(This is a thread from Mizahar's fantasy role playing forums. Why don't you register today? This message is not shown when you are logged in. Come roleplay with us, it's fun!)
The player scrapbooks forum is literally a place for writers to warm-up, brainstorm, keep little scraps of notes, or just post things to encourage themselves and each other. Each player can feel free to create their own thread - one per account - and use them accordingly.
We all know the ‘adventure’ story, right? A ragtag group has to work together, going up against some unspeakable evil and putting aside their differences to save the world/universe/animal shelter/whatever. They probably hate each other at first and get into arguments, but sooner or later they’ll work it out and come together as a team and get through whatever they need to get through and everyone gets a happy ending.
Of course, there are things that need to happen before the adventure; a plan needs to be formed, roles need to be given, the end goal needs to be perfectly clear for everyone––much like the script for a play. In theater, failure is not an option––when they say “the show must go on,” they mean it. If something goes wrong onstage, you can’t stop, apologize to the audience and then start the scene over; everyone has to know their roles perfectly in order to reach the end goal.
Let’s pretend that the actors are the adventurers, the play is the mission and the script is the plan. The audience is the enemy/obstacle that needs to be overcome, and there is no room for failure. You need practice, or at least the ability to work together towards an established goal.
However, as any experienced theater person will tell you, the best actors aren’t the ones that memorize the best. They’re the ones that improvise the best.
For every single play, you assume that something will go wrong; a prop doesn’t work right, someone says their line too early, I’ve even been in a production where the sound guy switched musical numbers around, forcing us to completely redo the scene order on the fly. You need actors that can see those unexpected hiccups, compensate for them and move the scene along anyway so the audience never knows. In an ideal cast, every actor understands that and is capable of supporting each other, no matter what happens. If a madman jumped onstage and began cursing, they would be able to adapt.
The same should be true for an adventuring crew. You cannot plan for every single possible surprise that’s going to come along, and you have to assume that someone will mess up. But when it comes down to it, the people are just as important as the plan itself––they need to be able to adapt and to support each other when things go wrong.
With that being said, it is quite possible to plan something on the go. It is possible to have no plan at all, if your people are good enough. One of the people in my theater rocked at things like this. He could pull three people together for ten minutes and roll out a gut-busting comedy skit. I’ve seen people go onstage with absolutely no idea what they’re going to do and then improv a tragedy scene. That’s because they’ve been in that position so many times, performance has been beaten into their bones. And even with a scripted play, a good cast can improvise onstage to improve the scene, if they know their castmates and audience well enough. Without group cohesion, though, this could be disastrous.
Translating that to the adventuring metaphor, it is also quite possible to go into a dangerous situation and just make stuff up, provided you have a deep enough connection with your teammates. A good team leader can gather the group, come up with a plan in two minutes and execute it seamlessly. If they have a plan already in place, some of the team might improvise a bit to support the others, but again, if they don’t have the rapport beforehand, it can be very, very bad.
There’s also a similarity between stakes. You don’t die in theater (usually) but there is an urgency to it. Once the curtain’s raised, you cannot stop. You cannot backtrack. You cannot mess up. The only option onstage is to go forward, no matter what. If your lead actor is missing and the seats are filling up, you don’t stop the show; you find someone else who can play it. One of my favorite experiences with this was going to see a community theater production of West Side Story, and when the time came for Maria to shoot the gun, the gun had somehow gotten mixed up backstage and had not reached her. In lieu of a gun, she pulled off her shoe and threw it, screaming “Poison shoe!” Her opposite reacted as if the shoe had indeed been a poisonous object and died accordingly. In her ending monologue, still not having been given a gun, she clutched the shoe and said “Would that there was enough poison in this shoe for me!” And that was how the production ended.
While the actual product might not be the same, the point I’m trying to get at is that the process is very much the same. You need a lot of the same skills for live theater as you do for an adventure. You need to be able to combine planning with improvising on the fly as needed. If you don’t like someone on your team, you need to be able to put aside differences once the mission starts.
