I'm not sure you said anything I particularly disagree with, Darwishi, including the part about preferring IC interaction over OOC negotiation.  I'd rather find ways to handle any disputes IC, but that doesn't seem practical in this case, for the reasons I mentioned above:  frequent IC negotiations would make for dull reading, IMO; they would eventually call into question Athena's competence as leader; and they would make Happy seem more opposed to her leadership than I want for him to be.  He's not a rebel or anti-authority at heart, he's a stand-up guy and team player, albeit with a smart mouth and attitude now and then.  :)<br/><br/>All I'm suggesting is, for example, I could have told Ana OOC that I was going to have Happy do a quick recon to see where Muddy was, before I actually wrote that he did it (sort of a mistake on my part, I guess, but it didn't occur to me there would be any reason for Athena to oppose that initiative).  Then Ana could have explained to me why she thought Athena wouldn't want Happy to do that recon.  I would have either conceded to her reasoning and shown Happy doing something else, or disagreed with her reasoning and had Happy try to do what he thought was best anyway.  If that led to a conflict between the two characters, I suppose Cogs could have determined the winner of the conflict, giving each of us a fair chance to have our way, but letting a neutral third party ultimately decide.<br/><br/>What would the IC alternative have been?  3 or 4 short back-and-forth posts over the course of a week or so, where Happy asks Athena if he can do a recon, she says no and maybe says why (or doesn't), and then Happy responds by cooperating or rejecting her orders, and then she responds to that.  That just seems to me like a boring, drawn-out way of deciding whether or not my character can do something so simple and small.  If that needs to happen every time any of our characters does anything major on a mission, how will anything interesting ever happen in the game?<br/><br/>I should confess to all of you that from my (limited) experience, I think it's pretty difficult and unusual for the results of these forum group RPs to turn into interesting reading.  At best, I think there are fun moments, interspersed with a lot of boring crap, which is pretty much what I've thought of our game so far.  (No offense intended to anyone; I think it's been far more interesting than most games so far, or else I wouldn't be in it still.)  I'm always trying to think of ways to minimize the boredom and maximize the fun.  If that happens naturally IC, great, but if not, I don't see why some OOC negotiation might not improve things.  None of this would be an issue for me if there was more interesting stuff happening regularly in the game.  I'm sure that's the goal all of us want, but IMO we need to adjust our approach to the game to make it happen.  Otherwise, like almost every group game on Elliquiy, this game will die due to prolonged IC tedium and outside real-life distractions.  That hasn't happened to this game yet because all four of us have put a lot of effort into playing together, but frankly, I'm nearing my boredom limit on this game.  If we can't ramp up the excitement soon somehow, I'll be moving on.  (Just sayin', not looking to point fingers or blame anyone else.)