@BrokenPromise Very nice. Also I love your siggy.

she was more panicked st the fact that i screwed her over. So no. No repercussions.

Interesting.

Well, despite the fact that the first RP ended without a hitch, there were repercussions in store for me. As well as repercussions for those repercussions. payback can be a vicious cycle.

The same GM decides to do a sequel of this RP. (Why, I don't know. But I guess I'm equally foolish for joining.) So once again, the big bad nasty has to take over the world, and my dragon emperor is the primary obstacle in the antagonist's path. GM wisely dispatched a new player to use his antagonist character to kill the dragon emperor. Let's call this sub-antagonist "Thorn." On paper, this would have never worked. There was no way Thorn could take down the dragon emperor, he just wasn't strong enough. But if he failed, one of the new role player's best characters would be killed or otherwise incapacitated for the rest of the story. Quite the conundrum, one of my favorite characters from the last RP or one of my favorite ones from this RP were going to meet their maker.

Interesting development to note, the new player hated the current direction of the RP as much as I did. Particularly the main antagonist.

We decided to have the dragon emperor fall. It was done in an interesting way, where Thorn offered to carry out a wish on the dragon king's behalf. He wished for his guardian to be escorted out of the country, and Thorn kept to his word. Another interesting development was that the dragon emperor had a portable trap that vaporized dark magic, and Thorn took this with him. I may be spoiling too much, but I'd like to note that the main antagonist is a dark spell caster.

So the GM collaborates with the new player, his antagonist congratulates Thorn on a job well done. However, their meeting goes south when the main antagonist decides he wants to deviate from his own plan a little bit. This upsets Thron, who deploys the anti-dark magic trap. Thorn then proceeds to take the powerless mage in his hands and poetically ends him by stabbing him with one of the dragon king's own fangs, collected as proof of death. It was very Sweeney Todd.

Admittedly this was not the same "surprise attack" kind of thing I did in the first RP. The new user did have to do some talking with the GM to make them realize the current direction of the RP wouldn't work. So even though we set all that stuff up, it was the new player's OOC diplomacy skills that made the whole thing work.

Perhaps not technically a best Rp moment of my life but probably one of the most flattering compliments I've ever received came recently to me from an Rper I'm regards to my gming.

I swear, Joss Whedon directs all of Lady A's RPs.

Actually, all my best RPing experiences happened on MSN Messenger/Yahoo Messenger with my inner circle when we were using my main story project setting, basically once forum RPing seemed to fall into large decline and the forums we were using stopped having activity. So while I started text-based role-playing on forums, my best experiences technically came outside of them.

Now that decent IM programs have pretty much fallen into decline, I'm in the process of creating a new forum using my setting in the hopes to breathe life back into that kind of quality RPing.

My worst RPing experiences mostly came from trying to write using settings that weren't my own, since my passion for writing is largely rooted in my passion for my main project, and I usually end up having to severely dumb down or alter my concepts for them to fit elsewhere.

Up to a few years back I had a dedicated group of some 10 people with whom a two full universes were established, one rooted in fantasy and the other sci-fi. They weren't the longest posters, not the best roleplayers, and at times left things sitting a few weeks on end, but they always came back and the stories continued - best roleplaying I had seen, in other words. A roleplay that lasted and wasn't something I blew time on only to see it sink like so many others over the years. Casual, yet effective.

I'm now left with most of my characters and stories unfinished, and most of what I create is based off those stories. So, similar to above, I am left with a pair of universes (the newly sunk ship known as Waeldeshore very nearly at the point of carrying the torch for the fantasy realm) that are unlikely to ever have endings for most of my expansive lists of characters. I joined RPG a few months after the group died for good; I got off to an ok start, but various life events have whittled me down to the point where I'm extremely picky on what roleplays I'm interested in, and the ones I do select as candidates often fall off the radar after seeing what actual in-character posts look like or even going from interest check to OOC. Too short posts make me go "eeh", too long "nope". But that's a rant on a subject nobody else cares about :p

ArenaSnow - On the subject of what you said at the end there, I've found that I almost universally post longer than all of the people that I got involved with, but thankfully their posts were never short enough for it to become a problem. Admittedly I am definitely more of the "long post" instead of "short post" type of person, but length is less important than giving the other people enough to actually work with for a reply, and to create the atmosphere needed for them to get into that reply, so it honestly has never bothered me if people posted shorter than I did so long as it wasn't something that couldn't be worked with.

