For the most part tisoz is accurate.
I'd been looking for an outlet, my real-life group had fallen apart even before I'd have fallen out of it (
Link - updating that one next), and I ran across
Living in the Shadows. I asked if I could create a PC for it. WinterRat agreed. Later, he asked me to GM, and I said I couldn't then, and wouldn't touch GMing a run in any case. (You all know why.)
Since then I reconsidered. Turned out to be one of the best choices I ever made: my fellow GMs ended up keeping me anchored, and I had a supportive outlet that forced me to something resembling coherence -- something that could build despite my apparent complete inability to process rules, or indeed anything beyond story structure.
It took me maybe two weeks after I'd first rejected WinterRat's offer to realise that if WinterRat didn't get some help
then, there was going to be no more Living in the Shadows. So I agreed to fill in a plothole for his character, the one he was entangled with, and one other, with the understanding that fully half the GMing was nothing more than story-spinning. That, at least, is something that comes to me even when I'm beyond exhausted and am seeing things crawling up the walls (yesterday, incidentally). Actual rules apparently don't. Remember what I said about not being able to process rules?
Here's a typical example. I was lucky: everyone was really nice about that, but that's not the kind of thing I'd trust myself with when there's no ability to check up on me, not after that. Even before that, more than half the time I was doing nothing more than answering questions, with the two of them doing a good 90% of the writing; and after that, they were doing all the number crunching until -- well, now.
So I'm not running LitS. I
couldn't. I
can't. I won't ever do a run in that universe: the Infiltration Challenge has already grown almost beyond what I can handle in that respect. I continue to be in awe of the administrative abilities of those coordinating everything. I'm the background webmaster, because html's easy for me and because translating out individual stories from a thread format doesn't require frontal lobe action and because it's something I can
do without requiring a lot of thinking. And I stick to my little corner of the universe with the three PCs I'm sheepdogging through their storylines, and somehow I've been talked into a fourth.
When I was posting there, I used a different name for two reasons:
(1) How do you explain that you can always spin a story and stay coherent
and consistent (although I slipped once or twice even there), regardless of whether other cognitive aspects are functioning at all?
(2) Reduction in confusion for other players. The character I asked to play was not a new one at all, but a very, very old one which had never gotten properly played. In fact, it is the one behind *this* username.
I'd been trying to get back to the Infiltration Challenge for a couple of weeks now, basically since the beginning of February, even before tisoz drew my attention to this thread (its resolution is backstory for the LitS thread), but I thought I had better give you something more substantial, this time, than a "will post this Sunday". I
owe you that. But when I tried to access the thread on the previous forum, it seems to be gone. Anyone know what's up with that? If it's gone for good, I suppose I can try to work with what we've got, but we had some major information in the previous thread too.
Sorry it took so long to answer here. I was told the thread, but not given the link, and I kept not having the time to hunt it down. But today I had time for more than one post in LitS ... which meant I had the time to find and answer here as well; and after this, in one more thread. But it will be a while before I am even back to daily blog writing.
Anyway, for what it's worth, that's the story, some of the rest is in the profile link, and some of the
rest has spilled out on various and sundry co-LitS GMs, mostly when I'm explaining why I'm a month behind in answering about a proposed PC and only managed to get that e-mail out on the very day that player began posting. (Much self-cursing ensued -- I'd just finished the e-mail, finally -- and
then I got to Dumpshock.)
And I absolutely guarantee that I haven't talked with any of you under a different name -- which you'll know for a fact, once you follow the link.