Lol, May I preface by saying I must've gotten wiped for inactivity. This is not my first post, just my first one in maybe a year. I come from the school of Paranoia-Live.net, which stresses heavily that excessive exposition prevents other people from reacting in reasonable realtime to you. Unless it's all backstory (IMHO) this isn't a prose contest, it's a game, and more technically an exercise in interactive fiction. A 15,000 word post prevents believable interaction. A few well-written paragraphs, allowing at all times for a pause between major events is more conducive to the game, I believe. Does anyone else share this opinion? If so, why? If not, why not?

Wasn't you being wiped for inactivity mate. The forum suffered from a catastrophic meltdown and required a complete rebuild everything prior to December last year was lost and then it took nearly two months for a functional site to replace it. So effectively everyone got wiped.

As to the topic if all you're after is a game then yes causal suits that more. A lot of advanced rps do tend more towards colaborative storytelling.

Thanks for that information, friend.

In response to your second paragraph, I still reiterate that as a post approaches a certain length, it robs othe players of the ability to collaboratively storytell, by preventing their opportunity to inject themselves into the narrative at an appropriate time. Though, also again, just my opinion on something I wondered about how other site patrons felt.

And sorry, at the risk of going on a rant. But, I'm having my old frustrations at how there's this almost Venn diagram of good RP'ers on this site who never play together. I'm kind of scared to join even some of these promising casual games, because I'm worried they're going to devolve into the rp'ing equivalent of overindulgent fanfiction. I'm also scared to join an Advanced game because I'm worried the second I lose track for 36 hrs I'll turn around to a small novella I'll have to work through before I even know what's going on, and then find a way to justify to myself why my character hasn't acted for something like 10-20 chapters. I'm a voracious reader, but anytime you get off work and someone tells you have a responsibility to get through 90000 words tonight, because your post is due, and you're 10 people's 2 pg posts behind... That's homework. That's a chore, not a hobby. I don't' know. I've always liked this site, but I wish I could find more of that middle ground between those extremes.

I see I might have been wrong. These complaints are largely the ones I left with a year ago. It seems most of the advanced rp's are moving at a rate pretty comparable to dead.

It's also a slow time of year, so a lot of people are doing finals at school and what have you. Advanced usually moves at a rate of a post every 1-3 days, I estimate. It all depends on the group, but it's never fast paced. Even a lot of Casual, even most I dare say, moves at a comfortable rate.

Advanced requirements are two or more paragraphs, 15,000 word posts are exceedingly rare unless it's a big collab involving 2 or more people, which in a way makes it more like 2-3 posts condensed into one. You will rarely see the big collabs drop at a quick rate. Certainly not to an extent that you'd fall behind taking a couple days or more off.

I think you're over generalizing both Casual and Advanced, don't you?

What we do for Precipice (which I dare say is more advanced than most advanced here, albeit we're using an archaic scale from the previous forum we were at) for interaction on a small scale (i.e., characters) is to simply have all that discussion in one post. We go into Steam or Skype or something and we basically write the dialogue for our respective characters that go into the post. So therefore we have one post really written by two people with the dialogue and interaction going on within it, so we can have smallscale relations without doing one-liners.

Larsgescale interaction, of course, is just the post after where your guy reads the newspaper and casually remarks how Prussia invaded Poland (again.)

As Dervish said, this is a massive overgeneralisation, but I do agree to an extent. Advanced standards may only be a minimum of 2 paragraphs, but there's absolutely no ceiling to this, and posts can be as large as possible. The same can be done in casual, but this is far more frequent in Advanced where some players just seek to overindulge in meaningless detail simply for the sake of length and thinking that this is better, when it's not. Of course that's not all of Advanced however, but still in my experience a fair bit. And yes, it can be a chore to wade through. One thing I experienced that annoyed me to no end was when players regurgitated scenes from their character's perspective, essentially repeating the same thing as everyone else that really added little, with maybe a sentence or two of 'new' content to react to on top of that. Reading the same thing 7(or whatever)+ times in lengthy posts is boring as hell.

