I'm not new to playing or GMing, but I'm fairly new to RPoL. Everything people have said in this thread about difficulties with players surprises me. I'd expect people who use this kind of site to enjoy words enough to be attentive readers and afficionados of the written word. I mean, if this site offered video and voice play, then the kinds of things you describe would seem more likely. What am I missing?

The human element. As long as there's Free Will, people will choose to act like apricotholes.

In reply to mickey65 (msg # 905):

I also depends on what rule system you run. Some systems only have a few players, so you will hit the same few time and again. I remember being surprised I was sharing 4 games with the same three users at one point.

Just take what you can get, and don't let the bad seeds bother you.

As someone that runs a popular system, and therefore regularly gets 20+ RTJs, I can expect at least three or four "canned" RTJs. They're usually easy to spot, since they almost never conform to the format I have for my RTJs and rarely fit the setting. Those are just the first I eliminate.

Obviously those people have some success throwing the same RTJ at multiple games, because one would assume they'd stop doing it if they had a 0% success rate, so I don't feel the least bit bad skipping over them.

One vent I have about running games on other sites has to do with what you could call temporal asynchronicity, which happens in three forms:

1) Three players post four times a day, and the fourth player posts once every four days.

2) Everybody's having a great time until some important conflict resolution happens to depend on one player (yeah, I know, bad GMing), and that player...disappears. For days. Or forever.

2) Four players love posting 12 times a day. Unfortunately, two of them post between 6 am and noon, another posts between 6 pm and midnight, and the third posts between 3 am and 5 am.

I've learned to start everyone off with solos until I get a feel for their posting pattern. Then I bring them together if they aren't post-asynchronous.

That one actually killed one of my first games. That was how I learned to push groups onward when one member is holding them up.

...you originally thought a game idea was really cool, but then when you checked it out it sounded sketchy and now you see tons of bumps for the game because people are dropping like flies.

Always trust your gut.

In reply to GammaBear (msg # 911):

My sympathies, Gamma. Was it a matter of Creator Blindspot?

In reply to mickey65 (msg # 912):

I don't know for certain, and I don't think I can go in to details about the game, but like I said, I thought it was a cool idea at first, but then when I actually read the stuff the DM posted for the game, I thought everything sounded sketchy so I didn't RTJ. Though now I see it constantly looking for replacement players.

In reply to GammaBear (msg # 913):

Sketchy is a bit of a slippery concept. Even the most detailed planning has to leave room for some sandboxing, because players ARE going to catch you off-guard unless you write an encyclopedia and have an eidetic memory. Maybe even then. And in a pbp game I've always loved thinking on my feet from outlines. Sure, I need notes on major events, locations, and characters, and sometimes maps are indispensible, but it's rare that I put a lot of work into things like NPC charsheets, shop inventories, family lineages, local dinner menus, etc. I've even been know to tell a player: "Tell me which NPCs in this caravan you want to interact with" and then let the player come up with their own wish list.

In reply to mickey65 (msg # 914):

You're reminding me of an argument I've had several times, whether computer games are essentially multiple choice.  If they are well-crafted, the player may never be reminded of that, but somewhere, sometime, someone will come up with a plan, a strategy, that the designer has not thought of or allowed for, even if s/he has done all the charts and detailing you say you don't, but that you could make up on the fly if necessary, and a computer game cannot.

In reply to Brianna (msg # 915):

I'm sure you've heard that multiple-choice questions are the most difficult test questions to design well, so that they actually measure what they're intended to measure. Computer game designers face a similar challenge, but I don't know whether any have thought of it that way. :)

In reply to mickey65 (msg # 916):

Both are indeed difficult to design, and often none of the choices given is exactly right, or even closer to 'right' than any of the others, at least to some.

In reply to GammaBear (msg # 913):

This happened to me recently, as well. Was excited to find a game. Started reading what the GM was posting for it and decided to wait a little bit before RTJing. Glad I didn't. Turns out they are just using the system for an idea, but not the world that I would have built the character to fit in. Ooops! Kinda makes a difference....

Your character understands that there are no bears in wolfhome.

How ironic that no bears are in wolfhome when the book specifically mentions them several times. I wonder if it has anything to do with the fact that mine was told find a bear and the packs Alpha will let her win the challenge. No, I doubt a gm will bend his univerce to apple with me like that. Surely not right? For a guy who claims I am trying to ruin his game with the idea of leaving he sure seems like he wants me gone.

I wish the bloak would make up his mind.
This message was last edited by the user at 22:02, Sat 15 July 2017.

Had a sad moment I've already vented privately about, and people have been so nice to me that I feel better but the situation is even more sad.

I started recruiting for two games around the same time, about four days go. The first game has seven players playing eight characters and is up to more than 700 posts already. The players are so enthusiastic that we're playing all day, and that not only uses up my free time nicely but keeps me happily occupied.

But the other game never got off the ground because I simply had no time for it, and I had to confess to those five players that I had to suspend the game after they had worked hard to create characters. They've been so nice about it that I wish I could run that game too after all, but right now that's not possible.

I'm slowly going blind from ocular cataracts that went untreated for way too long. I can't do a damned thing until after both eye surgeries are over with around the second week of September. Everything is lined up for the eye surgeries and I've got about five and a half weeks to twiddle my thumbs...or keep seven players happy while keeping myself happy. Which I'm doing. Yet I had to let five very nice people down, and that bothers me.

