Some ideas and thoughts about RPG - as a community, as a writing forum, but mostly just in general

[Shoryu Magami]

Indeed. Everything here's built from the ground up - I doubt this site is Mahz's priority in life, so I'm not surprised things are missed.

@ArenaSnow

Yeah, more reason why I think a few trusted people should have access to some of the features needed to maintain the place, if he doesn't have time to do it himself. Not inherently criticising his practices, since I wouldn't let a role-play site take priority over - for example - my relationship or my story project, but it still seems like a logical idea to me. That's assuming anyone here actually has his trust and wouldn't abuse that power.

I'm sort of inclined to agree with the previously mentioned comment about the way the forums are organized by writing level instead of devotion level, honestly.

There's really not a whole lot of difference between 'casual' and 'advanced' in the sense that both generally require decent enough grammar and punctuation, and should avoid one-liners. Sometimes an 'advanced' role-player won't put up a large number of paragraphs simply because there's not enough information to respond to or the role-play is currently focused on conversation (meaning all they'd really be writing is responses and their internal thoughts). At the same time, a 'casual' role-player will sometimes need to post more than they normally would in order to give a satisfactory level of writing due to being unable to give all the significant details if they don't write enough. Also, there's a real problem with how the level of depth is presented, since you could have threads in 'advanced' with very simple plots and characters and then threads in 'casual' that have very in-depth plots and characters.

Of course, this is an issue for more reasons than just the difference in writing levels being badly defined. After all, there's no mention of skill level in other categories (Arena, 1x1, Nation, Tabletop), and we've got a tab system that allows us to specify a thread as being 'free', 'casual', 'advanced', et cetera, so I don't even see a point in having those as forums. I'm actually inclined to agree with the idea that they should be categorized based on dedication rather than writing levels. People who don't want to have to deal with someone suddenly disappearing or not putting enough investment into the IC/OOC - unless they have a good reason of course, since not everyone is just getting lazy or losing interest and then blaming it on life getting in the way (though plenty of people do that too) - can have a forum dedicated to people who don't want to deal with it, while the more whimsical role-players can have a place separate. Honestly, the former are more likely to care enough about a role-play to be the ones who improve their writing - again, not including people who genuinely do have a lot of things getting in the way of posting - so they'd end up fitting 'advanced' in the long run anyway.

When all is said and done, there's just too little of a gap between 'casual' and 'advanced' since a lot of people who can easily post several paragraphs and love heavy focus on depth (like myself) end up taking part in role-plays in the 'casual' threads a lot of the time from what I can tell. Still, I can understand that it'd probably be a bit of a stretch to completely change the format of the forums this late into the life of the site, especially considering all of the threads would likely need to be moved around and reorganized, so I'm not actually thinking this is an idea we should use, but it does make sense in my head.

For all intents and purposes, I work the entire time I'm awake (I'm not getting payed, but that's beside the point) - including on weekends - and sometimes end up having to do all-nighters to keep track of my work, yet I'm still able to manage a long-distance relationship and remain the most active person in all of the primary threads I'm involved with on this site. It's frustrating having to deal with people who don't have enough dedication to at least attempt to put in a similar amount of effort, even if I - by no means - expect people to post daily.

Edit: Fixing typos. Sleep deprivation -- gotta love it.

[Dion]

I should clarify that with cliqueyness I referred to the OOC friendships and groups of friends that exclude others. Not the 'clique' nature of the subforums. I am actually for the abandoning of the subforums and just making a forum called 'roleplay' where we leave the tag system to decide what level they're at.

[Shoryu Magami]

While I think it only makes sense that people will end up developing OOC friendships - and it's beneficial, since those are an important ingredient to having good and long role-plays with people - I agree that the 'excluding others' element is a really bad thing (unless they deserve it, due to being disrespectful or toxic). Unfortunately, that sort of thing tends to happen everywhere.

It's similar to popularity contests, honestly. A person who's been part of a site for a long time will have a reputation and their words will be hailed over those of a newcomer even if the newcomer was the one who had more insight or made a better argument. I've experienced this sort of 'side with the person you have a history with, not the person who's right' mentality from people more than I care to mention.

So while I definitely agree with people forming friendships, I disagree with them excluding outsiders or newcomers and I have no respect whatsoever for people who jump on the bandwagon over whoever has more reputation. Like I said in a previously post -- this is a writing site people; it isn't Facebook. I'm the type of person who'll side against a friend if I think they're the one being an asshole.

[Mixtape Ghost N]

The whole thing about cliques (especially between roleplaying friends) is that people tend to stick with people that they know will provide them with an enjoyable roleplaying experience. Some people are straight up afraid to join RPs by people they don't know out of paranoia that it'll go wrong, or they'll "waste their time" (Well, brudda, I'd honestly point that person to the definition of roleplaying). It's easier for them to form groups that they know will be reliable, and whatnot. I've formed many cliques because of these reasons (Though, I'm heavily against pushing other people away).

