Other Roleplay Clichés

[Wick]

Why is it that whenever I come on here every roleplay I see involves some sort of academy-based story?

I mean, I’m not saying I’m the most creative person, but I’ve had some decent ideas, and I’ve seen plenty of other ideas for interesting and at least somewhat original roleplays, but in the end the school roleplays always rake the cake.

Whether they be for superheroes, mutants, regular people, people from other worlds, people always seem to flock toward them, and yes I will admit that I used to be a tad bit of a sucker for them myself. However nobody ever seems to be comfortable stepping out of that zone and trying a different general idea out.

It gets really dissapointing signing up for an exciting looking roleplay only for it to be drowned out by the immense popularity of the school roleplays. I don’t mean to come off as rude in saying this, I just find it rather obnoxious at times. Does it bother anyone else?

 

[Tove]

Roleplay Theory - Comfort Zones

Other - RpNation Diversity

A couple of topics of interest. In the end everyone likes what they like and will roleplay what they want.

 

[Lord Aphrodite]

Take our advice, let the topic drop. It sounds mean, but in the end, you’ll end up complaining more, only for people to say what T Tove said. (At least that’s what happened the other two times.)

The moral of story here, is that people enjoy what they like, and they roleplay what they enjoy. Complaining won’t change anything.


If I’ve offended you in any way, I apologize, but I didn’t want to beat around the bush.

 

[Lord Aphrodite]

Wick

 

[rae2nerdy]

Also maybe don't play the game of Keeping Up With The Joneses through roleplay.

Roleplays do not solely fail because someone else's idea is more popular. They fail for a multitude of reasons (including but not limited to):

1. Poorly defined plot/world building/setting.
2. The players involved underestimate the amount of free time they have available
3. There are not enough players with interest that fit the GM's criteria for joining
4. The GM doesn't move the story along in such a way as to keep their players engaged
5. Interpersonal conflicts from the players themselves
6. Lack of motivation form the players to post, regardless of GM engagement
7. The idea is too niche to garner a wide audience
8. The GM doesn't advertise properly

There are probably more reasons but those are the ones off the top of my head. And of those eight reasons exactly 1 has anything to do with the plot's relative popularity.

 

[Idea]

Considering the number of these threads that were already made and in order to avoid repeating what I or others already said as much as possible, I decided to do a little fact checking on this whole matter of school roleplays. Are they really swarming us? Are they oppressing other types of roleplay by the sheer weight of their presence? Is this as big of an issue as everyone seems to claim it to be?

After going through the first three pages of every group interest check (except for dice, nation building, quest and coloseum ones because those are so underpopulated that the few RPs they get are pretty specialized for them and I've never seen a single school RP in any of them) (sample total: 75 interest checks per section) , I came up with some results that frankly exceeded my expectations. The presence of school RPs is pretty overwhelming from a statistical standpoint:

Just Fandoms: 26.7%
Just Fantasy: 14.7%
Just Modern: 18.7%
Just Futuristic: 5.3%
Absolute Total: 8.175%
Total Not Counting NB, Colloseum, dice or quest: 16.35%
Total just fantasy, modern and futuristic: 12.9%
Total just fantasy and futuristic: 10%

Important to note is that for these numbers, I considered anything that had a high likelihood of being a school type roleplay (such as all BNHA fandoms or RPs with "academy" in the title) were considered as school type roleplays without further inspections of the interest check and all those in which I was in the fence I erred in the side of them being school-type roleplays too. Overall, I'd say there is a 0.5% margin of error to increase and a 2% margin of error to decrease in each of those. Still, even a 10% is quite significant, implying that one out of every 10 roleplays (in this case one in every 10 roleplays in fantasy and futuristic) is a school type roleplay. Then we have cases like modern, were almost one out of every 5 roleplays is a school roleplay of some kind.


