Hello, all!

So I've formally been on here for more than a day (lurked for a bit), and am wondering: when exactly can I start my own RP? (I've had the idea for one for about a year.) What do I have to do to be treated seriously?

This is probably a ridiculous question.

Basically you can do it one of two ways. Either go and join some Rp's and get to know some people before you host your own or just go ahead and type up an interest check and dive right in. For me, over the decades, I have always found it easier to join a few Rp's first and let people see how I Rp before actually starting my own. It lets you build some "cred" with other Rpers and you have a better over all chance of getting an RP to take off once you host it yourself. Like it or not, there are little "clicks" on the forum and people have their ways. So meeting people first tends to work better over all.

Nothing, really. Most Roleplayers will take you seriously right away. If you have an idea that you want to try out, then start out by creating an Interest Check (which is where you state the idea and see how many people are interested) and go from there.

Nothing. I've seen a lot of posts about people worrying they won't be taken serious because of their low post count, or clarifying that they've been roleplaying for years in spite of said post count, but I've never actually seen anybody treat anybody differently for having a low post count.

In my experience, the best way for getting an interest check attention boils down to two things.

1. Be clear and specific about your idea. You don't have to outright say "It's a quest from point A to point B" but the less vague you are, the better. Having a TL;DR at the bottom sometimes helps.

2. Make the formatting pretty! Centered images, nicely sized paragraphs, hiders, and proper spelling and syntax make people go apeshit. I've seen a few interest checks tank because they're giant textwalls, in spite of being pretty good ideas.

New or old, we're all strange bastards here. Thus, we take one crazy fellow the same as the next, as we are all some form of crazy.

It's when you act normal that you aren't taken seriously...

You can start an RP at any point. Just because your join date may be an hour ago doesn't mean that you aren't as good as someone who has been here for years. It just means that you're new to the site.

As long as you present your idea clear and well, people will become interested. Be aware though that in the case it doesn't work out it does not mean that it was a bad idea or that you don't have any cred. It could be the wrong timing (multiple of similar style), could be during school exam periods, or even it was bumped out of view by accident. In any case if you keep at it or try again in the future, it might work out.

Only time a low post count matters is when someone wants to know what level you write at. Because a post count has little to no correlation with your RP experience, few worry about it.

We personally only care about what you deliver in the present. Why should we care if you wrote horrifyingly bad last year if you write good now?

The only place on the guild where some seem to care about post count, might be 1x1.

If your post count isn't at least a thousand, I won't even acknowledge your existence.

As a newbie who has attempted twice to initiate an RP, do wait. Like the others said, join a few RPs, make sure you build some good relationships with other participants and pay attention to how good GMs handle certain things. You can learn a lot.

If you can't wait, you can go the easy route and lure the majority with an RP concept that you're sure will reel in a lot of people (read: popular fandoms, multiverse, crossover, high school), however chances are they won't last long. That's because they mostly attract people that have no issue with hopping from one RP to another when their interest begins to flicker.

If your post count isn't at least a thousand, I won't even acknowledge your existence.

And he'll only speak to you by @mention if your time here exceeds 900 days...

Mine was a strange one. I wasn't a newbie, but I hadn't posted once since Guildfall (tl;dr a little while back the site that was originally RPG went down for good and everyone had to migrate to this one, I'm not sure of the actual details because I had been on hiatus for RPG before it). So, it showed that I had been on forever, but hadn't posted once. When I finally put up an interest check that made some people go "huh, that's weird," but others were actually interested in the idea. Met some new friends, got some old friends from other sites to come here, etc.

Long story short, I guess my idea from this is don't be intimidated by the fact you don't know anyone here yet. I didn't know anyone here when I started my "first" (on this technical site) roleplay, as all of my friends from RPG before Guildfall have pretty much disappeared. I brought just one friend here and she had to make a new account entirely, but she didn't help me advertise so the unfortunate bastards I've drawn were all my own doing.

If you got an idea, especially one you've been sitting on, go ahead and make an interest check. Get the idea out there for people to see, stake your claim to it before someone else makes something eerily similar completely by coincidence. You may have to be a little patient since no one knows you so you aren't being actively stalked; it took almost a month for me to get enough people for me to be comfortable with starting my roleplay, but we've been going on for over three-fourths of a year since then.

If the idea doesn't get taken too initially, then that's when I'd say you start going to other roleplays, for a few reasons. One is the reason why everyone has said to do so, being the-making-of-the-friends, but another reason is because you're here because you want to write, right? That's what I assume at least, so write, get better at it, and improve your own idea while you wait. Once you've made yourself a good friend group, then put up the roleplay again, and I'm sure it'll get eaten up in a good way.

Basically, if you're impatient like me go ahead and do it, but if you actually have patience then do what everyone else is saying because it's probably less risky.

I should be working right now. This is what I do instead.