While I'm not saying it's a good thing, I'm saying a natural and inherent occurrence that you'll see out in nature (Lone wolves starve, after all). That said, being a dick about it, and being an elitist, doesn't do anything but make you look... like a dickish elitist that needs to be knocked down a peg.

And, yes, the subforum system is obsolete, and honestly needs to be reworked since we have casual RPs that, by this site's standard, belong in the advance section, and vice-versa (Not gonna point out names unless you're one of those "casual RPs that belong in the advance section").

[Ellri]

if the tag system was made fully into what it was at least at one point thought to be, with the ability to filter by tag, the subforums would truly be obsolete. The subforums could instead simply be links to specific tag groupings.

[Vor]

I wouldn't say things are that bad. I had been away from the RP scene for a long time and before I stumbled upon the Guild through a random Google search I legitimately thought that there are no serious RP boards left. Everything I came across was either too niche, too inactive or simply tacked on as an afterthought to a bigger forum. This is in sharp contrast to 2007-2012 when I RP'ed a lot more and knew of at least a couple of dedicated RP'ing forums with a sizable user base. So, the fact that this forum still exists and is frequently drawing in new members should be a testament to its resilience.

Things could always be better, though I wouldn't say the website itself is to blame. It's a writing forum after all, how many features and tools do you need? You've got solid thread system (first time that I've seen a forum which allows you to combine OOC/IC/CS in one thread), working PM's and a sub-forum dedicated to discussions about writing and RP'ing. Status bars, chat, visitor messages, etc. are all quality of life improvements, hardly something that makes or breaks a RP'ing community. In other words, if a forum is losing members due to the inability to delete PM's, then it must be one fucking boring place.

It's all about the community and from what I've seen the Guild is a fairly welcoming place, catering to a wide range of styles and writing levels. I think this is the real issue when people talk about a forum not being advanced enough; the more people you have, the more things average out and it's normal that the majority of people will be somewhere around a Casual level. Believe me, this is for the best as this is what keeps a community alive. My all-time RP'ing community was an unapologetically elitist clique of very advanced writers that challenged me on a daily basis and we created some amazing RP's, but the community eventually died off because it failed to draw in new players to make up for the regular members we were losing due to RL. The moment you raise the bar too high is the moment you're dooming your community to a slow, but inevitable end.

But yeah, I do have some gripes with the way RP is done on this site. For one, there is a distinct lack of collab posts in pretty much all the RP's I've participated in (or read through). I've only written 3 or 4 collab posts in the span of 6 months, which feels like such a waste. Often, Advanced RP's devolve into a back-and-forth of a couple of paragraphs between characters. Why not combine these fragments into a bigger, better post? Not only does it keep the high standards of the RP, but it feels a lot more organic, especially dialogue. Yes, collab posts are a logistical nightmare more often than not, due to varying time zones etc, but I feel the pros far outweigh the cons.

Another thing that bugs me is that, in general, the community seems to give up on RP's fairly easily. I've already lost count of how many promising, interesting ideas start out strong, then lose all their members within a posting cycle or two. There doesn't seem to be a long-term interest in keeping things going, once the initial momentum is lost, people move on to newer things. It's a shame, but what can you do about it really? You can't force people to stay interested.

As a result, I often have to stop myself from writing longer posts and I've grown very liberal with my editing, often cutting out 30% or more of what I initially write. It just feels weird to be writing walls of text when most people are putting out 4-5 paragraphs per post. And while I've had the pleasure of meeting some great people and RP'ers on this site, only a handful share my love for in-depth, detailed posts. I don't like it and I feel like I've stopped improving as a RP'er, but I can understand why this is the case and, as I said, it's preferable to having a closed-off group that will eventually suffocate under its own lofty standards.

TL;DR: All in all, I'd say the Guild is in a good place.

[Hank]

The Guild is doing okay. I agree that it's not as great as it once was. The Guildfall was a big turning point and it changed the overall feel of the place forever. In my opinion, the heart of the problem is that the Guild feels like a fledgling community now. And that's what it is. There are no well-established members that everyone knows, people that define what's acceptable and what isn't. RPG used to be very heavily community-moderated -- Spam was a cesspool of flaming and caustic nonsense because that's what its community mandated. Advanced was highly elitist because people like Dudel and Kestrel ran the place and set the tone for everyone else. The current userbase is too new right now.

It's true the moderators can't do anything about that, unless we decide to step in and start enforcing standards and shit like some kind of thoughtpolice, but we have neither the time nor the inclination. The Guild will have to do that by itself or it will stay as it is, which is... okay. It's far from dying. Mahz might return in a year or two and Make The Guild Great Again. Who knows?

[Ellri]

Nice post, @Vor. We quite agree with your sentiments even as we have those we put up earlier. After all, the status quo isn't some simple thing with only one definition.

There are some RPs that use collabs heavily still... both the RP we GM and the one we're currently in has plenty of collabs (mind you, the one we GM hasn't quite yet reached the IC stage, but it will have plenty of collabs. Nice, long ones. And probably shorter ones too. and single-player posts.).

Oh and Hank... there's something that feels off about that last sentence before your ending question... Something subtle. Something... Capitalized.