telophase | (no subject)

The weapon the 'modern' girl can't be without, eh?

I would SO want that Zanpakuto. It would save me a fortune!

From what little I know about the Forth Division Irregulars (and really, it is so miniscule it comprises entirely of whatever you've told me in comments) the idea of RPG based on them IS AWESOME! XD

I posted what my brain has come up with so far to

chomiji below. XD

Off-Key Sausage is a great band name.

An upset Hanatarou came by

tastes_of_honey's silly zanpakutō post to say that the Fourth Division isn't like that (http://tastes-of-honey.livejournal.com/55160.html). Schu consoled him/messed with his head, and the conversation swiftly turned as surreal as all their conversations turn.

Hee! XD Hanatarou just doesn't have luck with my generators, huh? :D

I think the point of them keeps escaping him....

>> no matter how much I tell my brain that this is a bad idea, it keep trying to come up with one <<

>raises hand<

I'd play!

It's setting up the milieu that's hardest. I think it'd really have to be all original characters for the players, who would be encouraged to make up the most pathetic, useless characters possible, the ones who just barely scraped through the Soul Reaper Academy,* have pathetic zanpakuto, and were shunted off to the Fourth Division (which is quite important despite what the 11th seems to think, but is noncombatant) and all placed in this squad to get them out of useful people's way. So they'd sort of be the Mystery Men (http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0132347/) of the Gotei 13 (or the people who were auditioning to be Mystery Men...). Or maybe Red Dwarf (http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0094535/) would be a better analogy.

At any rate, if there were any canon characters at all, I think they'd be mods wandering by to give them confusing and conflicting orders to do something-or-other.

* Maybe attended because their mothers made them. XD

So cute!
Do you have an idea when in the comic/anime fourth division is introduced? I'm curious enough to look at Bleach finally. XD

Soul Society arc ... sometime before Ganju and Ichigo are about to confront Kenpachi, not that that means anything to you. :)

Will look it up when the cable guy's gone from here. :)

(Screening anon comments at the moment in order to avert HP spoilers or potential wank form a post I made a few weeks ago .. .which has produced no wank whatsoever, actually)

dammit.
That anonymous was actually me.
*weep*

Hee - just answered it. XD

OK, you get the most well-known Fourth Division character, Hanataro Yamada, in chapter 92 (volume 11), and he's running around with the main characters through at least volume 14. The 3rd Seat of 4th is in the omake pages after each chapter in 11 and, I think 12 (my copies of 12 and 13 have gone walkabout), writing reports or, as he puts it, expressing the anguish of middle management through reports. XD But Hanataro's our biggest source of info on them.

The manga are about 8 bucks US each ~~and I would never ever suggest you download the scanlations from stoptazmo.com just to see if you liked them or not~~. You kinda need to read the first story arc, mostly a set of not-very-connected stories set in our world, to be introduced to the characters and get the background you need before heading into the Soul Society arc, where we meet all the wacky shinigami/Soul reaper characters.

Oh, I think original characters are definitely the way to go. I'd never run into the idea of running actual characters from a fictional work in a game until I came to LJ, actually. It's still slightly shocking idea to me!

I know all too well how much work running a game can be, BTW, so don't think I'm noodging you at all about this.

I'd heard of it before, because of various tabletop RPGs that were put out as tie-ins to various properties. When I got online mumblety-seven years ago, what got me WTF?ing was RPing without any real rules, or sometimes even no GMs guiding it, just doing it freeform. Which I guess grew out of MUSHing and MOOing.

I think the only sort of game I'd set up would be a freeform CFUD-type game, with a few boundaries set up so they wouldn't be rushing off and confronting Hollows or something without prior mod approval (although sending them into the real world occasionally might be fun), and a few defined locations - the squad's barracks, mess hall, and training ground, for some - and then letting them go.

I still like the idea of (not very visible) mods being canon characters, just to get Yachiru in there messing with their heads occasionally. XD

I could deal with the idea of Yachiru messing with my head!

I have a feeling the 4th Div irregulars might also attract those who had burned out or not worked out in the other Divs, which could make for some interesting interactions.

CFUD very much bemuses me, but I have a feeling the main issue is LJ itself as an interface ... a conventional bulletin board would be much less unweildy, but >shrug< we've got what we've got.

Oh, lord, could you imagine the one that even Kurotsuchi wouldn't have in the 12th? O.o

I'm thinking this doesn't have the potential to get as huge as CFUD 'cause of the OC requirement - I think a big part of the appeal of CFUD is seeing canon characters. OTOH, membership could be limited to a certain number if it looks like it's heading anywhere near the 300-comments-minimum-per-post that CFUD's got right now.

Another thing would be spoilers - I'm sure there's plenty of people who aren't reading the scanlations who might want to play. I'm thinking that restricting canon events that are mentioned to the Soul Society arc - everything else* takes place outside of Soul Society anyway, so the 4th Division Irregulars wouldn't likely have much knowledge of it outside of rumor, gossip, and innuendo anyway.

It *could* be placed before Ichigo's invasion, but that doesn't really appeal to me for some reason.

* I haven't watched the anime past the SS arc, so I have no idea if the Bount filler arc takes place in or out of Soul Society. The ongoing Arrancar arc is 99% outside of Soul Society.

I haven't watched the anime at all - my fixation is all about the manga, baby! I haven't even yet read ahead in the manga yet (vol. 20 should be out in a week or two!). I'm not really fanatical about spoilers on my own behalf, though - I reread stuff I like so often, it hardly seem to be something to worry about. (The Mr. says he's less worried about my manga expenditures now that he sees how much use I get out of them ... .)

