Shorticus

DPRPGC #7: Hail the Glorious Leader

Praise the Glorious Leader!

No, seriously, praise him. He's onto you. His eyes are everywhere. You cannot deceive him with these hiders any longer. HAIL THE GLORIOUS LEADER!

Let's B!tch. I feel it's a healthy release for our roleplay annoyances 2.0

*Lots of good points*

@Sombrero

This honestly makes a lot of sense, yeah. It's easier and safer to say "Vikings" than to potentially get something wrong or write about something you're unfamiliar with. Even as someone who's taken several classes on world history and different cultures, I find myself often worrying about whether or not I'm going to portray something in a damning, rude way.

This will still bug me, but you make a lot of sense.

The given settings had some blurbs about their cultures that made it pretty distinct and clear what those cultures were meant to be like. It was just such a weird, trippy experience when I made this dark-skinned warrior-priest from what I was pretty sure was, yeah, Mongolian/Native American when someone claiming to be from the exact same clan was playing your typical angry pale Viking Berserker with a chip on his shoulder. (Did I mention the word "swarthy" last time? Because this culture's people were either described as "dark" or "swarthy.")

Trippy.

Again, though: very good points.

Ancient Nations RP

Out of curiosity...

You mention demi-gods, which I think is a nice twist. Should we expect magical beings to exist in this setting? (I'm 100% okay with us playing human normies while strange, magical creatures lurk in the wilderness or enchant our people.)

You want us to stick to ancient technology levels, right? Like Rome, ancient Greece, Babylon, ancient Egypt? I really hate to sound like a complainer, but I did notice someone's character sheet involves a printing press (which could as easily be replaced with something akin to "Philosophers" or "Culture of Learning"), which is a late medieval technology that REALLY changed how the whole world works.

And on that note, I did want to ask if you wanted us to be in the Iron Age, the Bronze Age, or somewhere in between? I wasn't sure, so I left my options for now (though iron and bronze are about as good as each other; it's steel that changes the game). If you have an idea as to what sort of metals you want us working with, please let us know and I'll make whatever changes are necessary to my sheet.

Finally, do you have an idea of how many actions you'll allow per turn?

Thanks in advance!

Superheroics 101

It'll be late when I get home tonight, but expect a post either tonight or tomorrow.

I'm debating whether my character should follow someone else's character and try to strike up a conversation on their way to try on their new suits.

Weird Roleplay Ideas You're Afraid To Pitch?

@NuttsnBolts

That racing idea sounds really, really fun. I've never heard of the show you're talking about until now, but I could see a small group (4-6 people) or 1x1 working really well for that. I know how I'd do it, too.

So, obviously you'd want to have everyone write up their character sheets. That's first. You'd then have to make it very clear, in bold font and big letters, that "Your character may lose." I dunno, something like,

Big Font, Red Letters

There can only be one winner of the race. Do not join this roleplay if you will be upset upon losing.

And then I'd make it clear that there'd be some dice rolling involved. Say, for instance, that I roll 2d3 for each player's movement at the start of each round to see how far ahead they are, and that you roll 2d6 when attacking someone. You can attack multiple people, but get a penalty to hit and damage (-2? -3?) for each additional person you attack. Different events (some laid out at a specific spot on the map, some randomly determed by dice) could change the game each round. Etc.

Selling this would be easy, but actually getting people who understand "I don't have to win to have fun" would be much harder. That's a problem I've stumbled across in tabletop RPGs, in board games, in MMO RP, in forum RP... People want their characters to win, and they don't like unforseen events taking victory out from underneath them (like a shot to the engine forcing them to stop and repair, or an ambush in the middle of the race having terrible consequences, or even just a roll of 2 when the second place player rolled a 6). There'd be angry posts, for sure.

