Traveller's Cafe 4: Brainstorming, Discussion, Tea, Advice

[G-Tech Corporation]

So, does anyone still use this place?

I watch! Though, amusingly, I've hit a place where my need to crunch new ideas is quite low. I've made enough RPs that most of what I do these days is retread old ideas with a new brain, hoping to make them better and thus more fun to play with others.

[New yugoslavaia]

So, does anyone still use this place?

I watch! Though, amusingly, I've hit a place where my need to crunch new ideas is quite low. I've made enough RPs that most of what I do these days is retread old ideas with a new brain, hoping to make them better and thus more fun to play with others.

Mechanic based RPs do seem to be a hard thing to pull off right.

[Confederation of the Equator]

So, does anyone still use this place?

If lurking counts, I do

[New Antarcticania]

Welp, the 1925 idea flopped, so back to the drawing board

[Diahon]

I've longed to get back to regular roleplaying for the longest time, and now with a certain man out of sight and well near out of mind, I can finally cook up an RP...

... where everything bad or cataclysmic about the last two decades didn't happen. From 9/11 to the recession, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Daesh, the rise in appeal and power of various, vicious authoritarianisms, Trump, this pandemic... everyone lives! Except for certain hideous, loathsome people -- and Trump. The best of most worlds, to rip off Liebniz.

I do wonder what kind of RP prospers under such a feel-good environment, though. Where Fukuyama's "end of history" ain't just gallows humor spiked in bitter.

[Forest State]

I've longed to get back to regular roleplaying for the longest time, and now with a certain man out of sight and well near out of mind, I can finally cook up an RP...

... where everything bad or cataclysmic about the last two decades didn't happen. From 9/11 to the recession, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Daesh, the rise in appeal and power of various, vicious authoritarianisms, Trump, this pandemic... everyone lives! Except for certain hideous, loathsome people -- and Trump. The best of most worlds, to rip off Liebniz.

I do wonder what kind of RP prospers under such a feel-good environment, though. Where Fukuyama's "end of history" ain't just gallows humor spiked in bitter.

I feel like you'd have to figure out what kind of audience you want and then try to figure out what makes it interesting.

Conflict is usually part of what draws people to a story - but this doesn't always have to be violent conflict. We see conflict in slice of life stories, too, but it might be something more mundane like, I dunno, a character's conflict with passing their test at school or whatever. But the kind of audience that's looking for a simple slice of life story for their characters in a setting where there's no violent conflict or greater intrigue (mysteries, conspiracies, some paranormal stuff, etc would fall into this category) might also be the kind of audience that isn't interested in figuring out the worldbuilding of a setting where there's significant alternate history at play and things are going to be different.

I mean, you can't just say nothing bad happened and then leave it at that. Bad things have shaped the world plenty. So you're going to have to put a little focus into showing what the world has changed into without those things. Is thinking about alt history worldbuilding really what your players are going to want out of some RP where the focus isn't serious conflicts but rather slice of life stuff like goofing off with your friends and building personal relationships?

On the other hand, you can introduce a more traditional conflict, but this might bring you at odds with your premise. If it's a truly utopian world, you obviously have less things to use to create conflict. You could come up with some kind of scenario where it's not really a utopia. Like, I dunno, maybe the world is the same as it is now but everyone is on mind altering drugs that make them forget about all the bad things that happened. And the player characters are pulled off of these drugs and now they see things for what it is and have to make a Matrix style red pill vs blue pill decision on what they want to do. But saying it's not really a utopia probably defeats the theme that you're going for with it.

Of course, all this advice is just my personal opinion and also my own guesses on how people would respond. Maybe you could do a slice of life RP with no problem and not go into details about the world, instead just giving a blanket overview of how everything is better. But from my experience personally it's challenging to mix genres. If you put out a slice of life RP, people will expect slice of life. If you put out an alternate history RP, they'll expect, well, alternate history. Not sure how it would go over to do a slice of life RP set inside an alternate history scenario like this one.