Having thus presented the numbers I feel like I now understand a little more why people feel like school roleplays take up so much space, especially in sections like fantasy where one cliche premise gets replaced by the other every other RP. Still, I think it's important to understand the significance of this data. There ARE too many school RPs, but for every one of those there is, there are 2, 4, 6, 9 , 10 roleplays that just aren't. There is plenty of choice out there, you just need to actually support it yourself. If you want to make a certain type of roleplay exist work to make it viable by supporting others full-heartedly. On average there are about 4 school roleplays per page and 21 non-school roleplays, plenty of choices, certainly not every roleplay being a highschool roleplay.

If this is about your own roleplays then you ought to adapt. The interest checks are pretty much a market, and being a school roleplay holds several advantages for a "consumer" AKA an RPer. Familiarity for instance. What you need to do is present something more worthwhile in the eyes of others.

Feel free to take that advice as you see fit. Those are simply my thoughts. There is one last thing I would like to adress: school roleplays are indeed a preference. Some people just like participating in those. There are more reasons for their great presence numerically speaking than there being an overwhelming number of them, namely the fact that specific genres are quite keen on taking these types of roleplays (fandoms has a lot of media that takes place in highschool, modern has a much more limited range of continuous settings), and the fact school roleplays tend to die extremely fast which prompts replacements to appear a lot faster than in some other roleplays. So, rather than tackling what is pratically a non-issue, I'd argue there are problems that should be tackled more seriously:

1. Purposeful misplacement of interest checks for the sake of attracting a bigger audience (just dishonest)
2. Lack of awareness about the visual praticality of one's coding (I am guilty of this myself sometimes, but the sheer number of white on white text is a little disturbing)


Anyway, hope this was helpful or at least informative. Good luck and happy roleplaying!

 

[rae2nerdy]

If possibly this is due to differing themes Idea . The white text on white text.

I know when I made my current search check I looked at it on my phone and on dark theme. Neither worked with the original theme so I made a second “mobile” version and just posted it below the first.

I’ve seen some people just copy the text along and put it in spoilers under the pretty stuff.

Certainly a lot bit of organization is helpful but too much code just makes it unreadable

 

[Idea]

If possibly this is due to differing themes Idea . The white text on white text.

I know when I made my current search check I looked at it on my phone and on dark theme. Neither worked with the original theme so I made a second “mobile” version and just posted it below the first.

I’ve seen some people just copy the text along and put it in spoilers under the pretty stuff.

Certainly a lot bit of organization is helpful but too much code just makes it unreadable

Yeah, that's probably it. I'm not saying these people are doing anything wrong or malicious I just think that, as an actual problem, it is a more important matter than people liking school roleplays a lot, and that if we could just raise awareness about it, we could do a lot of people a favor, both on the players side and on the GMs side.

 

[AtlannianSpy]

There seems to be this idea among a certain percentage of roleplayers that a creative or unique premise is, by itself, worth more than a derivative one, that its more worthy of people's time and attention and when the creative premise doesn't automatically get that time and attention they're surprised but novel RPs actually need to do more work than derivative ones to attract attention, not rely on their premise.

When people join an RP of a type they've already been in before, they're still doing it with new characters, new people, new plots or at least new combinations of old elements, the premise need not be original to provide novelty. Think about tabletop roleplaying games, where people have been playing some version of D&D for decades now. Not only that, but the familiarity means that player can Role play in a way that's fun for the other people in the group, attracting more engagement and positive feedback for themselves and improving the roleplay as a whole.

When people instead join an RP that's more creative and unique in its premise they expose themselves not only to the risk that they won't enjoy the rp, but also the risk that they won't be good at it, that they'll drag down the RP as a whole by not understanding the nuances of the genre, that other players will want to engage with their character less and that they themselves might be subjected to silent judgement or harsh critique.

This is not to say that creative or unique RPs are inferior, quite the opposite, I'm always in favor of more diversity. But the confidence and support of a familiar genre are things of real value to an RPer, not something to be scoffed at.

 

[Bone2pick]

When people join an RP of a type they've already been in before, they're still doing it with new characters, new people, new plots or at least new combinations of old elements, the premise need not be original to provide novelty.

I couldn't agree more. It's a shame that concept isn't more widely understood.