The Official RPG Ideas Thread

This 100 times over. This

@pyrogram: There were some things partially neglected, like person-person reliability, but if it arises further, then it'll probably be tackled.

@arquitenens: You don't have to get tooooo technical, or else some people may get confused :P Simplicity is sometimes enough. That's another thing, if an idea is too complex, you'd lose people. Mhm.

@pyrogram: Ah, but you might attract others with the increased complexity (within reason), though. Demographics.

@arquitenens: True true. I've tried doing concepts and funnily enough, confuse myself in all of it. The Wanderers originally was a much more complex team idea, but I got bored and simplified it. lol

@arquitenens: I don't understand, reword it for me

:P

Breakdown of RPG on a college level, that's appreciated.

I drop knowledge so heavy, it leaves the world unbalanced. When I'm in the mood. ;-P

@arquitenens: @pyrogram: I would also add this is talk that a limit of how many people be on the team too.

@arquitenens: Yes it is (in part). But sometimes that's a necessity.

@arquitenens: Your deceptively smarter than you let on...

@surkit: I specialize in matters of fluid intelligence, crystallized not extremely far behind. [But comparatively, who knows?]

Looking back, it's not really all that special.

This, especially the highlighted part. I can usually handle writing one or two NPC posts 'for the cause' if I like the team a lot. It isn't fun but I can get the job done if I know I can just make a couple of five hundred word posts and then I'll be at the good stuff. But when its a whole RPG filled with NPC's I just feel bored, and pressured to post which makes me irritated. That's the point where a team membership feels like a burden instead of a joy.

That's the best kind of intelligence.

The trade off here is stories lack a lot of depth, as the only way to make an interaction between several people on a hero team and a suspected or open villain, is a fight. There's no mental chess going, it's just physical (you get what I'm sayin') checkers. Maybe what we really need is villains with more intricate motivations.

Truth.

You know sometimes it really is all about the leader. Without a leader on certain teams fueling activity drops almost over night. An amazing example would be the COP's and the Ronin's Rest. When I was helping, and orchestrating stories (as Master Master put it) the thread got around 8000 posts in under two weeks. That's probably the fastest growing thread in CVnU history, but I left the team, and it died overnight.

It's about the leadership, and if everybody relies on the leader, the team fails. Teams need a team effort, not just a single person. Not even the most active person can bare the weight of everybody elses motivation, and carry on being motivated yourself. You just burn out.

ALL OF THIS HIGHLIGHTED! And it was one of the points I was going to type before I got distracted. There's a universal balance with storytelling and CV OPEN RPGs tend to be more ACTION!EXPLOSION!ACTION!MARTIALARTS SHOWCASE and when that's over it's like: "Wait, what were we here for again?" Action is the lowest form of storytelling and it needs more ingredients to keep it interesting. The mental psychology thing you were mentioning is one of those things.

And for CV it shouldn't be that hard, but sometimes it is. One person wants to make a classic hero team while another girl/guy wants to do space. It's counterintuitive. There's no real response to their call.

You got it.

As far as what got the convo started I'm not gonna make the JLI, wasn't even my concept originally. A team still en route though. I'm gonna go a different route though and head hunt my team

@surkit: I owe you an affiliation since ditching you, so whatever direction the team is sign me up. LOL A promise is a promise :P

You got three minutes to delete this before I hold you to it.

@surkit:

Deleted or not deleted, I promised and you possess my membership!

@pyrogram: At first it was just an idea. Now I got you on deck.

@surkit:

@pyrogram:

@surkit: D:

I think we would all love more complex characters and nuanced plotlines. Just as we would all love advancement in every other area of RPG, from martial arts to magic to science. We're greedy like that :-)

The question is, how do you make it work?

Well, we are on a comic book website LOL. Not that I endorse that literary tradition but being that most of the RPG'ers on this website use comic book story-lines etc. as a foundation for nearly everything they do explains why things are like this with respect to teams and interactions. You mentioned fights as being the only thing that seems to bring characters together for a mass-interaction. That's true. But why? What are fights and battles? A battle or a fight is a literary tool used to more clearly portray the ideological clashes and differences in a narrative. That's why it seems to be easy on Comic Vine to create an interaction in which a hero team fights a villain or a villain team, because why are they even fighting? To settle their ideological disagreements.

Which shows to point out that you're right in that narratives here don't have as much depth as they can because the over-saturation of a particular set of literary tools in a narrative, in this case fights and battles, can degrade the quality of a narrative because it isn't the only way to portray and settle ideological differences between characters. It's not that the antagonists here don't have more intricate motivations, its just that the eventual reaction of every hero here would be to seek this antagonist out and beat them up because that's how they feel they'll put an end to it. In order to write the type of narratives you want to write, the ones with more depth, firstly we need to stop setting up teams the way we used to. Using first team RPGs as an opportunity to fight or write against NPCs is extremely boring for anyone over-time, as Zauby pointed out.

