Other What is/was your longest running roleplay?

[Vixen Dreams]

What is or was your longest running roleplay and why? I'm sure a lot of people love long term roleplays and would love to know what elements go into such long roleplays to keep them alive and well.


For me my longest and still ongoing roleplay started about 7 years ago. The characters are a Half Elf Spymaster, Human Magus and Elf Lich.

--The RP started with my husband before we started dating and where just friends. The RP had good elements and we took time building the story. It started with the Spymaster and Magus finding a jeweled skull and their adventure to find out what it was and how much they could sell it for. A few years later, it turned out the skull was a Lich and he came into play. The relationships between all three characters were expanded on, and now the story follows a more "Nation Building" theme.

We keep the RP alive by not only roleplaying, but writing short stories back and forth to help feel in the blanks and events we really did not want to roleplay out but wanted to know what happened. The short stories also helped fuel new roleplay and new areas to explore in our writing.

Also what helped out, is how our out of character relationship grew. I find all my longest roleplays happen with people I become really good friends with. (I have close to two dozen roleplays that have lasted over two years, because me and the people became friends OOC.)

That being said, I also find writing short stories about your roleplay helps! It sparks ideas and allows you to skip to different settings with out loosing any ground.


Anyways, I would love to hear your thoughts and ideas on how to keep roleplays going for a good long time.

 

[rae2nerdy]

The longest roleplay I was ever in was actually the first one I joined that had any kind of "literacy" requirement. Or possibly the second ( I can't remember if the smutty zoo rp or the X-Men AU was first....meh it was one of them )

It was basically just an X-Men AU ( dime a dozen i know ) but what made this one last was far and away the players. There was a core group of regulars that were super active and very encouraging of newcomers. They would offer advice on how to make posts better, help come up with new plots to keep a storyline going, and just all around were awesome to hang out with. They were also super active in the roleplays chat room always talking to each other pretty much 24/7.

It lasted I believe 4 years ( and in that time the characters left school and joined some kind of mutant underground resistance against blah blah mutant hating antagonist people ).

In all honesty a fairly simple storyline throughout but they kept it progressing forward and more over they kept continuity within the rolepay itself. For instance when the original GM had to leave for a hiatus and the regulars needed a way to move the action along they had a bomb go off in the school.

Well in subsequent chapters that bomb going off in the school was kept and characters would reference and move around that happening.

Characters or players who were no longer active were written out as either dying in some kind of attack or just moving away.

All in all it was just a roleplay that kept a story line going , had great people behind the scenes that encouraged participation and helped the less experienced improved, and was just all around a fun story to be part of.

 

[Shuusuke]

Long term RPs are some kind of sorcery to me. Jokes aside, I haven't had luck in the few ones I've participated in, or even a few I just followed. It doesn't help that I am interested pretty much only in Anime related ones, and most seem to be made on a whim only to quickly fade away. SAO, Attack on Titan, Neon Genesis Evangelion...those are the ones I've tried so far, and they were enjoyable. To make things worse I don't easily feel inspired so I need to give it a lot of thought before joining, and then when they become inactive it feels like a waste of potential and it takes time to recover.

There was a big Fire Emblem-based one in another forums I used to frequent, which last I heard became inactive, but that one was what got me into RPing in the first place. I pretty much only read people's posts back then, tried submitting a character but younger me couldn't resist throwing some stereotypical tragic backstory with other common sketchy things into it, so it was denied. But it did last 4+ years for sure, and that's not counting the "second generation" they pulled off, which lasted a couple of years itself.

I think the main reason it worked over there was that it was a Fire Emblem focused community with a lot of members who were interested into RPing. I'm sure there are successful RPs here but the community is much more all over the place, so it's difficult to concentrate interest.

If you have a fixed group of friends that have the same general interests it might be easier to find or make long-lasting RPs, but if you don't, like yours truly, you have to wander around and hope for the ones you like not to end up sinking. My vote goes to a few weeks.

 

[Damafaud]

It's an RP based on Lore Tales, starting back in December last year in ToS Forum. We are close to beating the chaos overlord, so I think it will be finished before the year end.

 

[Yaruzaru]

The longest running roleplay I'm still in at the moment will have been going for a year next month. It's a one on one roleplay with someone I met on a different site. The roleplay is still going simply because we both enjoy it and put in the effort to continue adding more to the story. There have been lull periods naturally but that happens in any roleplay. I think the roleplays that last the longest are simply the ones that have more committed players pushing it forward. I have seen a lot of roleplays die because those involved only joined on a whim or were bugged out by little things, but instead of talking about it, they would simply leave. There is life issues as well of course but I don't really account for those because, in my experiences, people leaving due to real life issues have been rare.

 

[Quincunx]

My longest was a 1x1 fandom OC romance/fluff RP that lasted several months. We had carried our characters over from a fandom OC group RP that had died, and we loved our characters and their ship so much that we wanted to keep it going. We lost collective muse and momentum for it after those several months, so it's on hiatus while we do something else, but it's not definitely over.

Second place is a 1x1 adventure RP about machines making machines. It lasted around 2 months before we found a place that seemed like a good "end" to the story.

Picturing what these had in common, I can think of two things:

• Communication. Both of us knew what the other expected in terms of post length, posting frequency, detail level, and where we wanted the story to go. Neither of us were afraid to speak up when something wasn't working, or when one of us would need to take some time off the RP.
• Knowing what you're going to do. In the romance/fluff RP, we knew our characters were going to have a bunch of dates around the city before going to a dance, and in the adventure RP, we knew our characters were going to fight post-apocalyptic baddies, find a city and decide what its fate would be, and make new machines. It sounds basic, but both RP had concrete ideas of what our characters would actually do. The ones where my partners and I didn't at least discuss that died within a week.

 

[crumbelivable]

Time-wise, I don't know. But the longest one I made was 10 or so pages. Rhe longest I ever participated in was like 30 or 40 pages

 

[Roxasarass]

The longest role play I've been in spanned over 1000 pages and it was one of those universe crossover things here you can use any character from anything, or make some original characters. It went on for 6 months or so, even spawned a sequel. I was there from start to finish, though got kicked many, many times and got back in many, many times.

It was horrible in my opinion, full of some weird shit we just made. One of my characters conquered an entire land, one of them was the literal embodiment of lust, another was a bored God and one was in love with a woman twenty years younger than him. Good times.

 

[Shagranoz]

My longest running rp was on another site. Didn't even last ten pages, but the vast majority of posts were massive 5-6k word collabs sometimes featuring half a dozen writers. Three of my signature characters made their debuts in that rp, and I'm working on a story featuring them. Good times, good times.

 

[composersproxy]

My longest running RP was a laid back, open world forum group RP. We didn't really have an objective or plot in mind for the RP, so it was difficult for people to think up interesting threads. However, it somehow kept going on minimal activity for about two years, I think.

As for my longest running activity-intensive RP, that would be the murder mystery group RP I'm in now. We've been going strong for about 8 months, despite hiatuses and a complete replacement of the mod team. I have no idea how we're still alive, to be frank, but we have a decent amount of activity at the moment and we just finished up our seventh murder case.