i'm currently pursuing a 4-year degree in game design. (i know what you're thinking... it's actually a pretty solid program, but i understand the burden of proof is on me to throw together a kick-ass portfolio before i peace-out). while the faculty members are generally pretty chill folks, my fellow students are... well, gamers. and as such, they represent a wide cross-section of varying degrees of social awkwardness. the better ones are just slightly quirky but are otherwise pretty cool people. others are really, really abrasive. this was immediately apparent when i started, and now that i'm partnering up with classmates to work on some game projects, this is not only becoming more obvious, but in some cases these personality clashes and maturity issues are affecting the projects we're working on.

so my question is... is grown-up gamedev like this? i know it's a silly question, but i don't think it's just an age issue since not all students are fresh out of high school- even a few who are pushing 30 seem to struggle with emotional maturity and professionalism. does it get better? or am i going to be dealing with this sort of thing throughout my career?

thanks.

So, you RP a Jumper ( like from the movie Jumper). That's great. You made up an 'original' character. Yet you use quotes directly from the main character of the movie. Not so great. Actually...that's lame.

It also lame that you keep saying "his own/her own" instead of "his/her". And its also lame how you call eyes 'hues' instead of you know...eyes?

It turns out to be something like this: He smiles, handing her her own book, his own brown hues looking into her green hues.

Ugh...

A few little letters.

Dear sir,

Please repeat after me: playing a character who is a spy is not an excuse to metagame. Playing a character who is a spy is not an excuse to metagame.

< Dora the Explorer > METAGAMER, NO METAGAMING. < /Dora >

Dear ma'am,

Who died and made you GM, again? In WoW, roleplay is kind of free form. You're not the guild leader. You're not even a guild officer. That is why I got thrown off when you declared you were starting a guild-wide storyline. It's a very minor godmode, but I'm not comfortable with you PMing me and simply declaring my character had this dream and then giving details, and expecting my character to care. Dude. He's a warlock. He probably has trippier nightmares by far. Having his chest ripped open so his wife (who has turned into a crossdressing Thrall) can juggle his still-beating heart is par for the course. Why do you think he's addicted to chamomile tea?

So when I tell you that thanks but no thanks, I'd rather not participate in your storyline, don't get all butthurt at me. I told you beforehand so you wouldn't spend your time writing out a long PM of what my character is supposed to have dreamed. Also it's because I started my own small storyline beforehand, and I don't want to line up one drama after the other quite so soon. I did so politely, I thought, and I had your time in mind, because I don't want you to waste your time. So why, when I joke about new character concepts, do you feel the urge to rip into them?

I know that "batshit Deathknight" is going to be overdone, but... c'mon. I don't think it's a profession that comes with sanity intact. I'm not sure Arthas' health care plan covers psych care, in fact, given that it's Arthas, I'm thinking it's a definite no. I also love how, as soon as I mentioned my Deathknights were going to have a little of the crazy, you started hating insane Deathknights even more than emo ones or good ones when those two were the only ones you were crying about before.

Also, really, just bad form with what you're doing with the storyline so far. If it's a guild storyline, then why have you just picked out your friends so far so they create a big scene IC to leave everyone else isolated? When people leave the guild meeting early because they can't take it anymore, that is a bad sign. It's just making people lose respect for you, because you are trying to set up an obvious supar seekrit cool kidz table.

remember I posted a few days ago asking for advice and opinions on the Mac Zealot?

I discover now he was deliberately doing so, to find out if I knew exactly what I was talking about when arguing what was needed in an art team... and if I would say "no, you're wrong" to him.

He's planning to use pc when they are most suited.

Bastard. Utter, Utter bastard....

I like the way he thinks. Note to self. Never play against this man in a poker game.

Time for another installment of eye-bleedingly bad City of Villains profiles!

( This is TWO SENTENCES. I want to weep. )

...So, okay, I need your advice, BRPS. For those of you who RP on Yahoo!... Is it, um, common that if you play a canon character and start a one-on-one IM rp with another person, they would expect you to only play romance with them from then on and want to put you in their profile as your character's lover?

