YOU ASKED FOR IT, NERDS. In an effort to foster community love and spread the suffering, let’s hear about your dark and brooding pasts and what you learned from them!

I’ll start us off.

My greatest failure was when I made a great big fantasy RP on a different site that shall not be named. It was glorious! I had magic, custom races, incredible world building, and a wonderful plot, to boot! I was ready for everyone to love it! People would sing tales of my great RP for years to come.

It died after like 5 posts lmao

I fucked up because I pushed my own plans way too hard and didn’t think about what players wanted. I was just better off writing my own novel if I wasn’t gonna listen to players.

inb4 “haha i’ve never failed” from some top tier comedian

People have successful Roleplays?

In all seriousness, thank you for making this topic and I'll post a response in the morning after I get some sleep. I have a plane to catch right now and I should stop reading Off-Topic threads on RoleplayerGuild at 2 AM, but here we are.

Aight imma top this. I did that too, except I did it 5 times with the same RP. A little old thing called Salem Witches' Institute. I built the world originally on one sleep deprived night when I was sixteen. I am 21 now. Each iteration was slightly different. The latest try I didnt get the turn out I wanted, idk if it was an overload of information, bad timing, or the world just not being captivating enough, but not enough people were interested in it for me to have the energy to write for it. I would love to run it again, for a sixth time, but at this point it feels like beating a dead horse

My greatest failing is something I'm still probably kinda doing but trying to get away from. Tend to make characters that just kinda go along and don't really push events along. Sometimes it's well intentioned so as to not take too much control of the pacing, but often times it's just not really fully participating.

That and trying to join a few RPs, Storm/Poo/Hank's Elder Scrolls one and LordWraith/Henry's Amalgam one come to mind, but failing to come up with an adequate character.

I’d say my two sad boi hour failures were:

City of Dreams

And

The Elites x2.

COD was thrown together really fast, my information and world building was delivered on the spot without really any consideration to how it could affect the plot and was super inconsistent. I had no clear goal in mind, got overwhelmed quickly and shut it down even faster. I had spent lots of time on my characters and the people who joined had down the same so I felt bad about ending it, but it was for the best. ^.^

Elites the first time was also a lack of direction (Ha see a trend?), but mostly because I’m a picky GM and the sort of IC environment I wanted to encourage wasn’t viable with the cast and I lost interest as did other people. The second time was a lack of interest and the timing. 2020 has sucked and it reflected in my haste to throw out ideas but lack of commitment to follow through with them.

I used to spend so much time just playing pointless "games" on Spam. Why did I do that? Fuck if I know, but I definitely missed out on some good RPs due to that weird fixation with numbers n shit.

Then there was that phase where I made an alt, joined a RP, dropped that RP, then returned to that RP with the same alt a year or so later, and forgot I joined that RP with that alt in the past, and pretended that it was my first time RPing with these people.

Fucking weird decisions, and it probably wasn't even made all that long ago, relative to the length of time I've spent RPing in general.

Otherwise, my RPing has no weaknesses, and every dead RP only makes me stronger + more depressed whenever nostalgia strikes.

Hot damn this thread is tricky

I have mountains of RP failure stories to tell from the perspective of a player, a GM and of a co-GM

But so many of them involve drama on some level and while I do love me some dirty laundry, I at least make a token effort to not air it out.

I guess my most innocent example would be Re:Unison. A cool RP idea about people who use their super-powered partner to fight rogue monsters and each-other. I found early success, my players were cool, TREE WAS THERE, and generally it looked to be on the up and up.

So how did I fuck it up?

So my first mistake was not seeing the trees for the forest. I had a midgame, I had an endgame. The whole seven yards... except I conveniently forgot to plan out the starting line. You can really tell I was scrambling together an opening to get the characters settled at that point. Second, the scenario I had come up with was super restrictive. I, as a GM, was kicking myself because I felt like I was funneling my players in one specific direction which was no bueno. Third, there was some very clear instant regret over one of the characters I had accepted. Not going into detail on that one.

There was also the fact that it only took about a week 1,5 from me coming up with it out of the blue to me posting the thread itself. I rushed the production of Re:Unison way too hard, got too impatient. It's also at a time where I felt like I had to GM something to... prove my worth, I guess? There was also a bit of drama with a friend of mine who wanted to join, but who I wouldn't allow because it'd create drama with another player I already had. Issues upon issues compounded and eventually I decided to pull the plug on R:U before it ever got a chance to truly keep going.

I am still super sorry to all my players for that one, as the RP's downfall is 100% on me. It wouldn't shield me from fucking up my next GM attempt, but at the very least I didn't repeat the mistakes of R:U.

Nah, I just made a bunch of new ones instead :-)

One of my failures, was creating an interesting little original world roleplay - and I was so desperate for players that I didn't exercise enough assertiveness as a GM and essentially let two players ruin it when I should have kicked them.

I remember when I first started RPing on Dragon Cave, I joined this dragon hunter RP as a dragon shifter... I have no idea how the GM allowed it. Then when my character was tied up I godmodded, had the character burst out from her chains, and state that she was a Goddess called Gekkigami or some shit. Oh yeah and the character was a Mary Sue and I only pumped out two sentence posts with no spaces after punctuation.

