@ Moon and Zanzi: Gratulations that you managed to turn this thread into a flaming against the will of most of the people here. I think you need one of those *tosses each of them a chill pill*... just don't do that too often, otherwise you could get addicted to the pills >.>
Back on topic.
@ all those who want to RP a fight (peacer, for instance, but also many others):
http://hydlaa.com/smf/index.php?topic=19339.0That's a collection of my experiences and rules derived from those experiences. (Yes, my main ingame char is Rilar.)
As they are not official or approved by anyone nearly "official" they should be seen as guidelines or proposals how to RP a fight.
They have been tested thoroughly and people fighting after those never complained that a fight was boring or unfair. Actually there even was a tournament with those rules and it was (despite of many troubles, because of the RL circumstances) a great event.
@ Monk, Darkshade and all those "masterminds" of this RP and other people who are planning to do such big-scale RP.
I already have experienced numerous attempts by others and I, myself, have tried my luck with such RP.
I like to give some input according to my experiences.
There are many people who think that it adds to the suspense if people are not filled in OOC into what is going on.
This is wrong.
If people don't get what they are facing, why they are doing what they are doing, they first get excited. BUT if this state continues, if they don't get the chance even OOC to know what is happening, it just frustrates them. Not only that. As there are no DMs or "leaders" of the RP amongst the players (I'm only talking from player perspective) everyone is equal in that respect. There are people who know more, others know less. But from the OOC viewpoint
every player is leader of his own RP . So this is the first thing to get. And with that they feel not respected or even insulted if you don't treat them like equal.
This is one thing. The other is how to organise RP of this scale.
With the stated above it rules out that one person is the leader of the RP, writes down all and everyone dances after his tune. This might work in a very small scale, but the more players are involved, the more opinions and viewpoints are to be considered. To write down a plot and to make people act after that without knowing the plot behind has also another, serious component: RL. If something screwes (and it always does), you, as storywriter, have to look after everything and to modify the plot.. this might work well to a certain degree. But what happens if everything goes wrong? Then you will be just as frustrated as everyone else in the RP because you won't know how to continue and your followers wont even have the chance to continue the plot. The other thing is: what happens if the storywriter can't get back ingame or gives up the plot as it just gets too complicated for him/her to overlook the flood of information? This actually happened with an RP I was in and it was an experience which I would like to avoid in future, and also prevent other people to get into that.
How to avoid that?
Treat the plot as modular blackbox. What I mean by that: You can't know what the players do in detail while you aren't watching. But you can know the conditions and the results. I know how hard it is to give up the "complete control" over an RP, to decide against knowing each detail, but beyond a certain scale it is humanly impossible to learn each action of the players and plan ahead.
The clue there is to give the players a set of conditions, settings, a precedent RP or alike. It is necessary that the involved players of a certain part know
how the situation they are in came to where it is now.
From that point you could let them play their own RP, but you like to put some plots into one. So the second step is to actually plan in "milestone-manner". Milestones are keyconditions, situations in which the different plots overlap or build on each other. So you don't tell the players what they have to RP,
but only what the result should be of their RP session. After the session, they report back to you the important facts (for instance that they chose against the result you was striving for). With that you keep the overview without sinking into detail and it is easier to change the milestones than rewriting the complete plot.
This way you keep flexible and its easier to plan. And it also leaves freedom for the players to choose their own way if they feel like it.
Just my few tria.
Good luck
PS: Once I lead three plots into one, the sessions where happening in the past, present and future. Without the system presented above which I developed together with Alhana/Odessa, it would have been impossible to keep track of what is happening and building the plot for such a long time (IIRC the RP ran over a month with the "united plot").
