How Not To Get Ignored
From TCWiki
How Not To Get Ignored
Don't worry about getting ignored. We've all been playing for months or even years, and many of us have characters that are very well developed, so taht it's hard to make them react to a situation in any way other than the way that's natural to them. That means if you come up to them in a way that reacting wouldn't be natural, they won't. It's not your fault. Just try another approach. For instance, yelling "look out, fire!" around Ash (who is fireproof) is going to have no effect. She'll walk into the fire and get nice and toasty. Yelling "Look out, avalanche!" will set her off at a run. Not your fault if fire is your first choice to try to spook her. It's not necessarily something you'd know at first. Just try again with something or someone else. It's nothing personal. Sometimes people are too wrapped up in a particular exchange to make room, especially if they're building up Dramatic Tension.
That said, it's impolite to butt into dramatic conflicts. If Erden and Vavrek are having some fancy gun battle, ninja-poofing behind one of them and stabbing them is considered rude. Try to jump in during moments of lower drama, or between spikes of drama. For instance, just after the fight, they find you crouched behind the desk, needing evac.
It's all about the hook. The goal of an introductory post or a thread joining shouldn't be, "What's interesting to me," but "What's interesting to me and someone else?" Creative ideas should have holes in them that need filling in, but also have structure on which to hang something. In my time looking at how poeple post, I've seen two patterns of behavior. Some people always take one, some always the other, and most fall between.
-Plotters: Jubai's an example of a plotter. Plotters have directions they want to take their characters, scenes they want to have happen, goals they want to accomplish. A good plotter will leave room in the plot for others to contribute not just their characters to fill in a slot, but also plans to reach a goal, new sub-goals, new complications or enemies. A good plotter will also be able to react to things that screw up plans. If you want a plotter to interact with you, you need to see what their plot is about, get your character involved in it, and give them a motivation to push forward with it. You need to make it clear that you're willing to stick around for the plot, because nothing frustrates a plotter more than losing all the other players halfway through. Plotters want you to work with their symbolic structure rather than impose a new one.
-Reacters: Jabes is an example of a reacter. Reacters need something to react to. They don't want a seamless whole that they can't add anything to, but they do need to know what the situation is, what they're needed for, and what is a useful reaction versus not. You'll often hear them asking, "what can I do". If you want to get reacters in your plot, make it interesting, make it clear what roles there are to be filled, and get their attention in authorspace via PMs or AIM. OFten they need to be told when it's their turn as well. ONce a rhythm develops, reactors will happily go back and forth with slightly shorter than average posts, so long as there is something to react to. A good reactor will try to detect the themes of a plot and introduce variations on them without working towards a specific goal. Reactors want you to create a symbolic structure rather than try to find one from them.
The advice below will work differently for different poster types.
1. Set up your character(s) where other characters physically already are.
This is pretty self explanatory. It's fine if you show your character arriving at the airport, or perhaps swimming across the sea, but in the end, you can't play with others if you don't have anyone else to play with. Suffice it to say, watching a person go about their ordinary day alone is not particularly interesting; interaction makes up the heart of the game, and that's why it's fun. Oftentimes large numbers of characters will converge in one place. This is a good place to get synched up with a writing group. Anna Miller's, Category:Faction HQs, and the OCSB have been popular places to gather a group in the past.
An example of being near people well:
(Previous post ending with) "And I think this would look great on you, Casey. Fish will be all over you," Ash said.
(New player could add:) It was just then that another patron looked up, eyes widened, and pointed. "You're the infamous Kimura Aiko. Stop! This is a citizen's arrest!" The infamous arsonist was off with a shot, and the patron right after her, directly into the toy aisle.
What works about this: It clearly identifies both characters as being in the same place at the same time. It sets up a motivation between old character and new to interact-- Ash has a very good reason to run away, not wanting jail time, and the new character thinks he or she is doing a good deed. Further it sets up a theme for the next poster-- Ash's author-- to work with, namely the toy aisle, allowing lots of gags involving toys and chases reminsicent of home alone.
