u/The-Magic-Sword

Title question, some weeks I can rotate through my alts doing them, and then other weeks I do them on my main and it changes to coffer key shards or something for every other character, I haven't noticed if it was already shards on those other characters.

There's this friend that I'm really close to and we spend a lot of time together. We've had a lot of issues over the years due to a boundary violation by her early in the relationship that led to me being retraumatized and I kind of don't want to get into all of the specifics of that here since it's not super relevant, in a direct sense, she's not being asked to undo that violation since doing so would damage her life, and because I probably wouldn't want that kind of relationship with her at this point, at least not without things getting a lot better, even if it was on the table, though i think there's some remaining feelings on both sides.

We have various commitments to each other, to watch each others back, we work on a worldbuilding project for a shared RPG game, and we play video games together regularly. One thing is that in the past she'd been dealing with abandonment issues and I made it a point to hang out with her consistently, which wasn't bad, I also wanted a friend who I'd be able to hang out with a lot and who wanted to actively spend time together, and probably had some abandonment issues from a former best friend. We made a lot of promises about mattering to each other, about always being there to talk, and being best friends-- as recently as my grandmother's funeral a few months ago she told me that I mattered to her and that she always had my back and that we were best friends.

But over the years, I realized that I was kind of frustrated. She would do things like bring books that she wanted me to read and just leave them at my house, or nag me to watch serieses that she wanted me to watch. She'd 'jokingly' demand to know why I hadn't booted X game that she wanted to play yet. But when it came to things I wanted to do, like when I started burning out on always playing the same two games, it was like pulling teeth to get her to do anything else, and especially in the early days.

She could also be a jerk, in the early years she'd make promises if it got me to do something e.g. "I'll try X if you try Y" and then would get me to go first, and then immediately change her mind, then defend herself by saying "Oh what I don't have the right to change my mind? I have to do it even if I'm not comfortable with it?" and if did something else with other friends when she wanted to do her thing, she'd get really upset, and talk about me abandoning her, so while I didn't abandon other friends completely, I made it a point to try and split my time as much as possible-- it was coming from a place of real distress, but I told her that I really wanted her to be able to try new things.

Eventually, she started to change, she did stop guilting me as much about it and started apologizing for it and saying that she needed to be more independent. But I started noticing that we were still spending most of the time doing the same couple of things that I was getting burned out on, so I kept asking her if she could try some new things with me and I noticed that she started talking about being more independent the most when I wanted to try something new, and she'd look for ways to limit our interactions during those periods, or start looking for other friends to rope into her thing uh aggressively, she'd get kind of annoyed if we were talking about things besides the game she wanted to play in the channel we were all talking in, and I realized it was chasing some other members of the server away who wanted to talk about other things, like the RPG game the worldbuilding was actually for. When she wanted to do something without me I encouraged her, like when she joined a raiding guild, or when she started playing OW with her brother in law on the nights he took a break from Apex and other games.

At the same time, our worldbuilding project had stalled for years because she had writer's block, and she would get mad at me if I created too much without her, she blamed me for the writer's block because i kept creating things she didn't like, but eventually she admitted it had to do with her insecurities-- she's a perfectionist and she can't bring herself to actually write because she thinks its not gonna be good enough, it makes her hate her own ideas, she also blames her inability to try games on that, she hates the period before she really knows what she's doing too much.

She'd also get mad if I wanted to have a serious conversation about things. She'd deflect, and refuse to engage for the most part, and eventually I'd get frustrated and call her to be more confrontational and that became a problem, the timing was always wrong because she'd want to do something else, or would get really busy with all kinds of random plans, she was 'too tired' to worldbuild or talk about things, but for months and months on end. At the same time, she's always had a habit when we do argue, to escalate the argument until she's hurling insults angry and then she insists on ending the call because of how angry she is and how she has better things to do and then gives me the silent treatment for a few days to a week, before either we talk and make up or she just pops back up and tries to get me to play more overwatch with her. She'd tell me she 'dreads' seeing that I'm calling her.

It got pretty bad, so I started trying to set boundaries, I told her I wouldn't allow myself to be friends with someone who never takes turns with getting to decide what to play or never takes recommendations, and that I wouldn't be friends with someone who hangs up on me in anger and then makes me wait. During this time i also found out after an intense vertigo episode where they gave me an MRI, that I have something called a 'torturous cartoid siphon' that makes me more susceptible to aneuryisms so I really insisted that I wouldn't want to be friends with someone who drags out fights for days like she does because I don't want the stress, my stress response is bad, probably related to PTSD I have been diagnosed and treated for. She got angry about this, and she kept insisting she couldn't understand why not being friends anymore was even 'on the table' eventually I pointed out it was kind of crappy to not care about me until my foot was out the door, because she'd only back down once I started suggesting we shouldn't be friends anymore.

She switched to insisting it was because my discord server has other friends in it, and going no-contact with me means losing access to the server, and how that wasn't fair because it was a friend hang out spot, though she could definitely carry on these relationships manually. She suggested we just 'not be friends' with her still in the server, but I don't like it because she would still retain access to me, and she can be petty af when she's angry so I kind of feel like it would turn into her baiting me to either fight more or trying to get me to make up with her on her terms.

She did start trying to try things I want to try partially because i helped her hard-grind for a title in Overwatch when she wasn't gonna have time and she popped the idea and I told her she didn't have to. She's still been doing it though pretty grudgingly tbh and she tends to hold back in such a way that she isn't very well prepared for the kind of content we're doing when we're doing it (WoW, she's scary good at Final Fantasy 14 already) so it ends up being much harder and more frustrating. Despite the perfectionism, she kind of hates actually doing the prep to do things correctly, and she isn't interested in games that aren't challenging/competitive so my idea to try fun lazy-night games like Stardew was shot down. She's still deflecting on worldbuilding. She's also been busier lately, mostly with trying to cram the summer with parties and trips and stuff, so for the last month or so we've only really been doing the stuff she wants when she's available.

