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Inbreeding; A discussion on how to prevent it and what we can do about it now
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Topic Started: Apr 3 2014, 12:42 PM (191 Views)
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Modrid Brennan
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Apr 3 2014, 12:42 PM
Post #1
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Loving Dead Girl
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As suggested, I've taken the liberty to post a topic in which we all can come together, form opinions and offer up suggestions on how to combat some issues regarding activity drop on this site.
One main concern is: Inbreeding.
Inbreeding is a term I use to describe a lack of variety or option in other members, as such, one member may have several characters in play, and due to the small nature of our group, eventually you must interact with yourself through two characters. Example: Brinley and Modrid being cousins, which was a 'big' inbreeding issue when Dinah, Brinley's wife, was engaged in a personal/professional merger of sorts with Modrid's master, and included an Engagement Party; Dinah and Marie being boss/employee respectively; Marie and Jarek being room mates.
To carry on with the suggestion of E - this problem can be avoided by allowing more members, which we can do at E. Naturally, there will be smaller circles and cliques - that's completely unavoidable - but at least we have the option to explore and expand.
We could advertise for this site here at LA but we do run the risk of being reported. We've avoided that thus far by flying pretty low. This has contributed to our dwindle - as I've expressed in our previous thread regarding Elliquoy, I like fresh flowing water, pretty much. Stagnant water doesn't do it for me. I understand that this is not how everyone operates, so, we're opening this up to discussion.
Should we advertise and risk ToS violations? Should we change our site to become non-adult? We're already non-adult in the cbox anyways. Or is there something else we can do to address this issue?
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Modrid Brennan: Everyone's Favourite Brand of Poison Plotnotes updated frequently
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Dinah May Anderson
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Apr 3 2014, 01:16 PM
Post #2
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A pretty complex question that I am tempted to suggest we split into "advertising" and "going non-adult", but for me it all boils down to writing and roleplaying.
While some of the writing about the more explicit scenes can be fun I never considered it necessary to the character development to write out those moments. It can add to the characters, but I believe the very same things can be expressed without getting too explicit.
Sexual encounters are certainly a part of normal human life - and therefore should not be excluded from the lives of our characters - but how we go about dealing with it and writing about it doesn't have to mean we have to go the whole nine yards.
I joined EoM to roleplay, not to write "steamy stuff", so to speak. That was never my raison d`etre, so I could very well live with opening up the forum a bit more and maybe keeping some stuff behind very closed doors. Just mentioning sex or violence should not get us banned.
That a larger group of people would present a certain advantage I will not deny, even if I have gotten quite used to the small group we had here.
So, given the choice between no advertising at all and changing the tone of the forum somehwat I would opt for the latter, even if it might be a bit of work to decide what should be "locked away" before we undertake such a move.
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Modrid Brennan
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Apr 3 2014, 04:22 PM
Post #3
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Loving Dead Girl
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So your suggestion is just to go right to non-adult RP. I admit this isn't my favourite decision at all. EOM was adult, and LA was supposed to be a copy of that. I understand that there has been some distance put between LA and EOM and LA is now strictly considered (in my perception) as "Dinah's". Even though we contribute as members not just to the story or plot, but also to the layouts. It has largely attempted to be a democracy (even though we all have bad days).
It's interesting to note that Cassandra is a character that is reliant on sex for food - it's an integral part of her character - just how she flippantly views it, for instance - and you'd consider wiping all that away - or segregating it to something off-site (or in a locked board?).
It also disappoints me to hear that you'd rather lock us away than invite people in. Could you clarify a bit more about this?
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Modrid Brennan: Everyone's Favourite Brand of Poison Plotnotes updated frequently
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Dinah May Anderson
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Apr 4 2014, 12:02 AM
Post #4
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- Modrid Brennan
- Apr 3 2014, 04:22 PM
It also disappoints me to hear that you'd rather lock us away than invite people in. Could you clarify a bit more about this? With "locked away" I meant that we could deal with certain topics in password protected boards, just as I locked certain topics in a sub-board of Dinah's mansion that I didn't want Minu/Lucian to see so it would be a surprise for the player what came next.
