ArenaSnow — Roleplayer Guild

Premade roles, themes, ideas on age, gender, and occupation, all of those I think are viable. I personally dislike the railroading of character development, but it is a simplistic and effective set of tools for GMs while giving sufficient player flexibility in creating their own works. There is more than enough potential to be vested in a character of your own creation with such guidelines, and for some GMs/roleplays, this is just outright necessary for things to function.

Now, premade characters I will not do for the same reason why I rarely, if ever, play canon characters from a particular 'verse. The main reason is investment. There's branches, but really, if I don't create the character and thus know every niche of the character's personality, then I don't actually care. A canon character was made with various inspirations and interpretations involved. I'm slightly more open to playing them, but unless I made the character have depth from a shallow base or interpreted the character from a wide enough baseline, it won't be the same. More rarely, I may believe I understand a canon character enough to present them in true form. That is the only case where I'm inspired enough to play a premade character in the same field as the sort that I think is being discussed in this thread.

But there are other issues I have;
 - I don't join roleplays to play your characters. Play your own characters, or write a book. The more you want to railroad a plot, the less likely I am to be interested. Lack of creative liberties in deciding who the character is I believe strays greatly into this territory.
 - Building on the above, the reason why I like some canon characters and no premade guild characters is because I've never seen a character on the guild beyond my own that I actually connect with. Additionally, a popular canon character is already rife with interpretations and media expansive enough for me to get the full image of who the character is, while a rando made for the sake of a guild roleplay I find lacks the background to truly invest in who the character is.
 - If a cast of premade characters is necessary for the GM to function, I'm not interested in the game, and I'm likely also skeptical of the GMs ability to hold a plot together as premade characters is a sure sign to me of a lack of improvisation skill (necessary to an extent when handling player-built characters I would think).

Then again, I don't play group games on the guild, nor am I likely to do so unless something particularly special catches my eye. My day of going out and joining group roleplays on the guild are dead, so take this as you will. I think I've already strayed too far from the ideal roleplayer anyways.

Part of the appeal behind roleplaying is character creation. However, seeoing how many people end up spamming the forum with characters and following through on none of them, I can see the potential in this idea. I have no interest myself though.@tex

Nothing to do with the actual characters made (by GM or by player) and everything to do with the disease of 'I'm interested! next week, hangover glaze aaaah, shit, what did I do, I don't like this after all'

If anything, you can argue that making your own character adds a minuscule level of investment as compared to having the character built for you. But, as evident by most of RPG, that doesn't matter one bloody inkling.

<Snipped quote by Burning Kitty>

@Mara you do know that does not mean every time right? You can figure it out from there. If not I guess you’ll just never know.@Burning Kitty

Try figuring this one. You state "Now however if there is one or two characters I really like I might overlook my distaste for it", indicating that you check without a definition of frequency, and then "more than likely I won't read the GM made characters at all."

A backwards system, wouldn't you say, when you check for characters you might really like - an open course where you're seeing what's up and then dismissing accordingly if it's boring garbage - but then say that usually you don't even give that benefit of the doubt in the first place. By that logic, most of the time you don't even check for the premade characters you may really like.

Just don't want too much of one or the other to stay true to general population.@Lady Amalthea
I'd argue the general population is filled with imbalanced scenarios, so staying true is to in fact have a wide range of this happening across multiple roleplays. But I digress.

Now lets go to the next issue. The application process to roleplays. I think the primary reason why the fast majority of roleplays die within a few months is the total lack of any form of application process. GMs tend to focus entirely on their awesome story/plot ideas and world concepts but totally forget to think about what kind of players they want in their game. They almost always forget to ask themselfs that simple question and generally roll with whomever expresses their interests. The most likely outcome of the lack of application process is that a group of people with totally different expectations about the roleplay start a journey. In that journey many will find out that player A posts to frequently to keep up with, player B posts way too little and drags the roleplay, player C likes to write these 10 paragraph over 9000 words posts which player D responds to with a one-liner. Player E is totally into same-sex romance and he's constantly persueing player F's character much to his annoyance because he's totally not into that and just wants the plot to move forward. In the end for many players the roleplay does not live up to their expectations and they will lose interest and drop out. Eventually the roleplay dies and the GM will start a new one and will repeat the above process over and over again until he is lucky and by accident stumbles upon a group of players that are more or less on the same level. Or he will lose his confidence and just persue a carreer of writing mediocre fanfiction :)@Milkman
In short, the GMs have a process, but the process itself is hollow when the GM fails to maintain his own standards when looking over characters.