From what I've seen, the best way to set up a team is to create a location thread that implies or confirms some kind of character recruitment for a particular purpose but isn't actually called a team. Avalon for example. It accomplished this by offering characters the option to work there. And characters did. But given that these characters are all working in a company that's situated in a very fantastical, fictional setting, they'll be cooperating with each other for more than just ordinary work. I think that's one of the team-formulas that are most compatible with the nU. And in order to write narratives with more depth, we need a greater diversity of literary archetypes. On CV you see a lot of ideal heroes, and a lot of villains. But you barely ever see an anti-villain (LL wrote one when she was Amaranth), or a Byronic hero or a romantic hero (Pyro wrote one when he was Xenon, and Psy has written a hybrid of the romantic hero with Xandra) or a tragic hero. And recently, we've had a lot of antiheroes and antihero hybrids, those would be all the neutrals.

There's only so much depth to be had when people write a particular set of literary archetypes over and over again. I think in order to have more narrative depth and more complex characters (psychologically, ideologically, ethically, and emotionally) we need to start by adding more diversity to our literary archetypes.

@casimiro_cardoso: Fights can have a narrative too, if done well. Remember how narrative driven Shinigami Vs Andres was? If a fight is done right, it's an amazing piece of narrative. If not, it drags.

Not disagreeing with you or anything, just adding that little bit. *Shrugs*

@pyrogram: Hmm. In the case of Andres and Shinigami, the fight didn't have a narrative. The narrative had a fight. I say this because the narrative wasn't a product of the fight, the fight was a product of the narrative which began with Andres' relationship with Olivier and gradually the fight came. What I think would apply to their narrative was that their fight made it easier for a reader to understand the conflict involved, which is what fights are usually for in narratives. In any case, I agree with you as well, it depends on the type of writing however, as with everything :)

Thats a dissapointing thing to read, comic books being lackig in depth on a comic book site lol. So many books out there rethink the idea of a storyline across any medium, not just comics. yet the problem is that the idea here is to not evolve our style past the 70's methodology of the pre-Stan Lee era where it was supply a villain with an in your face evil plan, get the hero involved, hero wins.

Why i say pre-Stan Lee is because, dude brought in emotional content to comics, and not just in heroes but villains. They had motivations that the reader could actually relate with and wonder if you wouldn't do the same in their shoes. We need those. When's the last time you saw a rehabilitated villain here?

In a way I agree the archetype is the issue but at the same time it's only a fraction of the issue, diversification within the archetype itself is more of an issue. Anti villian is cool, but if it's an obtuse anti-villain whats the difference?

Same way you make any thing work. Put a tool in it's hand and give it something to work for ;)

@surkit: We actually had one of those, antagonists that have motivations that we can relate to or sympathize with. What you're describing is a character like Magneto (an anti-villain) and to an extent, a Byronic hero. Although I only ever remember reading one such antagonist, which was Amaranth. The problem with the antagonists on CV is that almost all of them are irredeemable villains (or just villains really). Its impossible to relate to the motivations or objectives of a villain because in order to be a villain, your methods and your goals need to be absolutely irredeemable. A villain is supposed to be a character that's extremely evil and makes you go "That's a sick sick son of a bitch" LOL.

What CV needs is a greater variety in not only antagonists, but protagonists too. Not everyone has to be a basic villain, and most of the villains here don't even have any underlying reason for why they are the way they are, some are just evil for the sake of being evil which I was never a fan of. A villain must at least have some kind of psychological or ideological motivation for what they do. But you don't have to be a villain to be a narrative's antagonist. Even a hero can be an antagonist, any sub-category of the hero archetype e.g. the romantic hero, the antihero, even the ideal hero, and especially the Byronic hero (which is actually usually confused for a villain). The one narrative on CV that's had some depth in it, or at leas the one that I think had or has some depth is the mutant-human plot-line. And I say this because we had Amaranth and Charlemagne on opposite sides.

Neither was an actual villain. Charlemagne was an amalgamation of a Byronic hero and anti-villain because while his methods were very extreme and so was his ideology (the eradication of mutants), they weren't completely impossible to sympathize with because he wanted to do what he felt was best for the course of human evolution. Now I'm not saying that we would endorse the genocide of an entire species of hominid (the mutant species in this case), but what I'm saying is that I'm sure we would all want to improve the chances of humans surviving and maintaining their position as the planet's most dominant animal because its self-beneficial to us as human beings, so that bit of Charlemagne's ideology, I believe people can sympathize with or at least relate to. Now its how he intends to go about this that's the problem, because he wanted to kill an entire people which indicates that he's also a racist.

