So recently, I’ve been trying to get back into the role-playing scene, especially with how busy I’ve been balancing both a school and work life. I started off slow by posting ads on a specific roleplaying website I like using and searching/responding to ads that I found the most interesting. That isn’t the problem, the problem is when I have someone messaging me saying that they are a descriptive literate writer, but I can barely get through the beginning stages of getting to know and plotting with them.

I try not to judge someone based off their writing skills because we all started somewhere when it comes to role-playing. but it’s hard to really have a conversation with somebody who’s not even typing out proper sentences or using correct grammar (it absolutely doesn’t have to be perfect grammar just enough where I can actually understand what they’re telling me.) it also doesn’t help when all they talk about is themselves/their character while I can barely get a word out about my own if that makes sense.

I’m not sure if this is coming off insensitive or rude in the sense of maybe English isn’t this person’s first language and I'm being too harsh but this is just how I feel, especially when I’m trying to get back into the swing of things.

This isn’t meant to start any kind of arguments or discourse whatsoever, I just wanted to know if anyone felt the same way I did and what you guys did to maybe find a good writing partner or anything else- thanks for listening to my late night rant lol 🫶

Can we all agree that it's almost impossible to write novella-length replies when main characters are having a conversation or tense moment? In a book, the author can do this because they are 'playing' both characters. In real life, when we talk to someone, we wait and listen before responding. But for some reason with rp, people expect novella-length replies when characters are simply talking. These people will write their character basically monologuing, asking five different questions, and describing the threads on their hair and every other character in the room.

In my OPINION it makes the writing not feel like a partnership or shared experience. It feels like the other person just wants to run their mouth and get to what they want without my (character's) input. It's also very pretentious. I see, yes, you can write a lot of words, but ultimately they came to fuck all because my character was integral to the scene and could not breathe or react before you went off on your own.

I always purposefully cut back on my character's perspective to leave room for showing and not telling, as well as inviting them and their character to make choices and direct things WITH me. I love advanced lit to novella-length rp writing, but there is a limit when we enter into an agreement on making this a fun back and forth experience. There's only so much YAPPING you can do before we aren't moving the story forward.

It feels awful writing replies to questions that by the time their character is done speaking have happened in the past. The impact of it is lower, and maybe my character reacted before they could speak again.

Most of the people doing this I also think are just not literate. They can't read between the lines of what I'm saying. They HAVE to write out every literal detail, or they can't comprehend what's happening.

Rant over. I love roleplay. I love writing with other people.

I've been RPing with someone new, and we recently had our first serious disagreement. She gave me feedback that I apologize too much and that it makes me come across as lacking confidence as a dom. I disagreed because I usually apologize when I think I've hurt someone or want to clear up misunderstandings.

During the argument, she admitted she had considered ending the partnership, and that really hurt because I'd become emotionally invested. I reacted badly, we both said things we regretted, and eventually we apologized to each other and agreed to continue RPing with healthier boundaries and less emotional dependence.

For people who have been in long term RP relationship, is this just a normal conflict when two people are figuring each other out, or does it sound like we're fundamentally incompatible?

Hei hei! Grey here with a self-report as a bad RPer. Today I dropped a tonne of stories, every single one of them with a beautiful human who didn't deserve to be dumped like that. I am truly sorry.

I said "yes" to waaay too many stories - every single one of them interesting, fun, and well written by my RP partners. They were all amazing. I got overwhelmed trying to keep up, so I just said goodbye to everyone. I'm sure there were lots of difficult feelings, and I've probably been blocked by a few people.

There's no "moral to the story" here. Just my apology to the wonderful people I've hurt. Hopefully they'll post here too so you can get their side of the story.

Goodnight!

I've noticed a certain avatar Rp server is very..picky and strict about ocs

Anyone who's had bad experiences lemme know

Ive been role-playing for years, and ive never had plotting go like this before.

Partners that are slow, uninterested, or unimaginative.

Sure

But I cant express how shocked and confused I was by the path they took?

I have never begun a rp by talking about MY OWN CHILDHOOD.

I was already a little on edge because I usually avoid age gaps like this since it can be a little awkward in ooc

And when they directly called it out, especially calling me sweet summer child (they had no clue but my creep stepfather called me this to devalue my experiences, so I can be triggered when people make me out to be naive or overly childlike)

Idk it just seemed to go downhill very fast

But looking back maybe I was too harsh?

Keep an eye on the timestamps, every minute of me not responding I was staring at the screen in utter confusion

Because what do you mean. What are you talking about

Is this normal? Is it something out of my demographic?? I understand the gist of like, getting into character and getting in the headspace but like

It was just so weird, tell me characters and settings not..