Definitely agree that the biggest problem that seems to come up with role-players though is their lack of dedication. The people who actually want to make something of what they're doing and don't completely role-play in a casual light end up getting into situations where people essentially keep walking out on the stories they had initially seemed passionate about, either because whatever phase they were in passed or because they were just role-playing out of boredom.

This is a topic about positive experiences with role-playing though, not negative, so I won't let this post of mine turn anymore off topic than it already is. I guess you can just interpret this as me saying that situations where the parties involved were all devoted to what they were doing generally resulted in the better experiences.

@Shoryu Magami I've always, admittedly, been on the shorter end myself - I'm definitely not the one who overfluffs text (content and point > sheer length and heavily detailed descriptions). The main issue's keeping the flow going and the ideas across (I am a little abstract in that I like giving broad descriptions with certain special points that stand out being the ones with detail). That said, my content always ended up longer as in that group I mentioned as I was often the one setting the scene and controlling various NPC's not part of the group's main charset. Collaborative docs were also used frequently, so stories would flow from multiple people chipping into a single document instead of everyone having separate posts. That style puts me at best in the casual section on this site.

Dedication for me comes from investment - my group had years put into it, and when I'm in something and have written stuff for it, I likely won't end up leaving unless I am at a total draw AND if it's still in early stages (I have never intentionally left something I've spent big chunks of time and effort on). The issue for me is two parts - on one hand, I hate it when people drop and the story just sits there without an ending, and I do strive to battle on to the end, so to speak. On the other, I'm joining a very small amount of roleplays and writing very, very little lately in part because I'm accustomed to a project coming to an immature end. I've written easily 20k character pre-formatted nation sheets, for example, only for that roleplay to be dead in a month and 3 IC posts in on my end. I might get an initial interest, but the moment I get a trigger of "this might not work" it dies a swift death in my mind.

I want to invest in something while I still have the time, but I haven't found anything I trust to survive in order to do that. One of my best roleplays was with a person with poor grammar, poor engine usage and a cheesy plot over in Cortex Roleplay on Starcraft 2. Why is it one of my favorite roleplays of all time? Because it came to a natural end.

(I was thinking of being an author, but the moment I take other people out of the equation, I write a paragraph and proceed to nitpick it back to a blank document)

ArenaSnow - Oh, I definitely agree that the actual content is more important than the length. Quality over quantity. I think the only reason I end up writing such large posts is because my setting is very complex fleshed out and so without a lot of details the points and quality of a post would be lost in transition. It's sort of like how a movie will usually always be a really dumbed down version of a book's storyline that lacks its depth and doesn't feel as detailed. I'm something of an extreme perfectionist when it comes to details. The only other reason my posts end up so long is because I like to write very heavily into my character's thought processes, due to having an extensive interest in psychology.

Most of the best role-playing topics, or sessions I guess you could call them due to so many being over IM, actually did come to some sort of conclusion, but since they were all using my main story project's setting, they obviously felt more like the end of an "arc" or an "episode" instead of the end of a "series" or "franchise". Still, I definitely know the feeling of investing a lot of time into something and then lack of devotion on other people's ends caused it to all be a waste. I've had a few forums end up like that, and that Final Fantasy RP forum I told everyone I got my start in text-based role-play with actually had the same problem, multiple times. I poured well over a year one time into helping rebuild and flesh out its mechanics and systems, only to see most of the members abruptly disappear for seemingly no good reasons. Obviously, since I always work with my main project, I haven't had to worry about feeling like my work was a complete waste since it always contributes to the main project when its one of my own forums, but it can still be annoying.

As for what you mentioned about becoming an author yourself, that's an interesting dilemma to have. I honestly don't have that problem. The issue I have that causes me to keep nitpicking my work is that until I sort through my thousands of notepads and create a proper database for my story, I'm never satisfied anytime I attempt to write a sample of the work for people to see. So even though a large portion of the story is written in my head, until I get all those details collected and sorted, I can't really go anywhere with it. If putting other people into the equation does anything for me, it motivates me to be more productive so I won't procrastinate getting somewhere, because constantly having literally years of work get lost from technology screwing up can really do a number on a person's morale. I feel like I'm off topic though. There's probably some other place I should be saying this sort of thing.

My best RP moment was the time we actually finished one.

