The State of Roleplay Now

[Kafka]

To me it isn't baffling, as someone younger starting in roleplay is more likely to be open to input than the ego of an aged adult. Most people being unable to create or write anything outside of self inserts accounts for a great deal of the issues that come up, really.

[OH MYGOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOODOH MYGOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOD]

I remember how weirdly intense Gaia rp was when I was younger, around 2006-2012ish era. They'd have huge Gaia families and rp with them. I was in one which was just me and 2 other pals and one of us are still good friends, there was no toxicity there. But most I saw were... very toxic, yeah. Not even so much the rp aspect than it was their own personal grudges against other families and such and having petty wars. It was weird.

I miss rp. I kinda wanna get into it again, but if it's still like that I don't want involved. I just want to have fun.

The only thing I hate now is that people steal irl photos and what not of people for their character bios, but that isn't gaia exclusive. It just weirds me out a lot, despite it being a normalized part of rp culture from what I've seen.

[IternalSoul]

smudged ink

I exclusively do one-on-ones through discord, or tabletop (DND) rp with friends. It's just too intimate to be goofy and play around with strangers, much less strangers who are judgemental and picky about writing.

I know I'm picky & judgemental, but some people really inflate their egos behind overly purple prose and flowery language to a point the post isn't readable. So rather than weeding out through people who -could- suck and be lame, id rather trust my friends and have fun (or my rp partners and be able to talk OOC)

It has always baffled me how people would have these massive egos and think they are the next Mark Twain for being able to write three paragraphs of overly florid purpose prose describing their character taking a sip of water.

That isn't artistic that's just bad writing that screeches your pacing to halt. Quantity over quality seems to be game, and that is seen as "advanced lit". The only thing that is advanced is the feeling of absolute boredom I feel reading your fifteen paragraphs of monologuing in response to my character asking you to pass a glass of milk.

[IternalSoul]

Elinoire

I honestly TRIED so hard to get into Role-Playing on Gaia, but it just never really fit my style or personal preferences. Admittedly, I am a little bit of a snob or whatever about POV style, quality AS WELL as quantity, and overall level of grammar and originality of my partners. I am also a very visual person and the site just isn't pretty enough to keep me interested in long posts.

I have found great success on forum sites specifically created for specific role-plays on Proboards, JCINK, etc. I will say I rarely if ever join a site based on an already canon story, Harry Potter being the only exception (and even that usually has to be before or after the actual book's storyline) so it might differ from original and fan I suppose.

They just usually have higher quality storylines, more original plots, characters, and players, and tend to be more welcoming and less dramatic. LESS. Not entirely without, but people are passionate about writing and their characters, and where there is passion there is bound to be drama. I have been able to stay out of most drama, though. I'd say mixing role-play and friends is only time I've ever encountered any kind of drama. Kinda like don't mix money and family.

I think anywhere there is a community there is going to be a sense of elitism or cliques, people who join first or have stayed around longer are obviously going to bond together and if they see enough people come and go, they probably do form an attitude of "Yeah, you're gonna ditch us in a month anyway so why bother". It's not necessarily fair, but I can understand it a little bit.

Now, the doxxing and all that, I've never seen anyone do that, but that's inexcusable. I don't even understand what could possess someone to do that over ANYTHING let alone something as simple as role-play. Like I've hard partner's get impatient and even rude, I've lost friendships over it, but nothing as bad as that.

I think it's just the community you look at overall, usually Discords and Reddit and the like attract a... let's say a certain kind of person to begin with. If you haven't already, I strongly recommend finding an active, lived in forum on Proboards or JCINK, it's less likely to be unwelcoming (if you find yourself on an older one that only has a few active people, you'll probably be more likely to encounter the above mentioned cliques and elitism) and its literally created ONLY for that role-play.

Oh it is quite a reality in MMO RP scenes. People stalking people across games, harassment, doxxing.Or perhaps MMOs are a whole different breed of RP since it offers more avenue for projection than most mediums such that people take things that occur in RP very seriously.

[Avaline Fitheach]

IternalSoul

Elinoire

I honestly TRIED so hard to get into Role-Playing on Gaia, but it just never really fit my style or personal preferences. Admittedly, I am a little bit of a snob or whatever about POV style, quality AS WELL as quantity, and overall level of grammar and originality of my partners. I am also a very visual person and the site just isn't pretty enough to keep me interested in long posts.

I have found great success on forum sites specifically created for specific role-plays on Proboards, JCINK, etc. I will say I rarely if ever join a site based on an already canon story, Harry Potter being the only exception (and even that usually has to be before or after the actual book's storyline) so it might differ from original and fan I suppose.

They just usually have higher quality storylines, more original plots, characters, and players, and tend to be more welcoming and less dramatic. LESS. Not entirely without, but people are passionate about writing and their characters, and where there is passion there is bound to be drama. I have been able to stay out of most drama, though. I'd say mixing role-play and friends is only time I've ever encountered any kind of drama. Kinda like don't mix money and family.