Mickey...will you have to wear bandages for a bit?  Asking as one of my old gms here had a major stroke and then went blind from diabetes.  I am not sure if it is a machine or a program, however she was able to convert her keyboard to voice.  Anything that some one wrote her the computer spoke and she could have it type what she said back.  I know I am also having vision problems and am looking into it.  perhaps it could help

Finally got the power back on, if not the A/C, after 6 days without (last went out Thurs before the July 4th weekend; between people leaving work early for the holiday weekend, and the general back-up of overscheduled electricians, couldn't get anyone out until the following Weds). Then finally got the A/C tech out Thurs to fix that... and yet, once again, ~48 hours later, I've no power, no A/C.

Apparently, my summer break is being spent crashing in a friend's living room. Gods know how long it's going to take to get things fixed this round. :P

Why is it that the only time the battery in the fire alarm goes out is the day I arrive home late from vacation and just want to do nothing but sleep? I don't even know if I have batteries for this stupid thing, that, of course, is the one in the bedroom, so I can't ignore it even if I wanted to!

Some people are way too far on the weird side of stupid. I live out in the desert in a very rural area, so when three young teenagers flag me down on the road, a mile from the nearest house, no car in sight, early in the afternoon, I was wondering where they heck they'd come from. No bikes, no backpacks, no water, no drinks of any kind -- in the desert in summer... and no phone, either, as it turns out.

I let them call someone on my phone, and offered to drop them off at our community convenience store, where at least they could wait in air conditioning. (I figured with three of them, we should all be safe from accusations of impropriety; sad that has to be a consideration these days.)

Barely get started moving and a call comes in on my phone, we need to turn around and backtrack a few miles, the other girl is back that way... in an SUV full of kids with, it turns out, the young mother of the girl who'd borrowed my phone at the wheel. Said girl gets out, gets in the SUV without saying much, too busy crying because she knows she's in trouble -- but the other two adamantly refusing to change vehicles. Okay....

And the mother? Doesn't say a word to me. No thanks for helping my child, who was out in the desert utterly unprepared. No concern for the other two kids, who are supposedly her daughter's friends, and are in a car with a total stranger. Not even a hello. Just, nothing. Collects her kid and drives away. WTH?

Mind you, we're within 5 miles of a major "smuggler's highway," used for Mexican drug and human smuggling -- to the point the state land ~8 miles to the south has signs saying it's not safe, stay out of the area. And she says nothing?

I ended up driving the other pair of kids to one of their homes about 8 miles away. But I still wonder who ditched them out there with no water and no phone. And if they're smart enough not to get caught in that situation again. Sadly, I'm not too sure about that. :/

Well, you're a good gal/guy helping these candidates for a Darwin Award.

I wonder if they could have been the ones being trafficked. Just glad nothing weirder happened and nothing happened to you. I generally don't pick up anyone for just this reason. Much easier to call folks a cab or call the police to come help anyone on a roadside.

Thanks. :) I live on the edge of nowhere, though. There are no buses, no cabs unless you call one out from the metro (an hour+ away), and the kids had no phone, nor likely near enough money, anyway.

Average response time from the sheriff's office is between 45 minutes to 2 hours. On a good day. (Non-emergencies, they may show up 2 days later, if they don't just take a report over the phone.) Mostly, they just take reports after the fact, do traffic tickets, handle accidents, and make the almost quarterly major drug trafficking and/or illegal trafficking busts.

I am very cautious about stopping for anyone these days, especially when alone. Certain folks I won't stop for at all; I'll call the sheriff's department to get a deputy dispatched instead. That ensures someone will come by who can help, so they won't suffer too badly from the heat.

I definitely considered the risks, before pulling over. But these kids were ~14, skinny sticks of kids, and I routinly heft 80 pound bags of feed. All three of them together weren't much risk to me, and in minimal summer attire, no one was hiding any weapons big enough to be dangerous, either.

If they'd been nearly adult-sized teens, probably I'd have let them use the phone without getting out of or unlocking the car, and then called the sheriff's department once I left. That way, if the kids weren't picked up in short order, a deputy would have been sent round to look for them.

Having been stranded on the side of the road in the summer, I've had occasion to be terribly grateful for the people who did stop to help me. It was a very calculated risk, but it worked out. :)

I'm about to lose a game I played in to the autoclean function, and it's making me both sad and a little ticked.

It was a Battletech/Mechwarrior game, and I'll be damned if the GM didn't know their stuff and create some of the most engaging, wonderful and purely amazing worlds and NPCs for us all to interact with.  The characters were all selected and were amazingly developed, and we were all clicking together like crazy, with huge plans for the length of the game- we had plans to go all the way down the official storyline, from the beginning of the Clan War all the way to the Word of Blake Jihad and beyond, with plenty of the best stuff you could ever hope to find in a game.

This was a GM that was really one in a million, and I've found two of them during all my time I've spent playing tabletop RPGs.  But sooner or later I'm going to lose everything I did for it.  I can't even ask the GM of the game to poke it and take it off the delete schedule- he vanished near the end of 2013 and we only found out in the first part of January 2014 that he'd been in a fatal accident.

So I started trying to print off as much of it as possible- I feel games like that just don't come around often enough, and I don't want to lose the memories and all the work that was put into it.  I just don't know any other way besides printing everything off that I'm going to be able to hang onto it.  I wish there was a way I could preserve it completely, because one of these days I'm going to log on and it'll just not be there, and I'll have lost all the wonderful work and development and memories.

I know this isn't one of those rants where you're all irritated and such, but- I loved this game and everything about it; and it's a shame that it's just going to end up formatted into nothingness.  I just wish there was a better way than a hundred bucks worth of ink and paper...

My suggestion would be to kept it in electronic form. Windows 10, Mac and Linux have a "print" to pdf instead of directly to a printer by default. For older Windows, if you can install new drivers, you can add a special printer that do the same (google pdf printer for windows X). Otherwise, chrome and firefox have ways to save pages (html form) that they could reopen.