Blah, enough with my wordvomit. Theories are easier for me to process if I write them down, so this is one of them. No more to say.
Holy cannoli with a porcupine, this pisses me off to no end. They’re my pencils, I need them to write things down, and when I lend them to you I need them back. No, it isn’t a gift, it’s a loan. I am not a pencil dispenser, I do not have infinite pencils, I am not a pencil god.
Stop. Taking. My goddamn. Pencils.
I like pencils. This is mostly because I write a lot of my ideas by hand, just to get them out in a form I can then take home and refine when I have the time. I use mechanical pencils because I find them to be more reliable and more clean than regular pencils. But sometimes they run out of lead or break or build up some residue or another and become difficult to work with, and so I carry more than one. It is my policy to carry exactly three pencils in my breast pocket at all times. Because of this, I am the go-to person for anyone in need of a pencil. I gladly loan out my pencils in good faith that the pencil will be used and returned to me. I am only given back my pencils about a quarter of the time; the rest I have to hunt down, and even so, those that borrow my pencils tend to lose them about a third of the time. I have to keep buying more pencils over and over, and I do not like it at all.
Stop taking my pencils.
End rant.
Yes, yes, I know; first world problem. There are many others suffering much worse than what I'm complaining about, and that's why I'm complaining about it here; if I complain through text, I can get it all out and I won't complain verbally.
I feel your pain, Shahar. I used to be a pencil dispenser, because everyone knew I was that kid that writes. But no longer. In fact, I have gotten so protective of my pencils that I have stopped using normal pencils and started using mechanical pencils, because they were easier to identify and keep track of.
Even though I hate them and they break constantly.
So rant on, my pencil-loving friend. I understand.
Jessor: I hear and salute you, my fellow. May your pencils always return to you.
In the mean time, y'know when you're wandering the wild yonder of the internet, and you come across something that you are bound by fate to share? Well, I was wandering around today looking for horse picture ('cause Drykas) and I came across this...
How To Disagree also known as Mizahar Is Not The Fucking Youtube Comments
I didn’t wake up this week thinking I’d get into a Youtube argument. That’s the last thing I want to do. The drama’s over. I tossed my two cents in, I thought that was that, and I got back to the big rehaul I’ve been doing throughout my life. Some of you may have seen the big explosion on Gossamer’s scrapbook. Maybe you just watched and shook your head. Maybe you were like me, and tossed up a bit of your own opinions to add to the quagmire. Maybe you’re a newer player, and you weren’t around for the Big Blowup of January 2016. If you’re the last one, then congrats! You lucked out. To keep your luck running high, you should probably ignore it and get back to exploring Mizahar. It’s a big world. Go frolick.
For me, though, things don’t usually end with a snap of a finger. Especially things that go wrong. What happened? Why did it happen? What’s the underlying root of the problem? If you’re into personality stuff, and MBTI in particular, I’m an INTJ. And we INTJs are known for an OCD-level need for closure. When something goes wrong, it festers; we want to know all the angles, deconstruct the cause, pinpoint the faulty circuit, blah blah blah. I want this shit over with. I want it gone and sent downriver. But I want to understand first. Some of you may call this beating a dead horse, or digging up an old grave, or opening a healing wound, or whatever. I know it might seem that way. I don’t really care. There are several reasons I’m posting this, the first of which is my need to tie it all up neatly before tossing it in the river. I need to sort out my thoughts, and my thoughts are always best when sorted out into words. Once I’m done, I hope this entire drama is forgotten. I hope everyone moves on; this rant is going to be me figuring out how to do just that.
There is also a second reason I’m posting this. Gossamer may have deleted it on her scrapbook, but there’s been a swell of out-of-Miz buzz on the topic, particularly regarding a very long, very wordy post made by someone with the obvious intention of making Gossamer feel bad for an executive decision she made. I don’t want to stir everything back up, so let’s just call this person Sneezy. Sneezy was very vocal about his opinion on Goss, and that was sort of the focal point that got everything rolling. Now, out of Mizahar, there’s an echo of what happened in her scrapbook. “Are you with Sneezy?” or “Are you with Gossamer?” Fingers, ranting, hurt feelings, all the angst. What fun.
