Ladies and gentlemen, I apologize in advance for this. It is a blatant sign of immaturity on my part, and you should all feel free to add me to your ignore list.
Chapino... For the love of Strunk and White READ WHAT YOU ARE WRITING, THEN HIT THE "POST BUTTON", NOT THE OTHER WAY AROUND.
You just misspelled a THREE LETTER WORD. Three letters. We are NOT talking Masters-level English here. This is stuff I learned not to do in the third grade. Nobody's perfect, and I fuck things up every now and then, but you do not even appear to be making an active EFFORT to correct even the most basic and obvious errors you make. You have a "preview post" function. You have an "edit post" function. You SHOULD have access to a spellchecking program of some sort. You have your own set of Mark-One Eyeballs that either God or a puddle of assorted proteins struck by lightning gave you. USE THEM.
This is not a chat room. Speed is not important here. Quality is. You know, "quality, not quantity". It takes very little time to, if not run what you write through a spellchecker, at least READ OVER IT before posting it. This is a very big pet peeve of mine, the "Well, I don't really care about the quality of what I write so much as how much I write" school of thought. Have some respect for your own work, otherwise nobody else is going to.
After reading Chapino's post, but prior to reading yours, I fealt as if I was in a warehouse filled with the cacaphony of thousands of chalkboards being scratched, and an equal number of kitchen forks being dragged across glass plates.
For a minute, I thought I needed therapy. I read your post and the stress was gone. The madness has passed. Thank you.
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'But the discord of Melkor rose in uproar and contended with it, and again there was a war of sound more violent than before, until many of the Ainur were dismayed and sang no longer, and Melkor had the mastery.'
I find love interests to be overly difficult to implement well. I would love to play in a game at some point that uses love interests well (actually builds a relationship, inserts complications other than "X has been kidnapped", etc.).
My only real experience with this has been in a Vampire LARP, where I was "complimented" at the end of the game having done a very good job at being a creepy stalker. I had mixed feelings about that compliment.
When I recently asked SJohn about this in chat, he commented that it was very similar to any other genre, in that there were certain genre conventions which could be applied as a framework to build from. Unfortunately, he did not get around to elaborating. SJohn: care to give it a go?
. . . . . . . -- Eric
PS -- For those who must insult Chapino, or give him grammar advice, or whatever, would you PLEASE do it by private message?
It all depends on what type of game you’re playing of course – every game can be spiced up by having love interests, but in some genres that is all they should be: ‘interests’. As an example, the delightful interplay between Han Solo and Princess Leia in ‘Empire’ is brilliant, but they do have a surface only relationship, a sort of ‘kiss under a hail of blaster shots’ type of affair. This is great for Star Wars and a lot of heroic play. No problem.
Then you get other games that need to go deeper to make them worthwhile. It could be Vampire or Unknown Armies, or one of many other games, the difference is some games/play styles demand that you drop the term love interest, and instead just have a character, fully fledged, that the player character just happens to be falling in love with – complete with all the complications this brings, both in terms of character psychology and emotion – not necessarily in terms of him/her getting kidnapped this week.
It takes a mature group though, and a need to almost divorce your game from mechanistic ‘flow diagram plotting’ and to a method of story construction where these relationships, and the players driving them, are the plot.
Of course, this is what I think, I’m sure just as many people think its bollocks
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I'd just like to point out that the plural of a word does not require an apostrophe. Even the plural of an acronym.
Therefore, the plural of RPG is not RPG's, but RPGs. The plural of PC is PCs. I know it can make some people's nerves shriek with the urge to put one in there, but do yourself a favour and leave it out.
Also, "it's" always means "it is". Except for the case of possessive pronouns, like "Bob's Hat", the apostrophe is almost always there because of a contraction. If you're talking about an unnamed thing and the hat that it owns, you wouldn't use "it's hat" because that means "it is hat". "Its hat" is correct.
RPG books are full of these errors, so it's no wonder many gamers continue to use them.
Cheers,
Cam
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I would think, after years online (as many of you have had), you'd be used to people who don't look over their posts. The "its/it's" and "to/too" switches are common problems. People KNOW the difference sometimes, but they still type the wrong one in. Yet those posts make sense and people respond to them and life goes on.
I vote for a moratorium on complaints about Chapino's spelling and grammar. Different people have eloquently explained the reasons for writing well, and Chapino has listened in an open-minded, good-natured way. Someone who doesn't spell well or write sophisticated sentences will be thought less of, but that's the nature of language usage.
Now let's get back to RPGs please.
brendan
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