Personally, I run an rp in the Casual section that has daily posting of around a paragraph to 3-4 per person depending on the scene. It helps with character interaction and rp pacing so, so much better and generally makes it more manageable to read and catch up compared to long streams of text. The use of character banners etc helps to break up the text too and make it easier to read and digest. Now, I'm not sure whether or not it's 'purer', but what it does mean is we excise a lot of the meaningless drivel and waffle, get on with the story and character interaction, and make it easier to read/keep up.

And on a brief side note of collabs: I hate them. Collabs do, in my experience, kill more rps then it helps benefits. It ends up slowing activity down to a crawl when the rest of the group have to wait on two or so players back to back pming/posting (unless they endeavour to get it all done together, but rpers write at a different rate and speed to each other, so this can still take forever) and I also dislike how it 'bars' other players from really interacting or joining in on a scene that people are collabing on. And again, even though it's essentially two posts in one it doesn't help the fact that these collab posts tend to be monstrous in size too, which is a turn off for me. They can be done, sure, but I prefer a far more regulated posting rate in the IC where activity can be better maintained.

15,000 words? Come on, guys, please.

Realize that 1000 words in a post is about two-three pages in Word (give or take, it depends on your word usage). 15,000 words? We're talking about a 30-40 page post here.

Let's be real. NOBODY WRITES 15,000 WORD ROLEPLAYING POSTS. The longest post I have ever seen written in all my years in roleplaying (I've been doing this since 2003) was about 7,000 words for a solo venture that someone was doing. It was barely RPing at that point, it was just someone writing in the same setting but on a totally different tangent.

If you see a 15,000 word post, it's going to be clear that someone isn't contributing to the story. They're not interested in collaborating, only in showing off how many words they can write. These people need to remove themselves from roleplays and write fan fiction, short stories or actual novels. A reasonable GM, too, should be able to police excessively long posts like these, they don't help but rather hinder the storyline and make it difficult for everyone to respond.

I don't think you'll find any monstrous posts here at RPG. I would guess the biggest solo posts are going to top out around 1500 words on average, with a few exceptions above that. Collaborative/joint posts may exceed that, but it shouldn't be too much more than double that size. We're still only 1/5th of your mythical 15,000 words right now, so I think you're fine. 1500 and 3000 words posts don't hurt the storyline, they can tire some readers, but then it becomes up to the writers to make the post worth its content.

To the OP, I think you're psyching yourself out of this. Stop for a moment, step back and take a deep breath. You can't go into an RP being scared of what it might become, if you do, you'll most likely find what —failure— you're looking for. Stay positive. Join an RP that suits your fancy and looks promising. If it doesn't look promising, don't join it, wait a few weeks to see if it gets off the ground. Once you're in the RP, just cruise and let things happen.

And you know what? Sometimes things fail. Sometimes they don't. But it's like the old saying, it's better to have loved (or roleplayed) and lost than to have never loved at all.

One thing I experienced that annoyed me to no end was when players regurgitated scenes from their character's perspective, essentially repeating the same thing as everyone else that really added little, with maybe a sentence or two of 'new' content to react to on top of that. Reading the same thing 7(or whatever)+ times in lengthy posts is boring as hell.

I find this annoying to. It's just as much of a pain to write as it is to read because you have to find different words to say the same thing. Because there's so little to react to, I'm basically forced to restate the same thing again in order to avoid putting up a post that's only a sentence long. >.<

@ Captain Jordan: The 15,000 word comment is obviously a massive overexaggeration, but ignoring that number I think Holobunny brings up some interesting points.

Strongly disagree with Pachamac's vision of collaborative posting. If you're pming back and forth, you are definitely doing it wrong. There are several mediums of collaborative writing out there that make it far less of a harrowing chore. It's not even about a constant back and forth that is basically several posts in one (I have done collab posts upwards of 3000 words), but it's about the dynamic interaction that the kind of collaborative posting allows. Admittedly, yes the posts are huge. However, if they're spaced and paced properly from scene to scene they are far more pleasant to read than the big mess of... five paragraphs about a characters perspective on the scene.