Because that's what this girl wants to do with me. And I'm new to Yahoo!, so I've never encountered that sort of thing before. I was under the impression that we were just running our own storyline in a one-on-one thing.

Am I being a bad RPer by not wanting to do this, or is she being weird?

To the most special snowflake,

Thanks for turning me off forum games! Your writing, while it was initially pretty interesting, has got to be some of the most boring work I've ever read. There’s at least... six... ellipses... in each... of... your... posts, every single one of your characters talks the same, acts the same and absolutely needs to hook up with the nearest male hottie. And for someone who's so vocal about portraying realistic, believable homosexual relationships, why is it that all of your male characters are simpering ukes who desperately need their daddy figures to take care of them?

Also, you're not as funny as you think you are. Talking in memes all the time isn't really an indicator of wit.

Person in my scifi game #1,

Stop trying to turn this game into a sex romp. I already told you there would be no graphic sex scenes. And stop trying to plan sexy times with the female characters. One plays an alien whose anatomy doesn't allow for sex with your character's species, another doesn't really want to, and my character is too busy keeping her crew from accidentally blowing up the ship.

It's not gonna happen.

Person in my scifi game #2,

The more you whine about wanting your character to murder something, the less I'm willing to put in a random NPC.

Likewise, no matter how much you whine, we're not going to let you kill the PC stowaway.

Okay. I'll keep it short. The fact that I don't duel does not mean you can insult me. I don't like dueling. I play WoW for the quests and for Thrall. I don't even get why people duel, but hey, if you like it, go ahead. Just keep away from me and a.) don't bug me after I declined and b.) don't insult me after I declined. There are loads of people who will duel with you. Now shoo.

Yeah, you! The one who keeps begging me (and others) for threads!

Maybe if you stopped worrying about what your characters should be doing, you'd actually get something done! I'm so tired of you IMing me "thread with D plox! thread with X plox! thread with A plox!"

No, actually, I'm not tired of that. RP is good.

I am tired of you begging for a thread, us starting one, and then you suddenly forgetting the thread exists, only to beg me a couple of weeks down the line for another rp because boohoo our last one died. Which, btw, totally your fault!

Pretty soon you're gonna be wondering why nobody wants to rp with you. If you aren't wondering that already. Well, I can tell you why. Because you rarely finish your threads. Or, no! That would even be okay, since none of us are perfect and sometimes shit happens. Except, wait, it takes you weeks to reply. We have to nag and nag and nag you, and you make unfulfilled promises you had no intention of keeping. Your last thread? They'd been waiting nearly two MONTHS for a reply from you, but you've only just posted, with no apologies whatsoever, as if it's okay for you to revive it even though they've long since moved on without you! And then you whinge/bitch/moan/complain/nag/whine if anyone dares take more than two days to reply to you!

And as if that weren't bad enough? You mix up OOC/IC. You threaten to suicide your characters if things don't go your way. You've admitted openly that your main character is a self-insert; not to mention he's also a massive gary-stu. You've ripped countless ideas from me and your other friend, and yet you've always done so in such a way that the mods/admins can't do anything about it without looking like tyrant mods. Your posts have taken on a c. 19th century omniscient narrative style that doesn't suit your characters (or you) at all. What you think is interesting, funny, or generally good RP? ... just isn't.

You have so much potential, truly. And you're my friend, so this is even harder. But I'm so close to just refusing to rp with you ever again. Get a frickin' clue, please, before you really do have no one to rp with and you lose all your friends to boot.

Yours,
Almost Irreparably Pissed Off.

I hate reading through the premise of a game and getting really excited about the ideas and wanting to join immediately, only to find out after further reading that it's multiverse game (if that is, indeed, what one calls the games where characters from all different fandoms end up mysteriously in the same place.)

I wish they'd all say that clearly from the beginning so I didn't get all worked up about things before realising I'd have to play an already created character, something I don't enjoy at all.

