Kevin
Rising Star
First EXODUS Pro Heavyweight Champion
rrrrrrrrrrrrrrragh
Posts: 128
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Post by Kevin on Feb 11, 2013 1:47:26 GMT -6
Alignment in D&D should never mean you end up saying "I have to do X task because Y reasoning." It should be a tool to use, not handcuffs. I have always, as a DM and a player, felt it should be treated as "I get to do X task because of Y reasoning." Writing something that other people will want to read is all about making your character feel internally consistent. Despite doing some things in character as Omar this show that were sympathetic and could be very face-like actions(Visiting a sick family member, flashbacks about why he was like he was), I wanted to do them to show why Omar is the man he is. Face and heel are only tools to be used to help make your character feel more like a real person, with consistent, thoughtful motivations, goals and directions.
But the thing with Rizzo was that he was classified as a face, but none of his jokes were funny to me, and it wasn't even silly enough to get the majority of a crowd on his side. Now, as a heel, he would have made sense to me. But in writing his match, how do you get that kind of sense of humor across and make the crowd make sense?
The number one thing I like to harp on is consistency. The crowd's reaction must make sense, the character's motivation must make sense, the goals must make sense, the personality must make sense... If everything makes sense, and nothing happens "because that's the way it is", but everything happens for THIS very good reason and THAT very good reason... Then everything makes sense and the reader can just follow along without having to make any logic-leaps.
PErfect example: In Twilight, everybody wants to fuck the holy hell out of Bella. Why? Because. That's why. There's no REASON for it, just because that was the way it was.
And I love to bullshit about theory and gamecrafting of our dumbshit hobby. Don't feel like I'm trying to be defensive or lecture-y.
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Deleted
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Post by Deleted on Feb 11, 2013 2:46:28 GMT -6
talking shop is fun, and I agree with plenty of what you're saying here. I actually read Twilight as a bit of literary archaeology to show me what not to do, and because I wanted to figure out why the fuck it'd turned into this huge thing. and I got from it essentially the same things Reasoning with Vampires and TheOatmeal got from it. essentially, the main character is only cursorily described physically (what little she's described is exactly Meyer, she got the idea from "a dream" and I think we know what kind it was). her hobbies and personality traits are kept generic and not delved into in a patent example of what it looks like to break the writing rule of Don't Tell Us, Show Us. she is self-conscious, clumsy, and feels plain-- every adolescent girl in the world can empathize with that on some level and want to be the center of that kind of attention. and how many people in their 30s and beyond right now feel like we haven't lived up to the world's definition of "grown-up" yet? that's it. everybody wants to fuck Bella because she's a self-insert of Stephenie Meyer who's been genericized so that the target-audience reader can project onto her. it's part who-cares-about-logic and part passive-aggressive ego ( Stephenie Bella says she is awkward and clumsy and awful, yet she Stephenie orchestrates everyone fluttering around her in horny adoration). it's not a real work of fiction, it's just a disjointed Mormon sexual fantasy slapped on some paper. I have a special kind of love and respect for minimalist authors who can still tell a impactful story (Vonnegut, Palahniuk), but this is just terrible writing.
