Role-play Suggestion

[Super Buu]

10 Years Later is always good for a boost in activity, but just that: a boost. It fades pretty quickly because it doesn't address the underlying issue. Neither does planetary conquest, or a new set of dragonballs. It comes down to the "So what?" factor.

So RagBlack captures Namek. So what? They get more zeni? They get more TP? Oh le noes. I care sooo much.

XT got a huge super mega-carrier. So what? It's never used in sagas. It never has an impact ever. It's a worse zeni sink than an epic mount because at least an epic mount had its uses.

18 collects the space dragonballs. So what? It's not like she's going to wish for the destruction of the universe or anything. She probably won't do something debilitating to anyone IC with them.

What does get people writing is inspiration, not any of these nebulous "incentives." That works for an MMORPG, but it doesn't work for a labor of love like writing. You have to WANT to write about these things, but more importantly, you have to care.

The last few lines of this are kind of why I suggested those things. Right now we don't care because our characters can't really affect the world, and a lot of the time our characters seem kind of .... pointless, or trivial. Nobody wants to be the Yamcha looking on as the fate of the universe is decided by people 10 times your power (that's true for PCs too, but I don't think there's a very big problem there. In this case I'm talking about NPCs).

The reason we joined was to have our characters mean something in a larger context, as opposed to just writing by ourselves and having our characters be the super-strongest in a universe with only one writer.

I have disagree that nobody would care about getting extra TP. This is on top of the kind of things you suggested, so that TP would actually mean something.

If the only thing that mattered was inspiration, then the RPG wouldn't have a problem right now. If that's the case, then none of these suggestions will do anything. But clearly we do have a problem, and it goes beyond people wanting to write. There needs to be a reason to write here, something which you can't get from writing by yourself or on any old play-by-post. For many people, that reason is the competition and the RPG features.