You play Yagami Light. For people unfamiliar, he's a sociopath who sees himself as the "god of the new world" thanks to his possession of the Death Note, a book that lets him kill someone by writing their name in it. As the person doing this, he obviously needs to be very careful about what information he lets out. Over a period of several years he manages to do so, fooling everyone completely. Part of what lets him fool people is his utterly smooth off-the-charts charisma and flawless fake persona a of kind and upright justice-driven young man. You'd beg your daughter to date this guy. The other part is his incredible intelligence.

Simple, right? Ok, not really, I'll grant you that. But an easy-to-understand concept, just difficult to do. You cannot do it at all.

( You leak extraordinary amounts of information Light would never give out. -- read more )
( If the people tracking you down are laughing, you're doing it wrong. They're laughing. So are others. -- read more )
( Your lies don't work when truth is a click away. By the way, you're threatening not charismatic. -- read more )

This isn't exactly 'bad' rping, it's more like a preference, but since I seem to be getting this a lot -

'But threading is the only rping I've ever done, I've never done rp in aim.'

- I wanna put this out there.

SAME. DAMN. THING.

Just faster and better.

In a thread what happens? You go, then the next person goes. And I can see the point of threads when lots of people get involved. A group chat can be a royal pain in the ass. (Though I still prefer it.)

This is a Gaia-oriented rant which I will start out by asking a question: Since when does not decorating your posts make you a bad role-player? I've seen constant threads with role-players decorating their posts with lyrics, icons, etc. I see people requiring their role-play partner and/or group to make their posts 'pretty'. To me that's ridiculous. Some people don't have the ample amounts of time finding icons, lyrics, and the perfect font color shade to make everything look amazing! Actually, some people (like me) would like to write rather than fretting over whether or not my post meets up to the ridiculous standards of HTML/Photoshop perfection. I find that some people (not all, mind you) use their "vast" usage of HTML/Photoshop to cover up the fact that they aren't actually great role-players.

Please tell me I'm not the only one who feels the same about this or has actually noticed this form of superficiality.

So a few years back, my best friend and I decided to start a Kingdom Hearts roleplay, specifically designed to be Disney-centric.

It never got off the ground, though. :/ Mainly because the only people who applied wanted to be sparkly OCs with magical keyblades.

We had a very specific no-keyblade-unless-you're-a-canon-keyblade-wielder rule.

T_T Are rules really that hard to read?? What makes you think your Sparklypoo Sue is exempt from them? ;;

MY FIRST BRPS POST GAIZ WAO

basically, all i have to say is this:

if you/your character is being posted to roleplaysecrets ( formerly rp_secrets ) almost every week, it's not something to be proud of.

sure, people get aggressive and might just post secrets because they just don't like you. you'll always have that if you draw a lot of attention to yourself from the game's player base ( and the people in question surely do ), but, the sheer volume of these secrets/anonymous posters discussing your bad rping suggests something much more than just vindication and dislike.

it suggests that something truly is wrong with you/your character/your rping/all of the above.

and yeah, making light of a situation like that might be a way people cope with it. or maybe they just don't care.

but, when you actively ask for critique on how you play and then blatantly don't take a single shred of it to heart, i'm inclined to believe that you have no right to whine about anything when people actually come up to you with a problem ( and they have! ) or when people get angry because you just are just plain horrible at characterization.

don't whine that people don't come up front to you with their problems when they do and you just don't listen.

tl;dr: some people just shouldn't be allowed in public rpgs.

WARNING: There is race-wank ahead. Now, bring your spooge-boots and ( jump on in. )

It's a double feature of bad mods and bad players.

We've got a whole cast of people here:
A = overpowered smirking badass player
B = the mod who doesn't want to mod
C = likely overpowered as well but at least he's not undead
D = mod who does stuff sometimes
And me, the off again, on again player who wants to take out smirking badasses

A plays an attempt at the "Smirking Badass" archetype. The character is ridiculously overpowered, and any good player would have retired it from active, public play a long time ago, because of supposedly how powerful it is. On top of that, it's a heavily D&D influenced undead of some sort, complete with skeleton hands, unholy aura, and freezes things on touch. Yet, A plays it like it's some horny high school boy always on the prowl for chicks, and is apparently a notorious cyberwhore, from what I've been told. A god modes when he's backed into a corner in a fight, and when he's not allowed or is called out on god moding, throws some emo fit and is "GONE4EVAR" or 2-3 days.

