Dice or no Dice

At the down of modern aged role-play we had a man going to a military game meeting and bringing along a new game he created called D&D. This was a landmark for role-play, no more was role-play just kinky people pretending to be french maids and black men in their bedroom! No! We now had a sophisticated way to be super amazing adventurers while never moving from a table and drinking so much pop that it would eventually give us cancer in the butt! As I said before, THIS WAS LANDMARK. It spawned a whole new realm for role-play, the only successful path REALLY being VIDEO GAMES. Regardless I'm here to talk about the less successful and downright stupid paths that came out of it, but not the lessor of two evils which is larping, but rather the loneliest path ONLINE role-play. Now I'm not entirely certain online role-play originally did spawn out of D&D, but I think it's a combination of that and the french maids and black men moving to the internet. However, this isn't going to be a conversation about cyberer's, I'll be saving that for another day, this is going to be a conversation about people who want to ROLL DICE in role-play. It seems at first glance a sane enough thing to do right? If things came out D&D then of course we're using dice since this is just D&D's retarded stepbrother right? Well that's still up for debate... regardless it's not completely insane either.

Dice is often associated with many things that are competitive. For example Backgammon! And even if you're not competing against other challengers with dice games you are often at the very least competing against the "game master" like in roulette or D&D. Now for those of you who do come online to pretend to be someone else in order to out compete everyone around you, this is wonderful, but for people like me who want a happy healthy environment this tends to be a pointless add on to the role-playing environment. Dice used by the online role-player is a way to mediate online fighting that isn't based on T1 or T2 (Which honestly I don't know what the fuck these T's stand for. All I think of is Tea bagging) since everyone wanted their super amazing awesome character to win the fight without ever taking a hit. When I cared about competition we worried about post length! Back in the good old days your post in a "fight" consisted of your dodge/block and your counter attack and if your post was longer than theirs well then SHIT, you dodged/blocked their attack. This however is a stupid idea.... cause posts just get longer and longer to the point of insanity till one of you gives up......(Lets also point out the idiocy of fights going on and on and on without a single hit and then one hit ending the whole fight....) so one may say we can either T1bag it or T2bag it (The bag stands for douchebag) right? OR WE CAN DICE? Seems perfectly fair right? Well, this is all under the assumption that you WANT to be competitive. I like the idea of a friendly amount of humble juice.

The role-play is about character interaction not who can build the bigger stronger character right? Being constantly bombarded with the loner cool guy werewolf/vampire/elven superhero who can take on anyone makes it annoying passed almost anything I know. When "fighting" happens in a role-play lets just all be humble and let our characters take a punch? Maybe let the weird circumstances change the fight? Really you should be judging whether or not your character COULD win the fight given the circumstances! Also, don't make retardedly boring characters who could split the universe in half with their pinky. I mean it's a role-play we should be able to take a punch for the sake of interesting plot development. I've had a number (2) of counter opinions, which were so condescending I think I'll post them here for your amusement. For example: "That's so Primitive!" This being from the guy who wants to role-play our characters going on starcraft esk "missions."

I've heard missions from more than one person before..... what does this even mean in role-play? I don't even know. Regardless you can either take the creative path or the competitive T2000bagging path and see which is more fun. I don't role-play with dice though.

The Angriest Role-player in the Universe

The Angriest Role-player in the Universe, have you met him before? You just might have! Here's a paint drawing of what I think he must look like:

Today was an interesting day in the role-playing world. I pmed someone from a chatroom who apparently was having lots of conflict in the chatroom that I totally overlooked, but saw him say he like pm role-play. I pmed him and suddenly got incredible amounts of suspicion on his part at my attempts to try and talk role-play, but I carried on being true to myself and my cause. It took a long time of convincing, with negativity at EVERY corner, but I finally got him to look at my role-play character pictures and talk about role-play.

Here's an exert with a fake screen name for him of our conversation unmodified

AngriestRPerEver: I'm back. Looking at the site now.

AngriestRPerEver: Already I'm put off by 'lesbian romance'

supercompoundrper: Welcome back ^__^

supercompoundrper: Well it's not all I rp

AngriestRPerEver: Well, I like your anime images. But the sexuality is till a major turn off

supercompoundrper: Well um, they aren't all homosexual.

supercompoundrper: And like I said I have many other images I can show you whom's sexuality isn't determined and can be heterosexual.

supercompoundrper: If however the fact that I do rp lesbians bothers you, even if I offered up a non lesbian romance character, than there's nothing I can do about htat.

supercompoundrper: that*

supercompoundrper: Would you like to see my other images?

supercompoundrper: I've quite a few cuties.

