Week down.
Maybe more or less a day.

Alright,

So on my new homeboy, I've been playing as the title says, about a week, maybe a day or so more, maybe less.

And aside from acquiring a few VERY basic things, I feel like this is just chatroom masturbation.

Let me clarify before everyone starts freaking out.

Typical play session:

Log on, walk to street term, check gridmail, look at forums, see if anything new happened, 80% of the time, nothing.

Talk to folks on the SIC, fun but literally no actual benefit to my character.

Ask the first bartender NPC I walk by, Where the party is at, either get told it's right here, meaning I'm the most pc populated bar (Super sadface) or told it's one or two levels away.

If the latter, ride the train to said joint, normally arrive after everyone has left, or find the few mainstays that tend to hang in the bar (They know who they are).

Bullshit about our ic lives, our ic jobs (or lack of them), play the "Who will buy me a drink" game. Eventually piss away a half and hour to hour and leave to trudge back to coffin/cube/hotel.

Run crates because since there is nothing else of note to do, why not? Eventually run out of crates or get told to fuck off, so I fuck off.

I'm honestly not really sure what the hell I'm doing wrong or if this game is just THAT slow paced that I can't believe it.

So is this game really that slow paced? Or am I still missing something?

It sounds to me like you've got a stagnating character, with not enough for them to do. It happens! Here's what I reccomend. First, befriend those barflies. Ask them what they do for fun around here. You might get an answer that would make your character go "Aww, shit, really? I can do THING too!" Boom, direct link to something new.

If that doesn't work, you gotta make your own things to do. Maybe ask those bartenders if there's any back-room work they need done? Hey, you could set up a grid page for NPC, for a nominal fee, you be interested in that? Hey, did that motherfucker insult your fresh-out-the-garbage immie style? Time to make a petty vendetta!

Basically, if normal levels of poking and prodding aren't making fun, push harder and harder until your character gets permed for being annoying or you accidentally a plot.

You don't get there in a week, but you do ave to have both some brass and some smarts to get there.

Brass: You have to be willng to open yourself up to the risks of revenge, attacks, debt, memory loss, betrayal, in order to earn the potential for minions, connections, successes, position, and hard-to-acquire stuff

Smarts: you have to roleplay the above in a way which other characters and other players can feel all-right about rwacting to. Everyone can smell a clueless fake, but many are willing to play along as you "fake it till you make it". After all, if they can tell you're willing to take risks, they might give you a risk they will reward you for taking for them. But if you just bluster and swagger and pisture but cannot convincingly demonstrate any competence, connections or anything else to back up your brass, you're equally likely to wind up either dead or simply forgotten.

I agree - you don't know what else the people who visibly asspalm each other in bars and on SIC and at sex parties are up to, but, the thrill, profit, opportunities, achievements and mystery of the game aren't happening in any of those venues. Unless someone's using them to cover for something really crafty. Which happens. Heh. More often, what happens is that people do that stuff peripherally, when they find a little downtime from serious plottery and business, and become willing to relax their concentration long enough to partake. Or else, that really is all they're doing and they're okay with not doing anything else with their game. That happens too.

I wrote the "help chastity" helpfile in response to a conversation which happened a few months ago, on the subject of "how do I find what I've been missing?" as asked by people whose IC drama was (to my perception, anyway) limited to tiring, stale, old, un-CP and unprofitable relationship RP.

Also consider playing a character who isn't so obviously you.

If everyone in the game can spend 5 minutes with your character and know exactly who their dealing with because they've dealt with you as a previous character, then you're not playing a character: You're playing you. That's not role playing.

You gotta understand, as much as we avoid meta-gaming, we are ultimately going to avoid RPing with people who we don't like. That's just human nature and you really can't expect people to act otherwise. They're not going to go out of their way to include you in the RP if they don't like you, or what your character represents or is showing them.

The good news is you get to play any character you want. If you're playing a character, we shouldn't be able to tell that this character is you, we should know them only as this character, who should be a unique snowflake, not a rehash of everyone you've been before. If you just keep playing the same character over and over, that's not going to make for good RP. Try playing a character who is radically different than you; One who holds opinions that are different than yours, who acts and thinks differently than you, who talks different than you, and who treats people differently than you do. I think your level of game would improve greatly if you didn't carry around the stigma of your past, and when given a fair chance at a fresh start with a new character, you didn't make it quiet so obvious that nothing has changed since the last time.

I'm not playing a character who wouldn't be fun to play skill wise or aims wise simply to play something "different", that wouldn't be very entertaining.

Go out and explore the city after you run crates. Listen to what the people in the bars and diners are saying.

Can they maybe be of use to you in the future? That skill set they have. Or *obviously* have. Do they have a skill set that is not obvious?

And *sigh*, if you can use them maybe in the future, will they even be around?

What can you do to keep tabs?

Maybe, just maybe, that person who seems like they're not much knows a lot of people. Maybe even the right person.

Are you able to ask for what you're looking for without giving your main reason why away and can you do it without pissing off people so they have no interest in working with you?

You need to be clever and find those particular people in the midst of those bar flys that just might help you out.

And as bean_dip put it, sometimes what you see is a brief downtime between the plotting or maybe using that to cover for something else.