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It's interesting to note that Cassandra is a character that is reliant on sex for food - it's an integral part of her character - just how she flippantly views it, for instance - and you'd consider wiping all that away - or segregating it to something off-site (or in a locked board?).
I would not want to wipe that away. It's certainly part of who Cassandra is, but it's only part of her.
The last few days I have been reading through a few things I had written ahead of the actual plots last summer and what I found where possible posts/narratives that deal far more with relationships than the sexual aspects of those relationships. That gave me pause to consider how much "actual sex" we have here on the forum, and compared to all the other things we write here it doesn't strike me as such a big part. It's not like we are writing the equivalent of hardcore porn here to begin with. We talk about it openly, but we don't describe it in detail all that often if you compare it to the number of posts we have that deal with romance or relationship or the personal problems of our characters. For example, consider how much you and Dev have written about the Mod/Dev relationship without anything X-rated.
Yes, we had those posts with some of our characters and I don't regret writing those scenes. It can be fun. But I am under the impression that it's only a small part of the fun, if I compare the number of posts where it happens to how much other writing we have done here. That - of course - is just a personal, subjective impression, as I did not go through all posts, classify them in some way, and then compared numbers. But my general impression is that a whole lot of what we do is not actually that "adult", which lead me to the conclusion that building a "firewall", so to speak between the truly explicit topics and the rest of the forum could be feasible, should we decide to advertise.
Another option would be to create a new member group, something like a "probationary member" status and have a forum section where we can RP with them and find out how mature they are, before we allow them to see the sections where we have already written the more adult posts. Moving a few posts to other sections afterward is a relatively easy task that can be done in a few minutes, should someone want to stay and the community considers him/her mature enough to deal with what's happened here. Edit:An alternative to a "probationary member" status could be to "unlock" parts of the forum for members who have a certain number of posts. The effect would be the same, but it might look better and encourage people to post if it were handled by "posting rank" than "status groups". I admit it's only a slight difference, but both models could be feasible.
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Dinah May Anderson
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Apr 4 2014, 03:06 AM
Post #5
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Advertising and attracting new members aside there is still the topic of inbreeding.
I think that is a matter of what one considers important about the roleplaying/writing. I think no one here has written more narratives than you, essentially interacting with yourself and I was under the impression you did that not because you lacked writing partners for those threads, but because you wanted to write those pieces and post them somewhere. Having two or more of my characters interact with each other strikes me as not so different from that so I don't see it as that much of a problem.
I am also not certain if a larger forum can make all that much difference. My personal experience with forum RPGs is, that after a while it all boils down to a hard core (no pun intended) of dedicated people while others .... drift around at the fringe, so to speak. That leaves me wondering if any move to E will not leave people in the very same position we are now in, some months, or a year, down the road, i.e. if any move would really solve the problem, instead of just postponing it rearing it's head again.
Also I do not see the inbreeding as a completely negative thing. Having only a few characters interact with each other can help form relationships between the characters. Look at TV shows like Dallas or Dynasty, or maybe Glee or Gossip Girl. It's usually the same characters, but their interactions make the shows interesting precisely because they know each other. There are some other characters thrown into the mix here and there, but all in all it's the same core group of characters, and yet people tune in once a week to watch what happens to them. Heck, I could probably even throw in MLP as an example, given the number of core characters.
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Dinah May Anderson
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Apr 10 2014, 04:57 AM
Post #6
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It may make absolutely no difference at all at this point, but I would like to put a few thoughts down in writing that have gone through my head over the last few days.
One plus I see with the "inbreeding" is that it also breeds familiarity. When some writers play several characters (like me for example) or write a lot of NPCs (like Dev), the somewhat limited range of players might help to have everyone be familiar with all the characters in play, i.e. you don't have to search for information or look up biographies to figure out who you are dealing with. You know who everyone is. I see that as a positive thing, as we are good enough writers to pretend our characters don't know some of those things, but I believe as players we are all curious and want to know what's going on. The latter is easier within a small group.
