#i am one hundred percent going to turn into a dice dragon

[anonymous-harpy]

ONE OF THEM CAME

[heartslogos]

newfragile yellows [417]

Bull wakes up because Ellana wakes up. He’s not sure why Ellana woke up, because his internal clock is telling him that it’s nowhere close to morning. As in the morning people wake up to and accept as a good time to start the day - like, eight or nine. It’s maybe around just past midnight.

“What?” Bull says, listening to Ellana breathe a she recovers from the initial jolt of waking up so abruptly. “What’s wrong?”

“I had a nightmare,” Ellana says and then she drags one of his arms over her and wedges herself as far into his chest and side as she can. “It was terrible. You guys made me tank as a cleric. What kind of shitty party are you guys that you make me tank as a cleric.”

Bull closes his eye again and does his best to let himself unmoor himself from being wake and go back to sleep.

“And I kept rolling fails and - I don’t know why but Herah was our DM and she kept raising the difficulty level each time and literally all of you were holding your turn for me to do something? But I could do literally nothing.”

“I don’t know how I didn’t know you were a fucking nerd,” Bull says. “I have no idea how you pulled that one over me for years. I slept in your apartment half the time. You had a one bedroom apartment the size of our current living room. And somehow you managed to hide all evidence that you were a the biggest gamer geek ever. Now we have an entire game room and I have to fight you for space.”

“The only reason you ever caught me was because I let you and sometimes I regret it because I think I could’ve kept you in the dark for at least another year,” Ellana says. “And you were just so cute when you were being all nice and trying to play it cool while you were obviously bouncing around the inside of your own head like a little boy in a candy store every time I gave the idea of casual interest in any reference you made. How could I deny either of us that? You liked teaching me Dungeons and Dragons basics.”

“If I had known that you’d been a player since forever we could’ve gotten into the good shit.”

“You’d have been defensive, baby.”

She’s not wrong, but Bull can’t think of a good response right now. He can’t think a lot of things right now.

“Can we talk about this later?”

“Listen, the nightmare gets worse and I need to talk about it because I’m scared that if I go back to sleep it’ll pick up where it left off.”

“Didn’t you train yourself to lucid dream?”

“Babe.”

“You had several successive fails with an increasing challenge rating.”

“And then my brother came in and he pointed at me and called me a false idol.”

Bull opens his eyes and lifts his head for that, “What?”

“Yeah. And this is where things get really weird,” Ellana says, staring up at the ceiling. “Everyone at the table started chanting false idol over and over and Herah told me to roll my dice and I did and of course it was another failure and then everyone started to…quiz me? On the handbook? And various other stuff? I think you guys were trying to gamer gate me or something. It was so bizarre and I was just staring at you all because it was so weird and then the police came.”

“Someone called the police on you in your dream?”

“Yeah and it just - it just kept getting weirder and weirder. Like people came out to stare at me and point and I was walking to the station in the middle of the street with the squad car slowly driving behind me and this hoard of people following and staring and chanting. I am one hundred percent certain that there’s subtext and shit to that but right now I’m terrified that I’ll go back to sleep and I’ll be tied to a stake with people about to set me on fire.”

“Did you, by any chance, eat something when I wasn’t looking? Right before we went to sleep?”

“I had a glass of milk before we went to sleep but that’s because your curry was really strong.”

“Yeah, it’d been in the fridge for three days with all the chili seeds marinating in it. It’s probably the milk. I told you to stop eating things before going to sleep. It messes you up every time. Actually, I’m surprised you didn’t get the shits or something from that milk. Dairy, babe. Really?”

“Love me my calcium.”

Ellana hugs his arm tighter to her chest. He hears her nervous swallow in the dark.

“Okay. You can go back to sleep now. I’m good.”

“You sure?”

“Yeah.” Ellana nods. “I’ll go to sleep after you.”

“Maybe you should go to sleep first and I’ll watch you for a bit to make sure you’re okay.”

“That sounds creepy, babe.”

“Whatever I’ve got to do to make sure you’re alright, babe. Also? Your dream? Kind of freaked me out, too. Why do you always get these weird dreams?”

“I don’t know. I wish we could trade. You always get the nice dreams, the really vague ones that you can sum up in one sentence or less.”

“I’d rather we didn’t trade and we both just had vague dreams that aren’t terrifying mobs.”

“There must be thermodynamic balance, Bull. I have cold feet, you have warm everything. I wake up early and make you coffee and you make us eggs. I can make a really good seven layer dip but you can find the best chips to eat it with. I’m impossible to stop, you’re impossible to move. I’m good at word searches and you’re good at sudoku.”

