Looking for some new RP buddies (Full with 7 folks, try this technique out for yourself)

[Deserted]

This is my idea...

instead of having people come in, present a character, and when the game ends or the character dies, they all go their separate ways. End of story. Instead we get a group of gamers together... some people say "Hey, I was thinking of running this game." We all decide what to play together, and we go from there. However, when this game ends or a character dies we treat it just like a face to face game. We say "so what are we playing next?"

See what I did there? Instead of everybody walking away because the game is pivotal, it is the group that is pivotal now.

So why am I on here recruiting? First of all, I suck at selling things, my games, my characters, myself. Secondly, I don't know if it is just me and a run of bad luck but I keep encountering 4 scenarios. This is over the span of dozens of applications and months of waiting and working and trying to get something going.

1) A game run by a tyrant with a chip on his shoulder.

Me: So, you keep shutting down my character ideas, but you don't tell me why or how to make them fit your game. Can you give me some feedback?
Ego-trip-man: I've had about enough of your guff, mister, one more step out of line and I'm banning your $@#@ &^%# from my game. Heck, you should be kicked off of the board entirely for $&#% stuff like that! I'm being gracious here, but one more peep out of you and I'm going to the board administrators about you.

2) No-show players

Flaky Player: Gosh, 1 post of 25 words a week... I don't know, I'm sooooooo busy I've got work and school and Pokemon Go. When am I going to have time for this? I'd better just join, fill up an available space, and then vanish without a trace when the adventure starts. I'm sure that everyone will be appreciative that I got them started.

3) The games I choose to run are invisible...

I don't get a single nibble and I have tried a number of strategies. People act like I'm peddling poop.
What I say: Hey, come check out my original game concept. It isn't like anything you've seen before!
What they hear: Hey, you wanna buy some poop. Pooped it myself just this morning. Poop poop poop

4) Games I have no clue about.

GM: Whoooo's ready for some Hakatushi Mitsu Gi Mushi!
Me: *Read read read* What!?
GM: You mean to tell me that you didn't buy the reel to reel films from Japan and translate them into English or learn Japanese to really experience them they way they are intended? I could explain, but there's just too much. Go watch the entire series, it's only 10,000 hours worth, I'll save you a spot.
A throng of other players: Oh! Hakatushi Mitsu Gi Mushi!

So, enough on recruiting for games. That isn't working out, and enough for applying to games, that isn't working out. So, let's just focus on meeting some new respectable people and decide where to go from there.

As for me, it really doesn't matter what we are playing. (I say that, but I don't play horror or tabletop at all.) I'm game for anything because this really isn't a pivotal life decision here, it's a game. I don't have a story that HAS to be told, and I don't have a character I HAVE to play. Some of the best games I've been in are ones that I had no control over character creation.

So, playing? Sure, I'm cool with that.
Running a game? I'm cool with that too.

So, here are some ideas on what I can GM for you guys if
Fantasy Rising: Somewhat generic fantasy, but I find that D&D straight up isn't as fun since you have to be pretty educated in the Encyclopedia Arcana (aka 3.5 edition)
Rift Runners: Sci-Fantasy with modern characters from earth traveling to fantastic places.
Superheroes (I prefer Marvel, but I am better equipped at handling DC)
Alpha Zone: Science Fiction band of misfits in which the characters are trying to go big or go home.
Elf Dawn: This is a comedy game in which characters are about equal to Christmas Elves in a Lord of the Rings kind of world.
Something Else: I am super creative and have been generating new worlds, environments, plots, etc for about 25 years now.

We can do free-form, or we can use a rules system. (I have my own creation as well if anybody wants to give it a go.)

In addition I am willing to play just about anything so long as I am surrounded by the right folks.
So, how's about it? Let's get some introductions some blabbering (and the whole friendship making thing) and some votes on what we want to play.

[Disciple Cain]

A Discord server would be really good to set up if really want to get the communication thing going solid.

[Nevix]

I'm in another group like this. I May or not hop in on yours, but figured I'd throw in a bit o' advice. Etherpads are exceptional tools for this sort of thing.

[Primal Conundrum]

I like this idea! Having a dedicated group sounds like the smart way to RP. You can count me in! It'll also be a lot easier to drag myself out of a posting slump if I know I'd be letting down my friends rather than some rando strangers.

[Deserted]

Cool, well it is a pleasure to meet you, @Primal Conundrum

So, here's a bit about myself.

I'm 36, just became the father of the cutest little redheaded daughter in the world, and I've been married for 3 years now. I live in Colorado and work in Tech Support at a college.

So, I've been out of the movie loop (with a new-born it shouldn't be a big surprise.) I know Suicide Squad is coming up, are you looking forward to anything coming out soon?

