Alright. First off, I have deleted the last few posts in the main RP thread, to roll everything back a few steps. I am not sure I will actually be reopening the thread, but we'll see.
As someone who usually plays the DM, and is now a GM here, I have gotten used to losing. Most characters I make exist only to lose. Any wins they rack up are usually only there to establish them as a threat and/or get the PCs to have a reaction to them, to make their eventual victory later more memorable and satisfying. This has extended somewhat to most of the PCs I make, both here and elsewhere. Mitsuko has gotten injured every time she put on armor, for example. When this involves players fighting each other, I usually wind up volunteering to lose as well...someone has to, and as a frequent GM I understand that and will take the hit more often than most.
So, I took it for granted that we'd all just get along and work things out. I've been solely RPing here for the past four years or whatever, because I didn't have the time/proper hours to RP on real time things like MUSH or MUCK, where this type of combat between players happens more often. So I hadn't been in that sort of situation for a good while. This is probably all my fault, in the end, because I really should have just randomly decided the winner of each fight. I just thought I could trust everyone to figure things out calmly, which is again my mistake.
The base idea for this entire plot might not really be a good one, in the end. I was just brainstorming while working on the Martial Arts page, and things quickly got out of my control, and next thing you know I'm running a second plot. I didn't really think this through. I also originally thought two people from chat had volunteered to co-GM to take most of the load off of me, but I had misunderstood them, and wound up doing all the wiki work, plot setup, character approval and argument settling myself. Honestly, everything started because I wanted to write some cool background fluff for one NPC, which required doing the research that lead to the Martial Arts page, which started the conversation about this potential plot. Of course, the hilarious part is that the background fluff will never come up, and I'll never get to do anything cool with the character, because it's just an NPC there to facilitate RP for the players. So I did a whole bunch of work for nothing, and got myself saddled with this current problem in the process.
I wanted to make sure we had plenty of characters and players to start off with, so maybe I approved a few I shouldn't have. I pictured it as a high-energy anime action plot focused on super powered fighters, then allowed in several non-powered character, even one that specifically didn't really want to fight or get stronger. I wanted to have people training, sparring, and swapping styles and tips, then allowed in a character with natural weapons that was not interested in playing nice or learning any other way to fight. I asked for teachers and staff, then forgot to give them anything more interesting to do than watch the students.
Ed, you've continuously shown you simply can't help but get overly emotional about even the smallest thing. You came to an established site solely interested in wedging your own new species in as hard and fast as possible. I went out of my way to help you get set up here, and fought off a few other GMs to get you approved, and have done my best to get you and your species established here. And yet you've continuously yelled at me, complained to me, complained about me, argued with me, and tried to drag in every staff member you can find to get me in trouble. You've demanded more, more, more, and when I point this out or try to slow things down, you fly off the handle. It's been a really rough time for me, honestly, when all I wanted to do was help a new player out...because when I'd originally started, nobody had been interested in helping me do what I wanted to do, and I didn't want to sit back and let that happen to someone else. You can ask around, I've entertained some weird ideas and characters, and taken some odd ideas seriously, even when I knew the players had no clue what they were doing or were going to leave the site after a month or so. Sometimes some crazy stuff works out, though, like the Heartbreaker's resident android, which was a plot that took like five months to get started and get to the point where he could actually post.
This particular experiment isn't working out. Ed, you in particular are just not working out here. Again, I should have seen this coming, for all the reasons I have pointed out above. Your personality was a bad fit for combat between players, because you want your pet species to look good and you want to win and enjoy being in charge and fight to get your way. I also shouldn't have allowed a character that has zero desire to fit what I wanted to see in this plot, so that you can fall back on 'well my character would do this' or 'my character wants to win' in every situation. I just didn't think it would get this bad, but it's my fault in the end.
I was actually planning on introducing a new character and new plot wrinkle to try to help with this, but I think it's just a waste of time at this point. I don't think it's going to get better, because you don't particularly want it to get better...which would be fine if this was just Zoia killing my NPCs, but it doesn't really work with the plot as I've set it up. Which is my fault.
So, in conclusion, I'm doing two things. First I'm going to have to ask Ed to remove Zoia from the plot. It's just not working out. This does not affect any other Vekimen-related stuff that's currently going on, but yeah, I am rather irritated with you in general. I'm going to try to continue moving forward, though, and hope we can work together, but in this plot specifically it's not going to happen.
But that doesn't really matter so much, because the second thing is I'm keeping the main thread locked, and locking down the OOC thread after this post. I think I'm done here. If other people want to post a few more OVAs with your characters, go for it. If you want to play your characters in any upcoming holiday threads (I volunteered to help run one with Wes, since the Halloween one went well, but he never responded to me) then that's fine. If Ame or someone else wants to take over after we've taken a good, long break, then I'll consider handing it over. But for right now, I just can't take it anymore.
