I'm at once both confused and disgusted by the recency of posts on this board.
Wow... long time since the last message. About 3 months even. So I thought I would post this pointless message.
I'm at once both confused and disgusted by the recency of posts on this board.
What the hell does that mean? You think people should never here again?
Is that it?
IS IT?!?
In other news, http://www.xs4all.nl/~fransthe/Blobby/
Also, fuck this apathy train. Somebody post a thread. I have nothing to do with my time and neither do any of you. Lets attempt some shitty role-playing, just for the hell of it.
To tell you the truth, I'm kinda over roleplaying. I'm doing the job thing, and in my spare time I might convince myself to do some coding or learning or reading or something else. Roleplaying just seems so much like fanfiction, really. I'm sure we've grown a little since our last foray into that stuff, but the whole primary school "my character is me and I need to look cool" attitude gets in the way of everything.
The "I can't hurt you unless you let me" thing might be full of symbolism, but it made the whole thing somewhat stagnant, especially in fight-scenes. Sum-to-zero characters are a nice idea, but entirely unrealistic (whatever that means in context) and it detracted from things.
At the moment I'm leaning towards some kind of tandem writing project, a chapter per turn over a week or so, but rules against getting invested in a character you created or developed, trying to influence other participants, and perhaps against reading all of the other parts of the story.
Actually, that reminds me of an idea I had a long time ago - a tandem writing project with a defined storyline, only all chapters are written at the same time by different authors, and the plot details are heavily rationed. So, for example, we might take the heavily used storyline of the hit TV show Ed, and give the first chapter writer something along the lines of "On a day like any other, our protagonist returns from his place of work (no mention of where s/he is returning to) to find an unspeakable treachery afoot, perpetrated by his most trusted", or some such rubbish. Second writer could be sent something like "Our protagonist, shocked to the heard, makes hasty preparations to leave for some period of time, so shocked are ey at this turn of events". You know, keeping it ambiguous.
Variations on the theme include writers being given one of these vague summaries written by the previous writer about their work, to ensure no restriction is placed upon the creativity of the storyline. Trouble there is that people will want to introduce twists at every step, and there will never be any termination of the storyline, because people will wonder if they're on the end of the chain or not, and the story will just mutate in middle phases forever.
Other ideas include the whole vague plot (in chapter summaries still) being disclosed to the whole group, but individual chapters still being given out individually.
I'm really quite excited about this, because it means we get a book that makes no (or little) sense in about a week, and our names would be the biggest because we made the plot up. I w0naged my space-bar in the excitement.
The jury is still out as to whether the chapter summaries go at the start of the book, the end, or at the start of each chapter. Authors in the contents, or next to their chapters?
I'm sure that stuff would sort itself out when it came to never doing it let alone publishing it, though, of course.
Ever thought of a Momento style writing project? First writer writes the last chapter, next writer writes the second to last chapter etc. I think that would be the best way.
Well, it'd have to work a little more cohesively than Rhiannon [img]smile.gif[/img]
Trouble would be figuring out when to stop, I think. I'm still inclined to say predefined order is the key, though.
Start something, I think. Or I might. Either way I'm good to participate in a project of some kind (though I'm not keen on roleplaying). Will anybody else write a chapter for this sort of thing?
PS: Feels kinda naughty to respond this soon after someone else here. Might keep it up or something.
<font size="2" face="Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif">Wasn't that the point of the roleplaying? I thought the idea was to build a story, where each character would have a unique personality because their side of the story had been written by a different person...Originally posted by Gerald Blake:
(All that stuff about writing stories instead of roleplaying)
Maybe I've been way off all along. Oh well.
As far as this 'writing a chapter each' thing goes, haven't we done that before? I refer the reader to "The Debate", arguably one of our more successful threads, for examples on predefined lengths etc.
I wuold have thought that prehaps the 'primary school' idea of your own character being untouchable might have worn off by now. From memory, my character got himself into hot water in several situations, because I allowed him to be less-than-perfect and to make mistakes.
I quite like Clarke's idea of somebody writing the last part of a story, and then letting the next person add in the preceding part. Problem is, we'd need to clearly define the personalities of each character beforehand in order for them to make sense, else we're in danger of the various writers having differing views about what each character should/would do, which is where having each person control a single character was an advantage.
Personally, I think Martin might be a useful addition to this project. Anyone know if he still reads this stuff?
As always I think our best bet is experimentation, which we tried before but too many times apathy (or maybe the real world) got in the way. Either that or somebody decided that they were too cool for this and pissed off.
I'll participate in whatever somebody else starts, but you guys seem to have the ideas, so you go first so I can see what you mean.
Christ, this place still lives? I guess it's good to see that people are actually planning to do something constructive. I'm keen.
In other news, I post here now.
EDIT: The word "here" is a link. It hardly shows up, I'm just making that clear.
<font color="#333366" size="1">[ December 22, 2005 04:44 PM: Message edited by: Chris Wesley ]</font>
Several things:
1) So that's a gaming site, is it Chris? Yea, there are some wargaming boards I post on but I doubt you'd be interested.
2) When I first opened hostboard just now I wasn't logged in. After browsing a couple of old threads I'm now logged in. I'm a bit creeped out.
3) Are we going to do something or just talk about it like we normally do?
4) Several threads have been started that I didn't even know about. There are some others that I've posted in but don't even remember... :/
It's the forum of a gaming magazine that I read. I like it a lot better than this one because people post regularly and coherently, though at times they can be real elitist assholes.
I don't know about re-starting anything here, it'll just die. I think this place works well as our own little corner of the internet. I've been going through old threads, and anything that looked remotely interesting (the western one) was started in March. I'm actually keen for a roleplay thread again, if we can get people posting regularly.
Posting Permissions
Bookmarks