stone — Roleplayer Guild

I guess I'll throw myself in!

In person, I'm loud, friendly, and unreserved. I'm myself almost 100% of the time, and people's first impressions of me are usually the same impressions they'll keep forever! I love talking, meeting, and learning about new people! I'd say I'm the first person to say hi to a newcomer, introduce myself, and make an effort to get to know them. I'm in a position where I have to meet people, so I might as well make the most of it! 

Online, I think I'm actually more reserved. I'm especially a lot more polite on a forum than I am in person! There's a lot that's lost through text - facial expressions, body positions, all those little social cues that tell how a person feels. As such, I feel like I'm better off starting polite and gradually relaxing rather than making my exact self clear right at the get-go. Of course, once I really know who I'm talking to, all barriers are down and I'm just as chill as I am in real life :)

Though, I do consider myself an introvert. I LOOOOVE talking to people and navigating social situations, but I recharge alone.

(also apologies to stone if I dragged them into a conversation they didn't want to be dragged into, I just think your RP is one of the more interesting ones to pop up in recent times and I really like the unique shit ;w;)@Ammokkx

Hey hey, no big deal! I had a feeling To Face Tomorrow was gonna be brought up sometime! :P

And yeah, the reason why I hadn't popped into this thread immediately was because my RP hasn't even started yet! As of writing this message, I've identified who I want to be starting immediately, who's waiting in my queue, and who's getting a slower, more consistent message feed instead of a whole bunch every once in a while.

I just want to make a few quick insights and corrections (which aren't ur fault Ammokkx cuz you haven't been in my RP discord lol)

We both looked at it and came to the conclusion that, essentially, Stone is running with elements from a Persistent World and doing it on a smaller, more private scale. Each character is in the world and permanently a part of that world, and those characters can interact with each-other, but the players just don't know it. It's just one layer removed from having multiple threads that people happen to stumble into each-other on. The key is that you need enough characters to make it work, that's to say, there's enough of a brute force method to bringing them together. More people = inherently more chance that two of them cross roads...@Ammokkx

The difference between TFT and a PW is the presence of structure. I'm not letting people make a sheet and then toss their character into the world. I placed a heavy emphasis during my pre-OOC PMs with people about how I wanted characters who wanted something. I fed people plot hooks, watched 'em latch on, and built off that. Each character NEEDS to have a goal. Furthermore, each PLAYER helped me plan a little bit of where their character's arc might go. This builds investment.

Because of that, the actual format of the RP is more akin to a bunch of 1x1s in the same setting, with me as the GM for all of them. I'm able to plan plotlines out (though I try not to railroad), think about which characters are likely to meet, and prepare scenarios and flowcharts beforehand. Nobody even gets to READ another player's story until that entire CHARACTER is retired.

In the end, the tagline "you can be ANYTHING you want" was kind of a lie lmao. You CAN be anything you want in TFT - but you can't DO anything you want. You're in my RP to tell a story, to spin a yarn, to paint a picture. I'm damn well pushing y'all players (you know who you are) to show EVERYONE something good. And I guess that brings me to the next part...

...but that being said, it's also a massive amount of work for one person to undertake. My friend was of the opinion you'd need upwards of 10-12 characters merely to fill out the world to be breathing enough, an opinion I didn't quite share in its entirety. I'd argue that's an impossible amount of work for one person and that you'd need to throw in a second co-GM, but at that point there's even more communication that needs to be done and less chance of it working out. But the argument you'd need to bring in a co-GM(or, for comparisons sake, a mod) to make it work kind of shows the miniature-PW nature of Stone's RP.@Ammokkx

This is an extremely valid concern, and it was my largest focus when designing TFT, moreso than the setting, plotlines, or NPCs. GM burnout is 100% the biggest complicating factor here. Because of that, I took some steps to try and minimize its impact.

There are a few things that the format of this RP allows that a normal RP doesn't.
FULL control of the setting
FULL control of the pacing
FULL control of OOC/Meta knowledge.

So how did I use these to my advantage?

First, I broke the RP into groups that I felt would best interact. In PW, sometimes people make a huge trip just to interact with another player, even if it's out of character. I'm the one facilitating all interactions as well (copy-paste with editing) so I have 100% control over what PCs are even saying to each other (people just have to trust me on this front).

I then separated the PCs into time blocks as well. This is where TFT differs from a PW or Destiny's Call: I'm not letting everybody jump in at once. Instead I'm running a smaller portion of the whole. Why? Because PCs that are all the way across the continent don't matter to each other. The only PCs that matter to a player are the ones they can interact with.

As a result, I'm way less stressed than if I'd tried to let 16 players into my world at once. I can plan for half, maybe even a third at a time. If my schedule frees up, I can let more players in at a time. If I need some breathing room, I can stop the queue for a bit.

But overall, yes, Ammokkx is right. This is a lot of work for one person. Without safeguards and control like mine, without restrictions on where people go and who they talk to, without forcing the players to have a quantifiable goal that they can work towards, I believe a PWRP won't work.

So... to pull it back to PWRP (because I believe that was Ammo's original intent, to use TFT to try and gain a unique perspective on PW), I think this is the key takeaway:

Control and agency are opposites. In creating a PW where the goal is to TRULY let anyone play what they want (unlike TFT, which baited people into thinking they could play and do anything, sorry guys :P), the creators give up their control. They give up their control over pacing, their control over IC interactions, their control over the world. They lose what makes a story a story. People don't get invested into others' characters or the overall grand tale of the world.

On the flip side, control is a heavy responsibility. It's a lot of work to run a PW, and for what? Might as well just make an RP like mine at that point.

This is why I think PW won't succeed, at least on the guild. It's just not worth the effort. I've made sure the people in TFT are invested, that there's a reason to find out more about the world, that it's worth it to continue on with me. A Persistent World just doesn't have that. It doesn't have the mystery of a plotline you need to uncover, it doesn't have the mystery of interacting with other characters. Sure, some threads in the RP might have stories and such, but at that point you're just running a regular RP!

tl;dr PW will not work because of the very definition of PW

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