AngriestRPerEver: I just find it impossible to relate on an intimate or romantic level if that pretext exists.

AngriestRPerEver: How can I rp a possible male catch, when your mind is prefering females?

AngriestRPerEver: Its stifling.

supercompoundrper: I don't prefer female romance lol

supercompoundrper: It's why I do both.

supercompoundrper: Would you like to see my other images?

AngriestRPerEver: I suppose.

supercompoundrper: K, do you photoshare?

End actual conversation, back to me talking.

Could you believe it? I sat there and let him be negative all day long, even insult me, but kept my cool and tried to show him that there still was a nice person in the role-play world entirely willing to help him feel better and role-play with him. I got him to look at the images! Photo-share went well at first... But then he made ambiguous questions that were hard for me to answer, and me constantly asking him to clarify got on his nerves and he went back to being incredibly rude. I started to get kind of aggravated though. Who knew it was all just a set up.. cause when I finally decided that his meanness was too much to take I said nicely that I had lost interest in RP and thanked him for his time..... WHEN HE BLEW UP. He started screaming at me, telling me he hoped I'd die, and the likes of that. It was really just WOW, but quite entertaining. Here's so more angry exerts of him and me but, other than that there really isn't much to say.


MORE ACTUAL CONVERSATION

supercompoundrper: Okay well.

AngriestRPerEver: I'm starting to think somethin's not all going on up there.

supercompoundrper: This has been fun.

supercompoundrper: I hope you find the role-play you're looking for.

supercompoundrper: Take care.

AngriestRPerEver: Ooooh where's your enthusiasm now?

supercompoundrper: It's still here ^__^ I can't be brought down.

AngriestRPerEver: Just because you can't discern similar pictures you whimp out?

supercompoundrper: If that's how you want to explain it.

supercompoundrper: That's fine, because explination or not I've decided I am not interested.

supercompoundrper: I do sincerely mean it though, I hope you find what you're looking for.

supercompoundrper: I harbor no ill will towards you

AngriestRPerEver: FUCK OFF THEN. FALSE ADVERTISING BITCH.

supercompoundrper: Fair enough, goodbye

AngriestRPerEver: GO JUMP ON A PIKE.

supercompoundrper: No thank you.

AngriestRPerEver: FUCK YOU LIEING WHORE

supercompoundrper: I haven't lied.

supercompoundrper: I'm sorry you're upset and I'm willing to talk about why you are upset to help fix your problem, I only said goodbye because you told me to leave and I was trying to respect your wishes.

supercompoundrper: If there has been some confusion, I am not upset with you.

AngriestRPerEver: You're a liar because you advertised falsely. You also set up false expectations. And I want nothing to do with a manipulative liar.

supercompoundrper: I just lost interest in the rp.

AngriestRPerEver: Bye. I hope you die.

supercompoundrper: Those assertions are not held up logicly.

supercompoundrper: I wanted to rp, I pmed you and discussed it with great patience.

supercompoundrper: But your attitude on the matter never brightened up and I decided I didn't want to rp with someone who was going to be so incredibly critical of me.

AngriestRPerEver: You lied. You set up an expectation, only to not followthrough. You're a manipulative liar. And are now, even at this point, trying to play the innocent party when you led me on.

AngriestRPerEver: So I hope you suffer for your hypocrisy and die a lonely death.

supercompoundrper: I hope I do not, but respect your wishes to hope that.

supercompoundrper: Take care I hope your day gets better.

AngriestRPerEver: Bye. FUCK OFF AND SHOOT YOURSELF IN THE HEAD.

END OF ACTUAL CONVERSATION

I eventually just blocked him. What a guy huh? xD

The creepy role-player

Today I had the wonderful experience of trying to continue a role-play I had started with someone I had met a few days beforehand. I had downloaded several pictures of punky looking anime girls and started a rp based off of one that my role-playing partner decided "Well she's surrounded by instruments so I'll suggest to her that we rp a music rp" and off we went.

First set of posts go fine enough, but I couldn't help but feel the chill on my shoulder by his surprise that I picked for her to be the drummer. I'm sorry, what's so weird about a girl drummer? Feels like sexism to me. FIRST INTERACTION, what do we got? Well even though he decides that our characters DON'T know each other after I made it clear in my post that they do, he goes on to have his character upon first meeting say how cute she is. So, of course, I post a post that my character is uncomfortable with this stranger hitting on her (Especially since her hook was gonna be she had a boyfriend and she EVENTUALLY cheats on said BFF with the character he was role-playing as) So how does he respond? He makes his character TALK about how uncomfortable she is and explains that he was just shocked that she looked the way she is. WHAT? is he implying girl drummers are UGLY? This feels more and more like sexism....

