trying to figure out what kind of direction should I take my character's general development to its conclusion in a forum-based RP. Back then, for this one character I was trying to get them killed off some times down the line for reasons. Then during some chatting session with the GM and others, I entertained the idea of facing the figure everyone thought to be the final boss since the guy happened to be not too far away from my character, and he actually agreed to it.

It was exhilarating for me to partake in. I went there with full expectation of my character dying after putting barely a fight, but I managed to both get them survive, put some decent fight against the guy, figured out a probable weakness (though others wouldn't be able to exploit it), and most importantly though, the encounter managed to be something that I can use to be a turning point for my character's development path. It was so fun to see them being utterly broken by their loss, and due to the GM actually paying attention to everyone's characters, the banter between them actually fueled this further. The character still died some times later, but in the end they ended up as the character I had the most fun writing, even until now.

It's all thanks to the GM, bless him for being so accommodating. It's one of the first RPs I participated in, and I feel it was a big boost of confidence in general to have the GM be like that. Acknowledging everyone's characters even when they wanted to be the most special, and giving them more presence rather than just being participants of the plot. It was a fun time.

@kapuchu I love that sort of thing. When character interactions flow -- and especially when they surprise you, or lead to pivotal moments for characters. <3

@Nanashi Ninanai See, here's development happening! <3

I like to write dialog. I like to write characters being cunning. I'd rather write about someone who would beat you AT blackjack instead of WITH a black jack. I can occasionally enjoy writing a duel between two characters. But having one of my characters cut through a swath of enemies, or fight someone else's character just for kicks, bores the crap out of me. That's what makes this next story so interesting to me.

So the GM LOVES fighting. He likes it so much that he forced everyone to create extra characters so that he could run two stories side by side, and there would always be fighting going on in one of them. Yes, he liked fights. Complete chaos, awesome anarchy, endless entropy, he loved it. I was able to bypass some of the fighting, as one of my characters was more of a leader than a fighter. However, there came that "DBZ style" power up part of the RP where everyone had to become 100X stronger than they were previously. My leader character was included in this, and so she became a spellsword. Well, spellspear actually. There were only two battles left for everyone. One was a split/duel battle where everyone was locked into their own duel, and then all the heroes had to slay the final boss before he ended the world. Yes, it felt a bit like a video game plot at this point.

But do you know I actually enjoyed myself?

My newly minted spellsword had to go up against a zombie girl. This actually worked well, since both characters were leaders and had several other parallels like fighting style and experiencing great tragedy. The best part was that they both held each other accountable for their situations. Their arena was a magical lake that you could walk on, so there wasn't anything to utilize in the fight except each character's powers. I don't really like super anime stuff, but the dialog was entertaining. It wasn't deep or philosophical, but you could feel the hatred of these two characters as the fight escalated. The fight started with both combatants expressing slightly above average human abilities, but by the end they had transformed into a wolf man (girl?) and a zombie dragon. There was also a lot of counter-spell casting, and eventually the lake broke away and the fight took place mid-air. it was one of those crazy battles that could only happen in an RP.

I guess you'd of had to have been there though...

I just had a long debate with my character over whether or not to accept an artifact of ultimate power from a chaos god.

He won.

@VKAllen
Off topic question but what was the Guild fall?

@ineffable My understanding is that Guildfall (which I did not witness) is a time when the entire guild broke and a lot of information was lost. The site had to be remade all over again. Thus, this rpg is not the same site as the old one, even if the base code is the same.

@shylarah It didn't so much break as 'got broken' by the server hosts. Entirely on purpose, as Mahz missed a payment (by accident) and instead of notifying, shut down the place.

IIRC.

@Buddha Wait, Mahz shut it down, or they shut it down? Either way, ouch. >.<

they shut it down. Mahz wasn't very happy about it.