I called her at 6 on friday, a few hours before we were due to play overwatch with her brother in law again, and also after she was done with work for the day. She didn't get back to me, so I followed up a little bit before we were due online to have a quick check in about some of it-- especially some of the passive aggression about worldbuilding, and she got really angry at me, claiming I always have the worst timing, and how I'm trying to stop her from hanging out with him (we played with him over an hour the night before, and she usually plays with him from around 9 until 2 am on fridays, so there should have been plenty of time) by trying to have the conversation instead. it turned into a drag out fight, with her hurling insults at me, and me getting angry and telling her I'd make a scene if she did her usual angry hang up thing. She hung up and told him, and now I have him on my ass for "telling her she couldn't play with him" (even though I fully expected to have a quick check in and then let us go join him) and "emotionally blackmailing her" and we haven't been in contact for 4 days, I'm just so sick of this shit.

This is getting long winded, I know I make her sound terrible, she has good qualities too so long as we're doing what she wants, and stuff like this flares up every six months at most. Reading this back, maybe its obvious I just need to cut things off, but I feel like it would be a betrayal of her trust over the years and I want to believe that she can improve... I really believe that she does it because she's insecure and avoiding it, not because she really doesn't care about me. Anyone have any thoughts about what I should do?

TLDR, Friend always wants us to do what she wants to do, never wants to work on her writer's block for years even though we have a collaborative project, avoids conversations about our problems and blames me when I confront her to make them happen anyway, even though she's always committed to having my back. But I'm emotionally invested.

https://www.fergusonlibrary.org/event/tabletop-rpg-club-88663

The description is a little out of date, the Dungeons and Dragons table sometimes accepts new members but is playing an ongoing campaign with a consistent stable of players, the other table is in the process of branching out to trying other RPGs, though Pathfinder is ongoing.

Her r/rpg, I'm actually looking for some suggestions for something about my style that I'm trying to improve at. I've been on an exploration/dungeon kick for the last decade or so, and I've gotten pretty good at, but one thing I'm gradually realizing I'd like to get better at is improving my ability to run games with a lot of intrigue, conspiracies, and interesting, evocative NPCs.

Part of this is I have a growing fascination with urban horror, first from Vampire the Requiem and now into Curseborne, and these games are (sort of) known for their evocative flamboyant characters, with hidden depths and extensive conspiracies, at least in the fantasy of it that I'm looking to actualize to some degree.

Sometimes I actually feel like I've gotten a little worse at my improv for dramatic beats and PC/NPC emotionality since college (which in fairness was a decade ago.) But I was never really running intrigue then either, more like character arc melodrama.

Over the years, I learned and refined a lot of techniques for dungeons, sandbox play, etc and really got to where I want to be with that, and I'm hoping to do some of the same personal style development to up the more 'roleplay' side of my game, to add to that worldbuilding-heavy, exploration game base that I've built up.

This discussion/request has a couple of parts:

1. I enjoy doing the voice, so I'm not really looking to remove that element of it, but my stable of voices and mannerisms are a little indistinct and I have trouble staying in accent, I'm sure I could find resources for this pretty easily on youtube, to study some impressions / voice acting. I keep thinking about it because of a currently airing show about Rakugo, I'd like to add that 'storyteller' production quality, at least to the extent is reasonable for such an amateur-- my interest runs to some elements of that anyway, so its not overly burdensome if I can pick up some stuff from a good, fun-to-watch guide or something. If you have anything you find helpful in this vein, I'd be interested, and in addition to the listed titles, it'd help my Pathfinder game a lot. One problem is that sometimes with NPCs I end up hemming and hawing and buffering over what the players propose before responding, and they sometimes come off a little disjointed.

2. The last time I tried to run a politics game (which was in VTR) I bricked a little about the depths of the NPCs and what they want from each other, and how they're looking to use the group in various ways, it felt like even though i had notes about each one it wasn't specific enough. I usually run pretty heavily lore driven games with a lot of worldbuilding, in sandboxes, so I'm good at deductive improv (e.g. starting from lore and breaking it down to the implications. I think that my problem was that I had trouble inventing problems and setups for the NPCs that made them want things, so that the players could bounce off that-- those kinds of current events were less material than the longer-term world lore I'm used to building my exploration stuff off of. Advice in this respect would be helpful if anyone considers themselves good at that sort of thing.

3. Conspiracies and Large Organizations and how to manage them, the book about Seattle is supposed to have some stuff about designing a city in Curseborne, so maybe I'll have that covered. But I'll take anything you've got on the subject of turning what amounts to an organizational chart of NPCs, or a dramatis persona into a gameable meta structure, such that both I and the players feel like we're navigating court, if the players come out feeling like they're getting the fantasy of the 'Great Game' or what have you, then I've succeeded.

For 2 and 3, I've been speculating about applying my dungeon structures-- which chiefly employ simple flow charts between points of interest, to social scenarios. I was looking at experimenting in my current west marches with a 'social dungeon' in the form of a resort and casino for wealthy and powerful people, I tried something similar once or twice with a villa party of ghosts reenacting their last night before all dying in the same horrible event, but that was half-exploration dungeon.

From what I'm told, the long term 5e Dungeons and Dragons campaign is actually accepting new members, but that's high commitment (e.g. the DM expects you to come back relatively regularly), the other table is continuing with it's open table format for other games (mainly Pathfinder Second right now, but there's some interest in trying some other systems.)