Avatar of Hylozoist
  • Last Seen: 1 yr ago
  • Joined: 10 yrs ago
  • Posts: 515 (0.14 / day)
  • VMs: 2
  • Username history
    1. Hylozoist 10 yrs ago

Status

Recent Statuses

2 yrs ago
Current I remember when I used to be into nostalgia.
1 like
9 yrs ago
The sun is shining, the birds are singing, there's a few white fluffy clouds in the sky. I am closing the curtains and going back to bed.
2 likes
9 yrs ago
"What kind of solicitor doesn't have sweets on their desk?!"
1 like
9 yrs ago
"His multiphasic torpedo will penetrate your rift / and cause a quantum singularity in your transwarp conduit!"
9 yrs ago
"You make a pretty good sheep."

Bio

I live somewhere in the wilds of East London with a couple of friends, a pet rat and a collection of RPG books that is slowly consuming our house. I've suggested possibly getting rid of some of them, but it's pretty much got to the point where the books are the only thing keeping the building upright and if I move any of them the whole thing could come crashing down.

In terms of games - well, I'll consider anything, except that. As can probably be gathered from my posts, I find myself generally playing characters that let me bit a little bit light-hearted. I am reasonably certain that I can play serious characters, but I know that getting to post things which makes me chuckle as I write them keeps me far more engaged. I like fandom-y things (because I can't, apparently, still get enough Undertale, Adventure Time and various Nintendo stuff, good job brain), and non-fandom-y things, and will one day get around to rebooting a RP I'd made on here seven years ago.

Most Recent Posts


I have made a post. Please inform me if anything is wrong.


"Wait, what am I thinking? Ask the captain. Disregard that."


Somebody's going to earn their "Respecting The Chain Of Command" ISF badge. Note to self: draw badges. Anyway, nothing wrong!

@HylozoistI completely agree. I trust in your abilities.


Duly noted. And thanks, I really appreciate the messages over the last few days, it's helped put some stuff into perspective and generally helped me find the space to sort things in the old brain-meats into something a bit more manageable.

Today's baking is brought to you by some truly awful stuff.
Sorry it's taking me a while to post; there's quite a lot to read through to make sure that I'm fully following the situation at the castle, now that the cavalry Quina is arriving there.
Post is up a little earlier than expected, mostly because I've tried not to spend an hour or two editing it to within an inch of it's life.

Let's field some questions from the audience with this free time.

There's little to nothing you can do to make people react the way you want them to. Even if you're doing everything right, they may react in a way that's completely wrong regardless.


It's not that I'm wanting you to react in a particular way (because, goodness knows, you folks are plenty capable of surprising me), but it was more that I want to make sure that there are plenty of things for you to react to. So when I write, I put things in that would make me go "oh, I'd want to do something about that", and hope that other people would react to them too. There's not really a right or wrong way to react, because any reaction to any part of the post means things are happening and people are engaged, even if it's not a reaction I could've predicted.

Simply put - any reaction is good, and not reacting is bad. If some detail I included in a post serves to keep the story moving in any direction, that's good, even if I didn't plan for that detail to be much of anything. If a post garners no reaction, if there's nothing to it that makes people go "oh, I want to react to this!", then it means I've goofed up, because it's breaking the back-and-forth flow of the game that it's my responsibility to maintain, If That Makes Sense TM. Running off on some wild goose chase is preferable to standing around doing nothing!
The Brain took a step back as the swarm of bees began muscling their way through the door, not that either of the two goons were making much of an attempt to stop them. Their robotic maid still held Maracun hostage and Boss Hog wouldn't have had much luck against a horde of bees. They were outsiders, self-avowed drifters, after all, who clearly didn't appreciate the importance of the parties in Ofromia. The Brain was the sort of person who attached considerable significance to the value of information and the value of his own skin.

"Sorry, Maracun, but we're not fighting to preserve yer honour today," the Brain finally stood up straight and, just before patting his hog-like companion on the shoulder, he paused and thought better of it, "come on, Hogger, you can be the one to tell the boss that he's got nothing to worry about."