[Primal Conundrum]

Congratulations on your daughter! I'm certain that she's adorable.

I'll repay your little bio with one of my own. I'm 27, living out on the West coast of British Columbia. Single, working as a tester in the videogame industry. Don't want to remain a tester, my goal is to end up doing design work for games. It's what I went to school for after all—that, and creative writing.

As far as movies, I'll admit to being a bit out of the loop myself! Last thing I saw in theaters, I think, was Deadpool, and before that it was probably Zootopia. I don't really know what all is coming out in the near future, but I'm going to be watching that Star Wars: Rogue One thing pretty closely (It's dealing with the plotline from the Dark Forces videogames, which I grew up playing!) and I'm expecting that I'll like Moana when that comes out.
As far as videogames, I'm looking forward to a few. The new WoW expansion comes out towards the end of next month, and Dishonored 2 is still on the horizon. FIFA also comes out late September I believe, so with any luck I'll have a lot of free time after that date if I get laid off like I'm expecting.

[Deserted]

Dude, I went to school for computer animation and worked pretty closely with some of the game design majors. So do you mostly work with concept, or are you also into the whole 3D design and engine and such?

Likewise with writing, I have been working on a novel or two but while I am great at character development, I totally suck at plot because I get lost in all of the possibilities. So, what is your specialty in writing? Have you completed a short story, novella, or heck even a full novel yet?

[Primal Conundrum]

@Deserted I'm mostly concept and setting design! I have a very strong grasp of art theory, my dad was an instructor in 3D art at the school and my mother is a painter so I grew up around that stuff. I can do some basic scripting, mostly to prototype my ideas in gamemaker, but my art skills are fairly meh. TBH, if I had a good artist handy, that would open up the options for making several games.

I haven't actually written anything in ages, but I want to get back into writing. Last time I was sitting down to write something to show to other people, that was probably when I was writing MLP fanfiction under a pseudonym over on FIMFiction. For whatever it's worth, one of the things I wrote there got top slot in the featured stories box for like a week, so apparently people quite enjoyed it. When I get back into writing stories, they're likely going to have a savage fantasy bent to them.

[Deserted]

@Primal Conundrum Okay, so what is the coolest pen and paper roleplaying campaign you've played in recently? Tell me about it.

[Primal Conundrum]

@Deserted I think I played a single session in the past year or so, ever since I moved back West from Montreal I haven't put in the time to get a tabletop group together. I used to play endless amounts of D&D back during highschool when I had time and everyone was nearby, but these days? I've got boxes of D&D books sitting in storage.

[Deserted]

@Primal ConundrumWell, how about story? What was the premise of your favorite campaign you have ever played in?

[Primal Conundrum]

@Deserted Favourite campaign? Probably the Evil campaign we did years back, though that was likely because we had a great group dynamic. Basically, there were two players, myself and one of my close friends, and each of us ran two characters. I think we might have even made them gestalt or something. We set out with the ambiguous goal of gaining power, and we wound up using a combination of murder, drugs and mind control to organize a monopoly on the arms industry for a large city-state—we wound up being the only supplier to the guards / local military, and basically anyone who wanted to buy so much as a knife had to go through us. From there, we used our influence to gain access to ruling individuals, who we carefully and over a long period of time warped the mind of to leave our group in a position of greater power.

There was no concrete goal and the campaign never really ended, but we had some great times. My characters were a yuan-ti sorcerer or wizard, I forget which, and an extremely brutal Lizardfolk cleric who greatly enjoyed frontline combat.

[Deserted]

I was in this group that was playing Game of Thrones. Anyhow, as we went along I was the one holding the item of power (you know the one that if destroyed or properly used saves the day) We wind up getting double recruited by two underground organizations that basically say "do what we want or die." Unfortunately, they are also in direct opposition to each other. Anyhow, we had been going for months strait, and my character had lost 2 of her 3 brothers, her pacifist father was imprisoned and sentenced to be executed. The guy she had a crush on was assassinated, her friends (PCs) were getting killed off one by one. She was betrayed by one of them. Every time we tried to use the item of power (she was the only one who could use it) it wasn't enough or was riddled with evilness.

So, anyhow, I started cracking open the psychology books and began implementing PTSD and more and more aggressive psychological coping methods because it had been one thing after another. In the end, I find a third avenue from the cloak and dagger groups that are pulling our strings. I realize that they all want our arch-nemesis dead and are undermining his authority... so I marry my character off to the guy, trading protection from these shadow agents and using the item of power to counter them. LOL!

Expos-facto I went through and showed, step by step, how my character was starting to loose it, and the other players were like "Oh my gosh! I didn't even notice that!"