I think anywhere there is a community there is going to be a sense of elitism or cliques, people who join first or have stayed around longer are obviously going to bond together and if they see enough people come and go, they probably do form an attitude of "Yeah, you're gonna ditch us in a month anyway so why bother". It's not necessarily fair, but I can understand it a little bit.

Now, the doxxing and all that, I've never seen anyone do that, but that's inexcusable. I don't even understand what could possess someone to do that over ANYTHING let alone something as simple as role-play. Like I've hard partner's get impatient and even rude, I've lost friendships over it, but nothing as bad as that.

I think it's just the community you look at overall, usually Discords and Reddit and the like attract a... let's say a certain kind of person to begin with. If you haven't already, I strongly recommend finding an active, lived in forum on Proboards or JCINK, it's less likely to be unwelcoming (if you find yourself on an older one that only has a few active people, you'll probably be more likely to encounter the above mentioned cliques and elitism) and its literally created ONLY for that role-play.

Oh it is quite a reality in MMO RP scenes. People stalking people across games, harassment, doxxing.Or perhaps MMOs are a whole different breed of RP since it offers more avenue for projection than most mediums such that people take things that occur in RP very seriously.

I've had no fewer than two people take romance and intimate moments way too seriously just here on Gaia alone -- most often when I RP'ed in Towns 1 and 2 -- and it really is worse in some MMOs. It's one of the big reasons why I explicitly refuse to do any kind of immersive RP in MMOs now; just let me do my own thing in the game without having to think too much about you creaming your jeans to me, please and thanks.

[Alaric_xoxo]

I started my roleplaying experiences on Gaia back in 2006. At the time I was a younger teenager and I stayed fairly active until about 2016 and then it became more sporadic as life responsibilities began to take over. I have so many memories of different roleplaying partners and groups that I was a part of here on Gaia. So admittedly the nostalgia of that is what has pulled me back, today being my first day logging in since 2021.

I was trying to get a read on what the roleplaying situation was like on Gaia now and browsing through old threads I was subscribed to. It felt like a graveyard to my past and definitely caused a pang of sadness, wondering where everyone's life had taken them and thinking about the fact that we will likely never get the chance to speak again.

I'm really glad I found this thread though and was able to read everyone sharing their experiences and past with Gaia. It definitely feels a lot more welcoming to be able to see there are still a lot of veteran roleplayers from back when I was active who remember it for what it really was, the bad, the good and everything in-between.

[MegaRose]

I have never successfully had a roleplay.  I made the attempts, back in my peak Gaia days (2004-2007), but I think a lot of things got in the way.  Sometimes it's just the usual; people post long and detailed character profiles then drop off from lack of interest.  For me specifically, most of my attempts were to enter the communities of various breedable pet shops, which were often very cliquey.  A lot of the more intense ones required a lot of thread participation, money to buy your pet, and a certain level of writing quality for an ongoing pet journal.  I usually failed at at least two of those three things.  I was also probably just very bad at RPing and bad at integrating into other peoples' social environments.

I never really got a lot of direct critique on what I was doing wrong.  The one time I was given a reason for being passed over in an RP 'audition' to buy a pet, I was told my posts weren't long enough.  To this day I'm not 100% sure what RPers expect for length.  It feels wrong to write three paragraphs of internal narration and scene detail to pad out a single line of dialogue in response to what the other guy just said to you.  It feels especially useless when I'm there to buy a pet.  Why do you need a chapter about my character's dark past before you let me send you 5k gold for a picture of a dog?

I've had my best success in creating fun RP moments in places that don't RP, which probably says something about myself.  I've been a part of other communities, usually forums, that had NOTHING to do with roleplay, and somehow gotten people wrapped up in building personal lore with me.  So some of us would be families, and make up imaginary kids, or describe our super cool fortresses where we conduct raids on each other to steal each others' memes.  I've done little games in art communities where one of my OCs will interact with other artists' OCs and then I draw the scene.

I think actually, since I'm primarily an artist and a writer (I make comics, in theory, when I get around to it...) part of my personal problem was that I want to tell my own stories.  I even play MMOs like they're single-player games.  I enjoy interactions, but I don't necessarily want to make collaborative works that way.  If I really wanted it, I would have worked harder at getting good, instead of wandering off to do my own thing.  What I actually want is to make a good story on my own, without input, then get peoples' reactions after the fact.  I don't want to roleplay OC-to-OC, I want to make something that people will then make fan OCs for.  I've considered opening up some kind of venue for people to talk to my OCs, like an askblog on tumblr or something like that, so I have a comfortable control of the input flow.  But first, I have to present my OCs in a way that people take interest in.  I better get back to making my comics...


But I really wish Gaia's deep archives were indexed right so that I could go in to my oldest, cringiest posts and reassess whether or not I really was just a bad RPer.

[Ser Mercymurv]

I don't have experience with RP here, though I find all communities are toxic in the ways you describe. My partner says it helps to make your own thread and rules to restrict these things.

[1994 chicago bulls]

i mean just play dnd for roleplay my dude

[1994 chicago bulls]

*blushes* uwu hello
IternalSoul-san



*throws smoke bomb*

Roll initiative.

Hi folks im Matthew Mercer