@Hylozoist Wanna let us know what these problems are? I'll help with whatever ones I can.
It's mostly the interpersonal stuff; there's somebody I like, he likes me back, and it's a step into the unknown that's made me confront some fairly deep-seated things I've always told myself to be true, even though, well, they probably aren't. That's not been particularly easy for me to process, and so it's made problems of everything else, because my capacity to actually solve problems has been diminished, if that makes sense.
So, thank you, for the offer of help, and while I'm not sure if there's much that can be done to address the big problems, the offering of help (and the stern but fair talking to I've been receiving) has helped more than you probably realise.
In terms of small problems that you, and everyone else, can help with - here's a question that you could answer, and I clearly don't need an answer straight away, but it'd help me when it comes to working out what to do in the next post, and the ones that come after it:
how long do you want an ISF mission to take?I'm not going to be setting definite limits ("
This mission must be solved in 12 posts or less!"), but it'd be helpful to me to have a better understanding of how you, and everyone else, likes things to be paced in their games. Obviously, "
whatever pace you want, I don't mind" is a fair and valid answer, and if that's the case with most of you, I'll try and trust my judgement to know when's best to hurry the action up, and when's best to slow things down. There's going to be times where I get it wrong (as has been proven, my judgement is pretty bloody poor at times).
As a case in point, would this current scene work better if I moved the action along more in each post? Looking back over it, it's been fairly slow on my part. I think this is sort of a hold-over from my around-the-table-playing-games GMing style, where I want to make sure that players have opportunities to react to just about everything. Now obviously, in a game around a table, that's a lot easier - any one of them can interrupt me (politely (mostly)) and react to it. When it comes to a play-by-post style of game, however, it's harder; I have to sort of "guess", for lack of a better way of putting it, what it is you'll want to react to, and stop the action at the appropriate moment to provide the opportunity for you to react to it. In the current scene, for instance, it may have been better for me to move things along more in my posts, and trust that such a thing would have provided better pacing in exchange for less opportunity to react.
And I've just realised this has turned into a wall of text about GMing.
TL:DR - big problems are real life interpersonal relationship stuff that I am inexperienced with and bad at, things you can help with are telling me what sort of pace you're comfortable with in terms of action-moving-per-post so it's less "me guessing that this is the right idea" and more "me knowing what the audience wants".
