--I really have trouble writing from prompts. Is there another option?

If you can't write from prompts, then you aren't going to be able to do missions. There is no difference between "your agents do this" and "the badfic does this, how do they respond?"

I don't agree at all with that answer though.

Look, I've done roleplaying. Kind of a lot of it, by now, both over Gmail chat and on Tumblr. I don't know if you've seen them--there are these long lists of RP prompts.

Yes, the missions are kind of like a roleplay, I guess. Instead of one or both RPers deciding on the general plotline, you have the badfic as a rough guide which can be skipped forward in and cut off at a certain point.

However: the prompts are exactly like a roleplay. Look, let's say I was writing RP prompts for PPC characters. I might write something like this:

-Character A has just broken the console. Character B is upset because [they wanted to go on that mission/this is the second time this week!/they hate the Techie who always comes to fix it/they think the console might be sentient/etc]

-Character B has done something to get in trouble with the Sunflower Official. Character A tries to rescue them.

-Characters A meets character B in the Cafeteria.

-Character B comes back from Rudi's to find character A (a stranger) moving into their RC. ((OOC: I would so write this as character A trying to claim character B's room because character B keeps almost nothing in there and so character A thought it was empty, that sounds hilarious.))

And so on.

If you've noticed--these are rather similar to the prompts. They're just written in a slightly different style.

In fact--some of the Permission Prompts, rewritten as RP prompts!

-Character B just hit character A in a food fight. Whoops? (One agent falls to accidental friendly fire in a food fight.)

-It's time to do the Duty, but characters A and B both want to do it! (The agents argue over who gets to do the Duty.)

-Character A and character B desperately need coffee. Unfortunately, it's on the other side of the Cafeteria...and there's a food fight going on. (The agents must navigate a food fight to get to the coffee.)

-Character A thinks character B is a Sue. Character B has to prove they aren't. (One agent is mistaken for a Sue, and has to prove otherwise.)

-Character A and character B are [taking a walk/bored on a mission/hanging out/etc], when they find a mysterious thing. (The agents find a mysterious thing.)

(Okay, so, this is a lot of fun. I also keep wanting to write 'my character' and 'your character', as is another style of RP prompting, but...they both belong to the same author in a Permission request, so I have resisted).

Let's see...my point. Yes.

My point is that, yes, a badfic being used for a mission is rather like a roleplay scenario. It's in a format I don't generally see, but yes, you could call it one, especially when you're cowriting. However, my other point: that's exactly what the prompts are, too! "You get a scenario and what your characters do is up to you"--that's exactly it! Honestly, RP prompts as I normally see them are *more* specific as to how the characters react! "My character meets your character at a coffee shop and can't stop looking at your character's hair." "Your character saves mine from tripping into a lake, and my character insists on doing something in return." You also get things like, "Character A is a barista and character B is the customer they've had a crush on for most of the year", or "Character A is an overworked student and character B is their classmate who just wants to buy them lunch sometime". In fact, rewriting some prompts into RP prompt style made me realize that they're really wide open--I added in 'desperate for coffee' for one of them, and kept trying not to get more specific in the other ones (though I did add some options for where they might be in the last one). If I'd gone more specific, the last one would've read more like, "Character A finds a mysterious object. How does character B react?" or "Character B finds a mysterious object, and character A thinks they should leave it alone." or something.

Basically...apart from style, I don't really see much difference. You can very easily treat these prompts as RP prompts--more easily than you can a mission, IMO, since a mission has the framework of the badfic to keep an eye on. It informs your story in a way that a more general prompt does not. Even an interlude is a bit freer, especially if it's of the sort where your main goal is to have two characters meet--you quite literally choose a setting, a situation, figure out the reason why they're meeting, and go. It can be any length, go in any direction (unless you have a particular goal, in which case you'll probably be trying to stick to that), and include whatever you like. You are the only one guiding it--there is no preset framework of 'this is what is happening in the story they are analyzing which is also the world they're currently in'.

(That's not to say I don't like missions; I do. They just involve a different sort of writing process, to some extent.)

But yeah. Essentially:

-writing RP prompts is *fun*, and I should do it more often.

-missions can be considered to be like roleplay, but the Permission Prompts, IMO, are *exactly* that sort of thing as well, and are actually a lot more general than a lot of the RP prompts out there.

-a prompt can be interpreted in a whole lot of different ways, which, I would guess, is one reason why groups that write using prompts can work despite having different types of writers in them.

There may well be a few that are a bit restrictive; I haven't exactly been through all of them lately, though I have written some short pieces based on some of them (why? Because it sounded like fun--my exact words were probably something like 'why should the newbies have all the fun?'--, and then it turned out to be fun for me, so I kept going. I'll post them sometime when there aren't any current/especially recent Permission requests up--I really did write them for fun, not to be seen as examples or somesuch.) However, a whole lot of them look like regular, rather general (that is, wide open for interpretation) prompts to me. Hopefully I've at least illustrated my point well enough (and maybe entertained with the prompts?) in what's become a long post, even if I haven't changed your opinion.

~DF

Then choose different prompts.

Would it be so terrible if you, oops, knocked the dice off the table with your elbow, forgot which prompt you had rolled, and rolled again?

Sorry, I don't know anything. I'm thinking of maybe asking for Permission myself, though, so this is interesting to me. I'll go back to lurking.

... don't count as scenarios? *confused*

1/ In The Beginning, the older members of the Board were fanfic writers - Miss Cam, for instance, was famous for OFUM before the PPC was a thing. Nowadays, the oldest (= more aged) members of the Board are in large part people who've been here for a long time. We were fanficcers, but by and large we aren't any more.

(I do actually still write fanfic; it's been a while since I posted anything, though.)

The same can be applied to the oldest (= longest-time-on-Board) members. In the beginning, they were mostly from Miss Cam's OFUM Yahoo group (I believe), which meant they were fanwriters. Now, we're... from the PPC Board a decade ago, and we've changed.

2/ TVTropes. Seriously. For a big chunk of time in the middle, TVTropes was the Board's primary source of new members. And TVTropes isn't a fanfic community, so the people coming in weren't fanficcers (mostly).

In the old days, we got our members through fanfiction.net, when people read PPC stories, or read OFUM and went to Miss Cam's website, or got reviewed by us. All three of those happen far less these days.

hS