RPG Venting

[ghoulmouse]

TTRPGs can be weird. I am currently playing a character in a fairly large (6 players, which is large IMO) Exalted game, and my character is SUPPOSED to be slow to act, cautious, extremely deliberate. He is a SLOTH. Like an actual sloth. He is a Lunar scholar, and every Lunar has an animal they're associated with on like a spiritual level and his is a two-toed sloth. But somehow I always end up being the person who needs to step up and push things forward, and my character also ends up doing SO much of the talking I'm going to buy social skills with XP just to justify it.

Other than that I really like my character and I hope I'm at least playing him cerebral enough that it'll be a nice contrast when he inevitably kind of unravels over his undead past-life ex boyfriend.

ANYWAY.

I'm probably going to do NaNoWriMo this year with a longfic, and I used to enjoy hanging out with the local group so I went to see if they were still active. For one, they exclusively use Facebook and Slack, of all things, to communicate, which...who uses Slack for recreational purposes? And for another there seems to be some drama between the NaNo organization and the people who used to run the local group, so I guess I am either going to have to give up on the local group or investigate the Lore AND grit my teeth to join Slack (I'm nosy enough to want to know what the deal is but probably not THAT nosy).

There's a sort of...long-ish (25k) original story that I want to have in postable shape before then but I guess we'll see how things shake out. I'm not so good at making promises.

Comments

[chagrined]

i was bad but the DM was also bad with this in the first ttrpg i played haha. she didn't give me guidelines for designing my character, and so i made a character who was ill-suited to the plot, then she didn't adjust the plot to me at all and i didn't adjust either b/c i wanted to stay in-character. so basically i just ended up kidnapped/locked up the whole time and not doing anything lol.

[ghoulmouse]

I REMEMBER YOU MENTIONING THIS, wasn't it a horror game like Call of Cthulhu??? Those are especially prone to that kind of bullshit because people think "horror" means "your character is helpless" lol. Having a character get kidnapped and locked up is the kind of shit you only do if the player can't make it to the game and you need to get their character out of the way for a bit in an exciting manner or something like that, that's like basic GMing shit. if they had that rigid of a plot idea then they should have made pre-generated characters tbh, especially with new players. I don't think you were "bad" there lol.

ttrpgs can often be awkward in their own special ways but that was 100% a shitty GM making it worse

[chagrined]

yeah it was call of cthulhu. it was also that friend's 1st time ever GMing a ttrpg so, yeah i think they did a bad job but it's understandable. in retrospect DEFINITELY they should have just given me a pre-generated character ha.

I vaguely recall, I think they did suggest I should be a physicist, which is why I went with this character based on Rodney from SGA haha. but if they'd insisted "be a physicist who is brave/adventurous" things would have gone much better. 😅

[ghoulmouse]

Yeah, characters always need a reason to get involved with the storyline, but if you don't know what that is it's not like you can come up with a good reason, lol. Lots of TTRPGs do have issues giving "brainy" type characters, who in a TV show would be doing a lot of research, actual functional things to do with the rest of the party, but...it sounds like that GM made it way way worse.

Pregens are also easier on the GM since they limit the playing field, so yeah.