I have a story for you, one lost to time. That's in truth: the Guildfall took the RP from history along with so many others. It was a One Piece RP, perhaps the most popular one, perhaps only surpassed by my attempt at a swan song a few months before Guildfall. I wasn't the one who started this one, which is why I'm posting this in a horror story thread, btu what can I say, it looked neat. You see, I was inherently interested in One Piece games due to my love of the setting. It's a big place with lots of room for fun and creative ideas. I've tried as many permutations of One Piece games as I've been able to conceive over the years, to the point that I might have been in more OP RPs and created more characters than some newer roleplayers have RPs and characters period. So, as I answered a few setting questions to other interested RPers before the GM could, he took notice and asked me if I would be willing to Co-GM. The game looked promising, and I thought that if I was involved from the outset, it could only be better, so I accepted.
As you can guess, this was a mistake. You see, I'm very picky when it comes to GMing OP games. A casual observer might see the setting as a goofy, wacky fun time where anything can happen, ignoring the many unwritten rules that govern the world. In fact, at one point I denied a new character of the GM's because there were aspects of it that clashed with the setting. No one was safe from my meticulous gaze. This usually isn't a problem, as it's typically some semantics and more finding out how to make it work within the rules of the setting. Most of the early joiners had little to no problems with their characters and they were easily accepted. I put myself in charge of editing the character roster. You don't see such a meticulously kept character roster often: color coded and organized by where the characters are, what crew or organization they were in, and what their abilities were, complete with links to the individual character sheets. I made three characters, two pirates with a connected backstory yet on separate sides of the world and a Marine. If you haven't seen the first problem yet, I did. After getting my first post out, most of my time in the RP was spent accepting characters and editing the roster. As players were accepted, many tended to make new characters, meaning more work for me without the game actually growing. The GM was posting often as things were going on in a location I had no characters in.
I did want to keep posting, but I had to retire my pirate characters, as without playing both of them, I thought there'd be no point, and one of the players I'd latched one of them to had left. I noticed another player had placed their character in a prison, as an obvious plot point, so I worked at making a character to bite the obvious hook. Then, I felt a chill wind at my back as they posted their character for our approval.
To this date, I have yet to see such a blatantly disgusting Gary Stu. Some incredibly edgy or just regularly mediocre characters over the years, sure, be it funny or obnoxious, but I've always felt that either I'm good at avoiding the games that attract the worst, or that RPGuild community was pretty good about stomping that out of people. But holy shit was this an exception to that. You might have heard of Devil Fruit, but 'Devine Fruit' was a new one, and one that was completely broken (let's just say he didn't mean it had the ability to remove vines). No, you can't balance out the incredibly overpowered abilities of transforming into water to dodge attacks AND manipulate water AND transform into mythical sea creatures, by giving them crippling weaknesses in other areas, and the idea of a character who's unstoppable in the water but as feeble as a child on land is utterly retarded and limiting in any RP and just as unbalanced. No, you can't be a race that gets flight, because the wings of the skyman race are vestigial you fucking clod. NO, you can't have five different weapons and be good at unarmed combat on top of everything else. NO, you can't have a younger brother character with literally nothing defining on his own except an undying loyalty to the older brother and no special powers, just the exact same martial abilities. [NO]NO[/NO]. Ironically, it was so disgusting that I saved it, and still have it to this day. So much else lost to Guildfall, and this...thing still exists.
The GM's response to this was not an outright 'no'. He had some problems with it, I don't remember what, but it wasn't "everything". I told the GM outright that if he accepted the character I would leave the RP. He wisely chose to defer the matter to me. Of course, I was too nice for my own good, because instead of telling this guy to find some more experience in an RP of lowered expectations, I said he should scrap his character entirely and start again. Newbies need a hand from the veterans, you know? Well, he later claimed he had as much experience in roleplay as me, but that's not relevant. He ended up coming up with another character. A remarkably less shit one, but one with a new host of problems nonetheless. After some back and forth, with the OOC in the hundreds and the IC in the dozens, I was still working on my fourth character to get the plot hook, and still waiting on the only other Marine character to finally respond to mine so I could make my second post of the IC, all while upkeeping that beautiful character roster. By the way, the player of this other Marine character was still very active, just only with his other two characters. After a long morning of back and forth, I told the problem player that his character was still not accepted yet, but that I couldn't go into why because I had to go to work. I knew I was going to come back to a bunch more OOC and characters to accept, so I wasn't exactly in high spirits, but I was able to keep distracted with the usual grocery bagging and cart pushing. Call me weird but I found the menial work satisfying in a way.
I came back to worse than you could guess. The player who's character was prison bound? I'd told him I was going to join him when I finished the character, but he decided to drop the game. The problem player? Posted his still shit character and the GM accepted it. As I found going through the three dozen new OOC posts. And no, I wouldn't have posted IC again even if I'd had the opportunity (I didn't, the other player still hadn't posted where I needed him to, just everywhere else). I finally dropped the game, ready to put it all behind me. Except I did check back in the OOC once.
The GM's first post after mine announcing my departure was "I made a new OOC and I need a new Co-GM". Or something to that effect. He certainly didn't acknowledge me beyond that. It was my fault of course. I accepted the position and took on more responsibility than I should have, but you know, a little fucking recognition would have been nice. I would rate Co-GMing with someone you don't know as a 0/10 experience, would not recommend.
