I'll wait til page 10 then, probably not that far away.
!!! BLOGPOST WARNING !!!
>>5463361Will to write is a tough bippy to handle when you're QMing. It's that moment where you're writing almost on standby mode and you start seeing everything you're writing down as complete trash that isn't entertaining even though it's likely the contrary.
For example: I started to feel these pirates are boring as fuck as I wrote them and I should've done something more interesting cuz the players won't like it, yet I can see that there is a clear interest from the players just from the raw effort put into the write-ins (thanks boys btw) and I know that I have more stuff prepared for them that makes them a thing beyond being a run of the mill pirate gang to beat around and to give a reason for Vegeta to increase his PL.
I find that the best solution for these moments is to just pause for a while and focus on other stuff so you can eventually look at this shit with a broader mindset rather than focusing on the negatives. I should've done that in 2019, 2020 and 2021 too but life got in the way and I said fuck it, gotta forget about this and focus on other stuff. Now that I'm in a much more stable moment of my life I'm finding it way easier to write and dedicate a proper amount of time to making a cool story about Vegeta along with anons in the internet.
I'll eventually make some google doc polls to see what anons are enjoying about the quest and where they wanna go from here. After years of playing tabletop with friends I've seen that it's a very cool thing to do and can provide some measure of direction as to what to focus on and what to leave as secondary stuff. Generally I tried to gauge this interest through the quest itself, like the posts asking who do you wanna focus on during downtime, whether or not you wanna have a cool tournament VS the earthlings, etc.
Example: I've noticed that most votes are driving the romantic stuff into the background (then again I enjoy writing Bulma and relationships in general so I do add a lot of that in without player input asking for it), thus I've decided to make Vegeta behave in a way that shows his complete focus in his objectives and how he has no will to handle a relationship right now. I've also noticed that there's a certain interest in Rasha and Olond beyond them being mere soldiers in the new Saiyan army, so I developed them a little more behind the scenes.
To put it in a poetic way I see QMing as a ship sailing the seas, the QM's the captain, your notes are your destination and the players are the wind, you gotta make sure the ship is sailing along with the wind even if that sometimes makes you drift away from the destination (or get a new destination entirely) but you also have to keep focus and always have a destination in mind as you make a path through the waves otherwise you're gonna wonder why you're even putting in the effort.
This is years of QMing and TTRPG speaking.
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