Viewpoint What’s your opinion on school RPs?

[BlossomsOfRainbows]

I honestly think I already know that a lot of people are going to say they’re boring and such. I personally think they can be fun if there’s the right elements involved. Plus it’s sort of a comfort setting to me, I don’t know about anyone else. What do you think?

 

[Lorsh]

Trash (note: never joined one)

 

[Jannah]

I'm not usually a fan, but then again I'm not usually a fan of most modern slice of life RP's(there has to be a very creative plot to pique my interest). The only school RP's I'm interested in are ones with fantasy elements, stuff like Harry Potter.

 

[Crow]

They're aight.

 

[Idea]

I'm not usually a fan, but then again I'm not usually a fan of most modern slice of life RP's(there has to be a very creative plot to pique my interest). The only school RP's I'm interested in are ones with fantasy elements, stuff like Harry Potter.

Well, being fair, the vast majority of school RPs at least from what I’ve seen either are super hero academies or fantasy-esque academies, like magic academies or monster academies.

 

[Jannah]

Well, being fair, the vast majority of school RPs at least from what I’ve seen either are super hero academies or fantasy-esque academies, like magic academies or monster academies.

And I'm not really into those because they're way overdone. I don't even do much Harry Potter RP anymore within the school setting. I prefer the stuff with adult characters.

 

[Idea]

And I'm not really into those because they're way overdone. I don't even do much Harry Potter RP anymore within the school setting. I prefer the stuff with adult characters.

Fair enough.

 

[Jannah]

Fair enough.

I rarely even RP on this site anymore because there's not a lot of RP's I'm actually interested in. It's usually the same ten topics recycled over and over again.

 

[Crayons]

RPs set at schools can be fun, but in general I think they attract the younger and less experienced roleplayers so I'm not likely to join one. I've done a couple - one was a comedy AU for another roleplay and one was set in the bleach universe both with people I already knew I enjoyed RPing with.

 

[nerdy tangents]

I love them. I feel like a lot of hate is because people just see the premise and make assumptions without giving it a chance.

Plus it’s the setting a lot of newbies use so you get school roleplays done by people who don’t want their doing and that further adds to the disdain. Like oh they’re so boring and it’s just like real life all over again.

As someone who has done school roleplays my entire rp career, they can be really unique and fun. You just have to have an open mind and play to the settings strengths.

What are the strengths?
- Universal appeal. Everyone has some idea of how schools work (both from the student and teacher perspective)

- Interpersonal relationships (not just romantic bullshit either, but friends, petty rivalries, teachers facing burn out, teacher trying to hard, etc.)

- Calendar of events!!! (Don’t make the focus classes. Make it school talent shows, field trips, after school clubs, etc.) Seriously you can easily plot out a full years worth of school activities to ensure your roleplay stays alive.

Now personally I think another good tip is to not focus it in the real world. But that’s just because I like fantasy/sci fi worlds more in general. I have seen “realistic” school roleplays last literal years so obviously you can make it work.

Anyway yeah I will forever have a soft spot in my heart for school roleplays and the wild shenanigans you can play in them.

 

[Syntra]

I don't like them. As someone who has spent a large part of her life in academia, they just feel draining to me. I don't rp to experience more of my everyday life. And yeah, I do know you can focus on fun things in them-- on magic, relationships, etc. etc. The thing is, you can focus on these same things and explore the depths of the universe in a cool spaceship instead, so for me, the appeal just isn't there.

 

[Daisie]

As someone who was homeschooled all throughout, they fascinate me, but I wouldn't ever join one. I just accept that they have a very important role in a lot of people's RP journeys. They're valuable to someone, so I try to respect that.

 

[Murdergurl]

School/academy RPs are one on my list of AVOID. There are way too many of them, and the concepts behind 90% of them is just the same rehashed notions over and over. You can tell they are obviously ripped off of some series or book or whatever... but the source has become obscured by there just being so damn many of them. It's just another cliché clone RP theme, and I honestly wish that the ppl that want to make these could coordinate themselves and get all the separate RTs together into just a couple. Because when you dissect them all, you really only have like three or four variants and they are all pretty much the same thing.

They fall into modern/mundane school/academy, Some kind of supernatural academy (witches, etc), Superhero academy, and of course the multiverse academy. This of course has all the according fandom variants mixed in, but basically its the same thing just with a prescribed world setting. I did them a couple times early on in my RP life. But they got old really fast. Easilly one of the most boring RP settings, in my opinion. I went through 12 years of school, plus college (twice!). Hated every week of it. WHY would I want to revisit any of that?

 

[Ace Cream]

I might like an RP because it's a school RP but I don't think I ever dislike an RP because it's a school RP. I especially like the one with dorms.

 

[Phantom Phoenix]

Avoid them, pretty much all of the plots are the same. Magic, Superheroes, Romance, Mutants, the list goes on and on. Being out of school myself, I can't get into writing about it.

