What are your roleplay gripes?

Ah, so, apologies if this is a thread already somewhere, I attempted to search around for one, but didn't see anything. also, apologies if this is the wrong subforum? The same one as the fanfiction gripes was my best guess

ANYWAY

I was thinking back to the dark ages of gaia rping and all the incredibly elaborate search threads people would make with thirty to forty rules with hidden passwords imbedded in them you had to recite to prove you'd read them

and I thought maybe it could be fun to have a place to talk about roleplay pet peeves (and maaaybe swap stories about incredible examples godmodding and the like). And like what I mentioned before, pet peeves about the searching process are definitely also fair game

An example to start off: when someone's character ONLY ever reacts to what you've written, and never initiates any new action. Like, complaining about one liners was always a popular complaint, but personally I've seen plenty of one liner posts that drive the action forward and have real impact, and PLENTY of 2-5 page posts full of completely useless fluff and it drives me bATTY

 

I hate when people do the thing where they try and push you along with narration. Like, "oh wow it sure would be awful if your character did x while my character was sleeping" and shit like that. I hate trying to be shoehorned into specific actions, that's the sort of thing you talk over beforehand or let grow naturally.

 

oof, yeah, for me I actually tend to enjoy exploring ooc "what if's" with my main rp partner almost as much as I enjoy rping itself, but that really only works when both people are into that, and have an understanding that saying "nah, I'd rather do ____" is ok

I've definitely had other times where an rper clearly just has a rigid plan for how they want something to go, and pretty much expects me and my oc to play our part in this thing no one agreed to, which is awkward at best and really gross at worst

 

Yeah I mean I personally like to have the end goal or the reason for RPing set up - I generally frequent sites like cherubplay so my partners tend to be anonymous randoms that don't know my tastes.

But yeah either way I just really hate to get to like some kind of slice of life scene and the narration goes. "My character bends over to clean the floor. It sure would be embarassing if your character looked up their skirt!" or something like that.

 

If your only contribution to the scene as a sub is to sit there and let me do things to you with no actual input from you fuck you I am leaving.

 

omfg, so not even suggested in ooc? that's so obnoxious holy crap

like if someone had their character thinking "oh gee wouldn't it be so embarrassing if ___ looked up my skirt *butt wiggle*" that would... probably be obnoxious too, but at least that's informing the character a little bit and not just blatant 4th wall breaking xD;

 

yeahhhhhhhhh being a sub/playing a sub isn't an excuse to be a lazy writer

 

Yeah see that's the thing, I'm happy doing whatever in terms of the top/bottom/dom/sub thing, but I've come to loathe being a dom/top in RP's with random people because there's such a high proportion of bed starfishes. People like to complain about how rare dom's are, but I think honestly a lot of it is due to the wealth of really shitty subs.

 

I think that's a big part of why. There's just so many shitty subs. We have gone into hiding.

 

I wish more of them would at least play a bratty sub, going through the motions of that isn't all that much more effort than being a starfish, and it at least creates something to react to

writing doms is like pulling teeth for me most of the time, so I don't have that much to complain about when I rarely take up that mantle... but I write active subs, so at least there's that

 

tbh most of the annoying stuff that happens within bad rps are nothing compared to the guilt tripping and weird passive aggressive subterfuge so many rpers employ when they want you to reply more often

 

See I'm generally shockingly vanilla and mostly just prefer to RP fluffy slice-of-life stuff with characters I like, so I generally frame it more in terms of top/bottom than dom/sub, which has BDSM implications I'm not really into. My ideal situation has both characters on equal footing and taking charge depending on the scenario and their feelings rather than an established power-differential.

However that's a mythical thing that has literally never happened to me, so yeah sifting through the garbage subs for the three good ones is a thing.

 

Also yeah fuck that, I get that all the time on cherubplay and it's like sorry I have a life, I can't always just sit around writing multipara smut 24/7. There will be weeks where I only post thrice or so, welcome to adult life.