[Harbertia]

@ Kassaran : I think the concept is interesting though I don't think I'll have to time to join as I'm in one RP and starting another after a very long time of not hosting an RP on NS. Just thought I would comment to let you know it's not disinteresting.

[Diahon]

I've longed to get back to regular roleplaying for the longest time, and now with a certain man out of sight and well near out of mind, I can finally cook up an RP...

... where everything bad or cataclysmic about the last two decades didn't happen. From 9/11 to the recession, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Daesh, the rise in appeal and power of various, vicious authoritarianisms, Trump, this pandemic... everyone lives! Except for certain hideous, loathsome people -- and Trump. The best of most worlds, to rip off Liebniz.

I do wonder what kind of RP prospers under such a feel-good environment, though. Where Fukuyama's "end of history" ain't just gallows humor spiked in bitter.

I feel like you'd have to figure out what kind of audience you want and then try to figure out what makes it interesting.

Conflict is usually part of what draws people to a story - but this doesn't always have to be violent conflict. We see conflict in slice of life stories, too, but it might be something more mundane like, I dunno, a character's conflict with passing their test at school or whatever. But the kind of audience that's looking for a simple slice of life story for their characters in a setting where there's no violent conflict or greater intrigue (mysteries, conspiracies, some paranormal stuff, etc would fall into this category) might also be the kind of audience that isn't interested in figuring out the worldbuilding of a setting where there's significant alternate history at play and things are going to be different.

I mean, you can't just say nothing bad happened and then leave it at that. Bad things have shaped the world plenty. So you're going to have to put a little focus into showing what the world has changed into without those things. Is thinking about alt history worldbuilding really what your players are going to want out of some RP where the focus isn't serious conflicts but rather slice of life stuff like goofing off with your friends and building personal relationships?

On the other hand, you can introduce a more traditional conflict, but this might bring you at odds with your premise. If it's a truly utopian world, you obviously have less things to use to create conflict. You could come up with some kind of scenario where it's not really a utopia. Like, I dunno, maybe the world is the same as it is now but everyone is on mind altering drugs that make them forget about all the bad things that happened. And the player characters are pulled off of these drugs and now they see things for what it is and have to make a Matrix style red pill vs blue pill decision on what they want to do. But saying it's not really a utopia probably defeats the theme that you're going for with it.

Of course, all this advice is just my personal opinion and also my own guesses on how people would respond. Maybe you could do a slice of life RP with no problem and not go into details about the world, instead just giving a blanket overview of how everything is better. But from my experience personally it's challenging to mix genres. If you put out a slice of life RP, people will expect slice of life. If you put out an alternate history RP, they'll expect, well, alternate history. Not sure how it would go over to do a slice of life RP set inside an alternate history scenario like this one.

Thanks for your input, I appreciate it very much.

The thing is that my mentality when it comes to creating anything literary doesn't (usually) lend itself to collaborative effort, ironically enough -- put simply, I want (and try and aim for) seemingly minor actions contributing to the worldbuilding, in ways that seem inscrutable but in context build up the feeling that either the world is more peaceful or stable or fuckedup than the baseline, in a way distinct from the butterfly effect. More an atmosphere, a series of impressions rather than a series of events. So here.

I don't know if I have the talent to pull that off on my own -- I've tried once and again and again, with the same dismal result, though it may be that it's even harder to write a good story on the above premise without straining credulity -- and I don't know if it's attractive enough to enough people who dabble in RPs. But there's nothing as interesting as failure, isn't it?

Perhaps... if I make a sort of memorial out of it, where people who've lost their loved ones these past two decades get involved by writing up what they remember of their kin, of their friends, spouses, whoever else whose lives they'd want to see immortalized, even in as ethereal a matrix as the internet... the imagined interactions they'd think their remembrances will have with the world around them will suffice to bridge the micro with the macro, so to speak?

Is this spitballing? Maybe, but at least this one's from personal experience.