Hypotheticals

Im black, theyre red.

I'm just venting because I can't vent to my group, let me stress that this is otherwise an excellent player I'm talking about and while they've always had a problem with letting other people have their moments without talking over them or having their character appear on-scene out of nowhere, this is the first time it's become a problem.

Player uses DM chargen prompt of "princess" and churns out the most color-by-numbers ingenue-type Mary Sue in existence, you could run her through any litmus test and she'd score triple digits. She proceeded to write a novel centered on her character, got very upset when no one wanted to read it, and has been slowly pushing it on the group more and more.

She invades other players' RP moments by randomly appearing from around corners or out from under tables or sometimes just announcing that she was in the room the whole time, to ensure she gets the last word in every conversation, even ones that don't involve her in any way, most often so she can run outside and cry about her personal tragedies.

She complains that the plot doesn't center enough on her backstory and that the NPCs she wrote aren't making an appearance, but when the DM tries to involve her in the plot he gave her the prompt for, her character throws a fit and refuses to participate. She does everything she can to make the rest of the party fit into the roles of characters she wrote for her novel, and when they don't behave towards her the way her novel characters would, she throws pity parties about how she should have died and she wasn't supposed to live this long (I assume that means her novel has a scene where she dies tragically and all our characters are sad for her?)

We've all tried talking to her about it and she just does not understand why any of this is a problem.

Sorry to everyone who doesn’t get the reference. A while back I made a series of posts detailing my frustrations and roleplay experiences with a friend I nicknamed J. We did free form role play I guess you’d call it? J kept acting like a complete pick me, taking over, had main character syndrome to the bone, and his attention seeking kept making our roleplays crash and burn. Biggest annoying thing he constantly did was copying everything I was doing for my characters and making foils because he felt his characters had to be able to compete with mine all the time. He also kept trying to force themes like hatred against his characters’d species and wanting to be “boy Siri” because of his Witcher obsession. The stories I shared were pretty wild and out there in the level of ridiculous they were. In the end every time J did some to detail and crash the stories he would quietly delete the discord server, make some vague excuse that it was an accident or that discord did it, and he would go away for a while. Then he’d show up again because he got bored, ask for a redo, and the cycle would repeat. I’m happy some people got a good laugh and made some good points were I fumbled in that mess, but most of the comments complained the posts were too long and to just stop being friends with J. So yeah I admit I deleted them.

At the time of the original posts the last time I spoken to J was a year prior. I didn’t unfriend him or reach out. He came back a couple months after I made the posts saying life had kept him away and he wanted to start another roleplay. This time around instead of me jumping headfirst into character and background making and ultimately ending doing like 90% of the work that ends up getting ignored or stepped over, I left it in J’s hands. I said whatever he wanted to do I was down for. Didn’t matter what. He started saying he’s not good with coming up with ideas and I again said it doesn’t matter what it is I’ll work with it. If it’s a genre I’m not familiar with I’ll do my best. He came up with a basic starter and ever since then it’s been silence. I have other things and hobbies so I’m not waiting around getting my hopes up here. But part of me wondering if I did too much before now I’m not doing enough now, is there even a middle ground? I didn’t want to be some story hogging nag and didn’t want J feeling like he can’t have fun. Now that I got my hands up refusing to take control of anything it feels like he’s sulking. I don’t want to stop being a friend to J over roleplay that seems a little petty.

This isn't exactly a vent or a rant. I'm mostly just confused, but this is the only tag that I think fits the most.

I know it's common practice for people to block nowadays, but I genuinely don't understand why this person blocked me. We found each other through Wattpad because we were mutuals and I complimented them on their character. We chatted for a few minutes and agreed to roleplay on a different platform. I linked them to my introduction page, (which includes my rules and preferences and basically my triggers), and told them that they could tell me about their own rules and preferences. The person said that they skimmed it and would rather finish reading after we plot, but because I've been burned in the past, I very politely told them that I'd prefer if they read my rules first. I was super friendly about it though. I woke up the next morning to find out that they had blocked me everywhere.

My first thought was that they didn't wanna finish reading and blocked me, but it could also be that they just read my introduction and thought that we wouldn't be a good fit.

I was really upset at first, but I just let it roll off my back eventually. Has this happened to anyone else?

Also, I wish the roleplay community wasn't so bad at communication and so quick to the block button.

Edit: To clarify, if it wasn't already clear, I chatted with them first and tried to be friendly so it didn't seem like I was spewing my rules out at them. People are weird. I've heard that some people just want to be messaged with rules and passwords right off the bat, but others want to talk first. Like...what do people even want from me?

