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

[vriddy]

The last time I attended a local NaNo meetup was around 2009 I think, and it was super informal, organised through the NaNoWriMo forums... I drifted off after that but when I peeked back a few times over the last few years, it seems to have gotten a lot more structured with also a ton of rules that the local groups have to respect-or-else, it felt very top down. I didn't spot any upset in the group though I didn't check too far since I wasn't going to participate. I didn't recognise any of the names to see if the organisers changed (but mostly that's because I literally don't remember any XD). It was super nice at the time to have a weekly meetup in a quiet café, hope you find a nice support group as well :)

[deadfinch]

i had that issue in a d&d campaign once - i wanted to play a curmudgeony monk, great at Interfacing With The Spirit World but terrible with people, mostly because he spent all his life up in the mountains and he found the world below overstimulating and its social mores confusing and short-sighted. but it was a group full of new players, and i was the only person really comfortable playing face, which led to a hilarious number of checks hinging on my -1 charisma. (initially i was frustrated but in retrospect i think it made for some fun RP, so there's that!)

oh god, i forgot about nano. i don't know if i'm going to participate this year. last year i burnt myself too hard. (and what i got out of it was hard enough to edit into shape that i've barely touched it.) maybe with a new idea and a half-goal.

[lassarina]

My region is Too Much for me, by which I mean if there are any other reasonably serious writers, they have vanished to get away from the hordes of Writer: the Roleplaying Game! people, which--fair. (Doing NaNo as Writer: the Roleplaying Game! is completely valid, it's just not helpful and is actively detrimental to ME, so.) Instead, I run productivity sessions for local friends who are not always doing NaNo but are welcome to bring anything they can do quietly.

Slack, though. I guess it must be "someone was used to it for work and it stuck"?

[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]

Yeah, I end up in the same situation every time I try to play a character who isn't a talker, if there's a lull in the real life conversation I have to jump in to fill it or I start getting antsy. That does sound like a really fun character though -- my experience has been mostly that the low stats are the actually fun ones as long as you can kinda roll with the results.

Half goals are still goals!

[ghoulmouse]

LMAO being around Serious Writers gives me mega anxiety, since I've been critically low-output for years and most of what I DO write I can barely talk about, due to it usually being 1) fanfiction 2) obscure or 3) extremely offputting pornography, or all three of those at once. Even if I finished all my projects and did everything I wanted to do I don't know that I'd be comfortable considering any of it SERIOUS. I do have one (1) local friend I hang out with once a week to work on stuff at the local bookstore or library and that's great but I liked the casual vibe of hanging out with a bunch of people (granted, the period of time where I liked it was a decade ago at this point).

It turns out the Slack thing is even weirder, the previous regional lead (prior to the one who posted about the organization drama) refused to take anyone's suggestion of using Discord because he thought the name was too aggressive and had "bad vibes" (I don't know how "Slack" is better here). Unfortunately I primarily associate Slack notifications with work crises (even though nobody I work for uses Slack anymore), so unless I muted notifications entirely reinstalling Slack would kind of be just turning the Anxiety Machine back on.

Might still do it because it sounds like there's a lot of drama and I'm nosy.

[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.

[lassarina]

When I say serious I mean like - most of the people in my region have been interested only in chatting and socializing and not in doing any kind of writing. They're more interested in the Experience of Being a Writer, and the actual writing might as well not exist. I don't have any expectations for anyone's words output, but I do need for write-ins to involve quiet time for writing, is all.