Your on fire! Some of you, anyway.
Quit mulling over the reasons why people left and think of the reasons why people would come.- Focus on that which you want.▬ Do not target the person, target the topic.▬ If someone misses your reasoning, throw it more carefully or acknowledge that they do not want to catch it.▬ A game may have any total ratio of action and calm but still give any player their own chosen ratio.- Action does not automatically mean violence and destruction.▬ It is true that cool stuff alone does not a story make, but do you want a story that isn't cool?▬ When a story loses characters, it does not die, it transforms.▬ If your art is work, are you having fun?- Art might require work, but it should not be work.▬ The goal of a story is to teach you something; to trap the mind to its own thinking, and through it, grow.
I just now realized the blocking all the smileys might have been counter productive. I am ignoring this realization.
The reason I didn't like one of the role-plays posted was because everything going on was following a script they planned out beforehand; the character being attacked, the attacker, and the defenders all knew about it and agreed to do it. That kind of thing you can do on a forum, and I often do. In a game where you can have exactly defined mechanics allows things to break away from a man-made script. Especially when the game is programmed procedurally (random seeds!), and the complexity is high enough that you can't every be completely sure what will happen.
Such as how in Dwarf Fortress you can be wearing full plate of the strongest, lightest metal and have the highest skills possible, but you can still be killed by that one stray quarrel...or get curb-stomped by children when your knocked down.
