Why Your RP Is Bad and Will Fail

[Grey]

While SYWTW... is on an accidental hiatus, please enjoy this filler episode.


And by filler, I mean a short but important lesson many users need to learn. Happily, the world of videogaming gives us some handy examples for this discussion.


You know how movie tie-in games suck? Barely coherent, shoddy mechanics, and a loose relation to the plot of the film, at best? A overriding sense that the devs don't actually grasp the work they're adapting?


That, friends and neighbours, is what a stroll through Fandom feels like.


The medium is part of the message, kids. A particular narrative format is chosen to tell a story because it suits that story. At the end of the day. a roleplay is another way of telling a story, and some stories just don't work. Or they might, with enough talent and effort. I'm going to be uncharitable here and assume your roleplay benefits from neither.


Consider; Hotline Miami's fractured and strange narrative works in a videogame, but you might have a harder time telling that story with the same impact as, say, a movie. Or a novel. On a related note, Drive is adapted from a novel of the same name, but abandons the changing viewpoints and chronology of the book for something more straightforward. Not quite the same, an impressive exercise in editing, and it ultimately impacts the viewer in a different way, prompting different interpretations of the material.


Iain M. Banks' Use of Weapons is an amazing story in novel format - but the idea of adapting it to a film? Wouldn't work. As a game? Maybe, but it'd be a crazy amount of work. As a roleplay? Nope.


Attack on Titan poses problems for adaptation in two ways - part of the central narrative is world-building, and everything is built around the central narrative. Without knowing where the plot is going, adapting it to a roleplay forces you to try and run a side-story - which people are less likely to engage with, because we know the real plot is deciding the fate of the world just offscreen - or to try and finish the hanging plot in your own way, which is apt to leave some players cold and take a lot of work. A lot of the series impact comes from the visuals, the changes in perspective, and the limited information available to the viewer. A lot of those things contribute to the way it feels, you see?


And that, now I finally get to it, is my real point. When you want to start a roleplay based on a videogame or TV show, an anime or movie, you have to ask yourself - do I really have a story to tell, or do I just want more of the media I have just enjoyed? Do I want to sustain the feeling that this existing game or world or plot gave me, or do I really want to do something with the material?


Because if you just want more, you're wasting your time and everyone else's. You can't perfectly replicate it; you have to work on adapting it and accepting it won't be the same. You need to use a setting, or a conceit, or a mechanism, rather than simply copy/paste the existing work and hope it'll actually go somewhere.

 

[Honeybucky]

I wish I could like this post a thousand, thousand times.


Good lord, why are you my favorite person in the whole world?


Ugh. T HANK YOU FOR WIRITING THIS. Much love. Very information. I never post ooc things. That's really saying something for how awesome this is.

 

[Jabroni]

An interesting perspective. It's a bit harsh-sounding, but there's truth in what you're saying. I think the best point you bring up is, "Why are you making this roleplay?" The answer should always be either to expand on the book/movie/show or to use that as inspiration for your own storyline. The whole purpose, as you say, is to create something with the ability to go places the original work hasn't gone before.

 

[Xenonia]

Alternatively they're not good because they read like fanfiction, and no matter what, nobody likes to read somebody else's fanfiction.

 

[ShadowedNexus]

The problem with a lot of ideas, is that to go off of something else they usually have to go into an AU to explain details that they wanted like those people that do GoT RP's but reset it to like right after the Rebellion

 

[Ashurbanipal]

You're correct in that certain stories are slaves to their medium, and struggle when clumsily adapted--but that doesn't lead to the conclusion you draw at the end there. The struggle of adaptation has nothing to do with whether or not the desire for more is a desire that can be met; Hercules: The Legendary Journeys, for instance, is extremely easy to adapt from television show to roleplay (in that it's essentially just a lighthearted Greek pulp that throws its hands in the air when it comes to historical and mythological accuracy) and due to the simplistic nature of its story it's quite easy to expand the world and slot your own adventures right into it.


While true you can't perfectly replicate, sometimes what people are craving is to sandbox around in the world of material they enjoy, and being effectively supplementary material isn't a waste of their time.

 

[Shining Lotus Sage]

I want to make an After the End of Evangelion game now where everyone is depersonalized shadows of ego.


 
Sheer spite.

 

[Liberty Penn]

I very much relate to what you're saying. After the end of Avatar: Legend of Korra, me and my friends wanted to continue the story. You're arguments are something I have been concerned about as we've been setting up. Luckily I think the Avatar universe is better set up for it than other stories may be. We are simple using the world that has already been built by continuing the Avatar cycle.


We want more of the media that we loved, but we are also taking it and making it our own.

 

[Interstellar Bun]

I'm decently new to RPN and before I found this lovely site, I've mainly resided on Tumblr.


While you have a plethora of fantastic points (and a fantastic way of wording them), I find it interesting because, on Tumblr, it's the fandom rp communities that really thrive. For example, if you like The Elder Scrolls, there are close to 500+ people in that fandom all interacting with one another to create a large web of stories, a group I have been in for two or so years. While there are a few Dragonborns or Champions of Cyrodiil, those characters tend to be the boring ones. The enjoyment of fandom rp comes from not following the main story of the games, but facing the general struggles of living in a world with dragons and war where hypothermia is just as much of a problem as werewolves.


When I first started to move over here, the fact that fandom rps weren't nearly as popular was (and still is) very odd to me. Reading this post kind of tells me why that is. The experience here isn't the same and if people are just trying to recreate the same story, it'll never work.


You're exactly right, to pull off a fandom RP, be it Fallout, or Dragon Age, or Harry Potter, you need a story to tell. The characters need to have an end goal, or lots of small end goals that give them something to do. Using the setting can be great, it can give everyone a sense of familiarity and cohesiveness so characters flow together well and you know where things are to make use of plot points, even using canon characters can be oodles of fun if the writers expand on them and go beyond what little information we are typically given.


That's really the trick, though, expanding on the worlds we love is what keeps things interesting.


I suppose this is a weak defense of fandom rps, as I've been involved in them for so many years and have had endless amounts of fun writing with others. It has gotten to the point where I now typically love those communities more than I love the games they originated from. Granted, the fact that I tend to do fandom rps with games that have large sandbox worlds probably helps.


Perhaps this was just a bunch of moderately incoherent rambling, but I would like to end it with the point that any rp, fandom or otherwise, needs a plot and genuine struggle if it's going to be interesting.

 

[SkyPiratesAssemble]

If only more people heeded your words of wisdom.I tend to avoid all fandom related role-playing for this exact reason. However, I believe that there is a deeper reason to why bad role-plays are bad, the writers just don't have enough experience. Not only in writing in general but in life in general. The forums are absolutely flooded with high-school, zombie, and high-school zombie stories. It seems like people use already an already established lore as a crutch for their lack of imagination.The characters either act completely irrationally in a giving situation, the story grinds to halts frequently, or the world just feels flat. I may be completely off-base but this is my experience.