Approaching IC Threads As A Whole

[Jig]

Increasingly in my game, which I always bloody refer to if you've seen me in discussions before, Wolf Manor, I'm concerning myself with how the thread as a whole appears to a hypothetical audience. I know that such an audience probably doesn't exist, but that's how I'm approaching games I'm in.

An audience that reads just a given IC thread is typically faced with minimum one narrator and minimum one protagonist and, generally speaking, a complete mess to try to read; given the communal nature of pbp, there's typically only a certain amount of planning, and even that is more general plot-stuff, and not how the IC would be read as a whole.

That's not even mentioning different approaches to the medium, which can encompass varying writing styles (tenses and paradigms), varying presentation styles (use of off-site links, multimedia, and colour), and varying levels of IC-ness (ie; using OoC notes in the IC).

I think broadly speaking, people are aware of most of these factors, but without thinking about them. I can well imagine (and have seen and have been myself) a GM that requests players write in conventional style (3rd person past tense), presumably to conserve the convention of presentation and so the whole IC doesn't feel too jolting.

Do other people think about this sort of stuff?
To what degree do - and should - GM's consider the IC thread's content as an entire (if incomplete) work of art and seek to influence the writing of the participants with that in mind?

[Vilageidiotx]

In the RP i've been most active in (Precipice of War), we generally have policed writing styles. Third person past tense has more or less been the rule, and we've stressed the necessity for fully fleshed out posts. The caveat is that it moves slowly, since many of us write upward to 5k words in each post, probably averaging about 2k if I were to guess. The reward is that RP more or less holds together.

Another thing we've done is, when we want to have characters belonging to different RPers interact, we write out collaborative posts in PM's so that we produce a complete post rather than a bunch of conversation blurbs. It comes out looking sort of like this

[Jig]

Holy mother of Mahz, that's a long post. While nowhere near length (I don't think), Wolf is running a similar thing; it's very close-quarters with a limited cast of players and NPC's, so PC-PC or PC-NPC interaction is a constant, and I've really encouraged players to do it 'my way'; that is, to make sure that the completed posts are only from one POV - and they're lovely, so they do. :P

That said, I discourage them from putting 'credits' at the top as in your example, along with any other OoC content. None of it seems necessary; we know we won't Godmode each other, and including OoC information seems to be, by definition, interrupting the flow of the IC as one long narrative. Do you not feel* that including those credits undermine the effort that has gone into crafting a continuous work?

I'm reminded of an exception, which would be My Immortal, the infamous Harry Potter fanfic (which I urge everybody to read, for the comedy value). There is a kind of meta-narrative in the author's notes at the start of each chapter, which manifests in the story - though I wouldn't say this typically applies to OoC notes in an IC section in pbp.

* by which I mean 'I'm keen to hear your opinion' rather than 'I'm rhetorically asking about what I consider to be a flaw in order to make you feel bad'

[Vilageidiotx]

The reason for the credits is that, quite literally, half of that is written by me and another half by Gorgenmast. If only one person writes a post then we do not have credits. Personally, I don't think it particularly undermines the flow of the work, since there is more than enough IC to keep it from being any more than a blip. Also, each post is written in chapter format, which is to say there is a clear beginning and end, so those credits are essentially squeezed between two complete pieces of the story rather than in the middle of the narrative. I can see why somebody else wouldn't want to do the same thing, but I feel comfortable that it works within the frame of Precipice's style.

POV definetly helps keep things tied down too, I agree. It took us a while to develop a proper POv system (the PoW thread I linked too is what we have here, but we've been doing this for four years now over three forums, so there has been quite a bit of time to develop.) Over the last year or two, i've been making an effort to boil down the number of POV's I have. Now, being an NRP with such a large scale, we can't pull off one POV per player, so it does get convoluted.

[Dinh AaronMk]

@Vilageidiotx

To add to the point about PoV Vilage makes: though I consider it an advantage that in an NRP you'll have pretty much more PoV opportunities and narrative opportunities than a single-character RP (since one has in theory many hundreds of thousand or more characters to move through and explore the world versus just one singular character), at the same time you can have too much. This leads to some characters being irrelevant to the cooperative plot, some to end up dead-ending themselves, and/or some others who probably aren't as established to the writer to have any purpose. So that can lead to a lot of disgruntling story-lines for the writer, and a mess to read; especially when there are characters that might drop off the radar for weeks or months at a time then come back up in their own PoV posts.