A quick comment and some personal advice for the forums.

[WardenCelestine]

Hello everyone, I am known as Andromedai or Andro for short here on the forums, you can call me whichever you prefer. Coming this April, I will have been part of the RP community for almost twenty years. My RP experience covers not only forum based RP but also in game RP and live action RP. (Mostly military, Sci-Fi and Fantasy stories.) I have to admit (and this should come as no surprise) that I greatly enjoy it. Most of the members of this massive community you meet are great people that are willing to help you learn the ways of creative writing and are willing to take part in all of our crazy imaginative stories that we create. I personally love taking part in a wide variety of RP's that veteran or even newbie writers create that cover multiple subjects.

Now, I do not want to sound like a white knight here or anything of the sort, so please keep in mind these are just my observations and my opinions on a couple things I have noticed here on The Role-Player-Guild-forums.

Three Quotes for all of you to start things off.

“The most important things are the hardest to say. They are the things you get ashamed of, because words diminish them -- words shrink things that seemed limitless when they were in your head to no more than living size when they're brought out. But it's more than that, isn't it? The most important things lie too close to wherever your secret heart is buried, like landmarks to a treasure your enemies would love to steal away. And you may make revelations that cost you dearly only to have people look at you in a funny way, not understanding what you've said at all, or why you thought it was so important that you almost cried while you were saying it. That's the worst, I think. When the secret stays locked within not for want of a teller but for want of an understanding ear.” ― Stephen King

“Amateurs sit and wait for inspiration, the rest of us just get up and go to work.”
― Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

“Better to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the public and have no self."
― Cyril Connolly

(Currently being edited|3/27/2016)

[Jig]

I don't agree that every prospective game is worth sharing (god knows I've pitched some drivel) and some ideas are so (ahem) un-nuanced that they do come across as actually funny, but I really appreciate the thread. I'll be the first to wax lyrical about the faults of RPing as a format for storytelling, but it definitely has its upsides, among which are meeting the other lovely weirdos who're interested in the same shit as me. I maintain that some games are perhaps less subtle than others and are laughable to players who prefer something perhaps a little more maybe 'proper', but a lot of that laughter comes from a sense of recognising oneself; I remember when I thought the grimdark pointlessly antagonistic loner archetype was absolutely the dog's bollocks. When I see one of those archetypes and raise a smile, it's not laughing at the player that wants to play that - it's recognising a piece of myself that once wanted exactly what that player's gunning for, although I'm now looking for something else. It doesn't mean I don't want a particular thing in games I run and even participate in (I do, and there are things I don't want, too), but I don't begrudge people that want something that I don't, or want that and will probably move onto something that I consider, yes, more akin to traditional fiction as we read it in books. For me, that's the goal - writing fiction that is readable and makes sense, while maintaining the 'everybody is a main character and everybody is telling a story' aspect that is unique to us. For others that want something else - more power to their elbow, even if we probably aren't compatible writing-partners.

It depends on attitude: I want a game to sink my teeth into, develop a character, work out what I want to explore from the game and what perspective my character can bring to the overall story, and benefit from other players doing the same. That's why I join the games I do with the players I do, and, yes, broadly stick in the section that I do. Other people want something freer, less constrained, and faster - which is fine, if not my thing. Still more are looking for a compromise between the two which is sacrilege, which is obviously more than fine. This is why I particularly like how the forum divides its sections, even if I don't like how 'advanced' sounds somehow 'better' than 'free'. For me, advanced is definitely better than free, but I take it, judging by the healthy boards in free, that the players there see something in it for them, which is great.

I'm pretty glad to have found a place, and it's worth saying, that most of the actual discussion of games and players here has been fairly positive, or at the very least constructive. The only exception I can think of that I ever saw got blocked - and I knew them as a certifiable asshat from another forum I was on years ago (same username, same awful, arrogant attitude), so the staff did the right thing in my mind and blocked the every-living fuck out of them. Even when people submit Interest-Checks that clearly aren't going to float in a given section, either because the idea doesn't tend to lend itself toward what this forum does or because somebody is pitching something in the advanced section (where I hang out) that's riddled with SPaG issues or is clearly under-developed for the audience, when people pitch in to criticise, it tends to be constructive criticism geared towards helping people have a better shot at creating the game they want and not sadistic attempts to tear people down. Again, the only exception I've seen has been in the Spam section (meh) or in response to the aforementioned certifiable asshat who was then deemed themselves to be in the wrong and subsequently blocked anyway. I don't think I've ever seen public unpleasantness in the sections of this forum that directly relate to RPing, which means either I've been lucky, or we don't take the piss with regards to the staff's liberal attitudes.

Thanks Mr and Ms Staff-family for trusting us, and thanks everybody else for pretty much not fucking that trust up. <3