fledermaus — Roleplayer Guild

I got tired of updating it and had to do laundry.  Still have lots of stuff to add though.
@fledermaus

The Key

@Tuujaimaa
The key to a writing a good roleplay that will stand the metaphorical test of time is introspection, reflection, and iteration.

Group Size

@Hero
I think sometimes people want more interest than they need. For example, you get a group of maybe 4-5 when you anticipate double that. Sometimes smaller groups actually work out better than larger groups, but they get discouraged when they have only a few people expressing interest if that makes sense.

Reputation

@TGM
Do note reputation works in the inverse as well. If you have a reputation as someone who people don't want to be around, unreliable, temperamental, bad GMing, etc. people will pass on you. It's up to you to fix your reputation at that point and show you've grown past your past issues and consistencies. 

@Obscene Symphony
Reputation is  e x t r e m e l y  important. If you're new and don't have much posting history for people to look at (or if you mainly RP in PMs), write up some writing samples (or some previous RP posts you're particularly proud of) in a Gallery thread for potential partners or GMs to peruse. If you have a history of making an ass of yourself in the OOC, you'll have a hard time. Et cetera. 

Frustration

@Demonic Raven
I get that frustration, it's not great, but all you can do is keep trying until it sticks. That is the one thing that can be infuriating at times about role playing, things don't stick, nothing is guaranteed, and a great role play you love can be done in an instant. All you can do is to pick yourself up, dust off and try again with someone new. That's how the cycle of role playing works. There is very rarely a role play that lasts longer than a year from what I've experienced. So accepting that will help you feel less down when it inevitably happens.

@CorrosiveCherri
Personally, I try to take a very relaxed approach to the hobby as a whole. Unless I'm really trying to get into some coolsy-cool stuff and write collaborative fiction at a high level, I use it more as a way to blow off steam and work out the kinks in my writing style, as well as help buff up my word choice and try different themes and voice for characters and worlds alike. It's a hobby, and in my opinion, it's a hobby ancillary to compelling narrative writing as a whole. Dealing with differences both in terms of creativity and skill level can be difficult, but sometimes you just have to breathe and remind yourself "hey, you know, they've got their vibe and I've got mine." Sometimes you can make your patterns and styles tessellate, but it's rare to click perfectly with someone. 

If you're having trouble with roleplays dying over and over and over again, it might be time to look at what your standards of writing are, or if the side hobby is even something for you at the moment. It's not like sports where you could get injured and be out of it for the rest of your life. You can take breaks from it and focus on things that make you happy, rather than letting it absorb all of your attention and time. 

But, in a similarly personal vein, I find the best way to get yourself out there is to put yourself out there. Show off the best of what you've got. Write pretty words, try original settings that other people just aren't doing--take advantage of the fact that you can just pull a concept from the ether and put it on a page. Hell, coming up with a new plotline and world wireframe every day or every few days or so is a great creative writing exercise. Work on what you're doing and ensure your demeanor is pleasant and casual, and I'm sure the posters will come. 

Rome wasn't built in a day, but hey, Minecraft lets you do some pretty cool shit in a pretty short amount of time. Don't look for your Rome. Look for your sweet gamer Minecraft house for gamers. ...That metaphor got away from me.

@Celaira
After a certain point you want to sit back and look at several things: 

1. What are people currently interested in? What are some popular RPs that are alive right now, and what do they focus on? Do they line up with anything I'm interested in?

2. If the RPs themselves don't interest you, but some of their themes do, utilize those themes in your next thread!

3. If you don't have partners or friends who can/want to join your thread, post an interest check and let people engage with the idea there. 

Realistically, you should also try and join threads if you want to make them. Joining other RPs allows you to meet people, and make friends who then might be interested when you start up a thread of your own.

@Bork Lazer
You must first recognise that play by post roleplaying on a forum such as this and many others such as RPNation and Iwaku are inherently mercurial and chaotic in nature. Posters are not electronic robots that you encounter on the wild wastes of the internet. They are people. We have made this grave for ourselves whereby we value some abstract concept of literary quality as the marker of a good RP. There are multiple factors that make a good RP and focusing inherently on one single factor does nothing good for you. 

Blaming them for the failure of your RP is about as useful as blaming water for being wet. It’s redundant at best.

