pugbutter

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

You didn't ask me, but I feel inclined to respond.

I think that attractive characters aren't a problem in themselves, but can be a symptom of another problem. If a character is really super totally hot, but their attractiveness doesn't have any interesting implications on their personality, it could be an indication that someone is playing for wish-fulfilment more so than to create a good story. Chances are, they're just playing an idealised version of themselves, whether they realise it or not. And that's usually detrimental to good story-telling.

For the second point, there's a notable difference between someone playing a character who is snarky teenager, and an actual snarky teenager playing themselves. The former person knows he's playing an annoying character, assumably with the intention of making them less annoying through character development. The latter person probably thinks the way they're acting is actually cool. Their perspective is limited due to their inexperience, and if they don't see the flaws in their own character, they're unlikely to create any interesting development.

These are generalisations, of course. Point is, the problem isn't about snarky teenage supermodels specifically, but about the fact that they are statistically likely to overlap with a miasma of bad roleplaying practices.

@Lalliman

This is pretty much the reply I would have typed out last night hadn't it been 4AM at the time. I don't know whether to feel envious or grateful. I'm going with both.

I define Mary Sues not even necessarily as flawless characters, but those who flaws (if they have any) are not pertinent to their experiences throughout the story. Therefore they move through the entire RP having never been forced by their fears, shortcomings, failures, and unrealistically grand ambitions, to learn, forgive, mature, or cope.

If you've ever seen that one hyper-badass dude in an RP who is, somewhat bafflingly, "afraid of deep water," one of two outcomes is likely: the player is a fan of The Truman Show who inserted a little tribute to the film into his application, or more plausibly, he wrote a Mary Sue. He gave his character "flaws" as lip-service to the practices of good RP, without realizing that because that character will never have to sail across open water during the RP, it serves no purpose but to trick the app's readers into thinking he boasts depth and realism in his writing repertoire. The female version of this cliche is probably the "fear of spiders," again never confronted during the story, but the principle applies to any "character flaw" which is not relevant to the events happening within the RP's narrative.

It's simply inherent in the notion of "flawlessness," literal or practical though it may be, that your character will sport no physical flaws either. For the record, I've seen plenty of poorly written ugly characters, so deforming and marring a character isn't a one-way ticket to creating a more interesting personality by any means; but not once have I seen an ugly Mary Sue.

It's all about intention, really. You can play a good-looking character with hopes, dreams, ambitions, fears, and insecurities, just like those which exist in real life, because yes, people can be incidentally good-looking; or you can design them deliberately to be gorgeous supermodels, a single symptom of holding the same fucked priorities which spawn Mary Sues in the first place.

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

Would the same group of characters appear more legitimate or interesting if they were ugly?

@Prisk

Well, yeah...being ridiculously good-looking is one of the major elements of Mary Suedom.

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

@Prisk The majority of poorly written ones, yeah.

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

That feel when you read through a thousand interest checks until you find someone who seems to be a good match and you spend an hour typing out a PM with tons of ideas of your own and then they deliberately ignore you. Shit, if you're not interested just say so!

@Drache

And the version for public threads: when you read through a thousand interest checks until you finally find one which strikes a good balance between player freedom and a tight, focused plot, with an eloquent, engaging OOC thread, a passionate GM ...

but then you check out the Characters tab and realize you'd be roleplaying with a bunch of teenaged supermodels spending all their IC time shooting off "snarky" one-liners and generally being generic boring cunts with no personality, creativity, or vision.

The number of well-written, well-GMed threads ruined through the incompetence of the general public defies reality.

Something that may help you with writing

Worst Draft is a minimalist word processor that removes the two biggest roadblocks for writers: editing & distractions. Users will be unable to delete anything more than a few most recently typed words, and they will also be unable to access any other applications without first closing Worst Draft.

By removing these elements the writer is forced to lean on his/her creative impulses to complete a first draft, postponing edits and research until future drafts.

worstdraft.com

A less gimmicky program which serves essentially the same purpose as the one above.