 

[SP3CT3R]

From what I've seen, school settings run the gamut in terms of quality, and it's really 90% the execution that makes or breaks them. A lot of the "bad" ones are usually being run by beginner GMs because schools are a convenient way to get several teenagers in one place, but with a solid foundation, it's possible to bring out the stuff that makes school settings popular in fiction as a whole.

 

[Laix_Lake]

They fall into modern/mundane school/academy, Some kind of supernatural academy (witches, etc), Superhero academy, and of course the multiverse academy.

That seems to be the trend with school rp's. It's either some sort down to earth traditional academy, some sort of dedicated magic based rp, or something along the lines of a fandom/ crossover rp. As people have said, they are more interested in what happens outside of class. Personality I have only done one school related rp and ended up making a character who was a teacher just because I found playing a student to be boring. The setting in this case was a normal institution in Germany, there where people who have magic, and androids and all that fancy stuff. But it wasn't out in the open.

Now a days, looking through those school rp's. I no longer have that much of an interest. Maybe I might join one at some point just to see how it goes. But it remains uncertain.

 

[Murdergurl]

That seems to be the trend with school rp's. It's either some sort down to earth traditional academy, some sort of dedicated magic based rp, or something along the lines of a fandom/ crossover rp. As people have said, they are more interested in what happens outside of class. Personality I have only done one school related rp and ended up making a character who was a teacher just because I found playing a student to be boring. The setting in this case was a normal institution in Germany, there where people who have magic, and androids and all that fancy stuff. But it wasn't out in the open.

Now a days, looking through those school rp's. I no longer have that much of an interest. Maybe I might join one at some point just to see how it goes. But it remains uncertain.

With the kinds of RPs I look for, a school setting is pretty close to rock bottom on my list. Student, teacher, Janitor, school counselor, etc... I just can't find any motivation to want to spent the time and effort to make a character in that vein, much less play them out in a narrative. And if people are more interested in RPing outside the setting of the school, what even is the point of including the school?

 

[Laix_Lake]

With the kinds of RPs I look for, a school setting is pretty close to rock bottom on my list. Student, teacher, Janitor, school counselor, etc... I just can't find any motivation to want to spent the time and effort to make a character in that vein, much less play them out in a narrative. And if people are more interested in RPing outside the setting of the school, what even is the point of including the school?

hopefully, I don't end up spouting some sort of nonsense.

The way you worded it makes it seem as if it could be applied to any setting. Why have our heroes meet in a tavern when you could do the same in a town square or any other location? It is apparently something that people find familiar, even if a decent amount of us haven't even been to school for years. Not going to argue about the fact that most of those school settings tend to be boring or handled without some sort of concrete storyline,. It just feels like a sandbox that isn't a sandbox. Would have gone for those rp's a few years back (some said, they tend to attract newcomers to role playing), but now just see them as a pointless sandbox. That's not to say that there isn't more that could be done for it, or that it could actually be used in a way that isn't just some bland setting, that it actually has some reasoning behind it. Why not make an rp about WHY some random magic school was created (Outside of just saying that magic would be used for evil or something), and how it went about being created?

You do you bruh. I mean I use to do them all the time when I was a teenager, its a fun relatable and honestly easy to utilize, multipurpose setting. So like fuckin` who gives a shit right! XD Be a high school babe who beats the shit out of heroes and rules the school and has a crush on Yukiko from class 5-A!

Meh, at this point if I ever do join another rp after the crossover one I'm in (yes, a muti fandom crossover.), it would be nice to take a look at something with some sort a solid storyline with some room for variation. It's nice to have a definite end to a smaller story.

 

[Murdergurl]

hopefully, I don't end up spouting some sort of nonsense.

The way you worded it makes it seem as if it could be applied to any setting. Why have our heroes meet in a tavern when you could do the same in a town square or any other location? It is apparently something that people find familiar, even if a decent amount of us haven't even been to school for years. Not going to argue about the fact that most of those school settings tend to be boring or handled without some sort of concrete storyline,. It just feels like a sandbox that isn't a sandbox. Would have gone for those rp's a few years back (some said, they tend to attract newcomers to role playing), but now just see them as a pointless sandbox. That's not to say that there isn't more that could be done for it, or that it could actually be used in a way that isn't just some bland setting, that it actually has some reasoning behind it. Why not make an rp about WHY some random magic school was created (Outside of just saying that magic would be used for evil or something), and how it went about being created?

Tavern meet ups are definitely a cliché in fantasy, same as a colonizing crew set out for planet X is a cliché for sci-fi. Every genre has its "basic bitch" settings. But how often we see these settings recycled over and over again is what earns them their ire.