As noted, I'm not used to this style of RPG ... as a referee in a trditional RPG, 12 was about as many players as I could handle. In this sort of more free-form game, I'm not certain what the ideal pool of players would be. 30? 50?

There's also the issue of online time availability. I tend not to be online a lot at all during the weekend, when we do errands and family-oriented activities. I hate the idea of my slowing anyone else down, though. The online RPGs I've played previously (at www.dreamlyrics.com, which grew out of CompuServe's game board) often had people posting as seldom as once per day - in fact, many refs/mods specified a minimum to keep the games moving. But CFUD seems to run almost in chat mode ... .

Yeah, I have a feeling that things were pretty static in Soul Society before Ichigo & co. showed up - it would be far more interesting to be a character in the more chaotic situation that develops afterward. "May you live in interesting times" is a curse for everyday existence, but a blessing for a roleplaying game!

CFUD seems like LJ-based IRC, but IIRC the only requirement is that you post or comment once every two weeks. No activity for a month, and your character is retired. So I guess the ideal number of players would be dependent on how busy it was.

I spent some time poking about the Web for ideas but so far the games with the most info seem to be highly-structured ones like

tabula_rasa and

fandom_high, which are far less cracktastic than I'm expecting this to be.

milliways is another fairly free-form one, I think, but not much info on how it was set up at the beginning.

* (and let me tell you, it's quite a job to poke around while avoiding HP spoilers - every link I click, I'm not sure if it's going to have been hit by a troll of not...)

XD

It's at time like this that I'm just as glad my online activities are limited to a very few places ... neilgaimanboard is well-mannered and has vigilant, active board mods, and shejidan is small and well-mannered.

For myself, I just get angry at spoiler-bearing trolls - it doesn't bother me personally about the spoilers themselves, but the nastiness of the intent makes me froth at the mouth. I guess these folks kick kittens and take candy from babies, too.

I engaged a ~~nimrod~~ troll over at fandom_wank a year or so back, in a thread about Death Note. I was originally talking with someone who hadn't gotten very far in the series yet, and a few days after the conversation had ended the troll - an anonymous poster - popped in and informed her of the Big Spoiler.

Only this troll was an idiot, because instead of replying to the person I was talking to, who would have gotten the comment notification, they responded to me. So I replied, calling them an idiot and a coward for not signing their name, and the replied to me, and so on. I asked them why they liked bursting someone's bubble over something as simple as respecting the author's pace of revelation and they never gave a really satisfactory answer. They also never quite grasped that the person they were attempting to spoil never got any comment notifications, since they replied to me and not them, and thus was never actually spoiled. Idiot!

OH! And we can't forget the stylists (http://telophase.livejournal.com/871987.html)< now, can we?

LOL! Where would the Soul Reapers be without their faithful stylists!

Hmmm ... wonder if anyone would want to play a stylist. That's the sort of secondary character I have sometimes enjoyed doing, but the almost-reject shinigami are too tempting in this case ... .

:) It also makes you wonder how to handle characters who would, in the course of their jobs, have interactions with canon characters, like a stylist would. Hm.

Mind you, it's technically canon that Kenpachi does his own hair, so they wouldn't be having too many run-ins with him, which is probably good for their continued survival.

This sounds much like the Company of Ogres from the book "In the Company of Ogres" by A. Lee Martinez. Also much like Phule's Company from the book series of that name by Robert Asprin. Or... Or... Yeah, there's a lot of groups like that in the literary world. I love them. :)

Yup, I was thinking of Asprin's Omega Company, in part. But as you said, the squad/group full of nitwits and ne'er-do-wells that somehow keep getting out of scrapes is a standard trope. :D I ahvne't seen the idea played yet - there's bound to be games out there like that, but of the ones I've seen, people tend to want to be cooler characters. XD

OMG! Count me in!

:D Ideas, then! Ideas! :D

You can have all the ideas you want...but not until after Tuesday. I'm going to be working like work is going out of style until Monday and then I figure I will sleep like the dead and when I wake up there's Harry Potter to be read.

And now...back to work! I've only put in 13 hours or so today, I'm totally slacking!

I'm reading the CFUD wiki now to figure out how it was set up originally, but what they don't tell me is how much was thought up at first and how much was created through RPing and Good Ideas Later. Hrm.

Tomorrow's going to be an insanely boring work day - nobody else has gotten their webpage corrections back to me yet - and the major fires elsewhere are put out, then Saturday's HP for me, then Sunday's more boring ref desk work. So hopefully I can figure something out during those long boring hours...

Depending on if I get my proposal knocked out tomorrow and how badly off the other two submissions are, I may have time in between formatting and the like this weekend to poke at ideas and stuff...I just can't guarantee it.

In the meantime, I plan to curse whatever fate decreed that my department would have three submissions due on the same day with another due the next day. I cannot wait for this particular hell to come to an end.

Lovely. :D I have a deep, nasty ~~certainty~~ suspicion that everyone is going to realize they need to give me webpage info and report all the subject guide script errors two days before I leave.

I mean, this is the workplace where nobody can remember to check the intranet calendar to see if I've been GONE for a few days before emailing me (ccing both their boss and mine) asking me when I'm going to get around to doing something. I can't wait to see what vitriol fills my inbox when I'm back from Japan. :D

Anyway, if you poke at things this weekend, great, if not, I well understand. XD

As the person occasionally credited by the founder as being inadvertantly responsible for CFUD even existing, I say: you should have a chat with

biztheinsane. XD

She had a very specific idea and knew what she wanted to accomplish, but trust me when I say that she never ever EVER thought it would asplode into such a huge thing. XD

Would probably be a good idea, but despite my inability to stop talking on my LJ, I am terrified of contacting people I don't know out of the blue. XD

(no subject)

hehehe

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