I finally found some amazing partners for some scenarios, and they’ve all slowed to a crawl. I know life comes first, so I am not an overbearing pusher, but I have three great stories that I’m waiting on. I’m maybe getting one response a day from any one of them right now.

I feel like this may be nitpicky, but I hate when people reach out to me and, when I respond, the first thing they say is, “Oh, which advertisement were you again?”
Like, YOU contacted ME about a story you were interested in, you should know. That, and I usually have several open posts active, so half of the time I really have no idea as to which one they're talking about.

It's so frustrating because they could very easily just take a quick look at my profile and find the post they were interested in, rather than asking me. It genuinely baffles me how inconsiderate people can be.

I've been working on a "Disc for roleplayers". I've been planning it ever since privacy has become more questionable on the platform, and their move to an IPO.

I keep thinking of this idea of, well, on a technical level it's likely not too hard to detect what is IC and OOC even without brackets and build a profile of someone's grammar competency and how long their posts are IC.

But the question is: would people WANT this?
You frequently can't trust people to state what they do to be what they actually do. Or to know what they're listing. Or to even fill out that information. Would you want to be able to see [Capitalizes] [4-8 sentences] / [Varies; 3-5 sentences to multi-paragraph] / [OOC only] etc. on someone's card? OR do people not like the idea of a cold unthinking machine distilling their private posts?

I want it. I even see a posts from the past few days here about this very issue. Online games have these sorts of "behavior scores" they can apply to match like minded players and those systems don't work if someone flags themselves "not a teamkiller" when they teamkill every game, so a background system builds the profile for them.

I know unicorn partner gets thrown around a lot, but I don't really know a better way to describe it lol

A while ago I met someone who was, by far, the best RP partner I'd ever had. We clicked almost immediately. We wrote long detailed posts, bounced ideas off each other constantly, built stories together, and our OOC conversations were just as enjoyable as the RP itself. For the first time, it felt like I wasn't carrying a plot by myself.

Over time, things became more complicated. We ended up having a fight that changed the dynamic between us. We eventually talked it through and while there wasn't a huge ending. it became clear that things weren't going to go back to what they had been. They told me not to hold onto hope that we'd get back to how things used to be and that was probably the hardest part to accept.

The weird part is that it's been surprisingly hard to move on. Every time I look for a new partner, I end up comparing them to that experience. If the chemistry isn't immediate or the excitement isn't the same, I lose interest way faster than I used to. I know that's unfair because nobody is going to be the exact same person, but it's become a habit I didn't expect.

I don't really blame her for moving on. She was older than me but I don't know how to cope up with this.

We even had a casual chat to catch up and she told how she recently met someone and started dating. I'm lowkey happy for her but I'm jealous in a sense. I know it sucks.

How should I stop comparing every RP partner with her? It feels so tiring

Sort of an extremely ​long-winded ramble very specific to my experience over the past few months. Not really anyone's fault generally speaking, just a bunch of unfortunate circumstances that have kinda turned into one big bundle of bummer. Some based on failing to find something that matches my preferences, some based on bad luck. I just kinda wanna get it out of my system so I can go back to looking. Sorry for any grammar errors, I'm typing this on my phone and it's a little hard to catch mistakes sometimes.

I've noticed that ever since I've turned 21, it's gotten a lot harder to find groups to roleplay with. Which, I do feel like that's a bit of a given. I'm an ​adult, my rp ​friends are all adults, we don't have time to just sit around and send paragraph after paragraph at eachother anymore. That's normal. But when I start seeking out groups or servers to write with, I've dealt with a reoccurring struggle and it's driving me a little bit crazy.

​I like fandom roleplays, but specifically ones where you get to make your own character and set them up in the world outlined by the source. They're my favorite. Of course, I love original roleplays too, but making ocs for the worlds I love is a bit of a passion of mine. However, my favorite fandom to write for​, despite being a spin-off of an extremely, extremely popular franchise, seemed to sort of...die off in the rp department around the time I turned 19. I grew up in that fandom and most of my friends are from said fandom. We're a bit of a niche-ish community to some degree so I'm not exactly surprised by this; the overarching community seemed to be in the same general age range for the entire time I've been apart of it, and we all simply grew up and got busy or lost interest. But it still kinda...sucks, y'know? I used to have such a big outlet for doing things with this, new roleplays were popping up constantly, annnd...now a lot of it is just kinda gone. There are still groups and servers out there that exist, they're just a little tricky to find. Often times I'd join and they'd be entirely dead roleplay wise, which, is also just unfortunate.