 

One of my past close friends did the 'never push the action forward' thing and it was maddening bc she wanted to RP so bad and got so excited about our characters I never had the heart to tell her no but her posts were sooo boring...they were literally just rehashes of my posts but from her character's point of view. Like literally I could write 'George smiled and took Robert's hand, leading him to the bedroom' and she'd write 'Robert blinked as George took his hand, smiling at him, and led him to the bedroom' except she'd add like, sentences and sentences of unnecessary description about the texture of the hand and the feel of the carpet and her character's facial expressions and the color of the wood on the bedroom door. Description can definitely add to a scene, but not when it's literally what I just wrote but with longer, different words. And then at the end of her post - which would often be several paragraphs more than mine - her character would do like, one extra thing. Like take their shoes off or sit down or something.

And I've come across lots of people doing that, she was just the most egregious. But that's probably my biggest pet peeve.

 

several times i've seen people bumping chats by posting a single full stop and i'm just like. what the fuck are you trying to achieve here.

 

I've never done NSFW roleplay, but man, I have some stories from OC RP on the message board I was on in high school. I don't exactly have the moral high ground here, because I was a smug teenage bullying godmoder, but I have some stories. Like the kid who had a team of half a dozen Sonic recolors with no description except powers and "looks like Sonic but [color]." Or the ten-year-old who tried to sexually harass someone almost twice his age because he thought "rapey lady who won't take no for an answer even when physically attacked" was a fun, funny character trait. Or the people ripping off other people's OCs and OC descriptions.

 

Oh boy oh boy oh boy

I have sooooo many things.

fr'instance, one thing I VERY MUCH HATED was when people described my character for me—I used to RP on MSPARP a lot, and I'd have REALLY specific headcanons for my characters—one character was half Japanese, half Irish/Scottish mix (with a LITTLE bit of English that EVERYONE refused to talk about it was like SIX GENERATIONS AGO SHUT UP ALREADY)
and someone described him with red hair
I nearly disconnected then and there

oh, and this other COMPLETELY out of character jackass I RP'd with that like—apparently wanted me to do some really skeevy shit to their character (despite SAYING it was TOTALLY FINE if they rescued him instead), then would get SUPER pissy when I didn't do that
and kept doing really OOC actions to try and push my character into doing the skeevy shit. bleh. bleh bleh bleh.

 

I'm sure I have more out there stories somewhere I'm forgetting (there was a whole period of my life where I tried RP searching on Gaia? Life hack: don't), but the one that I always remember is the time way back in my days as a baby RPer on Neopets when someone in a pokemon RP thought "hey keltena can you tone your character down a bit? no offense but she's kind of a b*** :/" was a reasonable complaint. (I may have only been a kid at the time playing pretty simplistic characters, but I can assure you that one was fully intended to be a jerk. :P)

 

I pals I got some stories for you if I ever feel like recounting them... :P

But anyway. Back in 2009 when I, the 11 year old gremlin who probably shouldn't have been on most websites, started roleplaying (I was an animal roleplayer, so it was always wolves or horses I played as) I thought females were impossible to roleplay. I don't know why I thought this, something something sexism, but I always roleplayed males because of it, and soon after I started, in 2010 or 11, I always found myself, without fail, in the company of female-character female RPers about my age or younger, who would try and get their characters in relationships with the first male character they saw in the thread. I roleplayed a lot - I posted at least 50 times a day because I didn't have a life and so that male character they saw was almost always mine, cause he was just so handsome and swag, apparently. :P Anyway, this sometimes escalated to the point where the players thought I, the roleplayer, was also a guy, and the female players my character was with their character, would start referring to me as their total irl boyfriend. It was creepy. Please tell me there's no teenage or adult roleplayers like that now-a-days...

Also I roleplayed on forums where everybody roleplayed in 3-7 threads that corresponded to area. There was no such thing as one-on-one or small groups when I started. Everyone was in one area, still doing their own thing with others, but everybody was posting in the one, so that still annoys me to this day now that I'm used to tumblr roleplay where it was a very small group that took turns or one-on-one roleplay.

And another tumblr RP gripe... excessive special characters or HTML editing to make speech look cooler. Just. Just bold it. Please don't make the quotation marks size 50 while the text is size 9. Stylize that with css on the blog itself, not the post. I'm begging you.

 

hello yes camps out in this thread

people who go into rps expecting me to play the character the way that would advance the plot the way they want it instead of how the character would actually act

this is why i HATE really plot focused rps because you gotta sacrifice character for the sake of gettin the fucking thing to work