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Deleted
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Post by Deleted on Feb 11, 2013 8:00:22 GMT -6
Considering Judge's Preference is another 10 points, you lose a lot of points there as well. I'm sorry, what? There's a subjective category called "judge's preference"? How in the hell is that even fair to grade on? If I write about rape, and you've been raped before, you might be inclined to give a zero while "other random Judge A" will give a 10 because he's all pro-rape. That's…….yeah. That's unfair. That's really about as sketchy as "donating money to the site" for extra points on your RP grade. And yes, I've been in a place where that was standard practice too. Seriously. That is NOT a level playing field in any way/shape/form. When I was running Unleashed, which was straight-up story writing in a fight club atmosphere, we had no trash talk. We had no relevance, and an "enjoyability" score was part of the overall mark, albeit smaller ration than we're talking here (was also lumped into creativity as well as overall story progression). But when relevance and presentation and appealing to someone's PERSONAL and COMPLETELY SUBJECTIVE TASTES all this other rubric is being tossed down, we're talking about really stifling the creative process. How are you supposed to know what's going to be pleasing to all the judges to aim for that winning score? The number one thing I like to harp on is consistency. The crowd's reaction must make sense, the character's motivation must make sense, the goals must make sense, the personality must make sense... If everything makes sense, and nothing happens "because that's the way it is", but everything happens for THIS very good reason and THAT very good reason... Then everything makes sense and the reader can just follow along without having to make any logic-leaps. That's all well and good to say, but at the end of the day, Kevin… what you did in your rps for Omar was given to me as an example of "the best way to sell a match as a heel", when that's really just pushing everyone into the "this is how you do it because you're a heel" box. There are varying shades of gray in D&D alignments, depending on the choices and the branching results you make, based on your actual sway (lawful, evil, chaotic), etc. And there should be varying ways to bring forth a character. Personally, I didn't see anything wrong with Rizzo's rps. I see something wrong with him being pigeonholed as a "face" more than anything. "Asshole tweener" might have been better fitting, but he didn't do anything wrong. He just did a poor representation of his character on his bio sheet. If you want to harp consistency, there wasn't any real deviation between Rizzo's two rps. He was CONSISTENT, even though he wasn't spectacular. Taking a giant shit all over the guy when he asked for genuine feedback was kinda douchey. Really. PErfect example: In Twilight, everybody wants to fuck the holy hell out of Bella. Why? Because. That's why. There's no REASON for it, just because that was the way it was. Please don't use Twilight as a reference for anything even remotely resembling a point on how people should be writing.
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Kevin
Rising Star
First EXODUS Pro Heavyweight Champion
rrrrrrrrrrrrrrragh
Posts: 128
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Post by Kevin on Feb 11, 2013 11:15:20 GMT -6
If you want to harp consistency, there wasn't any real deviation between Rizzo's two rps. He was CONSISTENT, even though he wasn't spectacular. Taking a giant shit all over the guy when he asked for genuine feedback was kinda douchey. Really. Ah, but you seem to have completely skipped the gigantic part of my feedback where I said that we haven't seen any reason WHY Rizzo behaves the way he does, because we barely know him, because he skipped the establishing phase and was acting as if we all understood Rizzo's character from the start. You can be consistent all you want, but if you haven't spent the time to tell us who a person is and why we should care, we won't. Twilight was a reference for how people should not be writing. I'm trying not to be a dick in this response, but... Did you even read the stuff I posted in this thread? It seems like you just got all hostile based on skimming the thread or something.
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Kevin
Rising Star
First EXODUS Pro Heavyweight Champion
rrrrrrrrrrrrrrragh
Posts: 128
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Post by Kevin on Feb 11, 2013 13:26:18 GMT -6
Rizzo came asking for feedback, guidance at what to do and what would work better. I gave him advice based on what I personally thought would work better. I was going out of my way to NOT be rude, in fact. I've had this same conversation with Rizzo before, back when he applied to DEFIANCE, and I was way more diplomatic this time than I was in DEFIANCE.
It was his second outing, and we haven't found out who Rizzo is, why we should root for him, or any other basic character building stuff. In your roleplay for the tag gauntlet, you took the time to establish exactly what the personalities of the two characters were, who their supporting cast was, why they mattered and where they were going. That's exactly the kind of thing Rizzo needed to do.
Now, let's stop talking about Twilight, cuz you totally missed the point I was trying to make. (Which is that in Twilight, we're just supposed to assume that Bella is Kim Kardashian-level hot and alluring for some reason, but we never see why these two hunky supernatural guys wouldn't just go "Meh." and move on to some other piece of jailbait when Bella started acting weird.)
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