What are your roleplay gripes?

Conversely, I love plot-focused RPs, because when it goes off the rails, it gets wonderful. See Old Man Henderson.

 

:"D i love plot focused rps for the same reason, as long as u get to discuss the plot beforehand. . . then u get to see all the delicious characterization with a Lot Of Stress

 

In my social group, we tend to call those crap subs pillow queens, because for all you know, they're laying back and thinking of England. And if I should ever play with one I will ICly call them out by having my character get bored.

Anyway, echoing most of the rest of this thread, especially any and all complaints about Gaia. But everyone knows me and the salt I have for that inescapable pixel hell.

 

One of my biggest pet peeves is kind of a widespread one but I fuckin haaaaaaate when the other person takes control of your character, even for like a couple lines. Like. Don't do that. I just said what my character did, you don't need to puppet them further >:U

I also get super annoyed when doing fight scenes and I type out my character throwing a punch, telling where it's aimed and stuff, but don't actually RP it hitting for the purpose of allowing the other person to decide whether or not things hit their character... but then they proceed to make it so that absolutely none of the punches connect. Like. When it's my turn I make sure to have about half of the blows actually hit, depending on circumstances and whether I think my character could reasonably avoid the blows. BUT NO THE OTHER CHARACTER GETS TO AVOID ALL THE HITS.

also, re: plot-based RPs--I haaaaate it when you and your partner decide on a plot and a general direction for things to go in, and you both go "yeah that sounds reasonable!" and then the other person derails in such a way that it'd be impossible to continue with that plot. And not even necessarily because of keeping things in character, because we literally already decided that it was in character for things to go in that direction!

 

my partner and I have actually begun godmodding a bit in our rps for clarity since we regularly convert them into fic that we post publicly, and it just winds up reading more like natural prose that way

but you really can't do with with someone who doesn't know your writing pretty well, and without everyone having veto power if the godmodding isn't sufficiently in character

it occurs to me that at least some generally accepted rp rules are at their most important when you're rping with new partners who don't know you or your interests or writing

 

god, also, does has anyone else ever have rpers that don't seem to have any sense for when a scene ought to end (or are lazy and unwilling to write scene transitions) so every time they just keep chewing scenery or extending a conversation that's gotten pointless and boring until you write the transition yourself? because s ame

in all fairness, I probably lean a bit toward early scene changes, but there are still times in a rp where everybody ought to know that the horse they're beating is real dead

 

I have two big pet peeves in RPing. The biggest one is bad grammar/spelling. It just ruins the game for me. Especially from adults, they should know what a comma splice is by now. It's excusable if the person is younger, or even like in high school, but by the time you pay your own bills you should understand the difference between the theres.

Second biggest is not giving me anything to play off of. Like I'll have a post full of dialogue and action, and the next post will be entirely the other player's inner thoughts about what's going on, a full paragraph of their inner monologue, with absolutely nothing said or done for me to respond to. It's like trying to hold a conversation with someone who spends half of it staring into space without moving. Frustrating.

 

One of my biggest peeves in RPing is godmoding; like - I used to play on a MUSH where one of the characters was played by a guy who was at least very upfront about the fact that English was his second or third language and he was still learning it. So no one was particularly hard on him over any pose of his that was longer than one line being a barely-decipherable hash (we maybe should've been a bit harder, but idk; it's not like English is the easiest language to learn). That wasn't what made people dislike RPing with him (although having to decipher wtf he was going on about wasn't especially fun) - it was that he didn't seem to quite get the line between IC information and OOC information.

So anything he saw said in OOC chatter? He'd talk about it, unless it was very clearly not relevant to IC situations. And this got really aggravating, because this eventually meant that he was referencing stuff that he really shouldn't know about ICly. Even if he was told "your character has no way of knowing that" (which is about where my ability to forgive it ran out).
At about that point, those of us who kept running into his character just made a quiet pact to ignore him and anything he said that he shouldn't know about and treat his character the way our characters would if they saw someone babbling about things they had no way of knowing: "obviously, this character is Not All There, don't bother taking him seriously".

 

I always say I wanna make it a fanfic after the fact so no godmodding occurs, but me and close friends have lightly godmodded each others characters in the past for the sake of the plot we had going!