That said, I have to admit that the core group here has grown too small. And I have to admit that that may be, at least in part, my fault. We did have what I think off as a good phase a while back, for example when Izzy interacted with Dev, Modrid, and Cassandra. While it seems pretty much an academic question these days, I think it wouldn't take all that many people to open that door again. It doesn't need ten or twelve active players to create a variety of possible interactions.
I tried some math, based on the old question of how many handshakes there will be in a party, given a certain number of people, based on the assumption that (on average) everyone runs two characters.
- With 3 players (i.e. 6 characters) there are 15 different possible character combinations.
- With 4 players (i.e. 8 characters) the number jumps to 28.
- With 5 players (i.e. 10 characters) we are at 45 possibilites.
- With 6 players (i.e. 12 characters) it jumps up further to 66 possible character combinations.
Those numbers do include interactions between characters written by the same person, i.e. essentially narratives, but many of us have written narratives before and had our own PCs and/or NPCs interact with one another anyway. Nevertheless, it doesn't take all that many players to open up a world of possibilities, if scenarios can be created were different characters have a chance to interact and people stay on-board.
It may be too late for LA to get to that point again, but I still wanted to get those thoughts off my chest, and perhaps it can help you all with any endevours on "E" to have a small reminder that size doesn't always matter.
EDIT: I would like to add an addendum here, which is that the whole nature of the setup can actually limit the possibilities for interaction, as slaves are supposed to not run around by themselves and have all sorts of interactions without their master at hand. The whole setting has a "limiter" built into it that restricts some characters from interacting freely with others. I think that could be overcome if slaves are treated less as property, and more as commodities. That is, instead of thinking X owns Y, more thinking along the line of Modrid needs a favour from Master A who asks for Jarek's services for a certain time in return, or Master B looking for a cute Neko to date so he borrows Joss from Cassandra and gives her another slave in return, and so on. Not only would treating slaves more like coins than heirlooms allow slaves to interact with more masters, it would also necessitate masters to interact with each other to set up those arrangements. It would be a certain departure from the current setting in some ways, but nothing that could not be handled.
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Modrid Brennan
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Apr 10 2014, 12:36 PM
Post #7
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Loving Dead Girl
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I like your edit. I really like masters who are masters. That's kind of why I made Brinley -- all the slaves always said "you're not like the other masters" and fell in love with their owners. I wanted to be that "other" master.
Human currency is an idea I support. (Don't take that our of context, please).
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Modrid Brennan: Everyone's Favourite Brand of Poison Plotnotes updated frequently
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Dinah May Anderson
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Apr 10 2014, 01:13 PM
Post #8
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- Modrid Brennan
- Apr 10 2014, 12:36 PM
I like your edit. I really like masters who are masters. That's kind of why I made Brinley -- all the slaves always said "you're not like the other masters" and fell in love with their owners. I wanted to be that "other" master.
Human currency is an idea I support. (Don't take that our of context, please). Given the context of this forum it would be difficult to take it out off context. 
And I would not suggest to take slaves out of steady relationships, just to make certain we understand each other. That is up to the players in question, and if someone likes to play the role of "steady slave" they could certainly play it, but I think it would not hurt to have more "temp slaves", even if they are completely owned by someone. It could open up more possibilities and storylines. Perhaps a slave falls in love with a master and then is lend to someone else fore a while, only to discover they like that master better and wants to stay there, instead of going back to the master they only thought they loved, or perhaps a slave is handed back to his original master and falls in love with him because he knows he will be treated a lot better there. It would make for a far more interesting environment than we have now and allow for more character development of the slaves.
I am actually surprised I didn't think of this far, far earlier but I guess in many ways I pretty much "sleepwalked" from the old EoM to the new EoM to LA.
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