What are your roleplay gripes?

So, I made a slight mistake in my post.

so, I went back and checked. Nick's character was the one getting kicked, not the kicker.

the kicker was the guy who GMed the magic school game.

He was playing some kind of naruto or dragon ball z type athlete in a game designed to be about kid heroes with secret identities doing heroism. He saw no issue with this tonal gap in his character neither having a secret identity or saving the world because '[his character] recycles.'

 

I made a diagram.

 

Oh my god don't come to my prompt with a character that I'm not looking for (I was only looking for one specific character!) and then get mad when I say no, I'm only interested in the one character I said I was interested in! Why is this a thing people think is okay to do?

 

Man, can someone just not like things without being a jerk? It seems like that's some kind of rare power no one is capable of having.

 

ahaha I just remembered like the worst example of a guy trying to get someone to play parts in the novel he was working on

he explained that he had been rping with a friend for years, and they had been planning on turning the roleplay into a fantasy book. well, it turns out he and the friend got into an argument and parted ways, so then he made this search thread to find a replacement rper to play the ex-friend's characters so that he could finish the story

and of course this new rper he was searching for was required to filled in these character rolls seamlessly and backread years of rping , etc.

but definitely the worst part of it was him blatantly stealing that person's OCs

 

mhhhh sorry to come in five million years late but this honestly confused me and I'm willing to chalk it up to different larp styles but... what? of course you gotta scream on hit. sure the swords don't hurt ooc, but ic a sword strike hurts??? or did you not roleplay during combat somehow, i... what?

 

im not sure if this is a gripe more than some petty, funny bullshit, but i used to poke around on trollmegle sometimes in the ancient days of like 2012, and i one day i found out that someone saved the logs of this demonstuck dave/karkat thing i'd done with them, 'polished' it up, and posted it as a fic on A03.

the thing was i'd spent the whole RP cheerfully subverting and mocking the whole I Am A Lonely Alone Demon Forever No One Will Love Me demonstuck trope by having dave just, you know, be in character. my rp partner's idea of 'polishing' was to cut out pretty much every line i'd written and substitute their own appropriately tearful and melodramatic yaoi version of dave. they didn't change any of their super tragic karkat's super tragic lines, of course, except where things needed to get even more weepy.

i was pretty pleased that the ensuing result was a hot mess that got like all of three kudos. the best revenge is living well, right?

 

i like being a jerk. does that count?

 

...if you were being IC dave, then how did any of their responses make sense. If they were written responding to snarky funny Dave then they wouldn't make sense in context with Weepy forever alone super melodramatic dave?

 

well, they were determined to have a weepy tragedy at all costs, so any time i tried to steer things to be less trite they steered it right the fuck back or just ignored what i'd had dave say entirely. in the final fic, i guess they just edited in the responses they'd WANTED to be playing off of the whole time.

 

I mean, being unpleasant in a RP site because people do genderbends in a way they don't like is the quoted person's prerogative, but that doesn't make them any less of an unpleasant person.

 

Man I can't imagine being so welded to your language barrier kink that you'd forfeit RPing a rarepair that shares 99% of your other kinks but shrug emoji enjoy languishing in rarepair rp hell.

 

rpers that go months in between replies, and then get angry when they see you rping with other people c':

 

aaaah hate and loathing. if I'm not super invested in the RP I'd drop, tbh

 

It's so damn ironic that tumblr convinced everyone that RPing genderbends is transphobic, so now there's a slew of really cringey transphobic trans headcanons that are clearly just catering to the same crowd that wrote bad genderbend prompts.

 

Oh also wanting people to stick to an established post length/have good grammar is ableism apparently. Don't have standards in your collaborative fiction.

 

people need to maintain a fucking boundary between them and their characters jesus christ

don't take your petty bullshit ooc and force it ic

 

seconded, there was a guy in an rp group i joined once who was....... a shitty edgy rper in general, and would promise to shape up when people would call him out on godmodding (among other things) only to do the exact same thing again a few posts later, and would constantly start edgelording in unasked-for detail about how his character would do [x gory thing] to the characters of anyone he disliked at the time (or who, ic or ooc, didn't treat his edginess with Appropriate Respect (tm) ).

