The Roleplaying Forum's GM and Player Critique Thread

Note to Self When G Ming:

Many times when characters are given the option to "Do Anything" they will pick "Do Nothing". In the middle of a game, players can get uncertain about what they should or should not do in a situation when the GM tells them to just talk among themselves or whatever. Often times characters will end up waiting around for the next part of the story to occur and too long a time in this position leads to game stagnation.

Proposed solution: Always have something ready to distract the characters during non-story relevant parts of a game. Direct a conversation, have someone play a board game, have an NPC clown throw a pie in their faces. If the characters don't know what to do in a "Do Anything" situation then give them something to do.

This allows the characters who actually did do something engaging to fulfill their pursuits without being rushed back to the story just to speed things along and keeps those who don't know what to do occupied while the story is being set up.

Wait, there's a thread like this one?

I know, right? Who knew?

I totally found it by accident.

I know from the games that I've run that a big source of that problem is also the GM just waiting for people to post instead of just figuring "screw it" and pushing things forward, which is exactly what killed my last two games. Most of the RPs I've been in that lasted over a month had the more active sort of GM who wasn't waiting on every last person.

I never knew this thread existed, but I have to say that it seems incredibly useful. Might I suggest having it be stickied, so that it'll be easy to track down?

Requesting Sticky.

Should we ask for it to be moved to the Discussion section too? I think it'll get more attention there.

Ask and you shall get.

Thanks, daltar.

Back to this for a moment, but something that might be kind of a good idea would be to sort of network with the players themselves, and sort of kick off some character interaction-based subplots and whatnot. Like, a couple of R Pers might realise that their characters would be able to have a particularly rewarding friendship/rivalry/enmity/you get the idea, so they'd sort of try and plan out some vague interactions for those characters in advance. If you get people being creative about that and planning it out before the free time stuff even happens, then they'll have a lot of motivation to actually do that.

This is why things like Skype are awesome even for R Ps that don't have multiple G Ms who need to be able to keep in touch quickly, incidentally. It's a good way for R Pers to get to know each other, and to bounce ideas off each other in a sort of more real-time setting than the discussion thread. I think it's in general a good idea for R Pers to kind of get to talk about off-topic things just a little bit, because if you can be relaxed and casual around someone, then the easier it is to plan things with them, because you'll know what they have planned for their character and vice versa, and you can help each other.

But yeah, it's good to have something going on in the meantime, for the people who haven't got anything for their characters to do.

I agree with Kiri and at the same time disagree. Let the players bond and if you have pre-established or planned relationships then plan them out in this new scenario and setting.

On the other hand...just watch things unfold and react when the GM needs you to. For example in A Game Of Gods somehow my Doctor has become vitriolic buddies with Saren Arterius and the interactions just unfolded naturally without much planning. Trust yourself and trust those around you, I feel. It's very rare they'll let you down.

More on topic however...would anyone mind critiquing me. I feel like I've worked on my problems of only playing extremes of characterization and my grammar is improving, but is there any other problems I need to work on?

edited 27th Feb '13 9:03:00 AM by Fusionman

I like planning too, but when people start planning too much, it often becomes a problem. I've seen times where some people decide they want to have their characters do something, and get so set in their ways that if any character not in the loop accidentally interacts with those characters, they'll usually ignore, exclude, railroad, or just plain treat that character as if they just fell off the turnip truck, just so they can stick to their "plan". And that sort of noninclusive style of play isn't good for anyone. Then again, I've never been in an RP with you before Aldaris*

Huh, didn't know we had this kind of thread before today.

I agree with Nman. I rarely plan out anything exactly how I want it to go down, as a GM or a player. The nature of RPs that are open to anyone who can pass the GM's requirements for their character, are intrinsically going to involve interaction with players and their characters that you can't be certain of how they'll react.

This means that planning out every detail usually becomes a waste of time, as events unfold in ways that you didn't expect and thus have to change the plans for. Of course, that's not to say that planning is completely useless or that it shouldn't be done, but it needs to be plans that can flex in turn with a changing environment. Refusal to step outside the boundaries of a plan creates problems.

As a GM this is known as railroading, though I would go so far as to say that even planning out every detail of something as seemingly minor as a conversation is a mistake. It's like Nman said, once you've got it set beforehand that anything is going to go a very specific way with specific characters, you're locking any players not involved out of it. In my opinion, if you're simply not willing to interact with certain players' characters and let them be involved with what your own are doing, then you have no business being in a publicly open RP.

edited 17th Mar '13 4:13:09 AM by FirockFinion

So, in light of the site being off for quite some time today...

It might be kind of an overreaction, but I was wondering if setting up an offsite RP forum in case something like this happened again would be a good idea or not. At the very least, it would give everyone somewhere to go if the site ever goes down again. Not even sure if this is the right place to put forward this suggestion or not, but... Here it is anyways. Just wondering what people think of the idea, I guess.

That'd be a good idea in my mind, since it might help me connect to more people in the community.

I suppose that would depend on each game, and not on the RP zone as a whole. And even then I'm not sure that having the site offline for six hours would require anyone to go through the trouble of making a whole other forum. I know I wasn't exactly having much fun on Skype saying "Awww man, TV Tropes has been down for X hours", but just thinking about the logistics involved with shuffling an RP between two forums makes me sad.

Also, I suppose that the studying for exams that I was forced to do because the site was offline built some character But now I can go back to not thinking about numbers.

edited 21st Mar '13 1:43:38 PM by nman

Well, the advantage of having a singular site everyone's on the event of a forum breakdown is that, with everyone on the same site, there's more RPers and more RPs. If there's just a bunch of individual sites for singular RPs, there's a lot less people around on them.

I'm a bit confused. Are you talking about something related to TV Tropes, or just another RP site in general? There are already plenty of other sites suited for RPing if that's what you mean, but the reason I stick around here is precisely because everyone else is a fellow Troper, plus the integration with the wiki.

I'm addressing what Moe said. If that were done, it would be best to have a singular site.

If we were to move the RP section of TV Tropes off-site.

Then it would be best.

For everyone.

To be on ONE site. Not two, or four, and five is right out.

See, this is what I'm not grasping. How exactly would it be TV Tropes' RP section if it weren't actually on TV Tropes?

Also, whether it's this site or another, every site has downtime, I don't see how this fixes anything.

edited 21st Mar '13 7:00:10 PM by nman

No. Moving the section is advantageous to few, if any.

And anyway, today's incident only robbed us of the site for half a day.

I would like to posit that we are perhaps overreacting to an extremely brief outage.

If these DDOS attacks continue, then perhaps we should discuss this, but as it stands I think that discussion of moving the RP Forum off of TV Tropes is largely irrelevant to this thread, a thread dedicated to critique of Players and G Ms, not the forum as a whole.

I also feel that it's causing unnecessary anxiety and tension amongst us when there should not be.

It's only a suggestion if the RP section is made impossible to access at all. At the very least it means that there would be somewhere for the R Ps to continue if something like that were to happen.

Or if, in a worst case scenario, the RPG Zone gets closed down. It'd probably be better for the community to be in one place than just splinter off.

edited 21st Mar '13 7:17:28 PM by Psyga315