“That’s cute. Go to sleep.”

“You think we could time it that we fall asleep at the same time?”

“I’m good. I’m not that good.”

[guildwarsstartrekskyrim]

RP and the IC and OOC issues

I’ve been rping for a while now.  Table top D&D (Skills and Powers, Combat and Tactics, still have the pdfs of the books, loved the paladin handbook), Neverwinter Nights persistent world servers, City of Heroes, Champions Online, a smattering of Star Trek Online, and of course Guild Wars 1 and Guild Wars 2.

Throughout that time, I’ve seen a lot of great stories told (not my game session, but there was a group that killed a dragon by building a trap around it while it was sleeping… and they all started the campaign at level 1), incredible role play (actual riveting stuff that keeps you glued to the point you sometimes forget you’ve got a part to play), amazing dice rolls (a friend managed to save not just himself but our entire party with six amazing Nat 20s in a row), awe inspiring heroics (in an RP dungeon in CoX, everyone save for the blaster and controller faceplant and they manage to take down the boss) , but I’ve also seen a lot of really questionable stuff as well.

The RP itself wasn’t what was questionable, but the OOC rules that came into play before, after and during the RP.

Which is why there’s certain rp ideas that I won’t put my own characters through.  Some are from past events, others are because I’m not one hundred percent comfortable with doing something.

An example of the latter came with the Lake Doric rp and the attack on Camp Dam that was done by the White Mantle.  I had Flintlock there, and when the explosion happened, she was completely oblivious that her left arm was severely injured.  I later had her finally realize it and her wounds were tended to though she was somewhat delirious and at one point got up and had to be herded back to her bed thanks to Adri.  I thought about actually having Flintlock lose her arm after that incident.  But I hesitated because I had no idea how to go about acting out the trauma of losing a limb.  That was more a personal choice than anything, but I still considered the options.  The important thing was, the choice was mine and mine alone.

I’ve often been asked by some if I’d have any of my characters kidnapped or captured or even tortured.  I’m a straight up NO to the last, and I wibble on the others because I’ve been burned by communities that did that and then I went out and played the character just to level up.  Some explaining; in a past MMO I played, one of my characters was kidnapped.  They were also a long way from level cap and I wanted to play them because I liked the powerset.  I was informed by a member of the community that playing a character who was kidnapped was frown upon.  I told them it was entirely OOC and I just wanted to play with the powerset of a character I liked.  Besides, the kidnapping plot had run aground for a while and it had been four weeks in real time already.  As it turned out, the kidnap plot took EIGHT FUCKIN’ MONTHS! and I was informed that it took that long because I kept OOCly leveling my character.

I was younger and a lot more naive at the time, so now my thought process with regard to that kind of plot is a resounding NO!  I don’t begrudge anyone who goes with it, by no means.  But personally, I’ve been burned and it left a bad taste in my mouth.

Here’s the thing; if a person really likes their character’s skill set and likes playing that character, then they shouldn’t be told not to play that character.  If they want to take that character on a tour of Tyria or Millennium City or the Alpha Quadrant or Paragon (OOPS! Can’t do that one anymore) then they shouldn’t be stopped.  There’s times when a person wants to try out new skill sets, weapons, elite specs and so on.  They have that right, even if their character is sidelined in an rp story or event.  People have the right to play a character’s skill set if they enjoy it.

There is, of course, the argument that one could just make a new character with the same skill set.  But if I was into making cookie cutter characters I’d do that with all of them at the beginning.  However, one of the reasons I love GW2 is that you can have eight thieves all with the same weapons but have completely different tactics.  One could be all about stealth, another could be about DPS, and so on.  But once you play a character for a while with the skill set you’ve worked hard at achieving you still like to play it.

I’m well aware that if my character is disabled in some way, whether it be due to a mending limb or if they happen to be kidnapped or some other such thing, I wouldn’t be ICly running around the world with that character.  But I am able to suspend that for the time being so I can run the event chain in the Silverwastes on a character I know can do it.  Or complete dailies with a character I love playing.

I’ve run into those people who role play and run dungeons but simply refuse to run a dungeon with someone who’s character is out of action, even if it’s OOC.  We’d need the support or the tanking or the DPS, but that one person has a problem because one week ago they were kidnapped by the Orion Syndicate, or by Malta Operatives, or put into the hospital by Grond out in the desert. We’ve probably all run into “that guy”.

The point being, I’m not one to sideline playing my characters and running them through dungeons or completing dailies or joining task forces just because they happen to be sidelined in an rp.