Shireling
A Servant of King and Country
Recently I've taken a job at a factory, and although I've been looking for other employment, I'm stuck there for the time being. In the afternoons after work, I'm usually too tired to do much of anything but I occasionally get a spark of creativity that I want to channel into role-playing.
My dilema is simply this, people don't like RPs that run at a snails-pace. At least, most people don't. Most people, myself included, enjoy fast-moving and dynamic adventures. I have, however, found that this is one of the greatest reasons RPs die. People cannot keep up with the breakneck pace desired by everyone else.
I've been doing this a great many years, and in my experience online role-playing has two distinct time formats: short and long form. Looking back over my years, most of my RPs have been short form. However, the most successful ones have all been "long-form."
So what makes a long-form RP? While I realize that this is mostly an arbitrary category and no story can be completely categorized as one or another, long-form stories usually have the following traits:
1. A Small, Close-Knit Group of Collaborators
The secrets of success that have marked my best RPs have mainly boiled down to who is involved. It was almost always the same people, people who had built a reputation with one another and were comfortable with the plot stalling for even months at a time if a certain member couldn't post.
2. Dedicated to the Story
In most groups, people are dedicated to their characters. There's nothing wrong with this, but this kind of attitude usually leads to frustration when someone is holding up the plot and wasting time that you wanted to spend developing your character. People who put the story first, however, are content to sacrifice that extra bit of polish they could put on their characters in exchange for keeping a story going. These sort of RPers start with the end in mind. In this area, they're much more like authors than RPers. A good author must know where the story is going before they start writing it. Similarly, a good RP group needs to know what the goals are (at least in the broadest terms) and set about getting the characters there.
3. Deeply Invested
This really isn't something you can make yourself. To be deeply invested, you really have to honestly care about the story, the setting, the characters, and the art of storytelling.
4. Characters Need All Sorts of Relationships
What I find is a major driver of long-form RPs is the level of complexity to the relationships between the characters. This includes romantic entanglements (even the dreaded love triangle if used in a diluted form very sparingly), spousal relationships, mentor-student relationships, parent-child, friendships, and especially animosities. Any story that is lacking at least a majority of these different relationships will generally have characters that seem unnatural. It is also good to have a mixture of old and young and male and female when the setting allows.
There are more, but these are probably the major ones. Leave a comment below if you think I missed something or if you think I'm off the mark about something. If you read this and you would like to try to put together an RP built on these premises, PM me and I would love to discuss some of your ideas.
My dilema is simply this, people don't like RPs that run at a snails-pace. At least, most people don't. Most people, myself included, enjoy fast-moving and dynamic adventures. I have, however, found that this is one of the greatest reasons RPs die. People cannot keep up with the breakneck pace desired by everyone else.
I've been doing this a great many years, and in my experience online role-playing has two distinct time formats: short and long form. Looking back over my years, most of my RPs have been short form. However, the most successful ones have all been "long-form."
So what makes a long-form RP? While I realize that this is mostly an arbitrary category and no story can be completely categorized as one or another, long-form stories usually have the following traits:
1. A Small, Close-Knit Group of Collaborators
The secrets of success that have marked my best RPs have mainly boiled down to who is involved. It was almost always the same people, people who had built a reputation with one another and were comfortable with the plot stalling for even months at a time if a certain member couldn't post.
2. Dedicated to the Story
In most groups, people are dedicated to their characters. There's nothing wrong with this, but this kind of attitude usually leads to frustration when someone is holding up the plot and wasting time that you wanted to spend developing your character. People who put the story first, however, are content to sacrifice that extra bit of polish they could put on their characters in exchange for keeping a story going. These sort of RPers start with the end in mind. In this area, they're much more like authors than RPers. A good author must know where the story is going before they start writing it. Similarly, a good RP group needs to know what the goals are (at least in the broadest terms) and set about getting the characters there.
3. Deeply Invested
This really isn't something you can make yourself. To be deeply invested, you really have to honestly care about the story, the setting, the characters, and the art of storytelling.
4. Characters Need All Sorts of Relationships
What I find is a major driver of long-form RPs is the level of complexity to the relationships between the characters. This includes romantic entanglements (even the dreaded love triangle if used in a diluted form very sparingly), spousal relationships, mentor-student relationships, parent-child, friendships, and especially animosities. Any story that is lacking at least a majority of these different relationships will generally have characters that seem unnatural. It is also good to have a mixture of old and young and male and female when the setting allows.
There are more, but these are probably the major ones. Leave a comment below if you think I missed something or if you think I'm off the mark about something. If you read this and you would like to try to put together an RP built on these premises, PM me and I would love to discuss some of your ideas.