I think you'd need to have a system that you were REALLY sure was fair because it has to be a competitive thing, and you'd need to know the people you're playing with a little bit... And you could not have a GM character. You'd have NPC antagonists who are NOT slated to win (you WANT a player to win) but to harass the players. You'd have to be clear that your role is that of arbiter and storyteller. And you'd have to be ready to accept that some players will think you're choosing favorites when it's really mostly dice rolls.

I'd love to see this, honestly. If you don't do this one day, I might. Not yet, not for a good while (I've got classes to contend with), but I might.

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@Rin

I think how I'd handle alternate dimensions and everyone playing alternate universe versions of the same character is... Well, I'd have it such that they don't start the roleplay immediately able to interact with each other. At least, not directly.

But let's say that Jane from Universe A is going about her business. She's an everyday normal citizen, and she trips and cracks a rib on something. The scene shifts to Universe B, where Jane is a soldier, and she's clutching a bullet wound in the same place. She shares a passionate kiss with her boyfriend when the scene shifts to Universe C, where John is having a passionate kiss with his boyfriend.

The idea is that they're actually unwittingly dictating something that happens in the next poster's post with each of their posts. They're all playing the same character, after all. They all share SOME quality.

But as the thread progresses, I'd have the universes start to collide. Things start to have much bigger impact. Soon, everyone's in the same universe, a weird amalgamation of all the others, and there's bad stuff going down. They have to stick together to survive.

Could be fun, yeah?

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@Engel

I guess the only thing I'll say is that, as someone who doesn't search for writing partners so much as good roleplay premises with good writers in them, I've seen some good roleplayers on this site. I won't say that there's a huge abundance of folks I'd call "great," but there's some writers on this website I've really enjoyed having around, sometimes because they're working with a premise they love.

I don't have any suggestions, but I can see the appeal of wanting to roleplay out an era where technology or something has made the human experience something completely unrecognizable to us today. Heck, I think it'd be great to contrast someone used to living like that and someone who's got a history much more grounded in what we'd call "the fight for survival."

Good luck. I hope you find the right folks, because transhumanism isn't something I've seen any roleplay really discuss. I guess it was briefly covered in a Shadowrun campaign I played in once? But that was it.

American Dream: A Shattered Union

Gonna make my second post tomorrow. I waited to see who was gonna pop up in my area, but I think I'd better make a post sooner than later.

Weird Roleplay Ideas You're Afraid To Pitch?

"Everyone plays an alternate reality version of the same character".

@Rin

I could see that being very interesting and fun. That WOULD be a hard sell, though.

How would you want to go about it? Are the alternate universe characters each in their own alternate universe, or are they all together in the same place at the same time? Does what happens in one alternate universe affect the others?

Weird Roleplay Ideas You're Afraid To Pitch?

So, this thread is all about those funny ideas you wanted to pitch to someone but weren't sure if A) anyone would like it or B) how to present it in the first place. These don't have to be ideas you wanted to use on a forum roleplay. Most of the ideas I'm going to present throughout the course of this thread are things I wanted to run IRL as a tabletop GM.

Feel free to use this thread to post your own things that will never see the table, or things you want to pitch but aren't sure if you're ready to. Who knows: maybe you'll find someone who's interested, or maybe you'll get suggestions from other posters about how to make it work in a tabletop or forum setting.

So, without further ado, let me start by introducing the first one:

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Avatars of Dinosaur Gods

Yeah, you read that correctly. Dinosaur gods. If you haven't played Primal Rage before, you probably need a bit of a primer as to what sort of world I'm talking about: a fantasy setting - or fantastic post-apocolyptic setting - in which there are dinosaurs that are deities. They cast magic, they can grant powers to their worshipers, and most importantly: THEY'RE GIANT DINOSAURS THAT WALK AROUND EATING PEOPLE WHO MAY OR MAY NOT WORSHIP THEM. These dinosaur gods would probably have really primal, instinct or state-of-mind based domains, like madness, hunger, fear, family (protection of), survival, rage, the hunt, destruction...

