What I Learned From the SM RPG

[Merc]

Heh, I was thinking of 3rd ed, myself. My only experience with 2nd was Weekly D&D, and yeah, the only time I can recall the stat being used was me making a Crowd Working check with Elaine... ^_^;

[Anastasia]

Heh, I was thinking of 3rd ed, myself. My only experience with 2nd was Weekly D&D, and yeah, the only time I can recall the stat being used was me making a Crowd Working check with Elaine... ^_^;

Yeeeeep.

2nd edition charisma=DUMPDUMPDUMP. I mean, hell, I'd convert it to Comliness and insist you all play girls that wanted t have the highest COM as possible. <_<

Kinda like Redux and Apperance? >_>

[Dracos]

Charisma isn't absolutely a dump stat, since there's lots of cases where it's not so bad to use as a stat, but it does come up far less in use than any other stat, definitely, even with a good GM attempting to get some use out of it. The main problem is that Charisma tends to deal with a lot of things GMs would prefer to relegate to the PCs ability to roleplay though.

Charisma has gotten a decent amount of usage in both Weekly D&D and Bloody Fields though.

I've played in a couple where it tends to 'dictate out' reactions (How it's supposed to) and it tends to get quite annoying.  You often get a setup which is:
Guys with low charisma: Don't waste  your time opening your mouth.  You can't to anything.  Ever.  Even with a 10-11 in the stat.  Double pain if you're working in standard D&D rolling where it's almost guarenteed you have a negative in your dumpstat and secondary dumpstat.
Guys with high charisma: Don't waste your time paying attention, 2-3 words will instantly charm everyone pretty much.  Occassionally the GM will ask for a charisma roll, which with your 16-20, you will always  pass.

Gets old very quick I find.  Effectively, it discourages everyone who didn't put up in that usually from wanting to role play over dungeon crawl not just because character wise it's on the bad foot, but basically the rules often reward 'trying it' with 'ha ha' until cha-king talks.

Notably, we abused this kind of setup in Avatars, but thankfully it's not a huge pain thusfar as the game is a dungeon crawl, so there's not vast chunks of ineffectiveness for low cha characters, as there would be about every other session in the standard/generic "Town-Dungeon-Town" model that lots of games adhere to.

Dracos

[Dracos]

Heh, I was thinking of 3rd ed, myself. My only experience with 2nd was Weekly D&D, and yeah, the only time I can recall the stat being used was me making a Crowd Working check with Elaine... ^_^;

Yeeeeep.

2nd edition charisma=DUMPDUMPDUMP. I mean, hell, I'd convert it to Comliness and insist you all play girls that wanted t have the highest COM as possible. <_<

Kinda like Redux and Apperance? >_>

Yeah, that gets silly too.  I bet it's particularly awkward with everyone 'supposing' to be cute/beautiful and it also being a main stat you can put into that isn't boosting your power level *bets, without knowing!*

Dracos

[Anastasia]

It's actually just playing on the girl's vanity to soak up some points. <_< It works out pretty well overall; in a freaking Sailor Moon game it's natural for the PCs to wanna be cute.

[Dracos]

I'd agree, though I've seen a number of 'wah, folks are too high appearance' comments flying over the last month.

Dracos

[Merc]

An appearance of 6 isn't -that- high! =p

[Halbarad]

BACK ON TOPIC! *whipcracks*

Seriously. There are plenty of other topics here in which to discuss D&D.

Okay! For a slightly different perspective, what I learned as a player from the Sailor Moon RPG.

I'm tackling this mostly from the perspective of being both the 'canon' and the de facto leader of the group. As pretty much anyone who's played an RP will note, usually among the players there does emerge one person who ends up driving the group's direction. In my case, I pretty much took that role both by role played and by the way I played it.

For those who are unfamiliar, I took the role of Usagi in the game, and specifically one who stepped up and took to her job - in defiance of most anime canon points against such a thing. So I wound up in the leadership role for most of the game, arguably.

Anyway, without further ado. What I learned about RPing, and about being a leader, from the SM RPG.

1) Involve everyone. As stated, a lot of the first Sailor Moon game was based around PC-PC interactions, rather than everything being dependent on the GM. As a PC, though, and especially one in a leadership role, do your best to maintain some kind of connection with as many other PCs as you can. I didn't get this perfectly - I could definitely have used improvement on connecting with Makoto, and Herb is a whole other issue - but keeping my own character involved with a wide variety of characters kept the RP fresh for me, and I'd hope it helped to keep everyone involved in the game. As Bjorn said, with aggressive players it IS very easy to have the quieter ones left in the dust, especially in an IRC-based game running in near realtime.

