katyd wrote:; o r c a wrote:ʀose ; wrote:
I was thinking of making a post apocalyptic literate/semi-literate roleplay.
The good rps seem to be dwindling.
Is anyone into that kind of roleplay?I'd definitely join - as long as there was an actual plot.
Hi everyone! I'm glad to be here and I'm looking forward to meeting you all and having some good discussions on RPing.
I ditto the statements above. There does seem to be a dearth of good RPs out there. And even some of the good ones end in ruin after only a few short months, way before their time. Which begs the question, why?
Since so many of us are looking to join an RP or start up our own RP in the near future, I thought it would be interesting and hopefully enlightening to try and figure out why so many RPs fail.
Is it lack of plotting? Lack of preparation or maybe upkeep? Is it lack of time spent writing by the members? Is it too many or too few rules? Is it slow story progression? Is it too few or too many writers or characters?
Since I too am thinking about starting up my own RP in the near future, and since I have little experience at running an RP, I was wondering if any of you would tell me your ideas of what makes for a good RP (not so much the subject or genre, but more the mechanics and rules), and also what makes good RPs fail. That way, hopefully, I, and others, can avoid some of these pitfalls.
I know that in my short RPing time on CS I have already seen some things that have caused trouble. These are a few things that come to mind...
1. Lack of any rules or expectations as far as posting requirements or etiquette.
So members posted irregularly and some posted one liners consistently while others posted paragraphs consistently, which made for an unbalanced presentation of the characters. Some writers would disappear for a week, leaving other writers' characters stranded in frozen scenes, instead of writing their characters out of the scene before they left on vacation or whatever.
2. Lack of a well defined setting.
So people were left with a lot of questions as to where this or that was, and is such and such available to us or not? Also, writers weren't sure how much leeway they had to create the setting because nothing had been stated in regard to the freedoms they had in creating the world and the NPCs around them.
3. Lack of story management and pacing from the GM.
This allowed the story progression to bog down, and multiple tangents to veer off into their own storylines, thereby losing track of the main storyline (assuming the GM had even plotted one out, which is another problem altogether - the never-climaxing, never-ending RP).
4. Lack of willingness on the part of some writers to keep up with reading what other writers had posted.
Some writers would constantly ask for recaps instead of reading back a day or two themselves. Seems to me like all the writers should keep as up to date as they can on what has been written, even the details, which is essentially the history of the story. Otherwise how can they really ever get to know their fellow characters and gain an understanding of where the story has been and where it's going? It would be like reading a book's outline and chapter summaries but not the actual body text. It's no wonder some people would lose interest after awhile of doing that.
These are some of the issues I have seen anyway. What else have you all seen that might have led to RP failure that hopefully we can avoid doing in our own RPs? Maybe we can come up with a master list of Do's and Don'ts for CS RPers. Even the RP schools don't really address these issues. They concentrate mainly on cultivating a writer's ability to write a good paragraph, not on how to run a good RP. It seems to me that we should START with that.
Just some thoughts. I would love to hear from any and all of you on this matter.Thanks!
All veryvalid points, however for me it seems like most roleplays fail because of Lack of Participation. In my own roleplay, eeryone who has jined thinks it's a great plot idea. Howeer, the members just seem to have their characters drift about until I'm the one who roleplays with them. Right now there are about three people that are in this situation and I didn't roleplay with them, for I wanted to see if they wouldhave enough common sense to actually roleplay with each other. However, they don't; they are just having their wolves wander the territory, never evn bothering to at least bump into each other. It's extremely frustrating.~ -.-
