Welcome to Gaia! ::

Also, it's true that you can teach people how to roleplay better, I was just thinking about the overcocky ones who aren't willing to learn. Soul brings up a good point; as well as all of you brave people who start up roleplays of your own. T^T People will join--in time.

Roleplaying used to be fun on here when a large sum of the people that rped were actually writers (or at least considered themseles to be such). Now it's mostly stupid teenagers/tweens that want to live out their romantic fantasies. The ironic thing is, nowadays, most literate rps are based around being a stupid teenager.

But you know what was the best thing about the way roleplaying used to be? There were far less people trying to comondeer that plot and make i all about their character.

Ah, free form rps. If you get lucky and the right people join, they can be amazing. The plot for the best rp I ever joined was this: "A goddess came to you in a dream, and now you're glowing, so find this goddess and figure out what she wants." Through the combined creativity of all the members, we kept it going for almost a year. But that's extremely rare, and it's getting even rarer.

Saw some posts about teaching newer role players the ropes behind being a decent role player.

You can try to teach someone something but if the message is out there and they aren't listening to what you have to say, then it's wasted time and effort on your part. I would teach people or rather give them pointers on what I think are good role playing believes but it's hard to find someone that actually will listen to what I have to say. I'm not exactly the kind of person that does things how everyone else does it and maybe that has a lot to do with it. It's just how I am as a person -- I like thinking outside the box with common ideas to freshen a concept up that others might not have thought doing.

Distinguishing from a good role play from a bad one takes practice. Generally, if you see an extremely fast paced RP kicking off and then slowly come to a complete stop, that would be the clear sign of a terrible role play. Nevermind the concept behind the story. It's the players that really what make or break the quality of any role play: it's a fact.

I would write articles on this kind of subject, like an organized informative piece of writing about my opinion and believes on role playing in general, to give people another perceptive towards role playing. Though I don't really have the time with all the projects I have going on right now; which happens to be a lot of photoshop stuff at the moment.

I've done many different types of role plays and when I say the word "type" I don't mean what kind of genre or story. It has a more specific meaning that it's associated towards: structurely organized and unstructurely organized. It's my strong belief that in order for a role play to be awesome and successful you will need a few things first: dedicated and head strong role players, a detailed story plot and RP world, and finally a sense of direction the story will go and how you want to accomplish each step in the story. It seems far to often that when you begin a new role play, while thinking it will be awesome, to find out the random group of people that signed up aren't really that dedicated as you thought. Things start to slow down, people lose even more motivation, and soon the entire RP just fades away to nothingness.

Unless you're RPing with friends that will always post when you need them to without reminding them, your role play will fail over half the time. It's just how it is. If it lasts for three months, that isn't really a long time in most role plays to say it's successful or not. If you have a group of people that have stuck with you from day one up to six months and are still posting for you, then you do.

There are also some common mistakes people do that kill their RP internally without them knowing. This would be placing to many of the RPers in the same scene with their characters at a time. Typically past 4 (maybe 5 but that's really getting over board) will turn things into complete garbage really fast and the reason for that is it takes time for each person to put up a post. This can be some what bypassed by giving each person an extra character or two in helping them build that quality post of writing you want from them. Gives them lots of material to write with and very few excuses to not post.

I'll finish this mini-rant with saying something about real life excuses people throw at you. These excuses are more often than not complete bullshit. It doesn't take that much more time than saying "I'm busy in real life." to someone than giving them a more detailed reason. There is absolutely no ******** reason why someone can't give a detailed real life excuse instead of the generic bullshit response. It's rude, it's a nice way to get kicked out of a RP, and stays with you as part of your reputation on Gaia under your current username. I wish people would just be more considerate of others when giving these kind of excuses. I personally will kick someone from my RP that give me this excuse multiple times and I feel like more RPers should as well.

If anyone feels like they need to take offense to what I've said, then go ahead. I don't really care. I'm not the best writer in the world nor the best RPer, but I do take things that I have great interest in with seriousness and my opinionated posts on these kind of subjects and discussions reflect that.

Thanks, very few actually do find anything I say helpful. Technically I'm still in one of my friend's RPs in another guild. It's practically dead right now cause no one else is really posting at all and I might conjurer up a post out of the blue for him. In fact, he's in this guild too and runs a RP here as well; which seems to be having the same problems as the other RP.

I doubt anyone will actually take anything I say to heart or even "try" any of it. Although I do plan on practicing what I preach in my upcoming RP, I'm not sure if this guild is the place that will see it from start to finish (at least the first part anyways). That brings up another great point I would like to go into a bit more detail towards.

I lot of this will become more apparent when I start my RP and how I plan to manage it when and if it even sparks interest from others.

For the love of almighty god, I swear I rarely ever see people that host RPs plan to have a beginning, middle, and end towards their RPs. A story, no matter how long it is, always has a beginning, middle, and end. If you fail to establish these kind of things ahead of starting your RP I feel it will contribute to it's doom and failure. RPing takes up enough of someone's time and even more time if you're posting large 5-7 paragraph posts with dialogue included. It would almost seem rather rude to start a role play with no organization to the overall and generalized story plot of the RP. This could simply be a five bullet point listing of the main things you want to cover and incorporate into the RP. A successful RP takes a lot of preparation time to setup. You can't simply throw a few paragraphs together, think everything's in order, then start it and fail in 1-3 months. You waste everyone's time doing that and I don't like wasting my time anymore than anyone else's.