Let me point out here, that A has a very, very small following of mostly inconsequential people who don't really get involved. Most of the bigger players and mods don't seem to like A very much. C as well, is tolerated, and somewhat liked by other players and some of the mods. As for me, I haven't played steadily in the setting in 8 months or so, and stopped hanging out in the OOC forums because I was getting annoyed with some of the people there. I am, I believe, now a non-entity as far as the overall scheme goes, probably not liked by some of the people, but not stirring up anything either. B and D are both mods, and seemed to be well liked by the OOC public from what I've seen. Neither play often in the public IC forums, but most of the mods in this game don't seem to.

The setting does not allow for undead. They're supposed to be killed on sight, and the guard offers a standing bounty for vampire fangs. Yet, there's two undead characters that exsist in game. One belongs to A, the other to B... And while I don't like the favouritism, B's undead is at least a lot more subtle about it. B's character isn't parading about trying to boink girls, or freezing things, or walking around with "Dire Ravens" on its shoulder. This, at least in my estimation, makes it a lot more tolerable. Not to mention, B has proved useful to the crown on multiple occassions. Apparently, so has A, once or twice in the past, at least to be granted citizen status. Which A relinquished when he wasn't allowed to raise his dead daughter. Necromancy is bad and not sanctioned. A allowed that character to be killed in a stupid scene for reasons I cannot fathom. Drama, maybe?

Anyhow. So myself and C have been growing steadily fed up with A's antics. We hatch a plot to legitimately move against A, which is run by D, whom advises me in a few ways. Make my undead hunter female so A will try to hit on me. Don't let A catch wind that this is somewhat OOCly motivated (but hell, when are plots -not- OOC motivated?). Oh, and A will never let his stupid OP character die, so accept that now. A little research later, and some collaboration, I get a vague character archetype outlined.

Without even playing things, A gets the ball rolling by threatening C's character later that night, saying that A was going to kill or have C killed. C is a member of the city guard. Threats against the city guard aren't tolerated, or rather, shouldn't be. So, C follows the proper channels and mentions this to the cirty guard forums or whatever. Thus making aware to the mod of the guard that A was making threats. All pretty clear cut and proper. Hell, it was done on an IC basis, because ICly, the guard should know that A's making threats against a public servant. As it turns out, the guard is B's baliwick.

B tells C in no uncertain terms that C should just let it go. "A just wants to come in, be a badass, pick up cyber partners, and go again." "I don't want to deal with another mess on the forums like last time {when A killed his own character and was denied being allowed to res it}."

C gets disgruntled. I get disgruntled with this turn of events. And both of us are left with the question of, "Why the fuck are you a mod if you don't feel like dealing with 1. A's OP character and 2. the drama that A will start when/if this happens?" With neither of us having done anything with our plans, with A starting shit on his own, it was somewhat out of our hand. So B wants to let A get away with making public threats (in front of several characters) and let A go on and on with his usual bullshit? Thus reinforcing A's smirking badass.

While I can see why dealing with drama is annoying, but hell, it's a part of modding for anything. B's a mod, it's his responsbility. Deal with it, or step down from the position. Don't tell more responsible players to ignore it simply because you want to keep your head in the sand and not have to do your damned job.

Okay, I get that Heath Ledger is sexy. He's also dead, but if that's what gets you, sweet. I don't, however, get why Heath Ledger with a painted face, cackling and twitching and killing people for giggles is sexy. More over, I don't understand why you think your super spechul awesome snowflake princess on her rainbow unicorn of love is going to save him. He will kill you. Violently. And he will enjoy it. The Joker? Doesn't really do sparkly snowflake and rainbow unicorn.