Awesome ending, and rather appropriate for the universe.

[Polybius]

This is my idea...
instead of having people come in, present a character, and when the game ends or the character dies, they all go their separate ways. End of story. Instead we get a group of gamers together... some people say "Hey, I was thinking of running this game." We all decide what to play together, and we go from there. However, when this game ends or a character dies we treat it just like a face to face game. We say "so what are we playing next?"

See what I did there? Instead of everybody walking away because the game is pivotal, it is the group that is pivotal now.

So why am I on here recruiting? First of all, I suck at selling things, my games, my characters, myself. Secondly, I don't know if it is just me and a run of bad luck but I keep encountering 4 scenarios. This is over the span of dozens of applications and months of waiting and working and trying to get something going.

@Deserted

Yep. I feel ya man. I don't know if it is a symptom of online Roleplay or these forums in particular, but I do like it here. To be honest I only roleplay online because my real life commitments are insane-Professional chef, father of two. But I really enjoy being creative and writing, it's a stress relief for me. I'm more naturally drawn to worldbuilding, it's something I've done even before I knew what D&D was, but I'm taking strides towards being a better roleplayer and want to expand my capabilities in character depth and imagination. Anyways if your interested you can see some of my stuff in my signature or on my blog which I tend too about twice a month with original work. Nice meeting you all!

[Clanty]

Hey guys! It looks like this thread is still active so I thought I'd throw my hat into the ring so to speak. I'm a 31 year old tech support agent from Northern California (Think forests and farmland, not beaches). I like the idea of creating a group of writing buddies and going from there. I know for me personally, my posts tend to drop off when I'm one of 20 folks on an RP and there's a ton of posts to catch up on. A small group, especially one that jumps genres occasionally sounds like the perfect situation!

I've done some online Star Trek RPGs in my day, and right now I just finished DMing the first part of Rise of the Runelords (Pathfinder) and now get to play the next section.

My favorite genres would be scifi or fantasy, though I've always wanted to do an X-men or Marvel game. Got in on one where it was gender-bent Avengers but it fizzled before anything got off the ground.

I'm admittedly much better at the character creation part of the RPG equation, but I'm definitely willing to give it a shot. I also think it could be amazing to use some concept art found online (I'm loving Efflam Mecier's work right now) and build a world around it.

This brief intro turned into a huge post, but I'm just super stoked about this idea :)

[Deserted]

Ha ha ha! We just quadrupled our social interaction dynamics. Nothing can stop us now!
A pleasure to meet you @Clanty and @Polybius

This thread has been the best idea I have ever had for this forum thus far.

So, how about you @Clanty@Polybius? What is your favorite roleplaying story-line you have played/GMed?

[Clanty]

@Deserted- my favorite roleplaying story-line would probably be the last one I was a player in. We started out as an evil party (Pathfinder) and I was a half-orc farrier who'd been imprisoned wrongly and had gone evil and ended up REALLY disliking humans. We rampaged around for a while (set a seaside town on fire in an epic meltdown) and then I got cursed (alignment change to neutral good).

The rest of the campaign was me trying to atone for my sins by building a new society where the racial tensions were no longer an issue. The character change from 'burn the establishment down and murder them all' to 'oh god what have I done' was so much fun to play! And an interesting twist on my very first evil campaign lol.

[Deserted]

@Clanty That sounds like a good twist.

One game I played, we were present at this undead apocalypse, and the GM was trying to get us to fight against them. Instead, I was playing an undead revenant, and I wound up convincing them to function as the village's army and protect them because undead cannot reproduce but the living can. "It is like a crop, you grow them and care for them, and then they will ripen and join your ranks upon their deaths. Heck, you could even get them to help you out while they are still alive, and when they get killed in service to you, they can come back again and get a second go."

The undead lord was like, "I... well... it kinda works, doesn't it?"

Yah... that game didn't last much longer after that. LOL

[Clanty]

@Deserted-That's some enterprising evil! I'm impressed. That's very sickly efficent :D

[Polybius]

So, how about you @Polybius? What is your favorite roleplaying story-line you have played/GMed?

@Deserted

Friend of mine ran me and five others through a 3.5 Tomb of Horrors. Best D&D game I've ever played. I think my first D&D campaign ever was probably my favorite because the pressure to provide a good game was non-existent. It was just me, my wife, best friend and his girl. It was standard fantasy fare and it never concluded, but I really got into helping the players develop stories for their characters. Currently I'm into more abstract stories, non-linear, weird-fiction type stuff.

How do you guys feel about the numbers/mechanics VS. straightforward storytelling on a medium like forum roleplay?