2) Share the limelight. This is less of an issue with non fan-based RPGs, but it's one to take note of in any. Do your best to step AWAY from the center of the action at times and let other people have their moment to shine. Most people tend to be pretty competitive at heart, and so it can be tempting to run into a scene and say 'okay, I can make this all better!' That doesn't mean you always should. I won't claim to have been particularly GRACEFUL in learning that lesson at times, but it is an important one, especially for a character in a leadership role. You're usually the leader because you DO have the confidence to step up and say "I can do that!", but that isn't to say that it's always a good idea to do so. Playing back into the first point, use that leadership role to encourage others to step in and handle situations that they're suited to, or to support them if they're handling it on their own without any intervention from you at all.

3) Limit yourself, don't always try to exploit every ability you have to the maximum. Much more important in a roleplay-centric game, less so in a combat-centric one. Due to changes over the course of the game, I could easily have pressed Usagi into being a battle goddess capable of flattening entire battlefields with a slight effort, using powerful spells unrelated to the canon character, or able to read thoughts at a glance, all by pushing forward traits that either existed or were added on to the character in a reasonable fashion. Most of those traits, though, were kept fairly limited, and not all by Dune imposing restrictions on those abilities. Some things, like teleportation or telepathy, WERE major concerns of his at points, and in respect for that I did my best to limit their use. This doesn't mean you can't grow the character, but be reasonable with it, and....

4) Stay in character. This might seem a bit odd coming from me, as I took Usagi in some very OOC directions over the course of the game. Most of those directions, however, were dictated by events, and kept in the same line of thinking as the character as best I could interpret her. Again, in a non fan-based RPG this will be less of an issue as what's IC for your character will be solely defined by you, but once you've made a call about what your character's motivations are, stick to it. This isn't to say that events will take the character in directions you never expected (Usagi and Rei in particular BOTH had to deal with this, on many occasions), but even as they change try to keep an element of their original character present. Usagi by the end of the game was radically different from any Usagi ever seen in the canon SM series, but not unrecognizable as being the same character, I think. Others can correct me on that, as my perceptions are admittedly biased. >_>

Where possible, 5) Create your own plot. One theme that saw a HUGE amount of mileage in the first Sailor Moon game was the reconstruction of the Moon Kingdom - starting at the end of the second arc, it really ended up setting a tone and a purpose to a lot of the minor events of the remainder of the game. However, the idea was entirely created by the players - Panda and I came up with the idea in discussions over some of the events of the second arc, and when presented to Dune, he basically gave us free license to do with it as we willed - and the results were very, very good. Now, this isn't going to be possible in a lot of RPGs, depending on the setting and/or how it plays, but taking steps and working with the GM to develop your own lines, with or without the other players, will help a lot - both by taking some of the load of the plot off the GM's shoulders, and by giving everyone involved a new set of directions in which they can choose to grow.

[Anastasia]

1) Involve everyone. As stated, a lot of the first Sailor Moon game was based around PC-PC interactions, rather than everything being dependent on the GM. As a PC, though, and especially one in a leadership role, do your best to maintain some kind of connection with as many other PCs as you can. I didn't get this perfectly - I could definitely have used improvement on connecting with Makoto, and Herb is a whole other issue - but keeping my own character involved with a wide variety of characters kept the RP fresh for me, and I'd hope it helped to keep everyone involved in the game. As Bjorn said, with aggressive players it IS very easy to have the quieter ones left in the dust, especially in an IRC-based game running in near realtime.

True enough. This applies to every PC - trying to connect with your fellow PCs does nothing but good. It may fail, certainly, but improving interparty relationships strengthens and enrichens the game. This is a broad edict, not just something for the party leader to do.

3) Limit yourself, don't always try to exploit every ability you have to the maximum. Much more important in a roleplay-centric game, less so in a combat-centric one. Due to changes over the course of the game, I could easily have pressed Usagi into being a battle goddess capable of flattening entire battlefields with a slight effort, using powerful spells unrelated to the canon character, or able to read thoughts at a glance, all by pushing forward traits that either existed or were added on to the character in a reasonable fashion. Most of those traits, though, were kept fairly limited, and not all by Dune imposing restrictions on those abilities. Some things, like teleportation or telepathy, WERE major concerns of his at points, and in respect for that I did my best to limit their use. This doesn't mean you can't grow the character, but be reasonable with it, and....

Yeah. In an RP centric game keep this in mind, but it's not nearly so worthwhile in a combat game. I'd not even consider it in D and D, for example.

[Dracos]

Re: Involve everyone

I always have trouble inspiring that these days.  I can pretty much guarentee that no matter who is in a room together, if the npc(s) leaves the room, then conversation will suddenly move to a grinding halt, usually until the aggressive player of the moment gets frustrated or I poke and get a 'uh...no we don't have anything to say to each other' and just timeskip them on.

I suspect it probably has more to do with character ownership, though a lot of it gets blamed on the forum.  When a character is really owned, folks want to use them to speak.  Mmm, meh.

Dracos