My second reason for making this post is so I can point to it when people want to know where I stand. When I was in my senior year of high school, my parents occasionally invited me to church, and I occasionally went. If you’ve ever been in that situation, you know the feeling: everyone wants to interrogate you. Where do you go to school? What’s your favorite subject? Where do you want to go to college? What do you want to study? It was literally those exact questions, over and over and over from every adult I talked to. As a solution, I just wrote all the answers down on index cards so I could hand them out whenever those questions started, and we could just skip it.
This is my notecard. I don’t want to explain this a hundred times. You want to know what I think? I’ll just link you to here, and we can skip it.
Like I said, I didn’t want an argument. A bunch of people said their piece, and I was one of them. Sneezy said his thing, which was quite detailed, pulled several examples from his own experience, and made quite a few comments regarding Gossamer’s personal character, intelligence, emotional control and bunch of other stuff I don’t remember and really don’t care about. And then he had several people go “Yay Sneezy! Let me show you that I agree!”
Now, I’ve had my fair share of iffy-ness regarding Goss and how she runs things. And I’ve heard horror stories from around the Internet, both from those currently outside of and inside of the game. From all the hype, fear and my own observations, I was almost entirely certain that Sneezy’s name would be struck gray within the hour, along with those who voiced support.
But nope. Goss responded. Sent some snark and stuff back his way, and that was odd. It gave me a confidence boost, and I wrote out my own addition to the conversation. And then I got back to my life, getting my new classes organized with my job, more ambiguously fearing that Goss would strike me gray than immediately fearing it, if that makes sense. My day went quickly with all the stuff I was doing. And then, out of nervous curiosity I checked back in to see her reaction. Which was nothing at all. But everyone else’s reaction was almost surreal. Someone––let’s call it Bashful––leaped to Goss’s defense. This Bashful defender used a tone quite similar to Sneezy, in that it was derogatory, insulting and quite similar to his own, with the only difference being that it was aimed back at him. Then more people jumped up, on either side, and used the same sort of language: manipulative, ungrateful, fearmongering, emotionally uncontrolled, whatever.
It was like watching a boat floating gently towards a giant waterfall, and all the people inside it were too occupied by hitting each other with the oars to care.
I found myself growing annoyed with the entire thing. I was annoyed with Bashful for using the exact same words Sneezy used, the same tone, and acting like it was justified because it was in defense of someone. I was annoyed at Sneezy for starting the entire thing and using those words in the first place. I was annoyed at everyone else who stood up on either side. “You’re an incompetent baby for thinking like that!” “Your words are literally nothing!” “You suck!”
Weirdly, the only ones I wasn’t annoyed with were Gossamer herself, and later Bashful, who pulled out of the thing after saying their piece and just sat back and watched it happen. “Shaking their heads in amusement,” as they put it. I wouldn’t call my observation amusing so much as horrified wonder. Every hour I glanced back, and I found another response. I was repeatedly awed. Were they still going? What that another three-page opinion? How long could this possibly go? It annoyed me because it felt strongly familiar. I felt like I had seen this somewhere before. It bothered me, because I didn’t understand it, and I didn’t know where the end was.
So I went to Youtube to watch some dumb shit to give my mind a break. And then I found out exactly why this all felt so familiar.
Everyone is making a goddamn Youtube comment argument!
Mizahar is Youtube and the scrapbooks are the comments section. Or, I guess, Gossamer’s scrapbook is, specifically, because I’ve seen no mention of this in anyone else’s scrapbook.
Are you one or the other? Do you hate this one thing or love it? Because those are obviously the only two options, out there and in this particular argument. What is Gossamer? Is she Satan? Is she Chuck Norris Jesus? Are you with Sneezy or Bashful? Let me tell you why you’re wrong and therefore a basement-dwelling loser who has no friends!
