New B!tching:I know everybody has different ways of dealing things, but any kind of system to resolve a character conflict decided by anything other than good ideas for where the story goes gets my goat. Sure, it would be really interesting for your character if he were to be defeated by the monster, and have his confidence and maybe leg broken, but, nope, the dice say you kill it in one hit.
I see RPing as storytelling and not as a traditional game. The objective, for me, is to be writing prose in a format that doesn't require the same energy that solo fiction requires. There is no 'winning', beyond the satisfaction in taking part in the game. The idea of trying to 'win' an RP baffles me. If that's what people wanna do, it's what they wanna do and it's fine, but, like, ew.
Equally, I sometimes worry that, even if I genuinely believe that it would be good for the story for my character to win an engagement of some kind (say, to affirm alpha status in a group rather than have it be an informed attribute), I worry that people would think I'd be cheerleading for my own character's success, rather than the development of the story.
Old B!tching:
Prince said
Magic itself is normally defined as a super natural force, ie not natural, ie not real. You can't have something that is by definition 'not real' be 'more real' than another form of it.
Perhaps 'realistic' is, in this case, used as a wrong synonym for 'comprehensible' or 'credible'. If you look at two different versions of magic (say, most of the Final Fantasy series versus Rowling's Harry Potter), the magic in HP is more comprehensible. It's suggested (if not explored) that there is a science behind it, and it is bound by tangible rules: spells typically require incantations, gestures, and the focal point of a magic wand. In most of the FF series, magic is just a vague thing that makes shit blow up that some people can do and others can't and usually has a limit expressed by the unaddressed concept of 'Magic/Mana Points'. The magic in HP feels more credible and comprehensible because it can be understood better, even if it's not, per se, more realistic.
I tried to create a Pokemon RP that was to be, in my own words, realistic. Of course, fire-breathing dragons and electric rodents aren't remotely realistic, but, by realistic, I meant credible - dealing with some real-world ramifications of a modern society that has to deal with freaking huge monsters and people that have the ability and drive to tame them.
Rexcalibur said
On Jig's topic: I was in a similar community as well. It was on Gamefaqs instead of an RP-based site though, but I was always RPing with folks in the social boards lol. I didn't think sites actually dedicated to RPing would actually employ this. On the site you mention, what if the "owner" of a canon character leaves the site and never comes back? Was there a rule for how often you had to be active? What if the owner couldn't write that character well at all though? lol
I didn't stick around long enough to find out, though I think one of the semi-important canon characters had, indeed, gone AWOL.