Spoiler: tw rape and gore

my favorite, tho, is the time we were all joking about a bikini party and someone made a joke about my (large, stoic, male) character--dmitri--and his character--dean--having hatecrushes on each other; cue dusk (rper) immediately derailing the jokey lighthearted conversation into publicly fantasizing about torturing dmitri to death, and then casually moving onto to kidnap-and-rape fantasies about all the female characters he liked. the guy was like 19 years old, in a mostly-female rp group :')

as far as roleplay gripes not rooted in the rper being a shit human being, one time i started doing rp with a friend who would... have her characters basically ignore everything mine said or did so her ocs could talk to each other instead? to the point of literally ending scenes mid-plot-important-conversation with no warning so that she could have her characters leave the scene and go do something completely different and totally unrelated to my characters or the plot we had planned? for pages' and pages' worth of screentime?

i. still don't know what that was about, tbh, bc it's not like she wasn't having fun--she would seek me out to rp stuff and she was super super excited and seemed to think this was an amazing bonding experience between friends--she just kind of... only seemed to want to write about her own characters and didn't just go write her own stories about them for some reason?????

it was deeply confusing and actually really really upsetting and hurtful, but i never said anything to her about it because Teenager with No Ability to Boundaries, so i just kind of stopped rping with her

 

then there was the one who was so deathly allergic to effort that she would, upon ending up in a plotline or scene where she was controlling the character/s with the responsibility to move the plot forward/make decisions/Do Things to the Other Characters, literally and abruptly take control of my characters and dump hers off on me. and keep doing it over and over and over if i tried to continue rping as my characters, until i basically just had no choice but to do what she wanted if the rp was going to move forward.

Spoiler: further ranting

she would also do things like constantly turn every single plotline back to her favorite pairings, if available, and favorite kinks as a runner-up, and of course she would ALWAYS have to end up playing the sub. EVERY SINGLE TIME. this quite often ended up completely mutilating storylines or character arcs or ships i was deeply invested in. in fact, just kind of in general, if there was a grain of something i liked about something we were rping, i could count on her promptly, reliably weeding it out or ruining it by changing it into one of Her Favorite Things.

she expressed great concern and total surprise when i finally had a breakdown about it, and told her there was a system there that i felt like she was using to take advantage of me; she assured me that oh, no, she didn't mean to do that, and she doesn't care about making scenes that fit her pairings, she just likes to pick a prompt and see how they play out! but she'll try to live up to my rules, she just wants to make sure i'm having a good time :DDD

which. F U R I O U S S H R I E K I N G YOU CAN PICK PROMPTS AND RUN WITH THEM BECAUSE I DO ALL THE WORK JUST FUCKING COMMUNICATE WITH ME ABOUT WHAT YOU DO AND DON'T WANT SO I CAN DECIDE WHETHER I WANT TO PUT EFFORT INTO IT ASSHOLE

she then proceeded to continue not paying any attention to the things i had said unless i was actively, repeatedly reminding her and dragging her through the process, pressuring me to rp things i had said i wasn't in the mood for over and over within a few hours or a day of me saying so (because surely i had changed my mind by then!), and generally using me as a private personal kink meme despite knowing it was badly impacting my mental health.

i acted like shit to her the more frustrated and hurt and spirally i got, and if i'd had any decent sense of boundaries i would have cut off rping with her right when the aggressive godmodding started, so i don't have room to pretend i wasn't a dick too, but lord alfuckingmighty i am still SO SALTY. SO SALTY.

and, after several years of this, that's the story of how i can't hyperfocus on rp anymore. no, i'm not bitter :')

 

jfc. Stories like that always make me glad that I don't... really do 1x1 rps anymore.