End + Sleep

But in general all the characters are converging at a single location soon?

End + Sleep

Just to be clear, you're gathering all the PCs in a tavern once they've acquainted themselves and stuff, right?

The Chronicles of Irenaea [Always Open] [Historiograhy-Based] [Low-Commital]

Bronzespear's Casus Belli
Chief Seedsewer Rocklight Bronzespear of the Great Steppe (122-181)

Times had become for the lord a matter of great melancholy, not least of which due to his age, as he had very nearly reached the status of an elder among the tribal confederacy. But furthermore, just as the soothsayers had predicted, the construction of the canals brought only temporary tranquility to the lower farmlands, carrying in their wake more questions, concerns, and complications. All these things flowed upon Seedsewer's shoulders like the very water the channels carried down from the melting mountain caps, and certainly did few favors for his weakened health. Chiefly among these stresses, the workers hired to dig the canals, mostly farmers from the same lowlands which would benefit from the project, initially had leapt at the opportunity to perform work which paid more than the planting and harvesting of rice paddies. They did not wish to return to their fields when the project was finished, and Seedsewer earned many grudges when he ordered them back to these fields, back to the pittance of growing and storing food for the coming winter. Besides the men whose backs had given out under the toils of cutting and moving stones for the canals, others simply did not want to return to work which, while equally miserable, paid back a mere fraction of the wealth; unemployment rose among the tribes, despite the guarantee of larger yields from future harvests.

All the while, Seedsewer's favorite general, Khirgesh, demanded an audience, and tried to warn him many times of the project's strategic ramifications. The witches, he argued, if ever they decided they coveted the ancestral lands of the Bronzespear, would need little more than a few barrels of poison to kill, at their leisure, either the men who drink the mountain water or the crops which soak in it during the season of floods. Not one to be fooled by their current passivity, Khirgesh desired a preemptive strike, one which would drive the witches from the mountains, securing the safety of the tribes who lived in their shadow. Seedsewer conceded, but insisted too that because he would not let himself be seen as the aggressor of this war, he needed a casus belli before he would levy an army from the tribesmen. He left Khirgesh to create it, giving the general free rein to provoke the Witches as he saw fit.

This power, however, was unnecessary, as the general chose a grassroots solution, a matter of simply convincing the tribes that they thirsted for war. He accomplished this through the fearmongering of a foreign invader, a technique which transcends time and place. With the aid of oral storytellers, and when they cooperated, the soothsayers, Khirgesh easily spread rumors that the Witches, jealous of the tribes' success, soon would seek to destroy the irrigation canals if they could not be captured and commandeered. For those who were less fervent, slower to thirst for Witch blood on the merits of tactical positioning, Khirgesh appealed instead to religious ideals, declaring that, although they had hated the Bronzespear pantheon for centuries, the canals gave the patient cowards, at long last, an opportunity to wreak destruction upon the superior tribes at little to no cost to themselves.

Soon enough blacksmiths had stopped making plows and trowels, forging instead the blades for spears and swords. The tribes demanded battle. Seedsewer needed only rise to the challenge and lead them into the mountains. It would be, quite literally, an uphill battle, and although the commanders knew they outnumbered and outclassed the witches greatly in battle, they knew too that the terrain rendered their own warriors vulnerable, particularly the horseborne, so all their prowess would be nullified if they could not coax the Witches away from the mountainsides. They could not predict, however, what devastation the coming stalemate would bring to both sides.

Tôroch, biographer, ca. 184

Lords of the Stars [Military Space Opera]

Hey there. I recognize that wallpaper as depicting the Brunhild and the Barbarossa, two important flagships within the Legend of the Galactic Heroes universe. However I see no Anime/Manga tag for this Interest Check. Is this or isn't this an anime game?

gineipaedia.com/wiki/Barbarossa
gineipaedia.com/wiki/Brunhild

Piddle's art (also does commissions)

@Piddle Just checking that we're still on.