I still cringe when I think of it

Gunna tell ya about that time everything was going wrong in my life. Without getting into details, work and home life were kind of crappy, and roleplaying was the only thing I could take solace in. I wasn't old enough to drink, give me a break.

Oh and this happened about a decade or so ago on another forum.

Now I'm not going to say I was exactly fun to play with in that mental state, but it wasn't made any better by the fact that our GM was, for lack of a better word, a cunt. He liked to press buttons and get people riled up. He was unable to sense the mood and didn't really have the ability to tell when he had gone too far. Much to his surprise, this type of behavior made me angrier and less likely to post. I was also becoming extremely vocal about the shortcomings of both him and the other players. It could no longer be contained in our messenger and spilled out onto the forum. No player was safe from my wrath. Naturally, others tried to tell me that I was being too negative and I should lay off, even pointing out my own shortcomings as an attempt to fire back. It got so bad that one player eventually wrote a meme IC post that addressed me and how "bad" I was for point out his shitty grammar. At that point the GM closed the RP.

Internet Drama: Not even once.

Looking back on it, I think the situation was handled poorly by everyone involved. I was probably the one most responsible for bringing the RP to its knees, but looking at it from the outside, there were things the GM and their players could have done better. This is a cautionary tale, because I now know how to deal with (and have dealt with) people who were in my position.

Firstly, if one of your players is acting a bit off, talk to them. In private is best, as no one likes to talk about personal stuff out in the open. Don't worry about trying to help them. Most of the time just listening is enough. A simple "That really sucks" lets them know you feel where they are coming from.

If they insist nothing is wrong, or continue to act out and bother people, then you might have to make the hard choice and let them go. One angry roleplayer can sink an RP, I've both been that roleplayer and had roleplayers like that in my RPs. Your other players will thank you for kicking the bully off the playground.

I used to spend so much time just playing pointless "games" on Spam. Why did I do that? Fuck if I know, but I definitely missed out on some good RPs due to that weird fixation with numbers n shit.

I feel that hard bby.

Every time I've tried to GM a roleplay with a solid premise, lots of interest, great characters from the players, and we were off to a good start and I just bungled it up and walked away because I couldn't stand the feeling of responsibility or didn't exactly know where to take the story or something came up in my personal life and I had to drop it.

Happened a lot over the years. Such a waste, every time.

Every time I've tried to GM a roleplay with a solid premise, lots of interest, great characters from the players, and we were off to a good start and I just bungled it up and walked away because I couldn't stand the feeling of responsibility or didn't exactly know where to take the story or something came up in my personal life and I had to drop it.

Happened a lot over the years. Such a waste, every time.

Same, same. It all just comes crashing down because how overwhelming it can be.

was too afraid of overloading the players with information that i didnt properly express the concepts i wanted to explore and wasnt assertive enough with posting schedules and activity. rp died within the first page

Shoutout to Prized Bride that died and rose again 5 fuckin times before being buried

i try to do the big rp but then i shid and fard all over my laptop an now can no do big rp because of dried shid and fard all over keyboard.

edit: if anyone wan to do big rp with me an i then i promise to no shid and fard again.

was too afraid of overloading the players with information that i didnt properly express the concepts i wanted to explore and wasnt assertive enough with posting schedules and activity. rp died within the first page

Ah, that's one I'm guilty of too. I had a world and plans I was really happy with, then bungled it by not communicating it properly and then getting overly frustrated when things didn't pan out. It was a humbling experience, for sure. I had to come to the realization that different people get into an RP for different things.

I’ve struggled at keeping deadlines. The CS I said that I would work on over the weekend? It didn’t get a second of my undivided attention. The post I said I would get up tonight? My bed convinced me to break my promises and to sleep instead. The worst offense was when I was working on a CS and then disappeared for three years. Thankfully the GM liked me enough to pester me into joining when they started a reboot.

Since my return I’ve been working on getting better at this but it still isn’t perfect.

I really relate to @Rina's post.

Between working full time and mental stuff and life in general, I can be a total goof and drop off the face of the world for a while. I generally always come back to RPs, but me going radio silent has put people off. I try to be up front about it now, because while its something I'm working on, it's far from being not a Thing.

I'm fairly certain I've hurt people in the past who thought it was a thing I was doing because of them, instead of it being all my issues, and I feel kinda crappy about it. But all I can do is try and be better in the future.

Can't fail to GM an RP on RPG if you've never GM'd an RP on RPG.

Taps temple

I like this thread (and the advice one), 'cause it kind of really brings to the forefront that everyone makes mistakes and deals with the same stuff when it comes to our shared hobby. Kind of de-stigmatizes talking about ghosting and failure as well, 'cause it's a normal thing we all experience.

For me... I think my greatest failures would be failing to take initiative, as a player and GM. I think there's a lot of times I wait for someone else to take the lead when I easily could have, and maybe one of those times I could have delayed an RP's demise just by being the first one to make a move or set the pace. I think it's really hard to be that person though. The first time I tried GMing on this site, it was an RP I thought would "run itself" pretty much, which in hindsight was a very dumb thought. I wasn't getting as involved as I should have been or taking initiative to keep things on track. _{I want to try running it again sometime.}