[Harbertia]

I'm, looking to join a new RP group as my previous group has declined here on NS. I joined NS in 2013 and P2TM is my only area of activity on the site now. I like sci-fi and fantasy but my interest in those get picky and I sometimes default to Science Fantasy as a way to cope. I grew up in a home that limited my media exposure so while I was born in 1993 I grew up on material from the past. Atari, Flash Gordon (1930s serial), Star Wars, and a lot of religious shows. Due to this I am, not entirely intune with members of my generation which makes finding people I can associate with difficult.

I'm feeling like an outsider. I started my RP group's Discord to try to have the social feel I missed but, it hasn't done it for me. I use to at times get impatient waiting for a response to come on an OOC or Group thread here, but now I miss it. With Discord a response if fast but short... I feel I got a lot more back when it was on NS.

and that's enough old man talk from me. I'm at that point where I have fiends here, but I'm not appreciating them as I should. Feels we haven't done anything in years. Which is why I want to join a new RP group.

[Galnius]

I'm, looking to join a new RP group as my previous group has declined here on NS. I joined NS in 2013 and P2TM is my only area of activity on the site now. I like sci-fi and fantasy but my interest in those get picky and I sometimes default to Science Fantasy as a way to cope. I grew up in a home that limited my media exposure so while I was born in 1993 I grew up on material from the past. Atari, Flash Gordon (1930s serial), Star Wars, and a lot of religious shows. Due to this I am, not entirely intune with members of my generation which makes finding people I can associate with difficult.

I'm feeling like an outsider. I started my RP group's Discord to try to have the social feel I missed but, it hasn't done it for me. I use to at times get impatient waiting for a response to come on an OOC or Group thread here, but now I miss it. With Discord a response if fast but short... I feel I got a lot more back when it was on NS.

and that's enough old man talk from me. I'm at that point where I have fiends here, but I'm not appreciating them as I should. Feels we haven't done anything in years. Which is why I want to join a new RP group.

Council of the multiverse is decent. If you get a conversation going it'll go rather long.

[Harbertia]

I'm, looking to join a new RP group as my previous group has declined here on NS. I joined NS in 2013 and P2TM is my only area of activity on the site now. I like sci-fi and fantasy but my interest in those get picky and I sometimes default to Science Fantasy as a way to cope. I grew up in a home that limited my media exposure so while I was born in 1993 I grew up on material from the past. Atari, Flash Gordon (1930s serial), Star Wars, and a lot of religious shows. Due to this I am, not entirely intune with members of my generation which makes finding people I can associate with difficult.

I'm feeling like an outsider. I started my RP group's Discord to try to have the social feel I missed but, it hasn't done it for me. I use to at times get impatient waiting for a response to come on an OOC or Group thread here, but now I miss it. With Discord a response if fast but short... I feel I got a lot more back when it was on NS.

and that's enough old man talk from me. I'm at that point where I have fiends here, but I'm not appreciating them as I should. Feels we haven't done anything in years. Which is why I want to join a new RP group.

Council of the multiverse is decent. If you get a conversation going it'll go rather long.

I had to look them up but, after the II thread I lost track of them and thought they had, well, vanished. Thanks for prompting me to find them again.

[Forest State]

snip

I could see there being a audience for this somewhere - key word is somewhere, though. As in, I could imagine some interest but it's not something that fits into the usual pre established categories of stuff so I can't say for sure that a bunch of people would show up. Would depend a lot on who happens to check it out.

Personally I find that doing a more experimental or out of the box idea on P2TM is a rougher path than doing something that can be easily defined. If it's a superhero RP, for example, it's not that hard for people to get into the RP because they already know what the genre is like. Same with fantasy, to an extent, even though fantasy is a broad genre. Or alternate history nation RPs, or paranormal investigation RPs, etc. The main point I'm making is that if you've been in one of these RPs before or consumed media in those genres, you know what to expect to an extent.

