I wanted to take a minute to talk about pressure and what the moderators and your fellow roleplayers expect from your writing and your characters. More than one person has chatted with me recently about the pressures they feel to perform at a certain level when playing this game. And my main motivation for writing this is not at all for those players who've chatted with me about this over the years in one form or another (and it's been quite a few). It's really for those players who haven't but might be thinking it, or those who might just be lurking around and tempted to join but never have. We have some impressively talented writers on this game and it can be easy to start thinking along the lines of "well, I'm not as good as them, why bother?" or similar thoughts. I wanted to just take a minute to say that what we expect is to have fun. That's the core of it.
Sure, we like most of the words in the post to be spelled correctly, paragraphs broken up to make the thing easier to read and a reasonable understanding of what punctuation to use, but that's essentially it. No one is expecting any of you to crank out novella-length posts every time you go up to bat for one of your characters. I have seen RPGs that have lengthy, minimum-word counts and "X number of posts per week" rules and most of those games die out because people can't keep up. There have to be allowances for quickie posts and slack off weeks and all those other things that life throws at us that we need to adapt to and deal with so that we can enjoy our various hobbies when we do have down time
I like to think this RPG has a very reasonable balance between expectations for posting and acknowledging that we all have our own outside lives and commitments and flowing right along with them. So with that said, just take this as a friendly reminder to use that system. When this game was in its much earlier days, a great deal of the postings were a lot shorter than what you typically see in the game today. And it trucked right along and has always done so. I don't want to knock longer posts at all. I use them very often. But I do it (most of the time) just because I have a good amount of plot ground I want to cover, not because I feel I need to keep up with the quality of the rest of you guys. The game will survive if I do a Shockwave quickie every once in a while, just to keep a scene moving. The same is true for the rest of your characters. The game will survive. Nothing is guaranteed of course, but probability is on our side. The RPG has had high periods of activity and low periods and high membership periods and low periods and it has survived them all. The most damaging thing to this RPG--in my view--are those craptastic board crashes that happened back in the day. We, as players, have no control over that (though I'm pretty sure the board has backups more firmly in place now than it did then, too). We have much
more control over the amount of pressure we put on ourselves to perform at a certain level. Reduce it.
Cut characters, swap characters, post shorter stuff. Whatever works. Everybody's muse draws fuel to write differently.
One thing that this hobby has taught me is that no game lasts forever. And you will miss the good ones after they're gone. I want to keep exploring this universe and these characters with you guys, whether you play one character or a dozen or more. Because at the end of the day--it's fun. The world is rough enough. Draw enjoyment from wherever you can.
So that's all I had on my mind at the moment. Try to reduce the pressure you might be putting on yourself where you can.
Keep it fun