Even wores though I got backed into a corner didn't I? What would I tell a girl to do if treated this way? RUN BITCH RUN!!! Well I supposed that maybe role-playing a creepy character was his idea of good rp since we didn't actually talk about an overall theme. So to be fair I asked him if he was supposed to be a creepy character and he responded NO (Not in capitals, but that's to emphasize how confused I was when he responded that way). What really? Does he not realize how creepy his character is being? This isn't how normal human beings act. I feel like too many role-players don't like conflict in their role-play (This was way too early for this type of conflict but regardless....) so the try to resolve it by having their characters respond with words to what's going on with body language. THIS ISN'T HOW NORMAL HUMAN BEINGS BEHAVE!!!!!!!! So I said "Well if I was in that situation I'd find a reason to leave and never contact him again" His response? "Cool" So I say ":/" then "Well thanks for role-playing with me take care ^___^" and put him on stealth. He then tells me I'm a bitch from two different accounts (The creeper evidence is piling up) Excuse me? I'm a bitch for not wanting to role-play with a guy who's insisting that his character whom is acting creepy isn't acting creepy?

<-- YEAH, totally not creepy. Him posting that he's giving her the once over look while she's standing right there looking at him :/ Need I say more? If we had argued about him being sexist, which I made the smart choice not to argue about, this blatant objectification of my character would be ample evidence to suggest that at least his character was sexist if not the role-player himself. I may have been a bit abrasive and I'm sorry for that but, he's a creep and ya know I might be a bitch sometimes but I was pretty nice considering how creepy that was. What's the lesson here? Well there's two, one is:

SPECIFY WHAT YOU WANT TO RP. Creepy role-plays might be your thing but there needs to be an overarching idea that we're gonna peruse if we're going to role-play. If I had known he was being serious I would never have asked him if he was meaning for his character to act creepy Two is:

Don't lash out at someone just because the role-play didn't work. This is again reasons why people don't want to role-play anymore. Who wants to role-play with a bunch of jerks? Especially creepy ones. Three is (OH DAMN GOT YOU, THERE IS THREE): Think about body language when you rp your character. Not EVERYTHING has to be done through dialogue, a good deal of communication is through the body.

So for all you fucking creepers, I'm not a bitch for not wanting to be creeped on. :/ please sucka get back.

Role-players Like to Bitch

Role-players like to bitch, it’s apparently an unsaid rule

Sometimes I come across this thought that “Man, all role-players [online role-players] like to do is bitch about role-playing, rather than actually role-play.” It’s kinda like an unconscious need to ruin all role-playing before it can happen so that they can bitch about it. If not finding fault in someone, they’re complaining about how terrible role-play is in general. But frankly, there was a time in every role-players career when they were happy about their role-play. Why else would they keep coming back for more punishment? They tend to make the objective statement that ALL role-play was better back in the day, but this can’t be true because everyone has different ideas as to when this heyday seems to have been [maybe not everyone… I probably have no idea what I’m talking about on this point, but I’m skeptical none the less]. For each person though, it was before the current time period. You can’t go two RP chats without hearing the statement “Role-play sucks, remember when RP was good?” or something to that effect. I can’t help but wonder why this seems to be so rampant. I however do have a hypothesis. Mind you, this hypothesis might be total crap but it goes a little something like this:

So when most internet role-players come to role-play they are a young teenager or maybe even a bit younger, with very limited capacity for the idea of writing long, detailed, or complex statements about tasks and settings that their characters are doing. This leaves them with “one-liners” where all the characters actions are about one line in length. Most people look down on them, but this is probably some of the most fun the role-player will have in their whole role-playing experience. Everyone is doing it! One liner’s don’t matter because even if the person misunderstands what you were trying to express because 90% [made up statistic] of your detail was just in your head, they can’t write something coherent enough to show you that they’ve misunderstood it. Far-fetched RP suddenly becomes okay and cliche instead of being terrible and gag worthy it’s the very definition of fun. So everyone runs around with ignorance to their own lack of description.

This is NOT a bad thing though, because everyone is having fun. Eventually these early role-players will learn that there are more sophisticated ways to type in what you’re role-playing. They’ll probably meet someone who describes their role-play to a much higher level and think of how cool they are.

