An Unwelcoming Roleplay Community

[Sianserais]

What I find interesting about this, is that it sounds almost exactly like a problem I ran into years ago when I used to RP on another site. A couple friends of mine started their own storyline, which was a lot of fun to begin with, but they were very picky about who could join, kept adding new rules, and then they started getting quite passive-aggressive with us over not responding fast or detailed enough and keeping our posts in order with their timeline... which became a problem for me while studying for finals. Then a couple weeks later when they had their finals, they just dropped out and never returned. rolleyes And theirs wasn't the only group on the board that had become that demanding.
So to me, this doesn't sound like anything new or anything exclusive to Gaia, but something that can happen as people's expectations evolve over time.

[Dexigone]

A lot of role players are pretentious! One time I found a WWE role-play... and the leader harassed me for all eternity until I blocked and unfriended him. Then I changed my username. Even league players know when to shut their traps and move on.

I was a noob.

[_Mya_Kohler_]

I've never role-played on here, but I have role-played on other websites and haven't come across anyone who was rude or mean to me. It was more that that person disappeared and the role-play just dropped from there. I haven't role-played in a long time and I really miss it, but I'm not sure where to go to find anyone to role-play with me. I've just been writing stories about my characters, but I would like to have them interact with other people...so long as those people aren't rude to me.

I'm sorry this had to happen to you and I do hope that you find someone to role-play with. My inbox is always open if you'd like to throw around some idea. 3nodding

Also, I don't really follow a plot. I mostly just go with the flow and see what happens. A lot of the time it works out and I've been in some interesting role-plays because of this.

[Maethirion]

I can’t stand the special formatting. I can’t do it myself, and I feel like people believe the aesthetic is more important than the other person’s writing.

[mistalina13]

I tend to stick to B&C shops for my roleplaying. Some are more welcoming than others but settings tend to be more diverse and offer more opportunity.

Most of the Barton Towns stuff became dull to me really fast...and their "rules" I found to be obnoxious more often than not.

[i wish pokemon was real]

i'm not horribly bothered by the rp community because i never take anything too seriously, but i am both weary and wary of it haha xD

like most recently:
i got kicked out of an rp because my character was inadvertently acting as a foil for one of the mod's characters and they didn't like how this was diverting attention away from their character(s) and making them look a bit over-the-top and overpowered lol. like i got kicked out of this rp because my character was so averagely shitty and normal they were making the mod's characters look too amazing by comparison ?! wtfffff xD and my life continues to be a satire haha.
did make me a bit sad when i got booted bc i was enjoying writing for that character and people in the rp (other than the mods) told me they were enjoying my character as well and were bummed when i got summarily kicked. D;


so i've withdrawn from rping and gone back to writing stories instead.
because it seems like i keep being used as a scapegoat for other people's insecurities.
uhghhnnn and i'm so tired of this, it just makes me wanna go crawl under my duvet forever. OTL

[Starcrossedsky]

TBQH, I gave up on Gaia's community years ago as far as RP is concerned. It's a bizarre niche of being very elitist while also, IMO, being very bad. I haven't had many experiences with rude people (but I also haven't looked at groups in ages, sticking to the 1x1 searches because groups die WAY TOO EASILY), but I have a lot of experiences with people who just straight up do not read.

[pukadon]

I'm sorry you're having a bad experience, OP sad
I don't roleplay publicly at all for similar reasons, to be honest. I kind of miss the shameless "cringey" deviantart days where everyone wrote in script style and didn't give a s**t. That was fun.

Nothing wrong with taking pride in what you do, of course, it just seems to go to a lot of people's heads unfortunately. Which, yes, can be very intimidating to any newcomers that may be trying to dip their toes into the water.

[meep12345meep12345]

...While I would say my roleplaying experience on Gaia has varied a great deal over the years, the high point of my time roleplaying on Gaia was back when Gaians wearing peasant clothes outnumbered those who were not cat_rolleyes ...After that it was mostly private RP guilds or PM-based RPs, which I haven't done in a long time regardless, on Gaia... cat_neutral

Granted, I roleplayed when people didn't have samples, most people used rando-Anime images they found on Lycos (wow, Lycos... cat_sweatdrop ) for their characters, and the point of roleplaying wasn't good grammar or perfect spelling, just intelligibility and fun cat_3nodding

...But I don't really have the time to roleplay anymore, here or elsewhere (heck, I hardly have the time to be active on Gaia), but I suppose this also means I don't even know what the expectations are for roleplaying now or what they should have been... cat_sweatdrop

[Arjuna Alter]

☆☽The post format thing always bothered me, like what's the point? It even surprises me people outside of 2005 like those tacky graphics (no offense intended for those who do.)

Plus word limits are, honestly, the worst thing that can happen to a RP, it's the moment you realize someone is not good at writing. Having to take 3 paragraphs for your character to fall and eat s**t on the pavement is bad writing unless you can keep it consistently engaging.

It'll always vex me that RP communities are so... elitist when it's essentially a bunch of people playing make believe online.

[Bleeding Apocalypse]

FM Towns

☆☽The post format thing always bothered me, like what's the point? It even surprises me people outside of 2005 like those tacky graphics (no offense intended for those who do.)

Plus word limits are, honestly, the worst thing that can happen to a RP, it's the moment you realize someone is not good at writing. Having to take 3 paragraphs for your character to fall and eat s**t on the pavement is bad writing unless you can keep it consistently engaging.

It'll always vex me that RP communities are so... elitist when it's essentially a bunch of people playing make believe online.

For the love of God, this.

The word count limit is especially horrific if your character ends up doing incredibly simplistic. Like, say, my character is reading the paper at work.