Yes, someone could potentially write some great epic rivaling the (very successful) Harry Potter stories, because that was in fact centered around a school. But is it likely? No. The way I see it, the RT already went with the dime-a-dozen setting and didn't put much effort in to begin with. What are the odds that delivery of the (rehashed) plot is going to be any better? When it comes to finding great RPs, a lot of any given person's chances is just dumb luck. It's very tedious to vet your players, much less vet your GMs. So instead of going through all that trouble, I just go with the odds and avoid these types of RPs altogether.

And yeah, like a few people have mentioned, I guess they are good introductory settings for people new to the community. Like I said, I tried a couple out back in my fledgling years. But to be perfectly honest, I really didn't like them. So just because you're new, doesn't mean you should just default to these types of roleplays. Being new doesn't denote what genres you should be interested in.

 

[SP3CT3R]

Tavern meet ups are definitely a cliché in fantasy, same as a colonizing crew set out for planet X is a cliché for sci-fi. Every genre has its "basic bitch" settings. But how often we see these settings recycled over and over again is what earns them their ire.

Yes, someone could potentially write some great epic rivaling the (very successful) Harry Potter stories, because that was in fact centered around a school. But is it likely? No. The way I see it, the RT already went with the dime-a-dozen setting and didn't put much effort in to begin with. What are the odds that delivery of the (rehashed) plot is going to be any better? When it comes to finding great RPs, a lot of any given person's chances is just dumb luck. It's very tedious to vet your players, much less vet your GMs. So instead of going through all that trouble, I just go with the odds and avoid these types of RPs altogether.

And yeah, like a few people have mentioned, I guess they are good introductory settings for people new to the community. Like I said, I tried a couple out back in my fledgling years. But to be perfectly honest, I really didn't like them. So just because you're new, doesn't mean you should just default to these types of roleplays. Being new doesn't denote what genres you should be interested in.

There's probably a word for the way I think you're looking at things. I can't recall it off the top of my head right now, but pretty much every roleplay is derivative of something. Those plots aren't inherently bad just because they're popular, and most of the completely original, cut-from-whole-cloth ideas are bland without recognizable tropes. Yes, some people latch onto these basic ideas because they're easy to run, but you shouldn't write them off automatically. If you want to see more original takes, you have to support originality when it shows up.

 

[Murdergurl]

There's probably a word for the way I think you're looking at things. I can't recall it off the top of my head right now, but pretty much every roleplay is derivative of something.

Literally everything is a derivative of something that came before it. There is no idea that did not have a point of origin that was not someone else's first.

Those plots aren't inherently bad just because they're popular, and most of the completely original, cut-from-whole-cloth ideas are bland without recognizable tropes. Yes, some people latch onto these basic ideas because they're easy to run, but you shouldn't write them off automatically. If you want to see more original takes, you have to support originality when it shows up.

That's very true. Popularity doesn't automatically make something bad. But in my experience, once an idea catches fire and you start seeing it EVERYwhere (not just roleplay related), it very quickly loses not only its luster, but its soul. It becomes genericized and worn out.

I very much have tried to support ideas that I've seen here when I feel that they really haven't gotten the attention they deserve. Since I joined RPN, my signature has at least 3 or 4 times been used as an advertisement banner for roleplays not my own. I was even bumping two different threads for a while that I didnt even start because the OPs had long ago disappeared but a small group managed to come back to the two unrelated ideas. I've put out searches for GMs to settings that had players, but no one to run them. I've directed peeps towards ideas they wished they would see, and I guess they missed them when they were up a week or two prior to their sentiment. And that's just on THIS site.

So yeah... I think I've done more than most people would bother themselves to do in order to push original content.

 

[Jet]

School RPs were interesting when I was younger, but growing older made me realize how stupid teenage/young adult drama is. Investing in a story where every character interaction is largely irrelivent, isn't fun.

They also attract a younger crowd, and hanging around 15 year olds isn't it chief.

School RPs also limit your creativity, and the slice of life atmosphere makes for weak/non existent character motivations, in relation to the plot — assuming one exists.

Most school characters can't have interesting backgrounds unless unrealistic or tragic, because they're high-school kids. Everyone ends up making PTSD shells who watched their parents die. Adult settings allow you to make adult characters, who can have interesting backgrounds without entering the struggle Olympics.

 

[AndPeggy]

I actually like University RPs if everyone is over 18, teachers are allowed, and there's a plot.

The problem is that school RPs are almost never structured in a way that helps the RP move along. It's usually a big sandbox where people are allowed to make 100 characters at a time, and I just don't like that.

 

[Murdergurl]

I actually like University RPs if everyone is over 18, teachers are allowed, and there's a plot.

The problem is that school RPs are almost never structured in a way that helps the RP move along. It's usually a big sandbox where people are allowed to make 100 characters at a time, and I just don't like that.

Sandbox RPs in general are often destined to fail just as quickly as they start up. They have no direction, and everyone is just bumbling around.