Style guide?

Colors for dialog is a nice touch but the problem can be if people personalize their display it might be invisible or hard to read. But I do like the color especially if it is the character's color (if you all are interested in adding that touch to your character description).

3rd person is probably best for the forum entries but I don't really care if its 1stnor 3rd.

Colors? How do you do colors???

It's supposed to be 'guide' not 'guild', isn't it? That can be changed by admin.

[ font color="blue"]text to be colored[ /font] will also work to change colors, just take out the spaces between bracket and first letter.

I think I might change to 1st person past tense. I'm wandering a bit in terms of voice. Actually quite a bit. The only odd thing is, who am I telling the story to?


I also think I might put my internal thoughts inside a spoiler bubble. Not sure on that one.

You're telling the story to *us*, here beyond the fourth wall. Sure, your character might never actually say any of this to anyone, but it's a fiction that makes for a good story flow. Who is Harry Dresden talking to? What about Merlin? Sure, there *might* be someone, in their far future, whom they would tell the story to. There also might not. We who read their lives through the story of their narrative voice understand just fine. You can also assume your character's voice has attitude- for instance, they think we're an idiot, or we're someone who might benefit from their wisdom, or they simply want to stall us to get that last blow in... "The Innkeeper's Song" by Peter S. Beagle has some really good examples of character voice, and not all of them are talking to someone specific. Each chapter is told from the point of view of one character, as if they met you in an Inn and were explaining what happened/ what was happening.

Sounds like a plan

Thanks for the spoiler advice.

I try to keep the posts frequent and exciting, but obviously, I can't always make that happen. Sometimes the player doesn't leave me much to work with, so nothing inspires me to add a new twist, i.e. character sitting in his bar, sitting in a bath, trying to make change with gems for the local currency; these don't give me much, and I can't always have nasty surprises jumping out all the time otherwise they won't be surprises! Like reading an issue of X-men a be fun, and the twist or cliffhanger at the end is great when you buy the monthly issue, then try buying the Marvel digital subscription service and could read all the 1000s of X-related stuff they have online. Read 20 issues of X-men each month, and you will find that the constant cliffhangers and surprises get to be boring.

Some posts need to be set-up or part of a conversation to allow me (NPCs, that is) to learn of the characters and plan their responses. Also, you players often latch onto things I don't expect then I need to rewrite stuff to shoehorn it in or take ideas and elements from players who dropped out and fit them into the game. Ex. Edmund was planned fr stuff that if it had gone through would probably be involving most of the PCs right now; same with Natalia, Jaxiam, and Vincent, maybe Bella too if she dared venture closer to Amber. I really didn't expect the ride on the ship would have been more that a few dozen posts of the PCs getting to know each other and having the usual pissing contests; pirates and all of that scene was a surprise and so many of you taking such an interest in Deiga was also unexpected so I had to embellish to place a little. If only the expected Eivor and Kat got off the ship and the rest of yas continued on we'd probably be hip deep in Kasaba shenanigans by now.

The truth is I am guilty of ignoring and actively guffawing at the rulebook's advice to start the game with a big serious event to draw the players together at the start. Didn't help that two of the offered ideas were: a) have a giant dragon fly over and swallow the castle in one gulp then fly away. What they hell was Wuj on? b) all PCs are summoned to the castle, imprisoned, Caine comes to talk to them, a giant monster jumps in and swallows Caine whole, the real Caine walks in and kills the monster. No thanks; that's stupid too. I'd rather have the PCs doing their own thing and then get drawn into the greater plot but it has been going to slow so I have stepped up the noise in Deiga and with Calvera.

tl;dr running these games are hard, I'm not the greatest at it, and it can be tough inventing new stuff for 5-7 threads on most days of the week.

still tl;dr Dm is a weenie!

Feel free to use this thread to complain about things you don't like in the game, or complain about things you do like in the game if that's your bag. If I am really bad at some aspect of the game, letting me know about it can only make things better for all of us.