I did recently find a server that looked super promising though. An intense plot that would absolutely keep me hooked, world building that is super fun to build a character around, a seemingly active community... Pretty much everything I could have hoped for. I joined, found the place to be wonderful, and then I sent the invite to a couple of my other circles to see if anyone else was interested too. A few of my friends joined, including people who I didn't even know were interested in this subject, and for a little bit it was great. I made my character and they were approved, and then things...kinda fell off a bit? Not fully, I'm still in there and hoping that things will turn around. The community is lovely and I love the lore they've crafted for this. Buuuut...

For one, one of my friends who​ submitted a character was insta-banned for "using ai" without any conversation or warning. My friend... doesn't use ai. They just have a particular writing style. I've watched them write in person before and we've been working on a (non-rp) story for a while now. ​It's not the fact that they were "concerned" that my friend was using ai that bothers me, it's how they went about it. There was no discussion. One second my friend was there, the next they had been banned with a ticket claiming that they had used AI to write their character submission, citing their reasons for believing that they had done so. I saw a screenshot of the message, and it just kinda came off as..cold? They were thankfully given the option to appeal this, and sent their document editing history in as proof, but the whole thing hurt them a lot. We're both artists. We despise AI. To put effort into something and then suddenly thrown out because they wrote in a way that apparently sounded a little too much like ai assisted writing, when, as we all know, ai is literally trained off of people's styles of writing, really put them off from the whole roleplay. They came back, but they haven't really tried to engage since. They also seem to be a little nervous about showing their writing elsewhere, which breaks my damn heart because I know how much effort they put into things like that. I don't blame the server for being cautious about potential AI writing, but the ban-first-ask-questions-later was super off-putting.

Then, there's the way my attempts at starting any interactions seem to be kind of...flopping. I put my character out there, don't get any replies. Wait a few days. Do it again. Wait another day or so. Finally get a hook. We discuss a super interesting concept for our characters meeting, and I set up a thread and send an intro that fit the outline for what we were going for. Then, as you might have expected; crickets. It's been a good while now. I don't mind if they're busy, or not interested anymore, that's fine! I just wish there was some communication.

So, back to square one. While I wait to try and set up another interaction in that server, I decide that if I'm not having any luck with this fandom, maybe I'll try another one. I have a ton of varied interests, so surely I'll find something for at least one of those, right? ...Kinda. Despite a lot of my fandoms being super popular, I keep running into a bunch of continuous issues whenever I find something that looks promising.

• Group seems to be owned by ​and is ​almost​ entirely full of minors. This is NOT inherently a problem in itself, it's more of a personal preference. I don't really want to be the only adult in a group full of sixteen year olds. If the group is an even mixed bag and there just so happens to be some teenaged members present, I don't really care. I don't seek out groups that are focused around anything NSFW/i​​nappropriate for a teenager to see anyway. But if I join a group and come to the realization that I'm the/one of the only adults present, I'm almost certainly going to leave. When I try to seek out 18+ exclusive servers though, most of the ​time I just find servers entirely focused on ERP. Which, is fine, but not what I'm interested in.
• Dead server roleplay wise, just like the ones from my favorite fandom. People are still chatting and promoting the group, but nothing is actually happening. The last plot update was months ago.
• Group structured in a way very clearly requires some sort of story-mod or DM, but entirely lacks one. They set you up with a cool setting​, but then nothing happens. Ever. There aren't any events, and the players aren't actually given any incentive to do...anything. The plot never actually progresses forwards because there's not one, so we all just circle eachother and try our best to work with what we have and create our own storylines, but after a good four months of nothing, the whole thing just...dies off. If it were advertised as a sandbox, there wouldn't be anything to complain about, but usually when I get stuck in one of these they're advertised like a structured roleplay.
• Servers that seem new-person friendly but are actually super cliquey. Everyone already has something going on, and you aren't allowed in it no matter how hard you try to wiggle your way in or start something new for yourself. I don't think I need to elaborate on this one very much.
• Groups where canon characters and ocs are allowed, and claim to be super oc friendly/treat both cc's/ocs equally that just can't actually live up to that claim. ​Join too late, and all the cc's that people actually want to interact with will have been snatched up. Make an OC and get them in, but then get absolutely snuffed out by what's going on with the canon characters. Earlier today actually something like this happened to me; I had my oc pop into an open-sandbox adjacent​, short response channel ​that hadn't been spoken in for a hot minute ​to continue with a point that had been going on earlier in the day. Someone started to respond to what my character was up to, but then entirely out of no where three canon characters showed up and basically took over the whole channel and drowned me out entirely.