Jesus Christ. I just tossed my two cents into a Youtube argument, which is about as constructive as tossing my two cents into a trash can. But I can’t just accept that Mizahar has stooped to that level. Arguments are fun. I love arguments. But “arguments” and “shouting matches” are two different things. I’m an INTJ. We love facts. We love solving things. What we don’t love is emotional justification. An argument based entirely on “you’re a bad person”––especially on the internet, when you haven’t even met that person face to face––is pointless and nothing more than annoying noise in our ears. Do you know what this person does in their off time? Have you ever sat down and had lunch with them? Have they let you lean on them? Have they leaned on you? No? Then you have no goddamn basis to say “You are a X kind of person,” good or bad.
You can still disagree. I love disagreeing with people. I do it fairly often. I have a lot of unpopular opinions, and if someone challenges me on them, I’m all up for that challenge. But when you disagree with someone, it’s over something specific. It is wholly possibly to disagree with someone and not accuse their personal character based on whether or not they agree with you. If I only liked people that shared every one of my opinions, I would hate everyone in the world, including myself. People disagree. There’s nothing wrong with it. But this whole drama was based almost entirely on people judging personalities rather than facts and actual constructive problems and/or solutions––Gossamer’s, Sneezy’s, each other’s, whatever.
Here, I want to show you something.
GOSSAMER. I THINK THIS SITE HAS PROBLEMS WITH TRANSPARENCY AND THE CIRCULATION OF INFORMATION. I DON’T THINK THE WAY YOU LET OUT OOC INFORMATION IS FAIR.
There. You see? I just said something negative to Gossamer, and I did it without calling her manipulative, unstable, demonic or whatever. I’ll even do some more.
SNEEZY. WHY DID YOU THINK IT WAS A GOOD IDEA TO MAKE GOSSAMER’S SCRAPBOOK YOUR BATTLEFIELD? NOW EVERYBODY WAS SNEEZING PUBLICLY. COULDN’T YOU HAVE JUST SENT HER A PM?
I didn’t call Sneezy anything uncouth, either, but I still disagreed with him. It’s not that hard. Heck, I’ll call myself out here; I “Sneezed” publicly, too. In retrospect, I made a bad decision. I should have sent her a PM to inform her of my opinions. But it’s all out now, and it’s been deleted, and everyone got to see our dirty laundry.
So is Gossamer the devil, because all of this happened? Is she Chuck Norris Jesus, because she didn’t strike anyone gray? These seem to be the two polarizing spots upon which someone can stand. It’s like being asked that always-favorite question, “Republican or Democrat?” And when I say “They’re both full of jackasses,” I piss off everyone.
Worst case scenario I was expecting: Gossamer got angry and hurt and deleted everything and struck us all gray who had said anything against her.
Best case scenario: Gossamer took everything everyone said under advisement from both sides.
She did neither of these things. Which I feel pretty much sums up this entire situation. Gossamer isn’t the worst person in the world. She isn’t the best person in the world. She isn’t a tyrant. She isn’t a saint. She’s… an admin. She immortalized all our comments forever, then deleted them from the public eye. Great. The rest of Mizahar can move on. I don’t need to rehash what I said. It’s between her and me now. I said what I said because I wanted her to know where I stand. She may not have responded, but she posted it in my SS thread. That means that, at the very least, she read the damned thing, and that’s all I wanted. She can go back and look at it whenever she wants. Heck, can I get a copy of them? If she gets to see them forever, I want to be able to see them forever. I won’t back down from my opinions, and from how she’s handled this situation, I wouldn’t expect anything less from her, either.
One thing I think is for certain, and is something she said in response: Gossamer is, by far, the lesser of many evils. In the comparative field of roleplay admins, she is definitely one of the better ones. You don’t like her? I challenge you to find somewhere better. Mizahar is structured almost perfectly for a roleplay. The point system gives you rewards for playing. The story gives you items. It’s great.
Let me tell you a story. Before I joined Mizahar, I was kicked off another roleplay game. It was what made me stumble upon it in the first place. It was a freeform forum, no common overarching story, populated almost exclusively by tweenage girls. We liked wolves and dragons and girl-power and all that jazz. The admin in particular was supposedly writing a story, and one of her favorite things to do was to pluck the main character out of her personal story and use it as her main character in the roleplays. She would always play a half-elf, with the power to talk to animals and the ability to summon magical star-phoenixes if things got too tight for her.
