[Ranylyn]

As someone who's been roleplaying for approximately half their life, (Age 13, coming up on 27 in August) I've gotta say, I understand where both sides are coming from. Despite having not been there, I've heard about the event and read every post in this thread in detail. Both sides have several equally valid points. In particular...


- In the defense of GMs, players do unfortunately have a knack of attempting to do things above and beyond what they should be capable of. For a hilarious example, check out ProJared's "The Ballista Bat" video. In a more structured campaign, with a fixed number of players, such encounters can be balanced to be difficult but feasible. However, in a game like this, where people can come and go, it's understandably impossible to do properly. Especially when you have a lot of people, having one idiot doing something catastrophically bad (such as the instance of someone trying to shoot the bomb; that could have been the end of everyone assembled!)

- In the defense of the players, every GM ever needs to be aware of one rule: EXPECT players to pull this kind of stupid crap. In a good way AND in a bad way. As stated by Memelord McGee, players ARE selfish by nature. Between needing to act in a way that accurately represents IC motivations, and the OOC desire to continue to build the character further and wanting to avoid particularly crippling consequences, the vast majority of roleplay scenarios revolve around people acting entirely in their own best interests, such as a healer prioritizing themselves over a more useful ally, or whatnot.


Having been around for SOME of Chaos's events (but not all) I can honestly say that the biggest issue seems to be more with the fact that the events generally (not always, obviously - and I didn't participate in the attempts to strike at the Necromancer directly) take place at the busiest spots in the game, such as the arena. This naturally means more traffic, which unfortunately means a gigantic clusterfuck of special little snowflakes being supreme derplords and drowning out the intelligent ones. This, by extention, naturally leads to a LOT of "well, I can't let THAT do anything, that's honestly just stupid."


So what are my suggestions to alleviate the issues addressed by both sides?

1) Inspired directly by rogue skills in D&D, I'd like to propose: Roleplay-specific stats. A new interface with points to allocate to things like "climb walls" and "safe landing." You can choose to roll against this stat directly, with the end result being that it just shows other players nearby if it was a pass or a fail. This helps by giving each character things they're specifically good at, and allows a GM to clearly see that yes, they're actually doing things within their skillset instead of attempting ass-pulls.

2) To the GMs themselves, and I do mean all of them and am not singling any one out, I'm giving this advice: If you DO want to have a more structured event full of issues to be worked through, it really can't be done in a public area like this, purely due to the nature of players. From my experience, the best way to have something like this would be in smaller rooms, one puzzle at a time. As an example, a group of wanted criminals are hiding out in a player house and have set up numerous traps to punish those who would come after them, and seeing the guards would make them flee before the puzzles could be solved, so a group of adventurers are sent in, instead.


Just my two cents. Err... two dollars and twenty-two cents, more like.