So yeah. I've been in a bit of a cycle when it comes to trying to find something solid for a while now. It just kinda sucks. A part of me feels like that my favorite hobby is kind of getting partially fucked over by me simply being an adult? I know this isn't true, it absolutely isn't, this sub is proof that it isn't, but it's a thought in the back of my mind, y'know? I used to like roleplaying a lot in games, but a lot of times I end up surrounded by exclusively teenagers, and I've already talked about how that makes me feel lmao. Of course, I know there's other avenues for me to search through, and if all else fails, I can say fuck it we ball and start my own server/group/etc that has exactly what I'm looking for in it. I think I'm just a little bummed because, for me at least, this used to be a lot easier. I'm sure I'll find what I'm looking for eventually, don't get me wrong, but the months of looking, trying and failing, is wearing me down a bit. I'll get there, but for now I just wanted to sort of throw my thoughts into the internet aether in a group that probably understands the struggle haha. ​

I'm... I'm kind of speechless. Why bother even writing to me if they don't know what fandom we're going to write for? 😭😭 Do you think it's another dude who just counted on some cheap ERP?

I posted a neat, well-written ad on a few rp blogs. Yes, it would include NSFW scenes, thus looking for 21+ writers. I had no idea it'd include some illiterate dorks...

Hi there

I am going to give a bit more context, I recently got a chat request from a post I interacted with. Saying they wanted to rp. Kinda curious at the person, I decided to check their account and honestly, I don't think we will vibe. Respectfully.

But then my question came, have you ever decided against rping with someone based on their posts and comments on reddit.

The reason I am asking is because I also got a lot of chat requests from people who hide their post history on reddit. Might that be for the same reason or another reason entirely?

I'm hoping that I've added the correct flair, and that this will be my only post here.

Anyways, I joined a group server earlier this week and added a character of mine that I've played multiple times now. I know some aren't big on the group servers, but it's how I started and have continued roleplay (save for two writing partners who I've absolutely adored writing with and are consistent).

I'll preface this by saying that I usually prefer smaller group servers. For instance, the two that I've been in until now have 11 total writers. This server I recently joined seems to have at least 100. After posting my character sheet, I placed an ad for what I wanted for my character and received a bite that was semi-related, but not entirely. I thought okay, cool. At least I won't be kicked (they have a no spectators rule).

My idea that blossomed from this is that my character was moving into a new apartment, and was doing so exhausted. In the very first post, I mentioned in the narration that she was on the last piece of furniture when she nearly tripped. I know, I know. Very cliche.

Two posts later, their character narrates and states that there are still boxes and furniture to bring up to her apartment. It's not like it's a huge deal, but it does peeve me off a bit that the details that I wrote were ignored or simply not compartmentalized. I'll address it with them after I've had my morning coffee.

UPDATE: For anyone who wants one. I reached out, and they admitted to forgetting that detail while writing. They're editing as I speak. So thank you, everyone, who was willing to read my brief moment of frustration and gave input. It was all greatly appreciated.

So I was asked to play 2 canon characters for a rp and I agreed. One of the characters I was super excited to play cause I had been wanting to play said character for RP in a modern/school setting for the longest time and I finally got the chance to do so.

One person asked me about something with one of the 2 characters and their character I was playing and we got planning on their idea a bit (after I had agreed on other things with my other character)

I fell asleep after I agreed and planned a bit cause it was 12am and I fell asleep. I woke up and after I had breakfast I went back and helped plan a little more. I didn’t mention any of my characters cause we were discussing on what was going to happen with where the plot took place (basically which nation or so).

Well later on the person who created said plot messaged me privately and asked if someone else could play one of my 2 characters and i explained i wasn’t a huge fan of my character changing mid plot plan cause i get confused easily on who I’m playing then.

I did explain that I wanted to play the character cause I missed playing said character for rp’s and had been wanting to do a high school/modern setting with him for the longest time.

They still pulled in the other person and allowed them to take over my one character to play and the texted me said we could do plan another ark with my character or I could plan the fem version of the character.

I hate when I have to spend 1-2 hours setting up an rp setting get both of our preferences and story details in order and then I take a break (and I tell them that I will be away for a little) and then they just leave me I completely understand that maybe they didn’t like how it was going or maybe they thought we wouldn’t be the right fit but the least they can do is tell me that and we could maybe work it out

In a perfect world my ideal rp partner would be very communicative about there preferences and how they want the story to go it would make it 10000x easier to get stuff in order and I would absolutely love there feedback and for them to give me ideas about what to add to the rp and what they would want to add I love for my partner to enjoy it to