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A very much overdo blog post from Sir Muffonious about stuff which may or may not interest you if you happen to be inclined towards roleplaying.
Posted by Sir_Muffonious,
21 February 2011
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1,708 views
Well, Frontier did not go quite as I anticipated. I was very excited for that RP at first, but once I posted the sign up topic and started reading over some of the sign ups I got, I started to feel hesitant. It wasn't because the characters were bad or anything (though I felt like I had to really push some people to make their characters more interesting), but I just didn't feel right about the RP. It was like I hadn't conveyed to the players the atmosphere of the world I was creating, which was my fault. The RP was wrought with self-doubt from its inception. I eventually started to feel better about things, but a whole ton of my plans didn't work out when I tried to set them into motion and by the time it was close to ending I was just exhausted with it all. I had no motivation left to continue fighting against a story I no longer wished to tell.
So that's over now. I don't really know what to do with myself, but I don't want anything to do with RPing for a while. I'm going to finish with the one RP that I'm still involved in, and then after that I'll have to find something else to do. Right now roleplaying feels like a chore to me - more work than its worth. I'm sure I'll become inspired again, but for now I need a break.
In my free time I've been slaving over D&D stuff to keep up with the weekly sessions I'm running, with Lord Cheese Con, Anonymous SoFar, and Grim Malevolence as my loyal and unfortunate group of players. My work involves planning adventures, creating NPCs, preparing monster encounters, creating new monsters (a recently discovered hobby of mine), and rolling lots of dice. I roll so many dice. It makes me wish I could organize a legitimate D&D game with a bunch of you guys, but there are so many complications involved with that that I don't even want to think about it...but that's entirely different than what I'm talking about now.
What I often notice about our D&D sessions is that they seem a lot better on paper than they do in real life. Planning out a campaign beforehand I can sort of tell which encounters are going to be most challenging to the players and which moments are going to define the adventure. However, oftentimes when we get down to actually playing the game I find that some of my tougher monsters are killed more easily, my puzzles prove to be too contrived and needlessly complicated, and a good deal of important rules are forgotten about in favor of some DM improvisation.
To return to what I was talking about before, I believe this is why Frontier failed; it was better in my head/on paper than it ended up being in real life. I did something wrong, whether it was in the way I wrote some of my posts or the manner in which I chose to run battles and skirmishes. I don't know exactly what went wrong, but in my head this idea was awesome and then when I tried it out it sucked, as sometimes happens in D&D as well.
So, the topic of discussion for this blog post is for Dungeon/Game Masters only: Have you ever had this problem yourself? How do you make up for this issue of poor translation (from paper to players) in your roleplays?
And just 'cus:
So that's over now. I don't really know what to do with myself, but I don't want anything to do with RPing for a while. I'm going to finish with the one RP that I'm still involved in, and then after that I'll have to find something else to do. Right now roleplaying feels like a chore to me - more work than its worth. I'm sure I'll become inspired again, but for now I need a break.
In my free time I've been slaving over D&D stuff to keep up with the weekly sessions I'm running, with Lord Cheese Con, Anonymous SoFar, and Grim Malevolence as my loyal and unfortunate group of players. My work involves planning adventures, creating NPCs, preparing monster encounters, creating new monsters (a recently discovered hobby of mine), and rolling lots of dice. I roll so many dice. It makes me wish I could organize a legitimate D&D game with a bunch of you guys, but there are so many complications involved with that that I don't even want to think about it...but that's entirely different than what I'm talking about now.
What I often notice about our D&D sessions is that they seem a lot better on paper than they do in real life. Planning out a campaign beforehand I can sort of tell which encounters are going to be most challenging to the players and which moments are going to define the adventure. However, oftentimes when we get down to actually playing the game I find that some of my tougher monsters are killed more easily, my puzzles prove to be too contrived and needlessly complicated, and a good deal of important rules are forgotten about in favor of some DM improvisation.
To return to what I was talking about before, I believe this is why Frontier failed; it was better in my head/on paper than it ended up being in real life. I did something wrong, whether it was in the way I wrote some of my posts or the manner in which I chose to run battles and skirmishes. I don't know exactly what went wrong, but in my head this idea was awesome and then when I tried it out it sucked, as sometimes happens in D&D as well.
So, the topic of discussion for this blog post is for Dungeon/Game Masters only: Have you ever had this problem yourself? How do you make up for this issue of poor translation (from paper to players) in your roleplays?
And just 'cus:
The only time I did have a problem with this was with Bloodhounds. Bloodhounds was handled in a similar way like I did with Rise, and we had some great rpers, but I think the rp didn't work because the idea didn't sound as cool on paper as it did in my head. I'm a big fan of freedom for character creation, but with Bloodhounds I gave too much freedom. Way too much. I literally allowed people to make their own universes. Making one is hard enough. So yeah, didn't work out.