It's a tempting hole, to simply accept people and look nice. To have the expectation that people will probably make characters that at least somewhat fit, and then expect them to work out in the end. And before you know it, your thread is dead... although that's dependent on many other factors too.

Related to this topic, ongoing roleplays could have auditions for characters who's players left them if things are far enough along and the character is important enough. This feels like a really good way to let new players join an RP with a character that is already integrated into the story. If they drop out, you're not stuck with extra dead wood. If they like it, one less person the GM has to unceremoniously remove.@BrokenPromise

Fun idea, and yet, I think the least hassle is a system where the roleplayers are 'modular'. In effect, they can be put into the game at relatively easy checkpoints, and they can be removed by simply encountering vague GM circumstances (fell sick, injured, sent on a subtask where they return SoonTM, etc). In effect, people can bring in their own characters through those checkpoints and make sense, and old characters by design can be phased out. I don't believe in roleplays where characters are so essential that the roleplay literally collapses in character without them (except for the GM, but if the GM is dead, you're buggered anyways).

I mean yeah I like the idea in principle but how would you go about making the selection process fair??@ayzrules

The same way any other process in roleplaying ever is made fair. In short: It isn't and it won't be, because it's up to the GM's judgement and quirks of logic and motivations always. You'll just have to trust that the GM can handle things appropriately, and if you can't, the roleplay probably won't go well in any case.

I've done this for the first time (well, half-done this) where I basically made players follow a certain theme for the team they'd be on in the IC. I can tell from the lessons I learned from that that this is something I will do in the future as well (and possible double down, pre-selecting themes I want to see and/or character types). 

One thing I worry about is that, with certain niché RP's, you might force people a certain way that they don't want to go in and thus diminish the already small playerbase. Could be (easily) offset by just having smaller invite-only RP's, but people don't seem to like those.@Odin

If players can't set things aside a bit and follow a theme for an otherwise interesting roleplay, perhaps they weren't all that suitable in the first place. And if that results in a diminished playerbase to the extent the game won't run, perhaps you can take assurance in the hypothetical idea that caving in and accepting people who fail to match the roleplay's themes would just result in a game dead by page 2 anyways.

And as for people not liking invite-only roleplays, who gives a damn? I'm curious who legitimately dislikes those. By definition, they don't even concern others.

For a GM this is a delight. You can create characters types and roles that need to be filled and simply let others work within a boundary to sell the character right and boom you've got a coherently directed story. But for the player you'd have to be down for seeing the story and characters the GM is making come to life without intruding beyond the subtle actions and turns the characters can make.@Rai

I find this is an absurdly easy slope towards railroading people so you just present your own story. And that, I believe, is the counterthesis of roleplaying. Why don't you (the hypothetical GM, mind you) just write a book if you're making characters fill things and expect them to do things in exact ways that prod along the one plotline you're trying to make? If you cannot be flexible in that sense, I could not call you a good roleplayer. Perhaps some can walk the line, but it is a line easily and frequently crossed.

I think it's a neat idea. Though it might seem a tad controlling to some players, others, like me, look at it like answering a casting call. I mean, in essence, we do audition for RPs with our own characters, so these seem like the reverse of that. Instead of us auditioning with our characters for the RP, we are auditioning our writing skillset for characters/roles already made for us. That, in itself, is highly interesting to me.

I considered doing it myself for one of the games I have GM'd in the past. Maybe I'll do it in a future one. @Altered Tundra

As an idea that purely explores the concepts of players fitting into character shoes, I'd say this is viable. As a normal thing across the guild, it doesn't just seem a tad controlling, it usually is. Assuming we are specifically talking about premade characters, as roles and themes leave quite a bit of creative leeway.

I hope you didn't just sit there and read through my entire wall. Save your eyes
ArenaSnow Banned

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