This makes his character very complex. Not only that but he also had a messiah complex given that he believed himself uniquely positioned to not only lead an entire group (humans), but that he and only he could bring forth this radical global change for what he envisioned was the ideal world for humans. Then we have Amaranth who was a very reluctant anti-villain during this. And the farthest thing from an irredeemable anti-villain or villain. He killed a lot of people yes, but he felt remorse. And most of all, an anti-villain is a character that does what is seemingly a lot of bad things in order to achieve a goal that is actually good, in this case, it was freeing the mutant race from discrimination. Neither of these two were basic heroes or basic villains, they were sub-archetypes and they created the mutant-human conflict which while people are tired of it, was one of the deepest narratives the nU has ever seen. There was politics, economics, discrimination, ethics, and other social phenomena all interacting together in a big narrative with a massive literary payoff in terms of story-telling.

And this was a narrative created by Charlemagne, an antagonist who was an anti-villain-Byronic hero hybrid, and Amaranth, a protagonist who was an anti-villain. I definitely agree with you on what you said, but I wrote this to illustrate how archetypes other than an ideal hero or villain can breed stories with far more depth than the generic hero Vs. villain narrative. Oh and to answer your question about the anti-villain, there's really no big difference.

The amazing thing was.. Charlemagne and Amaranth never even met. Never spoke. Never fought. Never laid eyes on one another. And it still worked.

@surkit:

The thing is we tend to appropriate comic concepts. There ideas aren't just sanded down to just battles. They've written a hefty exposition, narrative, dialogue and philosophical/ethical perspective playing out a question-answer they had in their head -- events like: Civil War, Secret War, Blackest Night, Identity Crisis, Tower of Babel.

There were issues building to a boiling point for these events and consequences. We tend to just cut/copy and paste a comic writers event at surface value without any prehistoric logic to why it's actually occurring within the universe and with the characters involved. And we've sold ideas this way numerous times: I'm gonna do: Civil War, Avengers Film (2012) X Men First Class - Days of Future's Past etc. This is something that is hurting more than helping because it's always what's the next comic event we can play out, leaving out or erasing any consequence of the events prior to do that. Gimmicky.

Further fortifies why we don't need ideal heroes or villains to make a successful story, because they need fights and direct confrontations with one another to settle things. Charlemagne and Amaranth didn't ;P They managed to create a mass socio-political, socio-economic, paramilitary fiasco with a variety of complex issues that caused other characters to do most things for them, Charlemagne and Amaranth only ever fought each other through the support of their respective allies whenever the pro-mutant characters and anti-mutant characters would meet. And that's well, as you said, amazing. The two characters most integral to the narrative never even met, but it worked better than the narratives where the protagonist and antagonist meet... again.. and again.. and again ;)

@la_espada: That's true, a lot of times the impact is removed from a conflict because the principles clash too many times.

@strigidae_23: Exactly.

@casimiro_cardoso: I haven't had that much focus on one character in a long time. The whole mutant thing just... doesn't appeal to me. I get the sense even those two feel that way at this point. Guess it boils down to a need for motivation, and to get that we need a new turning point in the canon. To do that we might need to go some directions that'll make people uneasy, building insurmountable odds in the canon to create new drives, ambitions, and character types.

True. We don't so much apply the event in the way that best fits here, but like you said cut and paste it's highest interest points. Then once the short term appeal of it fades the hassle of maintaining the effect of it deters people, it's like a silent rule.

Truth be told though it is hard to keep canon straight, even annoying when someone puts out one post that was done only for the shock value, then if you choose to keep that event in canon for the majorities sake that means always remembering to sell someones five minute written post on how they blew up the moon or something.

I feel....kinda motivated.

But if I act on my motivation without finishing what I've already got, I'm dead.

That is the -worst- LOL.

@strigidae_23: I know this. v_v I feel like I could just T__T

Wanna know what I do when that happens?

I either drop everything, kill my character as an excuse, or just lose motivation entirely anyways :P

@arquitenens: Awwwww!

Just a quick question, is anyone doing anything Cain related? Like Cain and Able?

Mutants are in the canon, their apart of society. What happens next, thats a good starting point.

@declan_harrow: Me. Abby is the reincarnation of Abel (see? Ab-Ab? Clever ~_^) and she's got to defend herself from her secret sibling, who's out to kill her, but she doesn't know it.

I'm totally telling a huge lie right now.

Considering we are in the Official Ideas thread I might as well post one of my ideas.

The CVnU is a world that has been torn apart by a war between humans and mutants. A lot of people picked a side and fought for what they believed in however what about those who just wanted the two sides to stop fighting so they could live their lives in peace?

Specifically, what about classical costumed heroes? A Superman or Spiderman type character may not take a side but they would probably object to the violence and destruction caused by both sides. In fact they might few everyone involved in the conflict as villains who make life harder for ordinary people.

It would be interesting to see a Justice League formed out of an 'Enough of this sh!t' motivation. Like a world police to stop the two most violent gangs on earth from fighting over territory.