Ultimately, I would encourage everyone that the best way to get more out of this hobby is to learn and adapt. Staying stagnant with one single routine and one single fandom and trying to get people to fit within a mold that you have crafted isn’t the best approach. Join other RPs. Learn from other successful posters. Try to have fun. Learn from your failures. Failure is a teacher whose lessons are not always obvious at first but it’s up to you whether or not to take those lessons to heart. 

@Rapid Reader
I always feel there's a bit of a case of exaggerated expectations for RPing (and creative pursuits in general).

You have to ask yourself, "what does success mean for me as a GM/RPer"?

And realistically, if success for you is a several year long RP that runs perfectly, you will always be disappointed. Even expecting more than two people to post their interest or even commit to an RP is a pretty lofty goal.

RPing is like any form of writing (although I don't really think it's exactly the same as novel writing) in that it takes a lot of work, practice, and failure to learn. And like life, it's doomed to die. You can never beat death. Your RP no matter how great, no matter how fun, no matter how much effort you put into it will die (but you should embrace that and it be a motivating factor).

Reasonable goals when you start (or as you learn) are things like "I want to get 1-3 posts in before this RP dies" (as a player or GM). Looking at all the RPs posted on this forum, if you manage to make one post as a player or get one player post in your RP, then congrats, you've now reached the elite of the elite in terms of RPs, players, and GMs.

Eventually you might find groups or individual players you jam with. This however rare, this is special, and it isn't something you should expect to find regularly (e.g., if you are going into RPing expecting to find your creative soul mate or best friends for life, then you are setting yourself up for failure). If you do find people that you mesh with, then at that point just enjoy it for however long it lasts (there are no assurances of time in RPing or life).

RPing is a fun, ethereal hobby you should engage in purely for your own amusement, chasing success (outside of your own fun and the fun of other people) or "popularity" is massive waste of time in a medium that amounts to "I put on my wizard hat".

@Obscene Symphony
 don't keep a tally of your failed RPs, cause that's literally just a discouragement machine in the forefront of your mind. Anyone who's been RPing for a few years or more probably has dozens, if not hundreds, of failed RPs under their belt, but they also probably can't even remember most of them cause they moved on rather than dwelling on it. 

Think of it this way. If we ranked hockey players by how many shots they missed and not by how many goals they scored, even the best of the best would look like hot garbage. 

Writing

@Obscene Symphony
Honestly evaluate your skill level and write at that level. Not everyone is cut out for Advanced or even High Casual, and that's okay. Write with people of a similar skill level (no shame in dipping into Free if that's where you fit), be receptive to criticism and take an interest in improving your writing and you WILL get better, and in turn you'll have more options open to you. Because yes, the quality of your writing often DOES matter to potential partners/GMs. You might not like it, but it's true; and luckily, it's entirely within your control to change.  

Most of all, be willing to put in the work. Focus on making every post better than your last and over time you will get results. Better yet, your partners and group members will recognize the effort you put in, and hopefully appreciate you for it. What WON'T get you results, though, is giving up because you think you're doomed or that nobody "understands." Life isn't fair, nothing worth doing is easy, you don't always get rewarded for your efforts, and the only good way to cope with it is to keep trying anyway. 

Good Interest Check

@Ammokkx
I've found that in order to have a good interest check, you need to have at least some elements (but not all) of the following (and I definitely have left some gaps but oh well):

    Being able to clearly articulate your idea. You may have the best ideas in the world, but if you can't properly explain what it's about then you're not going to get anywhere.
    Doing something that people are both asking for, and others aren't providing. This one's a bit more abstract, but what it comes down to is this: Interest for a generic fantasy adventure is always high, but if your adventure is too generic, and there's 3 other RPs already on the market dealing with the same thing, people are going to be playing in those instead.
    Knowing what you want. This isn't the same as having a detailed idea, mind. I've gotten away with posting an interest check titled "let's brainstorm a yugioh roleplay together" and I sure did draw a crowd from it (even if, when it got time to actual writing, it all fell apart). Thing is, even in that brainstorm thread I still laid out a few fundamental things I was looking for. Close to the anime, none o' dat meta shit, a lot of freedom in how duels unfolded (so no simulators). The details of the actual plot was for everyone interested to figure out together. This, too, was made clear. Set your boundaries and stick to them.
    Putting effort into presentation. I'm not saying "use colours, tables, images and gifs like your life depends on it" since, really, I don't do that either. But do try to format your text in a clearly readable, easily accessible manner. Organizing your thread to have a clear beginning-middle-end structure and making sure it has at least some logical chronology to it goes a loooong way.