My best RP moment was the time we actually finished one.

Amen.

@Shoryu Magami If you'd like to keep bouncing those topics around, feel free to shoot a PM, where off topic goes many, many places...

@ArenaSnow dark places too. I cant wait to actually finish a rp for once. Probabaly never gonna ahppen but oh well.

@ArenaSnow dark places too. I cant wait to actually finish a rp for once. Probabaly never gonna ahppen but oh well.

I still have stuff for that BT RP cooking on the way way back burner. :p

@Shoryu Magami@ArenaSnow I feel you two so much. ^.^ I'm also something of a writer, but I tend to like writing with other people better, and rp seems to be the format that tends to end up in.

@Goldeagle1221 Oh gosh. I've finished a few rps -- mostly ones that spanned a couple years of multiple sessions a week (this group played in realtime, using a script style to allow swift responses). Mostly we wrapped up things because we ran out of plot ideas and possibilities for character development. We wanted something fresh. But in those campaigns, there were dozens and dozens of different plots that we finished.

I'm always a little reluctant to call an rp "done" because I get very attached to chars and settings, and I don't want to leave them, but then again there's something to be said for starting fresh, too. Actually that group is looking at another fresh campaign in a couple months. We're almsot done with the vague overarching trouble that's followed the group throughout the rp, so that should be a good place to end. ^.^

@ArenaSnow
If I actually decide any of those subjects are worth going into more detail on, yeah, I'll send a PM over your way. Feel free to PM me too if you have something you'd like to talk about. This latter statement is technically an invitation to anyone who wants to speak with me as well.

@shylarah
Yeah, writing with other people can add enjoyment to it. Admittedly, due to the nature of my project (being so closely attached to the foundation of who I am), I don't like involving people in the creation of the official story itself (except my fiancé over the last few years, who has a lot of impact on the actions of some of the female characters now, I guess sort of like a muse of sorts), but I do really enjoy role-playing with friends using my project's setting, and while I definitely don't depend on having other people who want to see my story to motivate me to write it, having people who are interested definitely helps prevent me from procrastinating during my times of bad morale. Most of the people who actually know me realize I have an enormous amount of willpower, but I really was not exaggerating in my introduction post when I said I frequently make jokes that the cosmos is trying to prevent me getting this project out at all costs.

With what you said about not liking to consider a role-play "done", I can definitely get behind that. As I've said before, I have actually finished several RP sessions with my main circle that used my setting as the basis, and due to the size of my project and how many different characters, stories, and plots it focuses on, it really is easy to think of those role-plays finishing as just an "episode" or an "arc" finishing, not the end of the story itself, so thankfully we never have to feel like "it's all over". As the project got progressively more fleshed out, we did need to "reboot" the role-play sessions occasionally, and for obvious reasons those sessions would not have been considered "canon" to the official story, but the people who got involved in these role-play sessions never needed to worry about the stories completely ending or them not being able to continue using those characters, since there was always the potential for many more plots.

I don't actually end up RP'ing much, between my own time constraints and the difficulty of actually getting an RP rolling, let alone keeping one alive. So great characters and stories are few and far between for me. To look at it optimistically, though, these restrictions make the brightest times shine even brighter. I remember vividly the first time I came to this site and how bad I was at making interesting characters (disclaimer: Spoo is still bad at making interesting characters). The first RP that got off the ground for me was a Highschool of the Dead spinoff. Daichi, my character, was a dork (unintentionally; I was shooting for "reliable, tactical thinky type" and wound up with anime Dwight Schrute) and at one point I accidentally initiated sexytime because he was sleeping shirtless or something. Bad writing on my part, but it still turned out to be a fun time.

There was one RP I was in that was based off Baka to Test. Comedy, school life, slice of life -- that sort of thing. My character was Itsuki Akoto. Another thinky type, but this time a charismatic dude and closet supervillian who manipulates people to get his way with no regard to their feelings. Still my personal favorite character of my own creation to date -- we had a weekly poll on that RP voting on favorite characters and happenings and such and Itsuki won once. Not exactly a Pulitzer, but it made me happy to know someone enjoyed his scenes regardless.

I never finished an RP, although I did complete a character's arc in an RP over the course of like 4 or 5 years one time. That was probably the best (and also one of the hardest) things I've done in an RP before because killing off someone who's head you've lived inside for about a quarter of your life (at the time) isn't fun and I still miss writing as that character to this day.

