Having a plot outline in mind seems to help keep things on track, and I much prefer a regularly scheduled campaign over trying to run stuff whenever people happen to pop online.
And this is one reason I really dread the idea of being roped into doing some roleplay with Gwendel on World of Warcraft. The whole situation has every downside of running plots on Sinai, with none of the upsides. Really, it would be easier to just run roleplay in Discord (the chat program of choice it seems for Gwendel's guilds), rather than trying to do everything in World of Warcraft with all the narrative and dialogue going into those little corner chat windows ... but then, that might beg the question, "Why bother with World of Warcraft at all?" (And I suppose that would be a grand question ... and the answer would just be that there are people who play this game who want to roleplay, and it would be GREAT if the game accommodated us with appropriate tools, but it doesn't.)
Every roleplay session is a pickup group, and good luck getting any continuity. Gwendel's pretty regular because, frankly, she doesn't have much competing for her time, other than her own odd sleep patterns.
Nobody who runs adventures seems to have any sense of pacing. It's pretty routine that we'll head out to some location, they'll set up raid markers to represent the locations of NPCs and the GM will try to narrate their dialogue, be overwhelmed by input (frequently doesn't reply to whispered questions or even stated ones from some of the NPCs), combat will go on for a very long time (I can get up and do some pacing to get toward my miles across the house before I hear the "ding!" that lets me know that it's time to look at the screen again), and then when it's getting close to the projected end time, suddenly the villain will surprisingly roll over and die even though it sure looked like his health bar was hardly taking a beating.
A big deal is made of campaigns where "characters can actually die." I suppose the stakes in many ways are even higher than at a typical tabletop D&D session, because: a) It takes so much longer for the story to develop; b) Players might well be playing their characters multiple nights a week; c) It takes months upon months of "grinding" to get your character up to a high enough level to be able to go to the locations where these RP sessions are often held. If your character were to "die," then I *suppose* you might be able to just come up with a new nickname for your character, much like a campaign where you recycle the same mini at the table but bring in a new sheet (e.g., "That last character was JIM Blackstone. This new one is JERRY Blackstone. Same surname, same species, same profession, same look ... but totally different character!").
I just intend to keep the stakes small. I have no intent of wading into the drama with "PC perma-death." If I want to run something with "high stakes," I might as well have the players create new "red-shirt" PCs specifically for that adventure. There's a mod called TRP that allows you to see "poses" and dialogue from characters that substitute their "in-character" name instead of the actual WoW character name. (This can of course lead to some confusion if you want to send a /whisper to a particular character, when it's not immediately clear what the character's "real" name is ... but so be it. As it is, there are so many umlauts and accents and other oddball characters in names that it's a challenge to type them in anyway.)
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2020-03-19 10:43 pm (UTC)And this is one reason I really dread the idea of being roped into doing some roleplay with Gwendel on World of Warcraft. The whole situation has every downside of running plots on Sinai, with none of the upsides. Really, it would be easier to just run roleplay in Discord (the chat program of choice it seems for Gwendel's guilds), rather than trying to do everything in World of Warcraft with all the narrative and dialogue going into those little corner chat windows ... but then, that might beg the question, "Why bother with World of Warcraft at all?" (And I suppose that would be a grand question ... and the answer would just be that there are people who play this game who want to roleplay, and it would be GREAT if the game accommodated us with appropriate tools, but it doesn't.)
Every roleplay session is a pickup group, and good luck getting any continuity. Gwendel's pretty regular because, frankly, she doesn't have much competing for her time, other than her own odd sleep patterns.
Nobody who runs adventures seems to have any sense of pacing. It's pretty routine that we'll head out to some location, they'll set up raid markers to represent the locations of NPCs and the GM will try to narrate their dialogue, be overwhelmed by input (frequently doesn't reply to whispered questions or even stated ones from some of the NPCs), combat will go on for a very long time (I can get up and do some pacing to get toward my miles across the house before I hear the "ding!" that lets me know that it's time to look at the screen again), and then when it's getting close to the projected end time, suddenly the villain will surprisingly roll over and die even though it sure looked like his health bar was hardly taking a beating.
A big deal is made of campaigns where "characters can actually die." I suppose the stakes in many ways are even higher than at a typical tabletop D&D session, because: a) It takes so much longer for the story to develop; b) Players might well be playing their characters multiple nights a week; c) It takes months upon months of "grinding" to get your character up to a high enough level to be able to go to the locations where these RP sessions are often held. If your character were to "die," then I *suppose* you might be able to just come up with a new nickname for your character, much like a campaign where you recycle the same mini at the table but bring in a new sheet (e.g., "That last character was JIM Blackstone. This new one is JERRY Blackstone. Same surname, same species, same profession, same look ... but totally different character!").
I just intend to keep the stakes small. I have no intent of wading into the drama with "PC perma-death." If I want to run something with "high stakes," I might as well have the players create new "red-shirt" PCs specifically for that adventure. There's a mod called TRP that allows you to see "poses" and dialogue from characters that substitute their "in-character" name instead of the actual WoW character name. (This can of course lead to some confusion if you want to send a /whisper to a particular character, when it's not immediately clear what the character's "real" name is ... but so be it. As it is, there are so many umlauts and accents and other oddball characters in names that it's a challenge to type them in anyway.)