Ah, Mylar! It’s good to see an old face. I might be staying a while, I might not, it depends, but I’d like to get back into writing things again, so we’ll see what happens. I scanned a couple pages of the FGF Master thread and, well… I think the term “Oh dear” would be the politest way to put it. I haven’t got round to reading through what’s happened in the Aether City sequel (Was it Aether or Ather? I was never sure) since it’s 5,000+ posts, but I imagine it’s bloated and convoluted as hell after so much time and with so many characters, so I don’t know if I’ll bother. But we’ll see. I’ve certainly got some ideas, although it’s nearly 4am here so I’m not sure “ideas” is the word.

You’re probably good. Thoughts go from ‘idea’ to ‘bleary hallucination’ at about the 20 hour sleep-dep mark. I spend most of my time on Kong lurking. I almost got into AC 2, but I woke up after writing the first draft of my sign-up and there were five more pages. Theres a limit even to my extraordinary awesomeness, and AC 2 is past it. Sometimes I actually play flash games! How the mighty have fallen. Most of my internet time is spent on the Wonderful World of Webcomics.

It would take a lot of reigning in to make AC2 a workable thing, then. I suspected as much from the start, having an entire world and no solid groundwork for the plot was too ambitious, too much room for everything and anything to go wrong and not enough control. And of course, as you get dozens and dozens of people, it gets more and more unmanageable… And if there’s no fixed end, nothing driving the story to a close, it just ends up absurdly long and incomprehensible. Better to have a plot driven by a handful of main (player) characters supported by NPCs, I think, then you can get it under control.

I mean, look at it like an actual book: You have a few main characters who are constantly followed by the plot, a number of supporting characters who are just as important, if not more so, but their path isn’t followed by the book, just glanced at every so often. And then of course, you have all the incidental characters who appear maybe three times in the course of the story, might have some purpose to them, but they’re still barely ever seen, and for good reason. You can’t really follow a billion threads, you’ll get tangled up too easily and lose any hope of seeing what’s going on.

Perhaps it might be time to construct something new, rather than build more scaffolding around what’s already there. But, so far in, I don’t know how you’d manage to do that. Kill off the cast, one by one, I suppose.

Yeah. I’m not sure if it hurt or helped to let players have multiple characters. On the one hand, it might make multiple characters work on the same story-arc, but it might just muddy things up more.
Also, I just noticed how we both have Eye avatars.

Yeah, I noticed that, kinda odd. I don’t even remember why I have this avatar, it’s not dark nor on fire. I’ll have to get back into drawing and make something interesting, I suppose. I think it might have been for some forum thing…

But yeah, I agree with your point about the multiple characters making things too confusing. I think the multiple characters thing can work, if you’re just staying on one story-arc like you said. The way I did it with Argent and his allies I think would work, having each character work together with skills that compliment each other. So you’ve got a permanent base for rapport rather than talking to the open air, or having to write constant “Note to self:” thought chains, you’re not going to be trapped and in need of help because you can deal with a variety of situations on your own, you can have some interesting character development and interaction, and of course you can have scenarios that don’t rely on other people making actions, and so you can’t get screwed by spending an hour writing something and then find it gets contradicted by someone who posted ten minutes ago. Oh, and there’s plenty of room for death, drama and all that other bollocks without ending your thread.

I’m no expert, but I think grammatically it was correct. And something else that I think should be in RP’s is a measure of parsing. It would make fights actually be somewhat suspenseful, and PVP fights practical/possible. One recent RP that was pretty interesting was War is Hell. It was made by a guy who rarely ever posted, but was vaguely cruel and used puns so it worked out. My friend, who was playing it, didn’t realize player death was a possibility until after several fights in which he did suicidally brave things. But I digress. If there isn’t any parsing, there is inevitably a complete lack of any kind of danger.

Ah. I guess its a new-ish phrase. Pretty much, instead of a RPer stating what his character does, he says what his character tries to do. The OP ‘parses’ the action and pretty much decides if its successful.