It took a while for the suggestion to leave Maracun to the tender mercies of the crew to penetrate the thick skin, thick skull and thick brain of Hogger. A more intelligent creature would listen with their ears, which would have been considerably easier. Hogger was a very literal minded and simple creature, and had done things 'the hard way' so often that it'd become the philosophy that guided his life. Hogger snorted and walked away, accompanying the Brain, into the crowds of people that drifted through the neon streets of Ofromia.

Maracun expressed his displeasure at being left behind with a rude gesture towards the back of Hogger and Brain. Hip Kallo gurgled on the floor in front of them. The banner of the International Space Friends fluttered proudly in the breeze caused by the flow of air through the open door.




Armed with tiny little GloBrellas, the bees organised themselves into three teams, based on the colourful glow. The team with pink GloBrellas insisted that they were now to be referred to as Team A, and were made up of tough, no-nonsense bees that didn't play by the rules, but they got the job done. The blue team opted to take the rather more prestigious name of Team B, and declared that they were young, up-and-coming heroes with hearts of gold and something to prove to the world. The final team, quite clearly a little unhappy about not being Team B, explained that they would be The B Team, and that they were a team of mercenaries who were framed for a crime they didn't commit, and have since escaped to clear their name and do good deeds. None of these elaborate backstories were true, but the bees were impressionable when it came to SpaceTV, and far from the guiding hand of the Will, they were free to indulge in their elaborate fantasies and their love of dividing themselves into arbitrary groups.

The leader of each of the three teams looked expectantly towards Fiddlesticks.

"Team A reporting in. Twenty eight years on the force," the bee was putting on a gruff voice, even though it had to speak up to be heard, "and this is how they repay me? You gotta be kidding me. I'm turning in my badge and my gun after this assignment."

"Team B, here to save the day," this bee struck a pose, holding the GloBrella like a sword, "we can do it! Yeah!"

"You know what they say," the third bee wore a little eye-patch, and somebody had gone to draw stubble around his chin, which grew more smudged as he stroked it in thought, "if you've got a problem, and if nobody else can help you, and if you can find us, well, we're The B Team."
Post to get things moving a little will be up tomorrow lunchtime (Monday).
I'm not so great at the interpersonal stuff myself, but thats maybe due to the people I've had to test my way of doing things on. (...) And I've only really dealt with introverts mostly. will say the thing I'm sheepish with is sex stuff mostly because I'm a guy and all that steriotype stuff...


Dealing with interpersonal stuff is tricky, and it's doubly tricky to offer advice and help with it when it involves somebody else! Especially as, when it comes to that sort of thing, there's (to paraphrase from Babylon 5) your side, their side, and the truth. As I'm part of the problem in the interpersonal relationship thing, my recounting of the problem is unlikely to do a good job of explaining it fully - I could say, for instance, that somebody is being a big ol' meanie jerk for absolutely no reason, and people might give me advice on how to act on that, but if I mistook their behaviour for being a jerk, and didn't see the reasons behind it, then any advice that could be given could just end up making matters worse by acting on my misunderstanding and flawed understanding of events.

On the "sex stuff" front, I'm one of those folks who isn't at all interested in it. It used to bug me a lot when I was younger ("Oh god, why is everyone suddenly interested in this?!"), but I'm old enough now just to shrug off my complete lack of interest in it.

Really the only thing I can say to improve on with the GM stuff so far is to give us something to react to in a combat or escalating situation, if that makes sense.


Yeah, it does. I think part of the problem is that (as I've done multiple times before!), I've often left out stuff - I think it, but I'm not happy with how I've wrote it, so I delete it, but continue to write as if it's still there, if that makes sense. "If that makes sense," ought to be a catchphrase for this game. The other part of the problem is that I'm very much used to writing for me; the point at which I would want to interject or interact if I were a player in my own game is when I'll put in a stop for somebody to react to it, and obviously the things that I'd go "hey, I'd want to react to that!" isn't going to be the same for when you, or Twelve, or Draco, or Valor, or DepressedSoviet would want to do it. It'll be a difficult habit to get out of, but I'll see what I can do on that front.