As for the more subtle kind of worldbuilding, I kind of know what you're talking about. I kind of use it in my own writing sometimes, throwing in references to things in the world to add to the lore in smaller ways over the course of an RP. But usually, I also have the world laid out more formally ahead of time so everyone can get on the same page. Atmosphere is something I also find myself chasing a lot. Sometimes with success, sometimes not. Atmosphere can be a big part of an RP, I think, but I'm not sure you can make the atmosphere one of the main elements while already not using a traditional storyline - or if you can, it's probably very hard.

This is mainly my experience, but it's hard to convey something like atmosphere just from an OOC description to pitch someone on the thread. You can say that you want to evoke a certain kind of atmosphere in the OOC thread, but that doesn't mean your players will be able to strike the tone you're looking for right off the bat. In the IC, on the other hand, you can use your own writing to give cues and get the kind of atmosphere you're looking for out there. Like I said, though, I've had mixed results myself.

As an example of what I mean with describing an atmosphere versus showing one, imagine making a horror RP. You say in the OOC thread that you want it to have a very scary atmosphere with a lot of tension and surprises. Some players ignore this because they aren't interested/experienced in writing atmospheric things. Others add some atmospheric elements to their posts that may or may not be on target. And then some do well with it. On the other hand, more players might do well with that part of the RP if you put more effort into guiding the atmosphere yourself and put cues into your own posts and such. To use the horror example, you might describe things the players find in a room or the way that there's creepy fog drifting across the landscape at night. They can add their own reactions to these things and everyone's on the same page more than if you just told them all to write something scary and otherwise left them up to their own devices on what that looks like.

Anyway, I said a lot and it might not all make sense - but the advice I have is to figure out some kind of storyline to anchor the RP to. More abstract concepts can be appealing but they're a harder sell, so to speak. I'm looking at the threads on the front page now. There's a Dragon Ball RP, a political RP, a superhero RP, a magic academy RP, a sci fi/time travel RP, a crime RP, another sci fi RP, a city states RP, a Star Wars RP, an AH nation RP, a civil war one set in a fictional country, a Warhammer 30k one, another crime one, another sci fi one, and a 2021 nation RP. Most of these aren't very abstract in their concept. It's not hard to classify all of them, and the one that stands outside of a traditional genre the most might be the civil war one, but even that one can still be described fairly easily.

These kinds of RPs, that can be summed up as quickly as I did, are the ones that usually do well over more experimental ones where it's kind of hard to explain the core idea. So my proposal would be figuring out a central story of sorts, figuring out what genre it falls into, and marketing the RP as that - and the other things that you mentioned like atmosphere, and incremental worldbuilding, and memories and such, you can use those as things to flesh out the story you have as a basis. Note that when I say story, I don't necessarily mean throwing your players into some kind of RPG party and sending them on quests, etc. It can be just a reason why everyone's there, something to progress towards, things like that.

[Bengal and Assam]

A little question here. Can I do a single-player RP, as in write a story, on my own, instead of the traditional multiplayer RP?

[G-Tech Corporation]

A little question here. Can I do a single-player RP, as in write a story, on my own, instead of the traditional multiplayer RP?

Solo RPing, that is, writing your own story, goes conventionally in the Arts and Fiction subforum, not P2TM. Unless it happens to be a story about your actual canon NationStates nation, in which case it goes in, well, the NationStates subforum.

[Bengal and Assam]

A little question here. Can I do a single-player RP, as in write a story, on my own, instead of the traditional multiplayer RP?

Solo RPing, that is, writing your own story, goes conventionally in the Arts and Fiction subforum, not P2TM. Unless it happens to be a story about your actual canon NationStates nation, in which case it goes in, well, the NationStates subforum.

Well, it is an ISOT story about a nation in my canonical universe, being transported to the canonical universe of another nation run by a guy I know on the site...

Thanks for the help btw...

