Congreveopia wrote:Hurtful Thoughts wrote:This appears to be an underlying problem with all our RPs, I suggest we address that.
I think people are posting when they can, and there's not much we can do to change how frequently people can post. Our problem is, though, that a lot of our RPs at least begin with a segment where nothing much is happening and everyone is just killing time until the OP starts the OP. Once we reach a point where all of our teams are on the ground fighting in a city, or our spec ops are kidnaping someone else's spec ops, or something similar, then we aren't relying on any singular person to move the story along, each participant can post what their team is doing without waiting for someone else. In the beginning stage, however, everyone is waiting on the OP, so if the OP is delayed for some reason IRL, it brings the whole RP down.
I'd say our biggest problem is that we rely on one person too much in any given RP, and that we should take steps to avoid that in future. For example:
- Give a clear map of the location, so people aren't relying on the OP to describe the area.
- Don't have a lengthy opening where everyone is waiting on the OP at the beginning.
- Find a way to prevent the OP from having to roleplay all of OPFOR in addition to his own squad. For example:
- Make OPFOR other players.
- Allow participants to dictate their own random encounters with enemy forces.
- Mark OPFOR on the map at the start and then let players roleplay whatever OPFOR their squad encounters.
I think that almost all of the deaths of our roleplays could have been prevented if the measures on this list were enacted. In Helios and Caesar, our squads made it into the action, but once they were there, we had problems doing things because we didn't have a clear map, and it wasn't clear how OPFOR was being controlled. In Dark Sun we are held up right now by an overlong opening (and almost all of our other RPs had very long openings too). Necropolis (I feel) was our most successful operation. It didn't actually finish like Olympia did, but it had the most posts on its IC, and it had by far the most posts actually engaged in action (by my count, only 19 of the 44 posts on Olympia occurred during or after the firefight, all the rest was briefing). Furthermore, I believe Necropolis was so successful because it adhered to the rules I mentioned above. It started with the zombie outbreak, so there was no lengthy briefing; it was on a carrier (which we all roughly know the interior design of), and the locations of zombies, enemies, weapons, and other things like helicopters were all fairly clearly dictated; and the majority of OPFOR was zombies, which everyone felt fine about roleplaying themselves.
I don't know if we would necessarily complete our roleplays if we tried to follow these rules, but I think they would go on for longer at least, and they would certainly have more posts involving actual spec ops action than our other roleplays (In Helios, we have 27 posts before anyone jumps out of the plane, and in Caesar nobody fired a single shot before the roleplay ended).
And now for something semi-related...
In Dark Sun, would it be useful for me to post what my Halian Spec Ops team is doing right now and where they are, so that somebody's team can go and abduct a member of them, and/or should other nations that are going to have their members abducted begin posting what their teams are doing?
It's AP season right now, and finals are probably coming up for some of us, so I'd say its more important than ever that a new RP be as death-proof as possible given the fact that at least some of us will be rather busy IRL for the next few weeks.