Ah, that makes a lot of sense, and it’s a lot less mechanical and random than stat-based systems and dice rolls, which is what I was worried you’d say. I mean, a good writer knows that the character has limitations (okay, Matthew [Android SS42-X17] was pretty short on limitations, but I was really more interested in the concept, the perfect war machine who wants to live in peace, drawn into this chaotic mess of pain and brutality, a robot trying to restore humanity, creating a sanctuary in hell, and all that jazz), and can’t do everything, and knows how to portray and push that, and when and where it makes sense to try and achieve the impossible.

But… How can I put this nicely? Erm… More than a few posters just want their character to be Badass McAwesome, punching their way through all obstacles without a second thought and leaving the battlefield flanked by dozens of scantily-clad women with dubious morals. Which is typically very dull and monotonous, and far from awesome. Especially when you’ve got more than one person trying to do it. I mean, the only way to do it is with a lot of humour, and perhaps a touch of self-parody, otherwise it’s just annoying. “Oh look, an immovable object! BAM, done!” You can’t constantly be drawing four aces.

The problem with that is it isn’t very quick or fluid, I suppose by design, to stop things from derailing. To make it work naturally, you’d need someone who is online very often, I imagine…

Yeah. In the previous example, War is Hell, it was composed of people recruited from RP chatrooms, so they would all be online at the same time. Delano, the OP, was on damn near 24/7, and managed to really make things work. And the reverse was obviously occasionally problematic in AC I. I remember one fight my first character had with another player, and there were about five posts of us poncing around before I said ‘fvck it’ and let him kill my guy. Another game, Nations of The World II, is a kind of bastard child of an RP and a strategy game, but the OP really does make it work. The basic premise is that a player controls their country and does stuff. Players PM the OP and he decides if they’re successful. There is no story line, but there are enough random events and player chemistry to keep the action going. Already Russia has pretty much become the ‘villain,’ but theres a great deal of plotting and backstabbery. The RP part of it has diminished, for better or worse. In the beginning, one player was bashed for posting profanely in character. Now there is a great deal of profanity and no one really cares.
Also, I thought Matthew was a great character. He reminded me of the Golems in Discworld.

Ahaha, yes! You have absolutely made my day with that comment, thank you! I wish my writing was even remotely as good as Pratchett’s books, especially his grasp of irony and humour. There’s definitely some of that in Matthew’s character, especially with The Way He Speaks, and there’s a lot of the same not-quite-humanity, and immense power held in check by an iron will, with the mechanical, sentient machine aspects.

I regret not staying around long enough to explore more of that, as well as explaining why his creation backfired so badly. And it would have been fun to play with the evil-side version for a little longer, but Spirit and Gambi jumped too early and I had to put an end to it too soon, which is kinda a shame.

Also, so I’m not just being both vain and flabbergasted, I think the problem with fighting is when someone isn’t willing to suffer, or even take hits, constantly “yeah, but I dodge away and attack again”, especially when they then assume their super death-blow strike hits instantly and is totally unblockable and unavoidable honest. But, as I said, good writing gives itself restrictions.

Yeah, (Wait, do I always preface my posts with this?) no RPer is ever truly neutral and willing to let their character suffer, although I like to think that I was somewhat fair in letting my three characters die horribly in AC 1. But what hurt most of all was not getting a single mention in the TV Tropes page. I still carry that grudge to this day.
And on the subject of Terry Pratchett, about how many of his books have you read?

TVTropes page? Didn’t know there was one. I imagine it’s purely written and read by people from the game, so it’s no big thing really. And yeah, if you’ve made a character you want them to do well, unless you’ve built them to be hateable in which case you want them to pay, but you want plenty of time before then to cause havok.

I think the only book I haven’t read is Reaper Man, which is a shame since Death is practically my favourite character, and I’m a big fan. I was slightly obsessed with the grim reaper in any form as a kid, but his version of Death is pure brilliance. Then again, most anything he writes could be described in the same way.

