My main strength is live action or face to face role play. That's my favorite thing. Unfortunately it's damnably hard to arrange that or find anyone online who is interested in having spoken conversations as giant robots. I text rped heavily in the early 2000s as a protoweeboo, and then I picked it up later in 2015 with an irl friend. From 2001 to the very end of 2015 I roleplayed exclusively with one friend irl, plus tabletop gaming groups. That relationship ended in a burning husk of sadness, so I'm trying furtively to get back to rping with more then one person at a time. Even, gasp, strangers on the Internet! I have no real idea what I'm doing or the etiquette of the community. My personal sob story aside, feel free to use this thread to ask questions, I know we have a robust rp community on kintsugi. This is probably a great place to learn all the secret rp handshakes. Tl:dr; basically a prose rp newbie with questions, please help.
OK, so I rped with a person I didn't know at all for the first time ever online. I think it went well, but then they set their skype to away without a word while I was working on my post. Is this code for 'pissed off'????? It's 5am and I'm worried about this.
if it's the type of prose RP with long posts that each take at least five minutes to compose, then i doubt it's code for anything negative. they probably just fell asleep or left to do other stuff. usually a partner will notify you OOC when they're leaving, but not always (especially if you're strangers-- chat RP standards tend to be pretty rude). i'd just ping them and straight-up ask next time they're online-- something like "hey, that was fun, do you want to keep going?"
i randomly disappear on rp partners all the time lmao, even ones that i talk to ooc on a regular basis sometimes end up with me just never replying bc i got distracted or left it too long or fell asleep or the cat threw up and i had to deal with it or... whatever u get my point. i wouldn't take that kind of thing personally if i were you.
I am really bad about forgetting to say when I'm going offline. Part of this is because I'll get distracted during the process of leaving, and part of it is because six animals leads to a lot of Emergency Leaving Now without a chance to say 'goodbye' and eventually that just becomes... normal. It's super rude, but also really common and unfortunately something I'm really prone to. They probably fell asleep (if they're in a similar timezone and it's late) without turning their comp off, or just fell off to do something else without thinking. Asking if they wanna pick up where you left off is a good way to confirm that, and remind them if they may have forgotten. (And since I know this is something people can get hung up on: no, really, the post length doesn't matter. As nice as it is to match length for length, sometimes you can't manage that, and it's not a bad thing.)
I also... do the thing. Most of my idling-off thing comes from a combination of living with roommates and ADHD - I will go downstairs to get a drink or a snack, run into a roommate, and then it will be an hour later and oh shit I didn't tell anyone I was going. Or I fall asleep. I try to give reasons, but I'm gonna be honest, I don't at least 30% of the time. I actually hadn't RP'd for something like five or six years until I joined the TF RP here! I found that like... everything else apparently, the key was communication with your other players. That's how you get characters and plots to ping off each other. (And yeah - length for length will not always happen. Sometimes you character just doesn't have much to say to a certain thing. And that's totally cool! My posts vary from like... three sentences to four paragraphs, with two four or five sentence paragraphs being my average, I'd guess, but not everyone is like that! Some people make longer posts, some shorter.)
Thanks guys, yeah, my rp partner just sort of leaves without saying anything. We've actually been having a hard time being on at the same time, so we just leave posts to be answered whenever. I get anxious about online stuff and tend to disappear because I can't bring myself to open the client for a couple of days. Eeehhhh, I hope I don't chase them off. I really love rp, but I drive myself crazy wondering if what I'm writing is good enough or being well received. We still don't talk ooc that much? Idk.
