Board 8 > I need to keep busy. Help me pick a board project.

(+) Yeah! (+)

all good from me

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People are going to be silly when given the ability to make choices. That is absolutely unavoidable in any scenario where you accept audience input, whether it be improv comedy, a CYOA, a DnD campaign, or even fucking polls. You can't deny silliness entirely without sucking all of the fun out of an event, and if you can't tolerate it at all (particularly when blessed with a workable name like "Juan" when it could've been so much worse), then do a project that isn't dependent on audience choices instead

Look at aforementioned ITD. They were very serious, very involved, complex CYOA games... and the people participating were still silly as all hell. Stupid names, stupid gimmicks, stupid choices. And yet Maria still succeeded at making her stories respectable. It's all an improv game; you have to work with the silliness, maybe let off pressure once in a while, and yet craft a story that people are invested in enough that when it actually matters, when shit gets real, people act responsibly. It's not an easy needle to thread, yet it is a necessary one

You might feel that people overreacted at you banning their name... actually, I just looked at the log and it was hardly a reaction at all, lmao. Anyway, plum had a point. From his perspective, the players almost universally chose a reasonably reasonable name, one that'd be absolutely trivial to treat with seriousness (unless you think the name "Juan" is inherently absurd), and you shut it down, as the first decision in the entire topic. The issue isn't merely that he, and presumably other players, were afraid that you wouldn't be ok with their humorous choices... but that you wouldn't be ok with their choices in general.

You have to have mutual respect in these games. Respect the players, take the weirder things they do in stride, work with them, and they'll in turn respect the game and work within the broader bounds you set and not drive the whole thing off of a cliff. You can have a direction you want the game to go in. You can restrain the players when it's necessary. But you cannot trivialize the fundamental principle that the audience is choosing their own adventure. Their adventure. Not yours. If you do, you won't have fun, they won't have fun, and there's no point in this category of game.

I'm sure there's a lot of tutorials on how to DM a game that get into how to guide stories without railroading and how to keep things moving

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Yeah okay, I didn't mean for my post to be interpreted as entirely black-and-white. There's nothing wrong with wanting to overrule your protagonist being named "Gay Pants" (especially given that you included an in-universe fail safe to avoid such a name), or feeling frustrated if one or two people constantly derail the story and prevent any momentum. But there's a difference between that and overruling any creative liberties you didn't anticipate. As with any board project, hosting means accepting that you might not be happy with the results. It isn't fair, but it's been that way for 20 years.

As for the name and other characters' reactions to it, sometimes you just have to allow for a little suspension of disbelief. In Ace Attorney almost everyone has a silly name but they hardly ever get questioned. We the audience giggle, but the characters mostly just accept it.

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Again, I'm not exactly in the best space of mind, so perhaps a CYOA isn't the best choice for me right now. I do have a notorious problem of thinking only in black-and-white but IDK how that can be changed. It's just how I'm wired. People keep telling me to reconfigure my DNA and I don't know if there's a way to do that.

Maybe a lot of it was just in my head given how I always feel like I'm left out and that everything I do is wrong regardless of how I adjust my behaviors. My messy, depressed, complicated head just... can't tell me otherwise. I don't know, honestly, and frankly I want to be done talking about it. But let's be clear: I don't want your pity. This isn't meant to be a psychotherapy session.

I'm sorry about all this, I truly am. I'll reevaluate and come back with a CYOA at a later time.
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