It’s kind of like when you’re a kid and you look up to your parents as gods. Once this is set they will, or at least a couple will, slowly start to try and mimic this person’s length description. Through hard times of trying to understand what exactly makes good description good rather than just focusing on length, they eventually reach a state they are happy with. The problem is, is that person they were copying was absolutely unhappy with their role-play experience. The "parent" has already achieved bitching status and started to tell the other role-players about the old days when role-play was great. This new person to the bitching is in its heyday though, because they’ve reached their goals and are still too ignorant to realize that their promise land is really a sea of shit that suffocates any happiness out of you when you breath it in. Like the parent analogy they should realize that this person they mimicked was flawed… but instead they ignore it and think of themselves as the best role-play has to offer. It’s a terrible cycle only kept alive by this idea that role-playing is the two person activity equivalent of writing a book and that what they are doing is a tribute to literature. It’s not of course, but this is their mistake. Regardless, it probably is also fed by the fact that life gets harder when you become an adult and these newly fresh kids and teenagers, once reaching the promise land, also have to deal with the stresses of the real world now that they’ve gotten older.

So was there ever a golden age of role-play? Ya know there probably was. Even though I think most of it is just role-players like to bitch, I do think these things come and go in cycles and maybe it actually is going down the tubes… but if it is I think it’s BECAUSE of the bitching. Not just bitching about role-play being bad now adays, but bitching at each other. I get into a RP chat and it takes the drop of a hat for someone to find fault in me or my role-play either they just disappears without saying anything or blow up on me for doing whatever it was I did wrong. Wanna know why RP sucks? People don’t like being treated this way. No one is gonna want to RP if everyone who is RPing is unhappy and complaining.

So do I think role-play can be salvaged? Yes of course! But not everything is gonna come out perfect! Stop bitching, be nice, smile, and role-play works great. In fact, I found two great role-players recently that I am EXTREMELY happy with. We’ve been kind and enjoyed our RP and so should the rest of y’all. It may seem overwhelmingly hopeless, but it doesn’t have to be. JUST STOP BITCHING!!!!!! ;)

The [usually] Male Ego Mistake

So! first post! This is going to be a blog about different things I get into in the RP world which will mostly be cynical criticism of people whom I'm annoyed with.

Lets talk about this, seriously, the Male Ego Mistake

MEM for short. So, while searching yahoo chat rooms like I know you all do looking for a RP I came across someone who seemed very promising. He liked my Drow character and we hit it off wonderfully. We set up the rp quickly and I decided "Hey, Y a know I'll post first" So, I post and set up my character in a slightly more exotic type of rp setting but really it's just a spin off of the tavern. The HOOKAH tavern! How wonderful, I describe it and everything and have my character sitting around the main hookah showing off her biological drawings. This is a common lure, make your character popular and interesting thereby giving the other character AMPLE reason to go talk to your character. It can be kind of an ego thing, but frankly my character IS interesting and well, draw back's aside it fit. Regardless I had underestimated the ego on my rping partner. So, he had to make his character incredibly interesting. What this means is, I failed to realize that making my character interesting made it so he had to make his character UNINTERESTED in mine to raise his character up above mine as the most interesting person in the room. I of course got extremely annoyed because not only did his character not even glance at mine, but he walked over into a PRIVATE area where mine wouldn't be involved. If I were to put this into a dialogue it would go something like this.

(I gave his character two swords and a dagger, cause what guy doesn't walk around with weapons everywhere he goes?)

I made the mistake of saying

"Did you really just have your character go into a private section of the hookah bar rather than coming and talking to my character? or even being NEAR my character so that mine can talk to yours?" [paraphrased]

"Yes I did. I don't want to rp with someone who has any criticism of me" [paraphrased]

"Fuck it, I don't want to rp anymore." [paraphrased]

So, yeah, the Male Ego Mistake, it's where men (and I suppose women can do this too) decide that they need to make sure that there character is ALWAYS the most interesting character in the room. I say male ego mistake, because females don't seem to have this problem (I'm sure some do, but I haven't encountered many). The men that don't are either better human beings or GAY (so better human beings)

So if you're a male and you do this... please realize this is a socializing DETERRENT. I can't even be your friend if you act this way, much less rp with you. God!

On a fun note, when I mentioned part of his post to a female rper friend of mine she said "Did he say a 'gentle tan'?" I hadn't mentioned the gentle tan part and she was right! So he's obviously a famously bad rper.