The most depressing thing about RPnation

How many RP's have you abandoned (after people signed up for them)?

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Tonstad39

God of wisdom
I've recently been poking around for new RP posts &I have scrolled back so far, that I'm seeing RPs that I signed up for back in April. Most of these RPs have other people who signed up as well, but the thread only consists of like two posts that typically went unanswered by the author of said RP. All that time and energy in writing a good story for others to act out are wasted because they abandon ship before they go anywhere!


People created characters to be in the author's world just for everyone to abandon ship before it goes anywhere. Main point: the effort that goes into an RP gets wasted because the people behind it move on before the adventure even got started!
 
The nice thing is that these RP ideas and these characters are forever on file for the creators to go back to, improve upon, adapt, and reuse. I'm in a good many successful reboot RPs and using a good many recycled characters. c:


Creation is never a waste.
 
I'm new to this site, so I haven't been acquainted with the frequency for dropped RP's that it has, but I did want to comment on something:

Anomaly said:
The nice thing is that these RP ideas and these characters are forever on file for the creators to go back to, improve upon, adapt, and reuse. I'm in a good many successful reboot RPs and using a good many recycled characters. c:
Creation is never a waste.
I agree with this, however, there are cases where months, maybe even years later the author of the RP or characters comes back to find the site no longer exists. In such cases they may not have backed anything up, mistakenly believing that the site would be up forever. And, that's not even factoring in the site having a database error, and losing everyone's posts, or some number of other things that could go wrong on a forum such as this.


Always back up your stuff, kids. You never know when you might want to reminisce!
 
I find ultimately, rather than seeking out particular RPs, you should emphasize finding a group - a collection of fellow RPN members whom you know to be reliable, and that you work with effectively. This takes time, of course, and energy, and plenty of dropped roleplays.


But I think one in every five of my RPs survives for years, mainly because I have found a pool of about fifteen members on whom I can rely.
 
Regarding those specific examples something to look out for is lack of interaction among any of the players or a total ghost town in the OOC.


This tends to mean people aren't invested.


The more active your OOC the longer your roleplay will last. Because that means the people are excited and talking about the roleplay and with each other.
 
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Whistler said:
Those are empty threads. There is no premise, there is no plot, there is no lore, and there is no other information about anything (to speak of). How could possibly expect any other outcome? There is nothing to invest in. It's like a random stranger walking up to you on the street asking you to give him money for no reason.
Took the words right out of my mouth.
 
Nah. I've had rps here, and other sites for that matter, with little to nothing to get invested in lasts for pages.


Hell, when I first started forum rps there was rarely ever structure and we'd rp for hours, just firing out 1-2 lines of story. As time passed, our skills improved, our posts became longer, more detailed, more structured. Then the little fragments we had before, became solid pieces of lore to our future roleplays.


The point of me saying that is, there needs not be much to invest in to have an invested player. An idea is oft enough.


Though, I will admit that sometimes the death of a roleplay often has all to do with the people in it as alluded to before, inclusive of the GM.


Personally as a GM, if the CS I get don't excite me I tend to let the roleplay die......se lavi -i'm haitian not french-
 
I haven't been in many RPs on this site, but I think one of the major killers is writers who don't know how to entertain themselves. Stories often struggle to to provide a plot for everyone involved and a lot of people run out of ideas to write during these periods and drop off.


Something that I would like to see is characters having an interest in each other (something that I'm guilty of ignoring too, tbh). I often have some semi-elaborate back story that I'm not going to write in a character sheet. But even just some pointless conversation in the characters downtime would be good to see. A story shouldn't require constant action to keep people interested).


Ultimately @Grey is probably right. A good group is the safest bet. (Sorry that that SOMA RP didn't pan out, by the way).
 
I've often came across the same issue. I've joined several incredible ideas and none of them survived but my rp I joined on a wimb survived and thrived into an incredible beautiful written rp.


I'm having this issue with starting my own rp. Everyone likes starting rps but no one likes to join existing ones
 
tammynorthland said:
I've often came across the same issue. I've joined several incredible ideas and none of them survived but my rp I joined on a wimb survived and thrived into an incredible beautiful written rp.
I'm having this issue with starting my own rp. Everyone likes starting rps but no one likes to join existing ones
Here's a conjecture: maybe everyone is too busy with other RPs to take notice of other RPs!
 
I agree..... I find it kind of strange even myself am selfish with joining rps. Like I found a perfect rp but I prefer not to rp with more than one player per rp. And this rp required 2 rp charas to play. So I backed out
 
There are many times when I prepare...And work on roleplays, that I've put months of thought into, and then I post them, and people sign-up. And I never start them (Or I do start them, but nobody else posts, and it dies).


For the few that I never started after people signed up, I apologize to them (Though I doubt they're reading this. Ribbit). Because I felt like I couldn't do it justice. I want to make an experience that people don't forget, and someday I hope to provide that experience with the roleplays I've created. It makes me said that I never started them...But someday, I hope.
 
Veren said:
There are many times when I prepare...And work on roleplays, that I've put months of thought into, and then I post them, and people sign-up. And I never start them (Or I do start them, but nobody else posts, and it dies).
For the few that I never started after people signed up, I apologize to them (Though I doubt they're reading this. Ribbit). Because I felt like I couldn't do it justice. I want to make an experience that people don't forget, and someday I hope to provide that experience with the roleplays I've created. It makes me said that I never started them...But someday, I hope.
This. So much this
 
Tonstad39 said:
I've recently been poking around for new RP posts &I have scrolled back so far, that I'm seeing RPs that I signed up for back in April. Most of these RPs have other people who signed up as well, but the thread only consists of like two posts that typically went unanswered by the author of said RP. All that time and energy in writing a good story for others to act out are wasted because they abandon ship before they go anywhere!
People created characters to be in the author's world just for everyone to abandon ship before it goes anywhere. Main point: the effort that goes into an RP gets wasted because the people behind it move on before the adventure even got started!
you can at least publish your story so that it is read by people
 

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