Oh yeah. Death is my favorite character, right after Lord Vetinari. I have no damn idea what my favorite book is, but the one that didn’t sit right with me was Sourcery. I like Rincewind, but it’s portrayal of Vetinari and the fact that a bunch of other characters (Captain Carrot, Mister Vimes, etc) must have been killed, because otherwise they would have tried to put a stop to it. Also I really like Maurice.

That’s the one with the kid who’s given his father’s staff, because he’s a natural source of magic, right? I haven’t read that one in ages, my book collection is scattered across the house and in several shelves, cupboards and drawers. But I remember it was one of the early ones, before the continuity and size of the Watch was really put into place. I’ll have to find it somewhere.

My favourite… Gah, it’s impossible. It really is.

Also, wow they really did go overboard with the TVTropes page, huh. WMG, Characters, miles of tropes on the main page… And you didn’t get a mention?

Makes me bleedin’ sick. I had more characters than any of them, but who gets all the tropes? Not me, thats for damn sure. And on the subject of books, what other authors are good, in your opinion?

Having read through, the only reason my character is mentioned is A) Having been a rather large chunk of the plot, and B) Being taken over by Gambi for a game and a half, due to me not being able to be online. And a lot of the things on there, I suspect were put there by the people who wrote the character. So don’t worry about it. But apparently there are questions I still need to answer regarding Matthew and Dominic, which I could really not care less about. And while there’s tons of information on some characters, others exist in a line or less.

Authors I’ve read… Well, I don’t do as much reading as I used to, but Douglas Adams for a start, you can’t forget him, although I’ve yet to read the Dirk Gently series. Also, there’s a book called John Dies At The End by the editor of Cracked.com, David Wong, which is great, but has a very stupid, low-brow (very Cracked-like) sense of humour, that was a fun read. But recently, not much else, I’ll have to go down the library and pick up some new books at some point. Presuming my town still has a library that is.

One of my favorite books is The Name of The Wind. It’s fantasy, and an excellent read. Compelling main character, well-written, good. And Douglas Adams is awesome.
Yeah, I have no damn idea what’s happening in AC2. I kind of lost track after the first fifty pages, and now I have neither the time nor the inclination to sift through 150 pages of ‘quality writing.’

Well, some of them can, some of them not so much. But there’s a lot of odd moments, particularly with BC and others making jokes and sexual references that make you cringe. And from what I can gather, I’m pretty sure that most of the characters have no drive or purpose other than as part of the group, and rely on contrived coincidences to make things happen, or sudden decisions that are uninformed and make no sense, or people being insanely overpowered and doing ridiculous things, etc. It’s not one solid thread, or a string of interwoven threads, but a jumbled ball of yarn, with everything going in different directions at random poins for no particular reason.

Yeah, you do. It’s chaotic, uncontrolled, unplanned. Getting into it now would take a lot of effort. My last post was page 130 I think, and that was part of a small series of catchup posts after not posting for something like fifty pages, and having joined in fairly late too. It’s a bit like… You know Star Wars? The original draft for Star Wars, as written purely by George Lucas, was an absurd mess. And then it was cut, recut, rewritten, and generally torn apart by the other producers to make it into something manageable. Except there’s no editing procedure in a freeform thing like this, it just happens as it happens. You can’t even stop it from contradicting itself unless you notice it quickly.

Pity, though. ACII could conceivably have been good. The ‘post-apocalyptic wasteland’ thing is really overdone on Kong, but with a (mostly) literate OP and dedicated players it could have been great.

I think the main problem is the scope. It’s an apocalyptic world, doesn’t leave much room for control or purpose, since the players can be literally anywhere ans the chance of them meeting up or connecting in any way is rather slim, constraining them is a challenge and saving the entire world is a bit difficult to perform or even define.

Actually, that said, it’s not just the world, it’s the characters too. Especially Dominic, who is an immortal supermagic god-thing. I’ve been rereading AC, and it’s interesting to see him reluctant to kill your army of supermutants as “that would be too close to godmoding” and similar things.