When I invariably stop a post to allow for people to react to stuff, and have failed to provide something that makes you go "aha, I shall react to this!", let me know.
@Hylozoist Wanna let us know what these problems are? I'll help with whatever ones I can.


It's mostly the interpersonal stuff; there's somebody I like, he likes me back, and it's a step into the unknown that's made me confront some fairly deep-seated things I've always told myself to be true, even though, well, they probably aren't. That's not been particularly easy for me to process, and so it's made problems of everything else, because my capacity to actually solve problems has been diminished, if that makes sense.

So, thank you, for the offer of help, and while I'm not sure if there's much that can be done to address the big problems, the offering of help (and the stern but fair talking to I've been receiving) has helped more than you probably realise.

In terms of small problems that you, and everyone else, can help with - here's a question that you could answer, and I clearly don't need an answer straight away, but it'd help me when it comes to working out what to do in the next post, and the ones that come after it: how long do you want an ISF mission to take?

I'm not going to be setting definite limits ("This mission must be solved in 12 posts or less!"), but it'd be helpful to me to have a better understanding of how you, and everyone else, likes things to be paced in their games. Obviously, "whatever pace you want, I don't mind" is a fair and valid answer, and if that's the case with most of you, I'll try and trust my judgement to know when's best to hurry the action up, and when's best to slow things down. There's going to be times where I get it wrong (as has been proven, my judgement is pretty bloody poor at times).

As a case in point, would this current scene work better if I moved the action along more in each post? Looking back over it, it's been fairly slow on my part. I think this is sort of a hold-over from my around-the-table-playing-games GMing style, where I want to make sure that players have opportunities to react to just about everything. Now obviously, in a game around a table, that's a lot easier - any one of them can interrupt me (politely (mostly)) and react to it. When it comes to a play-by-post style of game, however, it's harder; I have to sort of "guess", for lack of a better way of putting it, what it is you'll want to react to, and stop the action at the appropriate moment to provide the opportunity for you to react to it. In the current scene, for instance, it may have been better for me to move things along more in my posts, and trust that such a thing would have provided better pacing in exchange for less opportunity to react.

And I've just realised this has turned into a wall of text about GMing.

TL:DR - big problems are real life interpersonal relationship stuff that I am inexperienced with and bad at, things you can help with are telling me what sort of pace you're comfortable with in terms of action-moving-per-post so it's less "me guessing that this is the right idea" and more "me knowing what the audience wants".
So @Hylozoist. Won't you put your GM hat back on one more time? I miss those big goofy feathers.


I've sent you a PM, but I realise that I should probably say things here, because, well, it's relevant for all of us.

I would like to keep this game going, but I've got some things going on in my life that are making handling other responsibilities difficult. I'm (slowly) making progress in tackling some of these, and hopefully once I've tackled these big problems (mostly of the downright terrifying and unknowable "interpersonal relationship" type), the little day-to-day problems that I enjoy facing ("How do I make the lives of the characters in my game more difficult?", the annual "Maybe I Could Get A New Apron" and the ever popular "Should I wear dinosaur pyjamas or bunny pyjamas today?") will feel, well, more enjoyable.

The problem I'm facing is that I do not have a timetable for how long it will take for me to get back to that point. I didn't want to say to everyone, "I would like you to wait for an unspecified amount of time for me", as that didn't feel fair on anyone. Conversely, I didn't want to set myself a deadline to try and meet, because that only serves to make me more anxious, which rather defeats my goal. In my wobbly-brain-meats at the time, the best option was to cut the responsibility of the GM Hat out entirely, but I realise that's really not fair on any of you either.

So here's the deal - I am going to fix this. I will post when I will post (one of the perks of the GM Hat, right?) and try to muscle my way through this rough patch. Once I've managed to deal with some of the out-of-game problems I'm facing, hopefully, it'll mean less anxiety attached to this and things will improve.
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