Spicing up your rp

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Sun, 02/23/2014 - 15:37

In this forum we discuss ways players spice up their role play and plot lines.

No matter how fun a game is, it will obviously get old if you preform the same actions over and over again. So in this forum I thought it might be a good idea to discuss ways players have made their story telling experience different and new and keeping it fresh. To begin I'll post a few ideas myself, for example, making a forum post about spicing things up in game play.

Plot Twists

The first is obviously plot twists. Everyone does something different and people are generally surprised by different things. The simplest form of plot twist is just taking a scenario and flipping it on its head. Saving some helpless looking wood lander's from a couple vermin only to find out the vermin were peaceful travelers being robbed by the woodlander's is a quick example. Everyone has their own style for throwing in plot twists, for me I look at a situation and think, 'What would surprise ME?" then toss it in.

Toughen up your npcs

Npc's are generally considered cannon fodder. You make them up on the spot, sometimes you don't even need to describe them past, "A guard enters the room." They generally die just about as soon as they appear. If npcs had hit points it would be somewhere around the number 1.

If you want to add some flair though you could add some details to your npcs just like you add detail to your scenery. The fox coming at you with a sword now becomes a red fox missing a part of his left ear, wearing a kilt and leather strap battle harness that leaves his pot belly exposed comes snarling at you with a broadsword with Celtic designs running down the center of the blood gutter.

And you, as the player against Lance the skirmisher, instead of cutting down this npc right off the bat engage in a sword fight with him for a few posts. It adds a sense of drama and turns a simple battle into a no holds bared brawl of life and death struggle with an equally matched opponent.

You can even spoof different personalities and accents for your npcs to differentiate them. I've actually made a few alts from npcs this way who somehow managed to survive their contact with players.

Dice Rolls

It's no secret I like dice rolling in games like this. The actual command is +roll-dice 1d20. 1 is the number of dice being rolled d20 is the type. Generally in stories I will toss events that could succede or fail and I suggest the player roll against my own dice roll, if they meet or beat it they succeed. If they prefer not to roll I don't force them. I've also played other games where the difference between the numbers rollled determines the extent of your success or failure.

Lance the skirmisher fox strikes at your head with his sword. he rolls a five you roll a four, you spoof yourself getting a cut across the arm.

You counter the fox with your own blade, roll a 6 against his dice roll of 1. you cut the fox open like a water melon...

Mostly I like it because it adds the possibility of failure and you can apply it to more than just combat. You can use it to determine how many enemies appear, if the player talks his way out of jail, if he appraises the armor correctly etc etc.

Make a new alt

I'm an altaholic my self with 20 active alts on this server alone. When i get tired I make up a new alt, sometimes with a different personality than what I usually play, sometimes at least. I even wrote down qualities on a peice of paper and used a dice app to select which qualities to add. Wilks, Xial, Dale are examples of randomly made alts.

Run an oocly plot

Some times you just need a break from the plot lines going on. So...do just that. Run a plot that doesn't effect the story line. It can be comical like tossing your characters into a story book adventure, or REDWALL in SPACE! to something more serious like exploring where characters would be if Redwall were burned to the ground by vermin two hundred years ago.

Or you might just run an npc somewhere else for other players :)

Wow, i went on for a while. Its the forums turn now ^^ how about it player? What do you like to do to add some spice to your games. Feel free to talk about things I didn't mention, or expand on the things I did.

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