Darwishi, I find OOC communication faster because I put far more effort into my IC posts, so they come slower and occur more rarely.  For IC negotiations over a dispute to be effective, there can't be much character interaction or progression of plot until the dispute is resolved using short back-and-forth posts; otherwise, the current writer will end up moving on past the point of dispute, moving on to other topics or developments, with the current writer usually assuming that the dispute has worked out the way they wanted it to.  That leaves the next writer with the options of rewinding the action to get back into the dispute -- usually requiring edits -- or going along with the first writer's assumptions, effectively conceding the dispute to them.<br/><br/>For an illustration of what I'm talking about, see the recent posts where Ana had Athena "try" to stop Happy from running off.  No offense meant to Ana, and I'm not upset about this, but the post she wrote wouldn't have made sense unless Athena succeeded in stopping him -- she wrote a piece of dialog for Athena to say to Happy, which wouldn't make any sense if he wasn't there to hear it, and my post had already made it clear that he was gone.  In other words, she moved ahead with the character interaction and plot progression assuming that a disputed action (which I didn't even know was disputed) was resolved according to her preferences.  I was left with three alternatives, all less than desirable:  either I could edit my last post to fit with what she wrote, conceding the matter of dispute to her; or I could ask her to edit her post, so that it actually made sense with the disputed action coming out the way I wanted it to; or I could ignore the problematic parts of her post, pretending they weren't there, and proceeding with what I wanted to do in the first place.  I chose the first alternative because it took the least effort and resulted in the most readable results.<br/><br/>All that is the kind of headache that it seems to me could be easily avoided with a quick OOC exchange discussing what's about to happen.  I don't see why the resulting IC posts can't still be interesting and contain exciting elements, in spite of the fact that we know part of what will happen; the rest of the post can still contain undiscussed material, and if it's well-written, it will read well and be entertaining.<br/><br/>Both of you, Cogs and Darwishi, got the impression from what I wrote before that physical action is what I find interesting or exciting in the game.  This is actually not the case, at least not exclusively; in fact, I find the non-physical character interactions -- the relationship- and character-development -- more interesting.  What I find boring is all the other stuff in between:  descriptions of behavior and things which serves no purpose other than filling space -- neither advancing the action/plot in an interesting way, nor adding anything meaningful in terms of character- or relationship-development.  That boring stuff is what takes up most of the posts, and I'm as guilty of it as anyone, but some players do less of that than others, or do less of it sometimes than at other times.  Like I said before, this game's ratio of boring to entertaining is better than in most games I've seen, so I think it's actually a pretty good game, even though I still find the results boring too often, or more than I would like, at least.<br/><br/>Cogs, I too wouldn't ask someone to play their character differently, which is why I suggested more OOC discussions.  And, as I said above, I don't see why OOC discussions, handled properly, need to suck the life out of the game.<br/><br/>Finally, I wanted to point out that this distinction between "collaborative writing" and "roleplaying," a distinction Ana drew above and Darwishi also seems to draw at times, is a false distinction.  First of all, there's no such thing as "collaborative writing," as far as I know; authors of fiction work alone, with very rare exceptions, and there's no actual genre of fiction where multiple writers collaborate on the finished work regularly.  (Fiction in the form of movies and TV is usually written collaboratively, although some like myself see that as one huge reason why so much film and TV writing is atrociously awful.)  Like it or not,<em>forum roleplaying</em>as it's done here on Elliquiy<em>takes the form of writing collaboratively</em>, even though that endeavor is so unlikely to be fruitful that it's never done anywhere else,<em>because</em>the results are so seldom readable or entertaining.  I enjoy forum roleplaying because I see the whole endeavor as an engaging but ridiculously quixotic challenge, one doomed to produce results that are only occasionally readable or worth the trouble.  (Also it's a bit of social activity, which can be fun.)<br/><br/>The problems I'm currently having in this game, IMO, are problems inherent in all forum group roleplaying:  trying to figure out how to let everyone control their own character while still interacting with each other and moving a plotline forward.  I'd be curious to hear if any of you have had multiple experiences in the past with forum group roleplays that turned out to be more successful than ours has so far.  And that's not to say that I think ours is all that succesful, just that I think it's far more readable, more entertaining, and longer-lasting than most.  But then again, I've only seen forum group roleplays on two sites, and I've only looked at those sites for about a year now.  Also I may just have no idea what I'm talking about.  :)  If any of you have had lots of successful long-term forum group roleplays, let me know, and I'll admit to being relatively clueless about all of this.<br/><br/>By the way, I wasn't planning on quitting this game right now or in the near future.  This entire discussion is about problems I've had generally in this game, but at this exact moment in the storyline, my plans for Happy aren't in dispute with anyone else's plans for anything, as far as I know.  I've already conceded that we're all driving off together, even though I would have preferred otherwise personally, and I still don't see how the current direction we're heading in is the most sensible or entertaining of all the possible ways the plot could have gone.  But I hope we can collaboratively make it entertaining and worthwhile anyway -- at least I'm looking forward to the attempt.  :)  That is, assuming I haven't stepped on any toes or upset anyone in the course of this discussion, which I hope I haven't.