My experiences in the RP scene have been terrible. By my experiences and attempts, it hasn't gotten any better. Sure what I'm about to say may go off the tracks but at this point, I am fed up with it.
I meant different because of my experience that NO ONE can mesh, let alone me with anyone else. My RP luck sucks. I had 45 dead RP's here in a year, one year!
I tried to take a break when it was in the 20's, came back but it worsened.
Been here three years and it is over 50 dead total in a three-year span. I really don't see anything changing for the better for me. Even in searching for new roleplays, my luck is bad, really bad.
I'm tired of being ghosted on and frequently as now I see it as nothing but dishonorable and cowardly. And I feel like no one literally looks at my side of things as whatever I bring up they want to bury underneath the rug.
I feel like I am up against a stacked deck when I try to find partners and I can't find anyone.
Have you considered that your attitude towards 1x1s is making this a self-fulfilling prophecy? You post about it quite often, and I don't know about other people, but the promise of being called 'dishonorable and cowardly' for dropping a roleplay is pretty... disrespectful, and perhaps indicative of how you might view the other player's feelings on a 1x1. It may be putting off more partners than you think, because people
do read the off-topic sections.
People dip out all the time from 1x1s, especially with strangers. You're not the only one in the world who has been ghosted several times. Barring catastrophic life changes, it is usually because the player is uncomfortable with continuing the roleplay, whether they can tell that their roleplaying style doesn't gel, the plot isn't grabbing them, they expected a different level of writing or activity, or even because they just ain't feeling it. It can be hard to be honest with someone, especially someone who you don't have a pre-existing rapport with.
Communication is hard and everyone has different styles of it, in real life and in e-life. It is important in a long-running, healthy 1x1, but arguably understanding what a partner wants on a personal level – what motivates them to want to write, and what might prompt them to go dark – is more so. It requires some insight and self-awareness into one's own failures too.
I understood why people ghost the moment I tried to be direct and say 'yeah, sorry fam, this isn't for me' in a polite way and then had to justify, explain and defend my reasoning for dropping in a back-and-forth argument. Ghosting is a learned behaviour, and bad experiences are why people learn to ghost. I am wary of someone who says they are so frequently ghosted because it implies to me that they do not understand
why they are being ghosted.
Also... Just because you can't mesh with other people doesn't mean no-one else can, as evidenced by the other incredibly positive responses in this thread.
To reply to the topic at hand, I find all the discussion about 1x1ing really exciting to me because it's one of my favourite forms of RP, and
@stone is 100% right that 'it's harder to observe trends n stuff with this type of thing too because it's all private'. Loving all the 1x1ers coming out of the woodwork to explain what they're doing behind closed doors.
Right now I am in a RP which uses a player/player collaborative style as others have said, but we write the posts from one POV (to make it easier to read through later). My partner's character is the POV because she writes more convincing internal dialogue than I do and I adore reading it, while I generally try to write around it with action, more 'neutral' observations, scene-setting, and of course, my half of the romantic banter 'cus we are shipping trash.
Also while we're writing (in Google Docs) we're sending a huge back and forth of future headcanons or alternate universe versions of the characters in the OOC or just general chit-chat about roleplaying, usually like 600 messages when we're in the zone. I think this is the most important part of 1x1ing for me. Maybe even more important than getting the actual writing done.
It's amazing how much planning you find reading back, all interspersed with:
what if we did a bad end!au where everyone dies
omg aaaaaaaaaaaaaa
aaaaaaaaa
a n g s t