Well, one day I wanted to make a wolf roleplay. A REALISTIC wolf roleplay. I made the background and the rules and I posted it, specifically saying that I wanted it to be realistic, and the admin joined. The character she made was a female wolf that had gone gone against the alpha and killed the beta or some shit and had been exiled under threat of death. And I told her “No. This is a realistic wolf roleplay. Real wolf packs don’t function like that. Here’s X and X evidence on how it actually works in the wild.” She pushed to make her character the way she wanted, and then kicked me off for “suppressing her creative freedom,” despite the fact that she didn’t have to join my roleplay and that I was not violating any of the rules of the forum, and simply enforcing my own rules that I had put down at the very beginning!
Gossamer is the lesser of many, many evils. Gossamer, unlike many roleplayers, has the ability to use logic. She may not do it to your liking, but she does it. Mizahar is hers. There are plenty of things I think she does wrong and could be improved upon, but I won’t go into that here. Ultimately, that is between me and her, and it doesn’t need to be public. She knows my opinions now, and I’m glad for that. She may be abrasive. You don’t have to like her. Plenty of people don’t. You control who you like and don’t like. But you don’t control Mizahar. She does. That’s a constraint that plenty of people hate. I don’t like all of it, but I definitely like most of it. What she has created here is definitely worth following the rules for. She’s the admin. She calls the shots. I don’t like all of the shots, but I like Shahar, and I like the Drykas, and I like this big wide world and I like filling it up with pretty words and nice things to read. I like reading other people’s nice things. You might not. That’s your choice. You can leave, if that’s what you want. I wouldn’t blame you. I can understand why you want to. We all have different thresholds.
But writing all this out has helped me to realize my thoughts. Gossamer said in her scrapbook that she hoped the whole drama was cathartic. Well, at least on my part, yes. It was quite cathartic. Thanks for letting everything run itself out, Goss. Thanks for reading my thoughts about you and putting it in my SS. I think I admire you for the way you wrapped it all up. Now I understand it all, and I can tie it up in a neat little bow and toss it into the river. I can go back to my writing, because that’s what Mizahar is supposed to be for. You go to Youtube for the videos, not the comments.
And to whatever person actually made it to the end of my ridiculously long rant, good for you. You get a reward. Let’s see two psychopaths explain how to deal with differing opinions!
Yeah, those of you that have been wondering where I've gone; I've been chest-deep in finals and I thought it would be a good idea to start a Camp NaNo project this month. I definitely won't make 50k words on it, but I don't have nothing done, so... eh? Finals are almost over, though, so I should be back in full swing by summer––just in time to arrive in Lhavit.
Read the title. Read it again. Burn it into your memory.
Now please stop putting your sword on your back. For realsies.
Swords don’t go on your back. They really don’t. I know Hollywood and video games say otherwise, but they’re wrong. Don’t do it. Yes, it looks really cool to draw your sword from a back scabbard, but it’s also difficult, dangerous and pointless. Don’t do it.
Generally, if you have a sword, you will have to use it at some point. If you have to use it, chances are you’ll want your sword in your hand as swiftly as possible. Unless you’re in a formal duel or something, danger is probably coming at you very quickly and very violently.
This is a huge epidemic of misinformation. Mizahar certainly isn’t the only place I’ve seen it––not by a long shot––but it’s the only place I feel like I can make a difference. So here it is. Please, please stop putting your swords on your back. It’s a slow and dangerous place to draw from. The mere act of reaching back to draw it (presumably with your fencing arm) exposes you to oncoming attackers. With a sword that’s longer than your arm, it’s basically impossible to draw, since all you can do is draw up and your arm only stretches so far.
A back scabbard is a nice place to carry your sword, if you’re taking a long trip. But if you put it there and you somehow get into a fight, you will not be able to draw it in any sort of hurry.
by Colt on February 12th, 2015, 12:10 am 