It definitely helps when everyone is from the same continent, if not time zone, but when you're less worried about interacting with EVERYONE ELSE in the RP and just more specifically with the characters in your vicinity or relevant plot arc, this ends up going at a very comfortable pace where characters can actually accomplish something in a feasible amount of time.

Whereas typical play by post in advanced without any collaboration really does feel like back and forth novella without relevant interaction more than half the time.

There will be times your interaction will be as little as a sentence long because it's all they can feasibly do in a decent timeframe, or that they are acting and then waiting for a reaction, or a retort, or something. This is okay. It blows the whole 'one liners are terrible' out of the goddamn water, because there are occasions where the most your character has to contribute in between is perhaps a line or two. Any more would be fluffy nonsense. :U

Holobunny said
And sorry, at the risk of going on a rant. But, I'm having my old frustrations at how there's this almost Venn diagram of good RP'ers on this site who never play together. I'm kind of scared to join even some of these promising casual games, because I'm worried they're going to devolve into the rp'ing equivalent of overindulgent fanfiction. I'm also scared to join an Advanced game because I'm worried the second I lose track for 36 hrs I'll turn around to a small novella I'll have to work through before I even know what's going on, and then find a way to justify to myself why my character hasn't acted for something like 10-20 chapters. I'm a voracious reader, but anytime you get off work and someone tells you have a responsibility to get through 90000 words tonight, because your post is due, and you're 10 people's 2 pg posts behind... That's homework. That's a chore, not a hobby. I don't' know. I've always liked this site, but I wish I could find more of that middle ground between those extremes.

I have EXACTLY the same problem, and I really thought Casual would be that middle ground.. but it just isn't. I think people jump out of free a little too quick around here. I suppose because there's something in between writing a substantial amount per post (1-3 paragraphs), and writing something of quality, and people seem to think that because they're doing that 1-3 paragraphs.. then they're ready to leave free. Maybe it's just me, but there is pretty much no room around here (or on many RP forums) for people who write more than two lines per post, but write them well, with the skill of some of the advanced writers.

RusalkaAKAJessicaRabbit said
Maybe it's just me, but there is pretty much no room around here (or on many RP forums) for people who write more than two lines per post, but write them well, with the skill of some of the advanced writers.

Not to be an elitist jerk, but no, no there isn't. When I roleplay, I'd like to have some substance to read. I don't care well crafted it is, if a post is shorter than a Tweet, it's too short.

Captain Jordan said
Not to be an elitist jerk, but no, no there isn't. When I roleplay, I'd like to have some substance to read. I don't care well crafted it is, if a post is shorter than a Tweet, it's too short.

Agreed. I don't expect more than a minimum of two well-written paragraphs, but the reason I am now seldom in Casual is because it's way too easy to have a mix of players who post a bunch of paragraphs and others who want to do like two lines. There needs to be established standard going into it. I honestly don't know how people can roleplay with one-liners.

I really want to try advanced, but it's way too slow, my posts seldom exceed three paragraphs, and Just reading through the first post on the OC can be like getting hit by a brick wall of exposition.

Silver Carrot said
I really want to try advanced, but it's way too slow, my posts seldom exceed three paragraphs, and Just reading through the first post on the OC can be like getting hit by a brick wall of exposition.

I know people tend to hate the term, but try looking for something with a High Casual tag in the description. It's pretty much Advanced, but with a larger player pool and they usually don't expect you to do more than a couple paragraphs.

I have nothing against High Casual, but none of the ones I can find right now appeal to me.

Silver Carrot said
I have nothing against High Casual, but none of the ones I can find right now appeal to me.

it happens, things kind of go in cycles around here. Sometimes there's more games that you're interested in than you can join, other times you're bored witless hoping for something interesting to come along. Maybe give GMing a shot?