GOD yes, it's like... I have awkward enough conversations in real life, I don't need it in RP, too.

Another pet peeve I have is when people are RPing an AU and automatically expect you to do the same? Like I once RPed with a role-swap Apollo Justice where he was a magician and in their verse Trucy was a lawyer, and they yelled at me for playing my not-AU Magician!Trucy like.... I'm sorry bro but next time ask me to do a role swap if you want to so badly? don't expect me to do it automatically. My Trucy has and relatively stays in her own verse unless we state otherwise ahead of time.

 

I finally learned that this is called metagaming after being annoyed with it for years

back in my gaia days I had lots of rpers read the character info pages I had up in the forums, and then had their ocs know backstory stuff about my character right at the beginning of our rp

like p lease stahp

 

Dice are a good way to settle the second issue, my RP group runs pretty much all our fights off of them.

That's specifically called infomodding in the circle I run in, to separate it from more traditional types of godmodding. (Digression: I use "godmod" and "godmode" differently; the former is manipulation of someone else's character, the latter is going full untouchable never-fails-at-anything.) It's a bitch.

 

just realized that I barely ever have this problem because I'm such an obnoxious whump fiend my internal dialogue is usually something like "yes, good, punch my oc again" xD;

 

i mostly just wanna gripe about how sometimes people write in the most boring fashion ever and never like. do anything???

that was already discussed up thread tbh.


also just the whole 'what do we rp?' 'idk, but we should rp' that goes on for like. forever. that's on both me and whoever i'm talking at though.

metagaming is hella suck i've seen that a lot. but also doing things like creeping on characters oocly tends to be... eh? like i've seen people oocly go on and on about how much they wanna like. bang the other person's oc. or something. or are using their oc as an extension of themself to try to flirt with the other player??? i've seen that and it's WEIRD AND UNCOMFORTABLE LEMME TELL YA

 

ohhhhhh my god this reminded me though of how when I post an rp search thread, and I always have like 2-3 rules and that's it, and one of them is "please message me with an idea to work off of, even if it's just 'I wanna play ____ character'"

and no one

fucking

messages me with an idea. it's always "hi, wanna rp" and when I prompt them further I get crickets

like I don't even know if I'm gonna like your writing, I'm not about to do literally all the work of figuring out a scenario, fuck off

 

I tend to call them pillow princesses, personally.

Also please tell me what gaia rp is like. I only tried to get into it briefly back when I was like...12 and the site was new and not a hyperinflationist hell hole. My attempts failed and I met someone who creeped after me in PMs briefly. And that was the end of Aon's gaia adventures because she was like "how do i anything?????". Though I did stick around on the other message boards a bit. That lasted only like a year though.

 

same hat, and why I rarely do RP searches anymore.

 

Oh lord, yes, I remember that. It's somewhat more uncomfortable when they try and angle for nearly all of their OCs to be connected to every single one of the other person's OCs that they can find an excuse to be connected to. And it was always a romantic connection, never just "well, they're good friends" or "they know each other in passing", and nearly always consupiscent romance too, depending on the person.

 

seconding this, I love gaia rp horror stories

I remember stuff like the incredibly elaborate illiterate/semi-literate/literate/super literate/elite literate system that everyone had slightly different but very specific definitions for

the several page long lists of character type pairings (nerd girl/bad boy type stuff) with the characters the op was willing to play bolded (usually giving themselves the most interesting/tragic/subby character types and expecting everyone else to be an abusive body pillow with abs or whatever)

OH and there was a male character famine for ages, so most ops' solutions to this was "double rps" where both rpers played a girl and a boy, which mostly resulted in both people completely neglecting their male characters because all they actually wanted was to play a girl

it was weird for me because I only ever wanted to play guys through middle school and highschool

 

OH MAN. TYPECASTING. I HATE TYPECASTING.

One of the reasons I have like TWO dedicated RP partners now and barely go on any RP sites anymore is because whenever I wasn't playing an OC, my character would get typecasted SO HARD


...
er
the typecasting was mainly smut-related, but I also dealt with a LOT of people acting like THEIR interpretation of MY character was 100% the canon one like, buddy, no.

 

Extremely TLDR about my Gaia pet peeves post is forthcoming, @Aondeug and @whyguy, there is just so much so it's taking a while.