Oddsbod

Let's B!tch. I feel it's a healthy release for our roleplay annoyances 2.0

Shorter posts do not equate to being quality posts, all the same.

@Inkarnate

For sure. And that ties in to what someone mentioned I think a few pages back, players writing very short posts that don't at all acknowledging what your character's done or what's going on in the setting, and skipping over your own hard work and writing like it wasn't even there, which definitely sucks.

I've just seen a lot of places where 'long and detailed' gets used in the same breath as 'high quality writing and characters,' when length is a separate thing from quality of storytelling, and when it's forced has a tendency to completely bog things down when used unnecessarily.

"Did you ever hear the tragedy of Darth Plagueis the Wise?"

"Did you ever hear the tragedy of Godmodder the Role-Player?"

"No."

"I thought not, its not a story the Mods would tell you. It's an RP legend. Godmodder was a RPer of the Forums so insecure and so inexperienced, he could use the RPGs to create...power-fantasies. He had such a knowledge of the Mary Sue, he could even keep the ones he RPed with...from enjoying the RP."

"He could actually...prevent people from enjoying RPing?"

"The Mary Sue is a pathway to many abilities some consider to be...unnatural."

"W-What happened to him?"

"His character became so powerful, the only thing he was afraid of was losing his power...which, eventually of course, he did. Unfortunately, he taught his fellow RPers that the issue could not be resolved IC. So his GM banned him from the game. Ironic. He could save his character from powerlessness...but not himself."

"Is it possible to learn this power?"

"Not from a Mod..."

Let's B!tch. I feel it's a healthy release for our roleplay annoyances 2.0

Man you guys get pretty crazy over here with the sheets. Back in my country, in a far off and foreign land, our character sheets are literally just Name // Age // Gender // Personality // History // Things unique to their role based on the RPG.

But then I start looking around the guild forums and you've got huge titles in special colored fonts and paragraphs in every color of the rainbow and theme music and like all the text is centered—wild times.

Also, some much longer posts. The crazy sheets can be a lot of fun to read, but I don't really like that a few places around here kinda conflate longer posts with better, more in-depth writing. Like, 90% of the time in my experience it's better to just say what you need to say, and often you need a lot less words to say it than you think you do. Sometimes you need to post, but all you really need is two well-written paragraphs, and I think when RPG communities crack down on low quality posts they can also sometimes encourage some bad writing practices. Things like padding your writing with unnecessary description to hit word counts, or thinking that writing short and to the point means you're not putting in enough effort. Like, giant posts filled with unnecessary fluff just make it really hard and a bit of a chore for players to read through and catch up on and incorporate into their own writing, especially when a lot of the stuff going on in the post is interaction between one player and an NPC they're puppeting.

Let's B!tch. I feel it's a healthy release for our roleplay annoyances 2.0

Yeah, I think that ties into the whole power fantasy thing, a character won't change if they're already idealized.

So, I've never really noticed this before outside this forum, but I've seen a few character sheets where the writer notes down bra size in the middle of the standard physical description. Like, is it just me, or is that not really weird? Is it a thing in some RPGs where bra size is somehow relevant to the character's progression through the story? I dunno, I've just literally never seen it before I started up here, so it feels a bit jarring.

Who Believes In Fairytales?

Ooh exciting. I'll get working on my sheet as well, should have it done within a day or two. Because I'm a useless potato that's easily distracted from RL work. A+. Still running with the heroine of alternate Rumpelstiltskin, retold as an antagonist.

How do characters react when they run into Tales who're from stories extremely linked to each other but still distinct, like the heroine of Bluebeard and the heroine of Fitcher's Bird? Do we see any Tales from stories that've yet to be told? Is Homelands time is much more loopy and ghostly and weird and nonlinear than time on Eart? Is it much more dreamy and ethereal there, or is it still a pretty hard and real setting, less a fairy tale world and more just another hard and physical world that happens to mirror the fairy tales told on Earth?

"Did you ever hear the tragedy of Darth Plagueis the Wise?"

But why male models??

Oy Sherly

sherly you must be joking

Let's B!tch. I feel it's a healthy release for our roleplay annoyances 2.0

Oh yeah, for sure. You can break any and every rule you want as long as you know why you're breaking it and do t with confidence. Even when it's played straight, the "my entire family was killed and I'm the chosen one" cliche can be done well on the hands of a good writer, though it probably comes down to, are you writing a character with this backstory, or are you writing a power fantasy with this backstory.

I probably shouldn't complain too much since this player was very open towards changing the sheet to go with whatever suggestions and critiques me and other GMs suggested with no hassle.

Then again, when I tried explaining to him why describing a character as "Well built for the Asian Arts" makes both zero sense, sound dumb, and is just unhelpful since Asia is, y'know, an enormous contienent with multiple different cultures and countries, he responds with:

"I'll focus down to one or two martial arts. Despite them being so similar in all. I have a black belt in Tae Kwon Do, I know the differences."

????????????????????

Let's B!tch. I feel it's a healthy release for our roleplay annoyances 2.0

THIS is Katana. She's got my back. I would advise not getting killed by her. Her sword traps the souls of its victims.

(The one I had to deal with recently was an old man character and presumably not really gonna get involved with anyone romantically, but he was also an ancient angel who had secretly been basically every other significant figure from Japanese mythology and history, like the father of the first emperor(?), three different legendary samurai(??), and the General of Imperial Japanese forces in the Pacific during WWII(????????). Like, a) why are you doing this the angels in this RPG are foot soldiers not ultra-deities who shape world history and b) why are you getting an angel, divine protector of humanity, involved with one of the very few sides in a war that's Actually Historically The Bad Guy Side??)

Who Believes in Fairy Tales?

<Snipped quote by Oddsbod>

Hey man, thanks for checking us out.

Essentially you have quite a bit of room for interpreting your Tale's story, whilst you can't make your very own original story and accompanying Tale you are given the choice to and encouraged to make a unique spin on your characters' story. I'd say my only "rule" is that major events that shape your Tale are to be kept, Tiny Tim will always have a bad leg just as a hypothetical, you're mostly giving the how and why as well as making your own shaping events. Also no there aren't multiple versions of the same Tale, there's one Tale and their true story, the rest is how it's presented and interpreted by the world of mortals where they may get details wrong or embellish certain aspects

@Drag

.

Gotcha. So, it's less like fables that're given life by virtue of being told on Earth, and more like two parallel worlds that're linked by one world's storytelling matching up with the beings of the other world?

The idea I'd been tinkering with was a Rumpelstiltskin variant where the miller's daughter is a cruel sorcerer-queen who can weave enchanted gold out of straw, and she uses it to dominate the surrounding provinces. Rumplestiltskin is an imp from the elflands who goes off one day to challenge her and end her reign of terror. He and the sorcerer-queen have a terrible duel that lasts for three days and three nights, and each night, the sorcerer is able to steal a name of power from the imp. By the third night of fighting, the sorcerer has obtained the last and most powerful name, and the imp is now nameless—essentially, the sorcerer wins. But by stealing his names the sorcerer is forced to see the world now through his eyes, unclouded by her own malice and cruelty. She can't bear it and tries to return the names, but the imp, somewhere during that last night of fighting, has vanished, or maybe been misplaced, and the story basically ends with those three names stuck to her for the rest of her life. Drastic differences in how the story gets told comes from the queen basically having her entire worldview torn apart and remade. Different variants of the story include the traditional Rumpelstiltskin version, plus all the variants that go into what happened to the queen in her days after the duel. Would that be salvageable, or does it deviate too much from the base story? (I was hoping to play as the Queen, post-name stealing)