Yeah, it's a bit crazy sounding, but I love that setting concept.

One thing I've always wanted to do with such a setting is run a Dungeon World or Fantasy Age game in which the players are, well, the avatars of a dinosaur god of their choosing, and probably of their design. Using Dungeon World as an example, the Thief may worship Gargos, the Lord of Rot, a giant, rotting pterodactyl. The Paladin may worship Duragax, the Protector, a stegosaurus that fights to protect humanity. Etc.

Other interesting non-dinosaur gods could be things like giant sloths, yetis, sabertooth tigers, woolly mammoths, devil-like alligators, weird hybrids of different animals (some sort of chimera?)... You get the idea, though. These would all be scary, prehistoric monsters that are pretty much the size of Kaijus, and the world of humanity worships them in hopes of not being eaten.

This will probably never see the light of day, but damn do I want to run this for a group of unsuspecting dungeon crawlers. One day. One day.

A Fantasy Setting That's Actually A Giant Experiment By Aliens

Ever hear of an awesome game called Endless Legend? Well, now you did. Go look it up. 4X players will love it.

One of the key concepts of Endless Legend is that this fantastic, magical world is actually all explained by the science of the Endless universe (which does not mean OUR science can explain it; it's science fantasy, not hard science fiction). "Magic" is cast through the use of a strange material called Dust which is really common in space. The races of the planet, including the hydras and the minotaurs and EVERYTHING, were all created as experiments by some long-dead creator race. Humans, or at least one faction of them, crashed onto the planet in a goddamned space ship.

While it's a cool pitch, the problem is I'd want to keep it hidden from the players and let them discover all that. It means telling the players "There are secrets about this setting you do not know and may never find out, and you need to be okay with that." It means anticipating that some players would be upset to realize they're in playing in a science fantasy game, not traditional medieval fantasy.

"One Of These Things Is A Lie"

This is a forum roleplay idea I'd love to try, but it could end really badly, and I definitely don't have the time. The idea is simple:

At the start of the roleplay, I'd provide a list of things that are true about the setting, including rules. So, for instance, these truths might read: "Your character will not die," "The GM cannot do <X>," "One of you is a traitor," "There is no such thing as magic," "You are all human."

Then I'd proceed to tell the players that a certain number of those things - let's say three - are lies. I would not tell them which things were lies. I'd let them figure that out through the course of the roleplay.

Again, you can probably see why this would be a hard sell. But you can probably see the appeal to a GM, too.

Let's B!tch. I feel it's a healthy release for our roleplay annoyances 2.0

This is a little thing I notice, but it's not really a major issue, more like an annoyed concern...

So I've come to notice how some RPs are created with an American feel to them, some more than others. This can be from the freedom of gun weapons in RPs, to the way cities and vehicles are described, and even references to historic events like the declaration of independence, presidential leaders or even the seasonal school structure and school design layout.

Its nothing "wrong" with these choices as each rp caters to a different audience but as someone who is not from the US, God damn it can be hard to participate in some of these RPs.

For instance, I tried to participate into a school rp once. Now Australian schools go from year 1-6 primary, 7-12 secondary. We start school in Feb and end in Dec. So each year matches up with each year on the calendar. The idea of starting school mid year and finishing, mid year the next year, while having different schools for lower high schools and upper high schools and all that stuff is so foreign to me, that I cannot physically understand why.

The other part with weapons is that I've never grown up around guns. I know about guns through movies and games, so I have yet to see a role play where having a gun is actually a criminal offense and people have to watch their ammo usage because you cannot walk down to your local shop and restock supplies.

This isn't a rip on Americans as I do have a lot of American friends, but so many modern RPs seem to be set or influenced by the American culture that as an Australian I do notice, and it can sometimes break immersion as even if I try to create an American character, it can sometimes feel like the foreigner.

@NuttsnBolts

This is a really interesting post. I have a related, but not quite the same, topic.