[G-Tech Corporation]

Solo RPing, that is, writing your own story, goes conventionally in the Arts and Fiction subforum, not P2TM. Unless it happens to be a story about your actual canon NationStates nation, in which case it goes in, well, the NationStates subforum.

Well, it is an ISOT story about a nation in my canonical universe, being transported to the canonical universe of another nation run by a guy I know on the site...

Thanks for the help btw...

Probably NS then, if they’re both NS-canon universes. You don’t intend to RP with the other Author?

[Bengal and Assam]

Well, it is an ISOT story about a nation in my canonical universe, being transported to the canonical universe of another nation run by a guy I know on the site...

Thanks for the help btw...

Probably NS then, if they’re both NS-canon universes. You don’t intend to RP with the other Author?

No. But I did get his permission to use his canonical universe.
I may extend it to a full fledged RP if I want to later on, but idk as of now...

[G-Tech Corporation]

Probably NS then, if they’re both NS-canon universes. You don’t intend to RP with the other Author?

No. But I did get his permission to use his canonical universe.
I may extend it to a full fledged RP if I want to later on, but idk as of now...

Ah, fair enough. Yeah, I would recommend NS then, as it involves both of your canons.

[Bengal and Assam]

No. But I did get his permission to use his canonical universe.
I may extend it to a full fledged RP if I want to later on, but idk as of now...

Ah, fair enough. Yeah, I would recommend NS then, as it involves both of your canons.

Thank u very for the help...

[Eclius]

A little question here. Can I do a single-player RP, as in write a story, on my own, instead of the traditional multiplayer RP?

Ngl, I've seen two-player RPs, but never single-player RPs. I know there are amateur writing forums elsewhere for something like this, just never seen on NS before. Nevertheless, good luck with your story!

[Alfonzo]

er... hi

dumb question but how do i character RP? I want to try it someday and I would really appreciate advice on starting out.

[Great Confederacy of Commonwealth States]

er... hi

dumb question but how do i character RP? I want to try it someday and I would really appreciate advice on starting out.

What kind of character RP are you looking to do? And what aspects are you struggling with?

[Bengal and Assam]

A little question here. Can I do a single-player RP, as in write a story, on my own, instead of the traditional multiplayer RP?

Ngl, I've seen two-player RPs, but never single-player RPs. I know there are amateur writing forums elsewhere for something like this, just never seen on NS before. Nevertheless, good luck with your story!

Thank you very much. Although I wished for some feedback, that never happened, nevertheless I'll carry on writing. Thanks again

[Talchyon]

er... hi

dumb question but how do i character RP? I want to try it someday and I would really appreciate advice on starting out.

Not a dumb question at all.

If you're talking about how to play, the first thing you do is check out an RP's OP page (Original Post). That should both describe the RP, lay out the rules, hopefully catch your interest, and the most important thing for joining the RP - a character application.

Usually the application ("app") is set up so you can click on the box and it selects everything in it. Then copy and paste that app in a new post. Fill out the app. Sometimes this means having to save what you have written so you can come back and finish it (if you didn't get it all done in one sitting). You do that at the bottom of the post with the handy box that says, "Save draft."

Once you're done with your app, the OP (the other meaning of OP - The "Original Poster", like the Dungeon Master) approves or rejects that app. If approved, great, you can start posting. If rejected, you may need to fix a few things in your app. Then submit it again when finished.

How to play - Write. As your character sees things. Also, with this, there are some unspoken rules, such as, you can do actions, but you shouldn't tell how those actions affect other PCs (player characters). (E.g., you can write that your character throws a punch at someone else, but not how he feels it - or even if it hits). Acting upon NPCs (non player characters) can be written as though the actions accomplish what you wish with the OP's permission. So, while your super strong hero may not be able to knock out the big bad villain with a punch, you might be able to knock out a thug in the street. But again, a lot of that depends on the particular OP.

Hope that helps.

[Free Ward Marchers]

Do you think a LOTF style game based on the 1978 election (minus the Watergate sandal) be popular?