A bad example of being near people:
"And I think this would look great on you, Casey. Fish will be all over you," Ash said.
(New player adds:)
I sat listening to the conversation wondering who this Fish was.
What doesn't work about this: Sure they're in the same place, but why should Ash notice or care about this person overhearing her. If she is observant enough to notice that she's being eavesdropped on, her natural reaction is to move away, resulting in no character interaction, and the author basically being ignored.
2. Introduce a character, not a world
A common mistake of new players is to create not just a character, but a whole set of characters, a faction, an organization, or whatever so that they can work within it with familiarity and not worry about contradicting other people. The problem is that you've just taken the problem you have-- integrating yourself into a world-- and posed it to anyone who wants to interact with you. Furthermore, since the average new player lasts about five posts, they don't have a good reason to learn your world, while you have a good reason to learn theirs-- senior players don't go away much. This is not a good thing to do.
That's not to say you have to be part of something existent. But you do have to have sufficient connections to the existing world that you do most of your gameplay there, and not in stuff you create. You can always bring in more detail later. Another way to work is to take a minor reference of someone else and expand it. For instance I made Ash a member of the Instigators, a cult written by author Psieye. By expanding his idea, I was forced to interact with his work and the characters already tied to it, bringing me into the game world rather than keeping me in my own world.
Another thing players will do is try to change the world that already exists in a major way on their introduction. This is also a poor idea because people were using that world. Making a splash is good. It's important to do it in a way that encourages interaction, rather than is just a publicity stunt.
Good Example:
Arella's introduction was GREAT for illustrating this. She came with a plot hook-- my family was killed by vampires-- that she had made up, but at the same time, she was playing entirely in the existing game world. By the end of her first post she was already in FGTL headquarters, a clearly established place filled with PCs. Though her parents have backstory, it will only be revealed by asking her, rather than a ten page dissertation at the beginning.
Bad Example:
Neko's re-appearance in the thread disregarded this principle fairly heavily. He reintroduced an entire faction, didn't give it ties to anything but N1NJ4 (which is inactive at the moment), and introduce five different NPCs in as many posts. Because none of his posts have interacted with the outside world, the outside world has pretty much ignored his faction and NPCs, resulting in no plots to play with.
Final note: The amount of attention people pay to you is inversely proportional to the number of characters you control. It doesn't matter how senior you are. The more people you write, the more forgettable they are. Period. I speak as someone who wrote an entire faction myself. Even I don't remember who most of them are anymore. I now only write one character, and she's got the most plot hook of anyone in the game. --BozoCat
3. Create an interesting catch that makes players want to seek you/interact with you.
This is perhaps the most important and the most difficult skill to avoid being ignored, and also the most fundamental. You want to play someone interesting. Someone with storyline potential, someone who creates interesting or funny situations. Remember, MegaTokyo is a very varied place, and we have our bits of drama, but we also have comedy and slices of life, too. The extreme and the mundane mesh in new and exciting ways, and it's something fun to play on. For instance, a character with a fun and strange quirk (such as hiccuping frogs whenever you or someone around you says a certain word) is more likely to see early interaction and people paying attention to you than someone who's just really good at blowing stuff up.
3A. Make your character distinctive.
If you have a specific and very interesting mannerism, people are very likely to write your character for you, and that's one of the chief ways of getting involved in a plot.
Conversely, borrowing other people's characters will be necessary to make posts that are longer than five lines. When you know who you're working with, get to know the characters. Read their wiki pages, past actions, and ask their authors how they work so you can write them in your posts without rendering them out of character. If you borrow other people's characters well, they'll be more likely to return the favor.