Now I have to describe what he's reading. I have to describe what he's feeling, his opinion on the article, his dismissive attitude to the author that penned that article because they had a bad run-in years ago during some event and he was misquoted so now there's a long-standing simmering rivalry between the two, and also, his coffee doesn't taste all that great because it's not his usual brand, but this was on sale, so whatever. Anything to get through the day. And then I'll end the entire freakin' essay of a post with:

"So do we still have that board meeting today at 10:30?"

THE ONE SENTENCE RESPONSE. And then I'll have to wait for the other person to find the time to write an essay in response to this yes-or-no question. I have an extremely busy life. Two days out of the week, I leave the house at 8 a.m. and don't come home until 9 p.m. I don't have time to engage in 1,000 word count responses, and it basically slows RPs down to a crawl. I lose interest. I'm not going to put in all of this effort with close to nothing, and there's no sense of reward because you'll go through all of this for a "Yep, meeting is still on, there's donuts in the break room!" Like, come on.

If I weren't so short on free time, I'd love to start up a casual RP in Barton Town. Jump in, jump out, move at your own pace. You wanna be wordy? Fine. You want to have short one-on-one interactions with one other person there? Fine. Do you. Just have fun.

[IternalSoul]

Bleeding Apocalypse

FM Towns

☆☽The post format thing always bothered me, like what's the point? It even surprises me people outside of 2005 like those tacky graphics (no offense intended for those who do.)

Plus word limits are, honestly, the worst thing that can happen to a RP, it's the moment you realize someone is not good at writing. Having to take 3 paragraphs for your character to fall and eat s**t on the pavement is bad writing unless you can keep it consistently engaging.

It'll always vex me that RP communities are so... elitist when it's essentially a bunch of people playing make believe online.

For the love of God, this.

The word count limit is especially horrific if your character ends up doing incredibly simplistic. Like, say, my character is reading the paper at work.

Now I have to describe what he's reading. I have to describe what he's feeling, his opinion on the article, his dismissive attitude to the author that penned that article because they had a bad run-in years ago during some event and he was misquoted so now there's a long-standing simmering rivalry between the two, and also, his coffee doesn't taste all that great because it's not his usual brand, but this was on sale, so whatever. Anything to get through the day. And then I'll end the entire freakin' essay of a post with:


"So do we still have that board meeting today at 10:30?"

THE ONE SENTENCE RESPONSE. And then I'll have to wait for the other person to find the time to write an essay in response to this yes-or-no question. I have an extremely busy life. Two days out of the week, I leave the house at 8 a.m. and don't come home until 9 p.m. I don't have time to engage in 1,000 word count responses, and it basically slows RPs down to a crawl. I lose interest. I'm not going to put in all of this effort with close to nothing, and there's no sense of reward because you'll go through all of this for a "Yep, meeting is still on, there's donuts in the break room!" Like, come on.

If I weren't so short on free time, I'd love to start up a casual RP in Barton Town. Jump in, jump out, move at your own pace. You wanna be wordy? Fine. You want to have short one-on-one interactions with one other person there? Fine. Do you. Just have fun.

Can we get a standing ovation for these two lovely people? For the love all things creative, yes unless it's an opening post - which are usually long, for the purpose of giving background to your character - there is no reason for one to write two pages to preceed one action.

It's called purple prose, and it's one of the most irritating writing shortfalls. I have observed it on this site, where writers seem to think quantity = quality. Sorry, sweetheart, high vocabulary and lots of words do not good writing make.

Taking five sentenses to write what you could write in one is bad writing. Even if one is using a more abstract style, there is a fine line between poetic and wordy.

Yet, I have observed that the "advanced lit" writers do exactly this: take ten paragraphs to do a whole lot of nothing.

Two line responses are uninspiring...but so are two page responses.

[Seraphina]

I can't really say I'm not surprised, but sorta this feeling that it was bound to happen? Maybe it's because of the time we live in where people aren't emphasized to show empathy and general social queues? But this is just a general assumption on what I think about young writers/artist these days. It's honestly entitlement issues.

I think a good example is if I were to offer resources, hands on help, and advice to a young artist who seems talented but stubborn to accept the resources, because they feel as if they're already good and want to facilitate their growth on their own. They deny it, because they're just overall too cocky to want to grow further, blinded by their own arrogance.

I'm not sure if that example was actually good, now that I'm taking another look it just seems super off topic. But that's the general vibe that I feel w/o actually looking into the role play community today and basing it off your opinion.

I role played a bit when I was a kid, and I really enjoyed it. I played a character that I reflected the persona that I wanted to be, and it's super cringe thinking about it now. I've never been super literate when it comes to writing/typing and just lack a lot of grammatical teachings, because I'm too lazy to want to learn and grow, because my interest lies in other things.

BUT what I do know just by reading the first paragraph of "Elven Slave X Captured Assassin" is that you can word your words together very beautifully. I'm able to in vision the image you embedded in your text, and I admire people that can really put a sense of feeling into their craft. So maybe the role playing community is lacking empathy? Who knows?

[Mr A s t a r o t h x]

【 ʕ•ᴥ•ʔ 】
My experience is similar and I haven't RPd here for a loooong time.
It's kind of always been like this if you really think about it, lol.
And honestly it's...like this everywhere. I moved to Tumblr to RP
once I wasn't satisfied with picky mods, strict threads, and the countless
arranged marriage threads and it's still pretty littered with elitists and
wannabe pro-writers.

In RP you just kind of have to take risks, live and learn, and find the
diamonds in the rough.

I will say this thread made me look up some of my old RP posts and
I regret it ayyyy emotion_facepalm

[Tinkatuff]

I definitely miss 2011 gaia if only for the roleplaying. You could so easily strike up a super casual rp with people. I even managed to find a good chunk of folks who did literate roleplays but didn't weigh you down with tons of strict rules.