Some RP-events related questions

Long story short: we're thinking about making an event. One with the good, atmospheric story, full of nice roleplay. Something like The Visible Dark (forums.thesecretworld.com/showthread.php?85057-The-Visible-Dark-Investigation-RP-event), for (hopefully) lots of people to participate in and (the most important thing) to have fun.

Thinking about it we ran into some complications tho. With TVD it was relatively simple: we had a story to tell, and we shaped and re-shaped it until it was ready. But now we don't have a story. Yet. And we most certainly want the event to be interesting for the players - thus, we decided to ask the community (starting with the good people of ODO!) about the personal preferences (you want to do RP stuff, you know it!).

Basically, we are thinking about doing LARP-style game with pre-defined roles, a goal and free choice of a way to achieve it. But the concept itself is too wide, and before starting, we might need some feedback to choose the general direction.

First of all, would you like to join us? As a silent watcher, as a player, as a metagaming NPC?

How would you feel about RP-ing the character you rolled at random (not picked by yourself)?

Would you be more excited to participate in a mystery/investigation type of event, or the one more of the adventure/relic hunting (in terms of TSW, ofc) type?

Would you prefer the conversation-heavy event (I'm talking more about "get the answers from this NPC not willing to talk", not about the RP right now) - or the action-heavy, with running around, searching and trading stuff?

Would you want the "one united team against the darkness" type of scheme (TVD used that one, with all the players working on one case against the bunch of semi-helpful semi-evil NPCs), or "couple of teams against eachother" (basically, TSW with all the secret societies, or Mafia/Werewolf type of game), or even better, "everyone for themselves" (well, I can't give a decent example for this one, but you prolly know what I mean)?

Is there anything you really-really want to see (story-wise, location-wise, character-wise, anything)? Search the misty moors for more ancient cults? Some anti-Orochi infiltration mission, full of hacking and AI riddles? Factions catfighting?

The whole "constructing a story" part will likely take shamefully long anyway, thus we'd want to begin working on it asap - and every bit of feedback would be appreciated.

Sounds awesome 😀

I'd happily join in, either as a player or as an NPC. 🙂

If I was an NPC, I'd be fine RP-ing as a given character. If it was as a player, I'd prefer to be one of my own characters - it's often easier to RP as one of your own toons.

In terms of event, I like the idea of a mixture really. I like the idea of being able to RP with conversation trying to work stuff out which then gives us a direction to run off in. On the other hand, it could be interesting having a group of unknowns have to puzzle each other out during an action filled mission. On reflection, that might fit the TSW setting a little better - individual agents being told to go and do something, then meeting others in the field, having to decide how to approach them, identify their objectives etc, then a conversation rich part later to try to pool information.

I think in terms of teams, the united against the darkness works pretty well, but with the element of what the end objective is then defined by the faction (so temps would destroy something for being evil, lumies would want to use it themselves, dragon might want to leave it in a certain place so that someone else will find it in the future).

As for settings, the one thing I've always wanted in TSW is the Dyatlov Pass incident - en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyatlov_Pass_incident
Basically a load of skiers went missing, and were all found dead. They had apparently ripped their way out of their tents (from inside) and run out into a blizzard in their night clothes. It's an event filled with weirdness really, but I doubt we'll ever see it in TSW as the Ural mountains are just too close to Carpathian Fangs.

If there's anything ODO can do to help, we're happy to do whatever 🙂 It's entirely your show though - we won't be taking it over, but if there's anything we can contribute backstage just ask!

If you want psychological games I'd suggest looking at taking in elements of saboteur game. With either one team or member of a team having different interests.

A strucure of teams with different objectives on a cooperation mission. But with a saboteur team who's members are distributed among some but not all teams. The presence of saboteurs is suspected, but no one can be sure.

This way teams can also have focus on talking and on adventures to acomodate different play styles.

