Poison's Angry Rant thread

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poisonbite01

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Original poster
So this is my little thread where I can bitch about things I encounter RP-wise that annoy me, either as a writer, as a martial artist, as an experienced role-player and story-teller, as a man, or as a chubby dork. I will NOT be using names, I will try to avoid over-zealous swearing, its just a place for me to vent. If no one wants to read it, cool, I don't expect anyone too, but if you are going to engage me in conversation here, lets keep it civil. Its not a flame thread or anything.

If this is against the rules, I didn't really see it, so please direct me to the rule I'm breaking and I will happily take this elsewhere.
 
There is actually a thread for ranting, conveniently enough. It's in the counseling thread located here.

I also believe you can ask a mod to move this there if'n you want.
 
Post 1: New Characters!

Humans do not reach eight feet in height. Perfectly normal humans DO NOT REACH THAT HEIGHT, unless they have a very rare condition. And in that case, you'd better be prepared to play out the various issues when a race that normally isn't that height grows to that size. Like, if you are an ogre, cool, they are huge, powerful creatures. But an eight foot human would be a touch deformed, with all kinds of heart problems, back problems, leg problems. Again, you'll have to do some research to understand the condition...unless you explain it. Half-giant? Okay, problem solved. Does he have a curse/spell on him? Okay, problem solved. But the RPer goes out of their way to state "normal human" as his species, soooooo...explain!

Then there's the dog cat thing. This is a simple issue of not googling a word whose meaning you don't really know. "A Canine Neko" is wrong. The word you want is "Inu." Do a quick bit of research, por favor. Also, do they usually have the power to control metal? Is that a thing all canine nekos can do? If not, where did she learn this power? And she's only 17, where did she get the time to practice that power, if she grew up on a farm? Do you even know what goes on when your family owns a farm? You don't exactly have hours of leisure time at your disposal, ESPECIALLY in a medieval/fantasy setting.

I get that this entire site is about fun story-telling and such. We have a place for half-a-sentence RPs, and places for multi-paragraph text-walls. Its about creative freedom and interesting tales and characters. But I feel like I'm still on Gaiaonline, with the Naruto-clones and teenagers XP
 
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Yeah. I've fallen into the trap of slapping poorly made characters together, like kindergarten ceramics ... Y'know those cringe-worthy flower pots that leak all over the place? I do this because people often post character sheets in a mad dash, before collaborating to discuss the first scene / chapter. I find it the lesser of two evils to post a character sheet before the deadline, so I can keep tabs on the beginning of the story and write coherent, relevant responses. It would be my preference to place a precedence on research and development over character sheets, as I think characters will distinguish themselves over time.

I can spend hours mulling over minutiae: once, I was positively tormented as to why astral devas had breasts; were they asexual? If so, what was the point of sexual characteristics? Why did their ruling deity design them in such a manner? Why were they humanoids instead of beings of light or energy?

I like to immense myself in politics, faction disputes, histories, mythologies, rumor mills, geography, climate, trade routes, laws, regulations, modes of transportation, city planning, and sundry other elements of world building before creating one character who is just one speck of "sentience" in an entire cosmos of possibilities.

But then people just think I'm lazy because I don't have the incentive to create elaborate character sheets, and few ask to roleplay with me.
 
I don't think that a massive collaboration between potential players is necessary, at least when it comes to forum role-plays. World-building is awesome, and is fine to be done on the fly. But my problem is when people put in characters that aren't fleshed out, but should be fleshed out. Somethings don't need an explanation, but somethings do. One of my favorite things to get annoyed about is a characters age. I mean, you are nineteen, how could you be a master of five different martial arts forms, three different magical powers, and have fought in tons of battles? You're a child man, sit down. You only grew into a full adult a few years ago hahahahaha.

I get you on the obsessing over minutiae bit, I've done that before XD. But a character sheet, to me, is just supposed to be an introduction to your character, not a comprehensive list of every little ability they've even been able to do, and not the characters biography XP. So I end up with a bunch of stuff written all over my computer, but only a reasonably fleshed out character sheet.
 
I'm starting to believe that people should communicate about vacancies and roles that need to be filled, though. This is why I point out the merits of collaboration. A lot of people, in my experience, tend to be drawn to the same skill sets and the same spotlighted roles because they're the fanciest. I wish people had a vague idea of where they want the plot to go. If everyone is a heroic type, or if everyone is a skilled rogue, or every girl is pretty, where is the variety?
 
Plus, back stories can be really inconsistent and turn out to be very incongruous with the plot further down the line if people don't educate themselves about what realm they're playing in.
 
That is all very true. Basically, it comes down to "Coherent plot and diverse characters" versus "randomness and SUPER DIVERSE OR IDENTICAL CHARACTERS TO THE EXTREME"

Its why I don't let my D&D players swap out characters whenever they get bored. It gets tiresome introducing new characters to a story when they haven't been made part of the story. If you want a coherent story, you need coherent back-story. Perhaps I worded my previous post weird XP
 
Oh, and thank you moderator that moved this thread to the appropriate place!
 
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