When considering what background your character is derived from in terms of being either a conflict-centered character (a brawler, a leader, etc.), or a drama-centered character (someone who interacts with the plot specifically outside of armed or unarmed physical conflict), it is important to note that the world of the Clans, while subject to a good deal of combat between factions and ideologies, is not driven solely by these conflicts and is able to attribute most of it's prose to character interaction and development. No new player is required to possess a character that is combat-capable if they do not wish it, and any drama characters are just as apt to be fun to write for as any combat character. This is a matter of personal preference that we urge you to consider if it means that it will force a resolution between having genuine fun playing and feeling obligated to kick indiscriminate amounts of ass for the sheer sake of posterity. This is expanded upon below in section 4. -Erden
4. If you're going to make a brawler-type character, make him/her interesting in other ways.
There's a lot of powerful people in MegaTokyo. It may seem to a newcomer that the game is about fighting. But think about it: this is a systemless game, where anyone can write any set of powers. Players don't like their PCs to die, so most fights are against NPCs who always lose. Any victory in combat is thus inherently pointless.
It is very very very important to have a character for whom fighting is not the most important part of them. If you spend half your time thinking about combat or victory when you design your character, you need to seriously rethink how you make them if you want to get people to interact with you.
There are some threads that are combat-heavy. Jumping into one of these with someone who's a brawler could make sense. But there hasn't been one of those threads in nearly a year and a half (the Zars Children zombie attack), and even in a combat thread, generally the enemies tend not to get enough player respect to make for interesting tactical situations.
Example of a balanced character's statement of purpose:
"I am a student of Erika-fu. Ever since I saw Erika break that fanboy's arm, I've believed in women's self defense, and I hate seeing women get pushed around. Some day I'll be as strong as Erika, and I'll tell her how glad I am for what her example showed me."
This works well because there's a purpose to the strength that's fairly specific (not just fighting evil in general but a specific kind), and a future character interaction (with Erika) dictated by the philosophy.
This is a bad character's statement of purpose.
"I am a master of kendo, drunken boxing aikido, jujitsu, tae-kwan-do, and a dead shot with pistols. I heard all the most powerful people come to MegaTokyo to fight and I want to learn from them to become more powerful."
This works badly because there's no purpose to the power. It's just about the power. And since anyone can make up any set of powers, frankly no one wants to read about how cool any one character's powers are. Use 'em in a cool fight, sure, that's fun to read, but jsut talking about them is booooring and that's all this character will end up doing 80% of the time due to a lack of purpose.
5. Cliche is both a weakness and a strength
MegaTokyo the comic is all about cliche and stereotype, and the Clans aren't much different. Many of the characters in the game are built on a specific archetype. The heroic police officer. The badass ninja. The creepy servant of death. The sad girl in snow. The jaded mercenary. These cliches are a powerful way to quickly convey your character in a few swift brushstrokes. That leaves you time to flesh them out and make them 3D.
BUT don't rely on the cliches for everything, or your character will come off sounding paper thin and the other players won't realize you have some good ideas under that veneer of cliche. So when you make your badass secret agent, give him a non-badass quirk, such as being mortally afraid of cats, and 'show it immediately'. Character depth that isn't shown in a post is invisible to all the other players, no matter how much you know. IF you write a first post that's all "I'm a ninja", then no one will know that you're actually merely a dragon pretending to be a ninja until you reveal it.
Probably the most abused cliches have been the jaded soldier and the martial arts master. If you're planning on using either of those, make sure you have more to them than just that, and that the more is clearly visible. We have at least three of each of those characters in the game already.
To summarise, make interesting and unique characters and put them in a place for interesting and unique interactions with others. Take into account the play style of the specific people you'd like to start interacting with, and aim for them. Don't be discouraged if they're full or busy, but move on to another group and target them specifically instead. That's really the best way to get noticed, to be noticeable. Not to do insane things, or to sow chaos and destruction, or to be an unstoppable force, but just to be you. Or your character. Or characters. Being genuine is the best way to become a true part of the game.