As far as free for all. I think you will have problems in the sense that individual parties have no means to prevent each other's success, so it limits strategic options of play.

I'd suggest phenetians as the enemy, the faction is poorly explored, is not strictly evil, but has tried to obtain second filth bomb. If I remember correctly, better ask our resident lore hounds.

If you need someone providing "NPC" characters I can do that. Although not being an experienced role player and slow typer some script would be required and I am not sure if additional character slots caN be bought with bonus points

Thanks for the quick and full response! \o/

We'd be happy to have you - don't know about the NPC part (because there is no plot yet), but as players - very, very much (and the lack of experience was never a problem). Right now our main goal is to figure out the way to provide multiple people a way to get fully involved. Yeah, making an MMO event in an MMO game can be hard! 😀

Yes, something like that 🙂

The purple sails are always our first option to consider!

I'm always up for some RP. I prefer playing with my existing character unless I'm playing an NPC. On a related note if you need an NPC I'm happy to help.

I haven't really taken part in any large events so I can't comment on my prefered style. They both seem pretty interesting though and we can always do with some inter-faction rivalry 😉

I think it'd be neat to have a race-against-the-clock vibe to it, a sense of urgency. Perhaps there's a meteor that's approaching the planet and it needs to be dealt with within the time span of the RP event? I'm not quite sure how well that would translate into roleplaying. It's just a suggestion.

Oh lord, we're all going to die...

It's scary, but I need to start roleplaying sooner or later.

I'm not particularly attached to Elaisse, so would have no objections to playing predefined or random character. Don't really understand why we may need "random" characters, will they be created by some generator like this?

"Your name is Elaisse. You are 35 years old. You have indigo eyes and sky blue hair, and wear a purple Templar uniform. You are very pure; others describe you as clean, maidenly and pure.

Your back is covered with painful-looking welts from the whippings you received. You are exceptionally quiet, with a cool, subtle demeanor. You are not human, but rather a human-looking robot, with a number of overtly artificial features. You frequently get caught up in your own imaginary world, getting lost in frequent daydreams and having trouble distinguishing fact from your own fiction.

You have long admired Templars, and through much hard work you've finally become one yourself. In combat, you fight with a chainsaw. When you are extremely upset, you spend all day sleeping"

"You lost. Please, uninstall your game client manually to complete the immersion" 😀

Although we don't really support the stressful time-limited game mechanics (Telltale games, brilliant as they are, hit my nerves hard), in terms of the real-time event it may be an interesting idea. Don't know about timespan, tho... TVD took 6 hours or so. Would we be able to save the world in less than 6 hours? Time will tell!

Some offtop thoughts: I sometimes think that the scariest part is to finally separate yourself as people know you - the one they raid and go dungeoning with - from the character you are willing to RP (I mean, even considering the fact that Run is basically a picture of myself, she is different). Also, the part when you (as a character) will need to be reacquainted with the character of someone you already know and like... this part may be hellishly awkward.

Depends on the way we will organize the event. If we decide to separate NPCs from the players, you, as a player thrown into a story, will be allowed to RP whatever char you want, while NPC will do all the work to shape the said story (much like in every other RPG out there). But! The other way to do this is to make a bunch of pre-defined characters with some kind of a story behind them and a goal to achieve/a set of rules to play along, give each player the one of the bunch and let them shape the story themselves. They won't be randomly generated, tho - more like, written specifically to fill the needs and randomly assigned. Like this:

"You are Boromir, the heir of Denethor II, proud, handsome and ill-tempered warrior, easily corrupted by the One Ring. You arrive at Rivendell to take part in the Council of Elrond. Your main goal is to protect and strengthen the position of your city, to oppose most of the group when decisions are made and to show off a bit. Be ready to die somewhere later in the story. Off you go!"

(It would be more clean and probably less silly. Probably.)

And that's why my forum usernames are different from my character names. To remind readers and myself that characters are separate personalities from player who controls them when roleplaying.