Successful Roleplay

[ArachneGlycon]

Hey guys! So here's something a little less serious I'd like help with. What, in your opinion, makes a successful roleplay?


I've roleplayed, forum based, for 11 years but this is my first time on this site and I have started a roleplay and have a couple of people helping to manage. It's going great so far the people who are roleplaying in the story are active, posting 3-8 times a day and I'm really happy. I would just like for it to keep this steady as well as get some more people to join.


So, what's your guys' feedback?

 

[Life.]

This is one of the most top questions for this site being that it is most of our desires to have a "successful roleplay". There are also many ways for one to view a roleplay as successful. If you venture through the tutorials section there are tips and advice on how to keep a roleplay successful and even an actual thread generalizing on what most view as a successful roleplay.


Link:


https://www.rpnation.com/threads/suis-guide-to-making-a-successful-roleplay.217/


And if you do wish to see other user's responses on what makes a successful roleplay you can post a thread in the Roleplay Discussion and see what users post. You will probably receive more answers there rather than here since this section is more dedicated for site issues and bugs. The Roleplay Discussion is a great place where you can see little factors and details of roleplays that are critiqued and examined helping users gather an idea of what they think should be included and not included in their roleplays. By perhaps taking on what has been said they can make their roleplay slowly reach their status of "success".


I hope this helped and hope your roleplay is successful!

 

[call me rae]

I would say for me the roleplays that have lasted the longest have been entirely between friends.


I was in one roleplay that continued on in one iteration or another for going onto four years.


And how it kept momentum going through hiatus and dry spells was through the fact that everyone in the roleplay was friends with everyone else.


We would talk about all kinds of things from our favorite characters - life - whatever all the time out of character.


We motivated each other - offered each other constructive criticism - just hung out regardless of how well the roleplay was doing.


Because of that we had an easy time picking up the roleplay again whenever people would drop out or the GM would have to take a hiatus.


So my advice - keep the lines of communication going.


Talk to your players - get to know them outside of roleplaying


The closer you are the more invested they'll be in the story.

 

[Lexielai]

^ Yes. The more active your OOC is, and the more active your players are in it, can have a significant effect on the success of an RP. They become more emotionally connected to other players, so they aren't playing with a bunch of strangers anymore; and they invest more of their time, thought, and effort into this environment with this group of people.


The most important part of an RP, in my opinion, is not the quality of the content, but the quality of the people you play it with. RPing by nature is the social stance to writing, and that means having fun with a bare-bones story can trump a thoughtful, but boring one anyday.

 

[ZaiKai]

Everything everybody else said, but I believe another important thing is GM involvement, player commitment, and GM-Player communication. GMs have to be involved - it's a fact. If you can't post for a while and you're the GM, get your most trusted player to GM for you or something, because an RP without a GM is crap.


Players have to be committed. This is what stops RpN from having a lot of long-running RPs - I was in the SB the other day, and the general opinion is that players join, then do one of a few things: never post; post not very often; leave after "losing interest," in which case they should not have joined in the first place; or leave when a shiny, new RP is created (because, let's be honest, RpNers spit out a new RP every five seconds). And excuse me if I misused semicolons.


GMs and Players need to communicate as well. They need to be familiar so the player doesn't think of the GM as their boss (unless your boss is cool!) or their warden or something. Additionally, if a player isn't having too much fun, they need to express their opinions to the GM and other players so a compromise can be reached. GMs aren't telling the story - they're setting the stage for the players to do so by giving general plots and arcs. However, the GMs still need to provide new conflicts and such for the players to work through. If a GM wants to tell the story, they need to write a book.


Highschool RPs fail, believe it or not. While they are usually the most active and the "shiny new RP" people leave for, there isn't enough GM involvement for a good story - it's just mindless interaction, which may as well be a chatroom to be honest. And to be honest, if you're a highscool RP and you have over twenty members, it's going to be hard to have GM-Player communication.


That's my two-cents on the topic, anyway. A good thread from a while back that relates to this can be found here.


Also, for a successful RP, players need to understand they can't just post a couple of sentences. A good RP post, even in a casual or simple RP, has more than just that much to it.

 

[DerUbermensch]

I'll be short and sweet. It's all about dedication. Small but dedicated groups are the best. Though keep in mind that real life can be a total crapshoot. Besides, make sure your RP doesn't reach too many players. After all, too many cooks...

 

[Ramero]

I already successfully finished several RP's before i moved here despite it was 1x1.


It's about dedication and the RPers are willing to be involved with it. But there are some issues like getting bored all of sudden or real life activity.


It's all about dedication and how much you want to get involved so far throughout the RP.

 

[RedTimbre]

Besides, make sure your RP doesn't reach too many players. After all, too many cooks...

Spoiler

In my many, many years of roleplaying I've never seen a group game's ending come to fruition. They are like sickly gazelles in the greater heard of other roleplays - susceptible to predatory neglect and sudden heart failure. Every player is a moving part in a potentially complex machine: all it really takes is for one to break or disappear and your construct is hosed.


So, like Over Man said: keep the group as small as possible, and make sure they are dedicated individuals. Yeah, real life gets in the way, but short of losing your spouse or an immediate family member to alien abduction or the Republican party, there's no real reason why someone can't take 15 minutes out of their day to write two paragraphs in order to keep a story moving.

 

[Archie]

^ that


I've run actually quite a few to completion and seen just as many more go to the end, but by the end it was always 5-6 people or less doing something.


A big part of it for the GM, or even for players, is that leading an RP is like leading anything: you have to manage but not micromanage.


RPs get way more signups than 5-6 a lot of the time, but people drop out since they don't feel like they're in the plot - aka writers block. The GM has to reach out to them and pull them in, but only to the point where they don't have writers block and won't make it for someone else. That means if a group is posting too fast of say, 3 people, the other 3 or more might be left behind, but at the same time if people don't have plots, you need to give them ideas. GM is a title of ownership, but you don't need to be GM to lead an RP either - i've seen people totally take over (and for the better) when the GM didn't know what to do, but it was less a coup, and more like helping


Ya gotta reach out and ask every single person what they'd like to do, and propose ideas, even if they're basic and simple, then when they have an idea that doesn't hurt other people in the RP, then you've won


In the end the smaller and smaller group gets more and more focused and usually ends up doing the same thing or being on the same quest, then there's sort of a collective decision to "end" it, but not in a way of it falling inactive, more in a way of "this might get inactive soon, let's do the final encounter, leave it a bit of a cliffhanger, and take off at a sequel"

 

[Idea]

To me the key is that the rp immerses you in it. The rp is exciting when I find myself think of this or that sequence of events that haven`t happened yet, when you want to find out how your partner is gonna react to what you just did, to how things are gonna turn out.


To do this a moderate dose of planning is required, but there`s more: It takes investing (as someone already said here, I believe, but perhaps for a different motive). Thing is, you CAN`T take the lazy way out of stuff if you want the rp to be interesting. You should also consider vey carefully what can truly kill the thing. For me, it´s lack of material for my characters to act upon. For others it can be other stuff or this as well. But usually, before you even realize it, someone may have done something that doomed the rp. Keep an open eye to the several posts across the rp to be able to go back and say "this went right because of that" or the opposite.


A note on group rps, they usually fail. It takes quite some experience to manage one (experience I don`t myself have), and a capacity to organize that must come from all parties involved. Never leave entries open for too long, or you`ll have people jumping in in the middle of the plot or worse. It`s mostly about pacing...It`s very hard to pace something when you`re not sure what is going on exactly at any given point.