@ERode
 from my point of view, there's two ways in which players are drawn/stuck with a RP: the promise of a fun plot, and the potential for characters to grow. If you can formulate an idea that offers both ways, that's even better! To clarify what I mean, I guess I'll ram in some examples...
School-based RPs are essentially all about character development. If this is a battle school, people can look forward to growth in terms of their supernatural or martial abilities. If this is a SoL school, people can look forward to hooking up and causing melodrama. If you add in a concrete overworld plot ("This is a post-apocalyptic world with a dystopian government who sends superpowered teens on ridiculously lethal missions"), you heighten the potential for even more positive/negative developments by letting your plot spark inter-PC drama. Sometimes, it backfires by making people get pissed OOCly at each other, but I've seen at least one time where it worked VERY well, and culminated into a RP that didn't lose any players at all. Initially, it's the promise that something special will happen to your character, and your character alone, that draws in interest, whether it be GM-sanctioned power upgrades or a trashy, dumpster-fire romance sparked by an encounter gone horribly wrong.

As extra examples, Ariamis's Magical Girl CYOA makes character creation hella involved by adding in an element of randomness that gives people ideas about their character that they wouldn't immediately have thought about or considered on their own. Rune's Epic of Beginnings encourages making cool, heavy backstories (cult leader, literally Oda Nobunaga) because you get a superpower based off that backstory, and then afterwards, that backstory can be used to inform your character's trajectory through what is otherwise a sandbox-y setting.

Adventure RPs depend on having a delicious plot to draw people in, and they paint a fantasy of involvement, of being part of something that'd change the world rather than yourself. Sparking a rebellion, escaping a prison island, killing a dragon, all those pull in attention through having any character you make involved in something lasting, something big. If you can get people excited about what they're going to do, and what they're going to plan against, then that excitement can be the momentum you use to drive the RP until they've become invested enough that it'd feel bad to leave. Conveying the idea that they'd have something to do immediately when IC begins, and then carrying through with that promise, gives potential players something to look forward to, and then something to enjoy. In this case, even people who're not interested in having long, philosophical chatter with other players can enjoy the RP, just by beating up baddies or braining themselves outta dicey situations.

As extra examples, Valor's FEARLESS had a hell of a start where PCs of a rebellion immediately crashed a prison to get someone else out, had a deadly encounter with an elite guard of a dystopian, superpowered government, and managed to escape after suffering a good amount of injuries, and all that really materialized the sensation of how shit is definitely real, how kid gloves don't exist at all. RC3's Goblin Quest offered a sense of achievement just through the mundane-est of things, such as beating up and eating raw rabbits or crafting random tools on your way to surviving, which worked out well, cause the players start as orphan goblins trying to figure out how to get strong fast, before the humans that slaughtered most of their tribe find them.

And if you can mix plot and development together (Yankee's Windfall comes to mind for creating an ensemble adventure RP where everyone's traveling together around the continent to fulfill different quests that have personal/continental impacts BUT THE SPECIFICS OF HOW THE PLOTS WILL GO IS PLOTTED BY EVERY PLAYER EXCEPT FOR THE ONE WHO PURSUES THAT PLOT), then it becomes fuckin' delicious.

If you can convey the sense that such things are possible, AND the sense that you're able to offer that to players (which may really just be something dependent on something as intangible as the vibes that your post gives off), I think that there's a pretty good chance you'll have at least some interested folk, whether you're new or not. Presentation, of course, also helps a ton (I've become so visually-dependent that my mind shrivels up without A E S T H E T I C S to keep me engaged), while I'd say that branding your RP as based off something else (rather than just being inspired by it), is a double-edged sword in terms of getting people's attention. Pretty sure others make better points about it than I did though.

Advice

@yoshua171
something else to keep in mind when it comes to taking constructive criticism is that trying a piece of advice once and it failing does not constitute the advice being wrong or responsible for the failure. It just means you tried it once and that time didn't work. Try again.

Don't drop a piece of advice just because it fails once, twice, or three times. If you've tried to make RPs/threads X amount of times and have gotten failure (resulting in a perception of a pattern of failures/bad luck) then why not try a given piece of advice (or more than one) just as many times to see if that method has the same rate of failure.

That Thing Fledermaus Mentioned If It's Not Already Listed
{Insert Thing Here}
@BangoSkank

thanks i feel special now, seriously tho good job on the thread im sure it'll help someone else in the future maybe hopefully
fledermaus Member

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