Well, I'm in a boring class and had the time to do this, so here we go.
So, yeah, Tales from the Frontlines, and basically the entire RPG section, is in a medically induced coma. First, a piece of minor house keeping, you'll notice the other RPG sections (General and AU) are now gone. That was done as part of some forum housekeeping, removing some sections (Namely those and the old Junk Guild) that were basically unused.
Now, for the real matter, TftF.
There are two interconnected matters that kept delaying all my posts doing everything (Aside from daily crap like school and work and life). The first is the sheer workload of it all. At my last tallying of it, I was controlling characters that were supposed to be handled by a minimum of three separate players (Fritz was handling the bulk, with Cardi and/or Wedge and myself assisting him), and that's just talking about the ones we planned for, never mind the characters dropped by other players we inherited. That isn't really anything new, but I've mentioned a few times that I've never been comfortable handling characters for other players, so that was part of the problem. A bigger one has to do with that, even with the characters the Trinary was supposed to handle, those were almost always intended to be done by Fritz and (Insert Third Stooge Here). They did all the planning, they had all the details worked out. Now, as some of you know or may remember, we had almost everything planned out for the final battle, but a lot of the minutiae and exact details of things were either in their minds or are literally buried in chat logs that are almost impossible to search through. They used to joke about me not entirely paying attention when they went over things unrelated to my characters (Such as me not reading the Titan threads... years ago... wow I feel old
), and there was some truth to that. Frankly, I'm not fully versed on all they had planned, which adds to my discomfort when it comes to writing those parts.
Now, if pressed, I could get the majority of what they had planned out and create something fairly close to what Fritz, Cardi, and Wedge had envisioned, bringing about this final cataclysmic battle we had planned and built up to for years and years, but that brings us to our next problem: Sentinel.
We planned on going forward into Sentinel, as you all know. Well, we also had plans to continue on after that, too
. Our flexible skeleton of a story plan for Sentinel was finished, for the most part, in March of 2012. We've got the course of events plotted out well, we've got a bunch of characters created, some ours, some from other people, and Fritz had even created a good amount of art for it...
But as things currently stand, it's unplayable.
Why? Although it was a Trinary group effort, Fritz wrote probably 75% of the thing. And all those characters I mentioned? Well, of the major ones (Either new or being carried over from the current RPG), Fritz was going to be controlling around a dozen of them, almost all of whom would be
very important to one faction or another, and hell, he was still working on fleshing out some of them and even creating new ones when he disappeared into the wind. Then we still have the characters that were going to go to Cardi, Wedge, wonton, and my own, and while not all were important and a good number could be dropped or whatever to lighten the workload, it would still be far too many for me to do on my own. Sentinel, from the start, was planned with the assumption that the Trinary would be intact, and without the other guys, it's just not possible to run.
Here is my next dilemma. When it became clear about a year or so ago that I'm basically running this thing on my own, I started toying with the idea of rewriting our Sentinel story, to reflect the lesser number of players (Both from the stand point of running the whole thing, and players in general) and make it easier to run. However, the ending of this thing and Sentinel's story are so tied together, I'd literally have to start making changes in any future posts (Both to speed up ending this thing and set up future plans) for anything to work out, and given how long we worked on Sentinel and how much I like the story we created, I've been highly reluctant to do that.
So let me ask now, what would you all like to do?
As far as continuing this thing, there are a few different options. I could start changing our plans, leading to a highly reduced (For lack of a better word offhand) version. I considered the idea of just doing a big long post explaining what happens to everyone, but that would lack the drama of everything and be nowhere near as cool, although it would be faster and easier to do, with less risk of me screwing things up. There is also no reason we still have to continue on into Sentinel. We could end this thing (Now or with some kind of proper ending), and leave Sentinel (Rewritten or not) for another time, or do some other setting if that is what people wanted. In that case, I'd probably do a series of posts explaining the story and showcasing all the art, because there is no way in hell I'm going to let all that stuff go to waste, not with all the work put into it (Which, FYI, is something we kind of planned on doing after TftF ended, going back doing some "director's commentary" on a few things and explaining how some things went down, which I could still do if anyone gave a damn about that sort of stuff). I'm open to almost anything at this point. I'm still interested in doing something, even if it's another RPG, but I'll let it be known now I can't run something big entirely on my own. I'd be more than willing to help out with something, or even run something smaller (Kind of like our original plan for this thing, nearly nine years ago on the old board) but I've never liked handling more than a handful of characters, so make of that what you will.
Well... In my mind, I had more to say, and probably better ways to say it, but I'm drawing a blank at the moment. If they come to me later, I'll post 'em. So, if anyone has any ideas or opinions, please, voice them here.
EDIT: Oh yeah, one thing that I wanted to include: What happened to the rest of the Trinary? Cardi and Wedge are alive and well. Cardi posts on Facebook fairly often, and AFAIK is still in Korea or was until recently. Wedge messaged me a few weeks ago, so he's alive, but no longer into RPG stuff. Wonton I haven't seen anywhere since he last posted here. As for Fritz, I know he was still around, since he and I both tend to lurk on the same parts of SomethingAwful, but even there I haven't seen him in a while so I have no idea what's going on with him.
And, in case this hasn't convinced you, I'm still alive, but finally back in school full time, and working as much as possible. Getting older sucks.
). 
, so that said, I'll actually start working on some stuff again and doing posts in the next week or two (Exactly when depends on how happy/depressed I am after the Super Bowl 
). However, in order to do things that actually move the story forward, I'm going to have to bunny characters around, and in some cases, that will mean damage to MS or even deaths as I alluded to in October. I don't think there will be much of a cause for people to complain about me not warning in advance or not waiting enough time, and I've mentioned enough times before I'm not comfortable doing those sorts of things, but what the hell, I'd like to get things moving so the rest of you can finally see how this whole thingamajig ends. 
