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Re: used to roleplay a lot, but...

Posted: May 14th, '17, 13:55
by Reht
I've only just recently got back into rping, although with me it was more of a time thing - whilst I was at uni I just simply didn't have the time to post regularly/ stay committed to any roleplay.

I'm hosting one on here atm and it's nice to be back in it c:

And I find the whole length elitism weird too - it's like, yeah, if the situation needs it, I'll post a longer post, but otherwise you run the risk of making too much happen for people to respond satisfyingly to.

The worst rp experience I've ever had was back when I was a teen and ran a little proboards rp forum - one of the members just killed ever roleplay she joined. She often posted 2-3k posts and often refused to interact with the other characters - there was one time when we were doing a fairly generic fantasy rp and it was still pretty early on, characters were still meeting up and finding reasons to join the main party.

Anyway, she starts her character in a tavern, so we head over to the tavern, easy enough. We get there and I get my character to go over and try to start up a conversation. In her next post her character proceeds to just shrug at my character, then ignore him, then creates a fight between some npcs, then sets the tavern on fire and then single handedly (literally, her character only had one hand) puts out the fire.
We were just like "wtf?" and all had to come up with flimsy reasons as to why our characters hadn't interacted with any of the events occurring around them.
So, after that I'm annoyed but I still want to try and be civil, so I send my character over again and try to interact - her character bluntly says "I'm not interested in you." and then buggers off by themself for the rest of the post.
So I just say fuck it and decide to carry on the rp without her - she spends the rest of the rp regularly posting super long posts about what her character is up to in a completely different part of the city, with a bunch of other characters she's made. I give her posts cursory glances to make sure she isn't trying to join in with the main story, but I honestly cba to read any of them properly.

I don't really find post styles all that annoying really - I can cope with some misspellings and bad grammar - what I hate is when people play mary-sue type characters that are perfect at everything, or play their characters so that they are somehow omniscient of all thoughts and events going on that their character wouldn't realistically know about.

I've only ever really rped on community sites like this, but rps where the forum comprises the whole world sound really interesting (although I'd have no idea how to search for/ find them xP )

Re: used to roleplay a lot, but...

Posted: May 14th, '17, 19:24
by Lycanthus
oh man, that sounds like the one time i roleplayed with a girl whose character was... so... awful... she gave me a 2k word post consisting of her character's appearance, which didn't even fit in with anything that was going on at the time. seriously- fishnet stockings and a cosmetic eyepatch at a military academy?

there was another more recent time where my partner was good, but... 1500-2000 word posts with absolutely nothing happening. it was painful, even if their writing was nice to read. a 1500 word post and all their character did was take a sip of coffee.

also, yeah, i actually have no idea how to find other forums like that other than via affiliate links on the ones i already know of. hm, i should look around.

Re: used to roleplay a lot, but...

Posted: May 15th, '17, 00:25
by Akili Li
Sometimes I have trouble with blurring the lines between round-robin story things with everyone taking point on a specific viewpoint character and rps.
Maybe it would be easier to find rps if I actually looked for the former instead? And then it's kind of, in practical terms, actually the latter?

Re: used to roleplay a lot, but...

Posted: May 15th, '17, 05:12
by Lycanthus
oh, yeah, i don't really like round-robin types of roleplays honestly. i like to stick to my own character and play them specifically. i don't really understand the appeal of it because i think the joy in roleplaying is to... play a role. it's no fun if you've got to share it, you know what i mean?

i don't mind sharing settings and npcs, but my ocs are so important to me it weirds me out imagining letting someone else try to write them.

Re: used to roleplay a lot, but...

Posted: May 15th, '17, 07:40
by Akili Li
Huh. We are coming at it from very different stand-points then! I find characters pretty easy to make, so I don't really feel very much attachment to any given one of them; but I love the world-building aspect of RPs so having other creative minds to jointly do that with is my favorite part.

Re: used to roleplay a lot, but...

Posted: May 15th, '17, 08:02
by light_sucks
I only roleplay when I play dungeons and dragons. I'm not super great at it. But I'm slowly learning.

Re: used to roleplay a lot, but...

Posted: May 15th, '17, 17:48
by Lycanthus
oh, it takes me a while to really get a feel for the oc. i have to really internalize them for me to consider them really well developed? it's kind of a weird thing with me. i've had a number of my ocs for over 3 years minimum and they always keep surprising me with new facets of themselves, so i don't think anyone else could really know them as intimately as i do.

let's see... jonah was made in 2012, alex in 2011, keith in 2009... and cade i still use surprisingly, from 2006. i really like reusing ocs to discover more parts of them i didn't know before.

it's not really so much that i have a hard time making ocs, but i like knowing them inside and out (and i am a firm believer that you will never completely 100% understand your own character- i guess that sounds odd but that's what my experience has been)


also, dnd sounds fun! i never tried it but i've been meaning to, to be honest.

Re: used to roleplay a lot, but...

Posted: May 15th, '17, 18:13
by Kitalpha Hart
Lycanthus wrote:oh, it takes me a while to really get a feel for the oc. i have to really internalize them for me to consider them really well developed? it's kind of a weird thing with me. i've had a number of my ocs for over 3 years minimum and they always keep surprising me with new facets of themselves, so i don't think anyone else could really know them as intimately as i do.
That bolded bit happens to authors, too
Like Keladry or Mindelan wasn't originally meant to be aromantic, but that's how she ended up being

Re: used to roleplay a lot, but...

Posted: May 15th, '17, 21:30
by Akili Li
Hmm, yeah, I can see that..
Mostly for me it's kind of like, a character isn't complete without all the characters around her that shaped her in the past, or that he interacts with and mean a lot to him in the present. So creating any one new individual OC is impossible; they don't exist in a vacuum. I'll end up creating an entire family, a small town, the friend and enemy group, etc. So then you have a batch of several dozen at a bare minimum and every single one of them will have to have at least enough information on their characters that you can predict how they'll react to situations. And at that point I'm more into world/story creation than character creation.

I end up DMing more than playing, lol, as you can probably guess.

Re: used to roleplay a lot, but...

Posted: May 16th, '17, 02:29
by mementomori
Oh man, now that I think about it, one of my main OCs was a repurposed RP character! And that was...crap, first year of high school, so 15 years ago. :mcomg:

...damn, I feel old now...

...uh, yeah. That's the danger of me RPing. I have four or five of those really, really old guys and gals floating around. They mostly get spun out of characters I make up on the fly for realtime one-on-one RPs. Most of the new ones have a decently fleshed out past, but all of the super old ones have very detailed backstories. I like to think of it like writing a non-fiction biography for a person who doesn't exist. Got to dig deep and research and make everything line up year to year. Which is tough going, when you've got OCs floating around who are 300+ years old.