For me the dice write the story in rpg. The player points them to be sure, yet the dice write the missteps, coincidences and all the other factors mentioned above. If one wants to write a store then my feeling is they should sit down and write it. If one wants to see a character develop on their own the dice should be employed.
Needless to say that is not the approach of most of the present players on PS. Yet my feeling is that it is the natural, and desired, approach of most players that have at least
visited PS. The former have remained to some degree and the others move on.
Even development of the project works against all the suggestions on this thread to date. Game mechanics do not support the RP concept but baffle and confuse it by their mere existence.
The fact that there is no consensus on RP speaks volumes. Dice define things. They remove the ego of the player and allow the character to be presented with results that are not player manufactured but are what the life of the character presents to it.
My play would, perhaps, fall under the category of
fringe RPer here on PS. Some players have communicated who their characters are well to me through game play and there is an enjoyment with interacting with them.
As an RPG GM it is hard for me to imagine anything other than disagreements if outcomes are left to player consensus in a general sense. There are no doubt pockets of players who through prolonged interaction have a means of doing so. This, again, is why it is likely that most players come and then go from PS; never being able to find that clique of their own.
This all begs the question of my remaining on PS. It passes the time, and has a community that seems comfortable to me. It is my practice to neither seek nor push away RP; yet effort is made to remain on that
fringe allow others to
do their thing. My ooc desc explaining my desire for dice has been removed over the last year after realizing that it just lead to my character being totally ignored.
You have to wonder though, why develop all the game mechanics if the stats and dice mean nothing to the players? That time could have been spent on things like GMs being able to freeze time, allow turn sequences, other things probably not even aware to me that would be helpful to aid this allusive thing called RP. Yet they were not. Instead hours and hours of coding have transpired to develop game mechanics that have little use to RP as explained in this thread and throughout the forum.
Someone had gotten things wrong. It is not clear to me if it is the, now, small group of professed RPers or the developers who have things amiss.
Ok.. my advice Kaerli is to come up with a good dice system to use here in PS with the aid of MyPlane. Try to draw to that system players like myself and the countless others who come here thinking RP is RPG only to find that is not the case. You may be surprised how many more there are that desire the use of dice than those that don't. That is not to mean the regular players presently on PS yet those that come and instead of going again would remain if they could find such a system of play in existence here.