However it was a great experience to take a character to their logical conclusion. They were always one of those more unstable asshole-ish characters that had trouble getting on with others in the group, and it was established during the narrative they were slowly sinking into a feral state as a result of degenerative disease (this was part of the main RP plot incidentally, not my down device). It was really sad because there would be periods where they would kind of warm to the others, then there would be some perceived slight or betrayal that would set them off and push them further away, and this built and built until my character ended up trying to kill the leader of our group. He loses, and is killed.

The thing that was so great about it was that it forced the group leader to also deal with a bunch of stuff and evolve and change as a leader, as well as completing my character's spiral into self-destruction. But still, all very bittersweet. I don't write as that character anywhere anymore because it doesn't feel right. I finished their story. Sometimes I would have liked to give them a different ending, because looking back there was a fair amount of me in there in many ways, but its never felt right.

Yeah so that's probably the best moment I ever RPed, the death of my favourite character.

There was a lot of stupid stuff as well, like the time me and friend got bored of a survival RP so spent a night whole replying to each other to build up an elaborate suicide pact death scene. Or one time a high school RP we were in died except for me and the same friend, so we highjacked it and introduced some Lovecraftian demonic characters we used to 1x1 with to slaughter everyone else. That was fun, but the best moment was still probably killing off Rolnak.

I had a quite a lovely experience with my inner circle of RP'ers. Most of my favorable experiences came from MSN/Windows Messenger Chat RP. I liked more of the rapid posting with one or two paragraphs. We do a lot of silly RPs and some duel RPs. It was quite nice and some were complete RPs, though short. My prouder moments were actually completing RP topics on forums. It's satisfying to complete a chapter of your characters and embark on another journey or struggle.

There are some RPs where I had to think a little more. I do enjoy thinking outside the box. Though, I must say that I'm not the smartest RP'er in the bunch when it comes to that. I do always try to get more of an understanding of concepts and such. I always get help and often get help to think in a certain way and get an answer. But, I struggle quite a bit. I have a love / hate relationship with frustration. Hehe.

Another thing I'm proud of is using big vocabulary words. I try to look up word-of-the-day words on dictionary to help me out, to help me look somewhat smart. I'm not a reader. I don't read many books, which I know hinders my ability to write and articulate well. I like to try to bring words to life.

Oh. I do take simple pleasures in turning intro topics into short RPs. Hehe.

I have been role playing and writing for the better part of two decades. By far my best experiences come from my humble beginnings as a real-time play-by-post role player on the serves of Battle.net through games such as Warcraft or Diablo. The achievements that brought me the most enjoyment were the collaborative efforts that established a static, yet concrete continental environment that brought about wars, spies, and other espionage. Another collaborative effort established a variety of fighting pits, a guild across that continent if you will the battles of which were gathered together on one website that allowed people to read our collective works. One particularly nasty battle had been created between two dragons, where I unwittingly encountered a dragon much younger than the dracolich that I had been writing for. Back then transparency was not always required as we experience here on the guild. Or there happened to be a particular role play between and few friends and I that developed into a few short stories and an epic sized adventure that I am still working on today. In fact, before the fall I had attempted to post a chapter of it to get some feed back on this website before the fall. Unfortunately, as I am sure many of you have experience the members at that time weren't exactly receptive. On any accord, little of that matters now. The guild has shifted into a place where varied skill or past reputation matter little.

@ELGainsborough When you say transparency, what do you mean? Are you speaking of character details, intentions...?

By the way, lovely signature. <3

@shylarah

What do I mean by transparency? Well, if you want to understand what I mean by transparency just saunter your way over to any one of the role playing categories on this website. All matters of character sheets - the big, the small, and the terrible. All sorts of extensive background work, pictures, and maps for role playing threads. So much is known before you even get to it that you already know where you are trying to go before you even get the opportunity to allow the being you are writing for make that decision for themselves.

When I began role playing, to put this into a better context, the profile sections of our accounts allowed for age, sex, location, and a short desciption off maybe 100 or 150 characters? If that much, I remember it begin four or five short lines in a text box that was barely a fourth of the width of the one we type our new replies in. You had your character and your little bit of information you could fit in that tiny box and the rest your character had to find out for themselves. Sure, character pages from free internet pages slowly crept in as time moved on and the internet was more widely active but overall everything was enshrouded in mystery.