I'm typically a world builder type of role player now (use to not be). I will not post up an unorganized or poorly structured role play simply to get things started. I will not cut material out from the role play to get things rolling. It's really a terrible way to run and manage a role play when you aren't making absolute sure that all the necessary and vital materials are present and accounted for.

Maps are something that are rarely used by people and it's even rarer to see someone setup a RP and make character portraits (Kalon in this guild, who is my friend, makes them from time to time -- also, I have a portrait shop in the artist forum too). These things are added bonuses. I can understand not making character portraits, but running a RP with no map is a nice way to confuse the ******** out of everyone. I work on map cartography in photoshop as well as my character portraits -- which I need to redo my textures for -- because I feel that by providing such materials for people to use distinguishes my RP from other people's on another level (besides the story of course). It can be a lot of work and it's worth it. The problem with people with these kind of things is that they aren't motivated enough to make such materials for their RPs. Even a premade map off Google Image searches can work for any RP if you aren't to hell-bent on the geography of your RP's world.

Role players need to stop being so unmotivated to put effort into their posts, structure of their role plays, and constant bullshit that goes along with all of it. I miss the days where people knew what the word dedication meant.

First off, I don't mind "Rants" as you people call 'em. To me it's valuable input. I don't mean to keep beating the same subject over the head--I just really wanted to know what people thought of the matter. It seems that 'haste' really does make waste. (I love the term 'auto-pilot' that was used.)

Also--though I do agree with you Obsidian, sometimes the best roleplays fail because there's too much planning ahead. People get overwhelmed. The map idea is unique, and yes, I agree that roleplays shouldn't be spewed out as fluffy "b.s." type writing; but at the same time..if everything's predetermined it takes away from the whole "fleshing out" of your character.

((Btw, I'm not attacking you; I'm just saying that I've been in roleplays that are heavily planned out, so sometimes it gets confusing. As always, it depends on the people you get stuck with. x) ))

XP Hehe. I think it makes sense. Yeah, I'm not on Gaia as much as I used to be because of school getting busier.

So, I've taken up the challenge of trying to think of something sci fi that won't take TOO much effort on my part.

As for races, what do you guys think? Keep these in mind when you read my short crappy vague idea below Two options:

1) Human and androids only. Humans can have modifications.
2) Any race (I know this is riskier)

The Galactic Guards are an official police group that maintains order in the galaxy. A mysterious virus/plague of some sort has been infecting ship systems across the galaxy, making it a Galactic Guard issue to investigate. The Guards find a possible lead that points to a secret scientist lab in an asteroid belt. Now, their mission is to infiltrate that lab and find out info (and survive too before getting to the lab).

Edit: Oh, yeah... and there's a part of this where every character is going to have to pass off as a girl... xd

I've been working on a really cool RPG system over the past several months, for my guild that is, to help revive RPing on Gaia as much as possible. Although I'm faced with the usual problems of getting members for my guild, it's a system like no other RPing game system on Gaia. It's actually structured a lot more than what you'd see in other guilds. It also isn't anything like D&D either (minus a couple twenty sided dice rolls for determining successful attacks but that hardly makes it a D&D clone).

You guys also have to realize that roleplaying is also dying on this website cause those roleplaying guilds either aren't willing to do what is necessary to keep their members active or think of things to incite new members to join.

The responsibility isn't just on one group of people or one single guild. It's everyone's responsibility inside the same roleplaying community to step up and fix the problem. If new roleplayers are willing to learn story writing style roleplaying then teach them. That was one of the things that this guild failed at (the guild is still pretty decent IMO). They used a Roleplaying 101 style teaching feature and it never really worked the way it should be. They didn't market it well enough and incite people to have a reason to do it. You simply can't expect people to show interest in something that gives them no immediate benefit. I just think this entire idea behind the Roleplaying 101 wasn't organized, managed, and then executed well enough. This doesn't mean it wasn't a good attempt or idea at all and I do think the crew of this guild need to take another look at that guild feature and revamp it to keep members active, keep the guild alive, and gain new members willing to learn better story writing style roleplaying.

This goes back to my philosophy on running website communities, video game clans, video game guilds, and other similar collections of people: give them something they didn't know they need. This could mean a lot of things. Such as a Roleplaying 101 system that rewards them of their good effort in learning how to roleplay better in some kind of area that is roleplaying or a reason to stay active in the guild outside of any roleplays they are in. Honestly, these concepts aren't hard to think up. You can take the guild The Literate Roleplaying Guild as an example of what not to do (I know this isn't the only time I've slapped them in the face in this guild). They don't do anything to keep their existing member base active. It's like they don't even give a s**t. Recently Your Akina made some stupid recruitment contest for 100k. To some that is a lot and to others they could care less (I care less about the guild than I do about the gold). The fact is, this contest hasn't even really produced any results because the execution of this contest was s**t storm terrible. No marketing, no advertising, nothing. It's like she expects the s**t to just work when that isn't the case.

I honestly think the next step in roleplaying in general is massive world building and/or RPG system creations. This is something that I am doing with my guild. Each system designed to be as easy to understand as possible. There will always be a lot of reading involved, but it each game is also designed to be unique and original from one another and exclusive. The roleplaying process (making the RP) has to evolve on Gaia Online in order for it to survive these tough times. There isn't much else that can be done about it.

/rant
/bitchfest