Whether I'm playing on a forum, in a video game, or at a table in real life, one thing that bugs me when I sit down to roleplay with people that consider themselves experienced - not people who are new to roleplaying, mind you - is when they completely misinterpret what something in a given setting is designed to represent or else just shove what they want into a setting that wasn't designed with that in mind.

For instance, I played this game called Neverwinter Nights 2 a lot back in the day. There were some decent persistent worlds. One day I saw a server which had a culture that I was pretty sure was a mish-mash of Mongolian and Plains Indians cultures, and of course that really interested me. Its religion resembled the Tengri religion, the clans that made up the culture had totem animals and were named "Bear Clan" or "Deer Clan," and I think they were even described as swarthy. Despite this, someone decided this was obviously a Viking culture, and they turned it into that. Then I saw someone do the exact same thing on another server, this time to a culture that was pretty obviously based on India. Yeah. How does THAT translate into "Vikings" in someone's head? They even had castes!

But let's go back to the topic you introduced. Sorry for the diversion. I just had to get that off my chest.

So, as an American, I catch myself doing what you say a lot. Frankly, a lot of roleplays are very much built with assumptions from a western cultural view in mind, especially that of Great Britain and the U.S. This is the case both on this website and others. But as someone that likes to roleplay characters that aren't carbon copies of me, I've found a pretty good way of dealing with this:

I roleplay someone who doesn't get it. I roleplay someone who isn't from the big culture, and I roleplay out their confusion, frustration, and NPCs likewise being confused and frustrated with them. And if I can, I have them explain their confusion either in their heads or aloud, the better to sort of explain WHY this is so annoying, WHY this is so... bad.

To use a real-life example, I was playing a character in a fantasy setting akin to a medieval Wild West. He was a dwarf from a culture that had certain unbreakable rules. The trouble is that nobody in that part of the world adhered to those rules. So, I roleplayed out his frustration at how nobody actually followed similar rules, and he came to expect disappointment.

I also played a spellcaster from halfling clans based around the Romani people. He lived by a different set of ideas of what right and wrong were than the other characters in his group. Really, this brought mutual confusion to both sides, even though they usually got along swimmingly. What might seem like a great insult to them would be a great joke to him, and vice versa as well. It was an intriguing thing to play out.

You can also turn this around on people if you build the right character and make them be confused and frustrated in a way that's conducive to roleplay. In Neverwinter Nights 2 I played a Half-Orc paladin of Ilmater. I played on a server that took realism seriously... which included, well, racism. He was beaten, had people try to get him thrown in jail, and otherwise horribly mistreated. He was known for being a goodie-two-shoes, selfless protector of the weak, giving all his money away to the poor, blah blah blah. So, it upset people enough that some of them wanted him to fight back, either by trying to take the problem up with the law or by getting some SWEET VENGEANCE in with his huge honkin' greatsword. But he refused to, and he made people promise not to, because he wanted to show, by example, that you didn't need violence or a loud voice to make changes. (I was going for a Gandhi or Jesus style of martyrdom here.) This drove people nuts, but in the end it made people really intrigued, and it reintroduced them to a style of protest and preaching that society sometimes forgets about.

Yeah. In general, I just think the best way to counter people who insist on playing characters based around traditional American / Western ideals and beliefs is to introduce them to a separate belief system. Hell, if you want to really provoke some thought, take apart the western ideal of "progress" in a roleplay.

Harry Dresden/ The Dresden Files

I can't join - I'm in too many roleplays to let myself join another - but I love the Dresden Files book series, and the concept you have hear is neat. If anyone asks me about interesting roleplays, I'll give you folks a shout out because this looks like it could turn out really nice.

If you end up running another thread like this in the future, I'd be interested in joining, potentially; but right now I can't dedicate. Please let me know the next time you run a thread like this, though, since modern fantasy is awesome fantasy, and Harry Dresden is the coolest wizard in Chicago.