TheEvanCat

Precipice of War - We Write Under The Sign Of The Goat

SIEG HEIL!

Military RPs- a Cause for Debate

kingkonrad said
The thing was, I would say this- realism isn't the aim, it's a cited point of reference. Task Force Hephastatus is the perfect example of this. Yes, I stole a lot of inspiration from Arma 3, and I mean, a lot (fuck, it might as well have been called a personal take on it, but hey, I thought I'd add a lot of my original content to create a semi-self created story). But I put in my own timeline, my own way of how things could work- and "Realism" in some cases, doesn't mean historical or exactly even a future path. I don't like going overboard with it- or else you'd never be able to RP it out effectively enough. And while the modern soldier is perhaps sitting away in peacetime, this is something as a writer, that we can subdivert- we aren't done with Afghanistan, and while the calm and peaceful moments are in there, nobody wants that. They want the moment when things go to shit, is frantic. And I know more than well enough what conflict is like- I am in a MilSim clan, with many former military members. They have banter. You may not understand it, but these are people who laugh in the face of death, they're really funny, they just don't give a shit sometimes about the little things, even in the worst of times. Crazy really.

Arma 3 is realistic until you get trapped by a vengeful god inside of a rock while the AI all pinpoint you and land headshots from a couple hundred meters away. I've spent a couple hundred hours there, I would know.

Also: "And I know more than well enough what conflict is like- I am in a MilSim clan, with many former military members"

That's not even true at all, dude. I'm a cadet and I play Arma but I can admit that I know full and well that I have no fucking clue what conflict is like other than what other peoples' experiences have been. You can talk to other people about it but you cannot say that at all unless you've been in it. So everyone's going to be skewed on the concept of realism. It's just how people handle it that kills stories. Too boring or too unrealistic.

But the banter is all military people really have when they're bored. When you have nothing to do, you're going to strangle your best friend to get back the Doritos he stole (true story) or sit in the corner and watch everything go up in a fiery flame of ineptitude while talking about which actresses you want to bang (also a true story.) It's a different society.

Precipice of War - We Write Under The Sign Of The Goat

Dinh AaronMk said
Implying I'm literally 1.1 decahitlers worse than Hitler?

You rank up there.

Precipice of War - We Write Under The Sign Of The Goat

That's still a couple DecaAarons though.

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

My thing with character sheets is that the gang and I have started just going minimalist. Name and a biography. Sometimes some other concise information like his job. No need to have an app with everything in it when it a) can be done in the biography and b) can be done in post.

It's kind of lazy to just put everything in a sheet and never reference it ever again because you're checking off a box on an application. You don't have to develop it in the story if you don't want to. If you want your characters to have traits, don't state bluntly that their personality is so and so. Develop that shit.

Military RPs- a Cause for Debate

Official "closest thing they've got to an actual military man" Preciprick here: I'm just a cadet and a service academy candidate with a healthy dose of being a military dependent for my entire life.

I have many things to say about modern war and how people want realism. I've kind of picked up a lot on the whole military society and how it operates, outside of what people typically think of (people think military realism means that this army dresses this way and uses this gun, but when it's really about a whole myriad of other things.) Some of the things that I'd say are positive, some aren't. A lot of it isn't what is expected. When I talk to my dad about joining the military, the discussion isn't really "hey, you might die" but rather "this is what you could do for housing when you join and get a BAH." I find as a whole that a lot of military RPs that aren't run by people with experience in the matter tend to shift towards the blisteringly, frustratingly warped view of the military that movies and TV show. Even if they are billed as "realistic", they don't show the parts where everyone sits in their barracks for twelve hours and watches Netflix because they're on standby or something.

But at the same time, the actual military (now in peacetime mode) consisting of mostly hanging out and getting yelled at for putting your hands in your pockets isn't fun. When the military - a supposed bastion of adventure and danger - is a 9-5 job in an office with the sole difference being you wear cammies to work, nobody wants to join. Even when there's a war on, nobody wants to play Desert Storm and roll into towns with bigass tanks to find smoldering wrecks of OPFOR armored vehicles from the previous day's airstrikes and a bunch of naked dudes who took off their uniforms and surrendered without a shot being fired (or with poorly aimed, meager resistance that couldn't possibly hurt you.) That's disappointing and anticlimactic. Outside of initial invasions, a lot of these wars have been occupations and the people I know who have deployed often say that exciting things like firefights are rare, disappointing (shooting off a round every few minutes at a guy two kilometers away and never hitting anything, or massive firefights ending up with one wounded friendly and two enemy combatants maybe being dead but nobody knows for sure), and just nothing like TV. That's not fun, but at the same time Rambo is frustrating because that's past the point of believability.

Don't get me wrong, heroism and excitement and danger and tragedy all happen. It just always seems to happen to someone else, if you know what I'm saying.

Nobody's really able to get a balance between the two, and then there's just the community that RPs as a whole not really being the type for more authentic military things because a lot of them are younger and gravitate to kawaii animu highschool or some shit, or want to do D&D online, or want to play with numbers. Nothing wrong with that, it just doesn't create a big community for military settings to draw on.

Of Steam and Ambition -

YO!

Of Steam and Ambition -

Also: my nation sheet is also WIP but I plan to just play things out.

Of Steam and Ambition -

If we wait even more, the interest will collapse completely.

It has happened before. It will happen again.

Precipice of War - We Write Under The Sign Of The Goat

Go Syria or something.