rpanons | Your privilege at any time is only as strong as the wifi signal

Your privilege at any time is only as strong as the wifi signal

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Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

why are you all so bent out of shape about exclusively apps? apps are fine. this is the most off point discussion ever.

there is no theoretical app that will allow mods to keep shitty people out with a hundred percent success rate. the only thing that could help with that is culturally being more tolerant of booting people out of games just for being sub par.

Word. Yeah, apps aren't perfect, but they're probably never going to be. People are always going to slip through the cracks who you wish you hadn't accepted, whatever you do about it, and the solution definitely isn't to make apps this weird intensive game wide test drive experience that's a bigger pain in the ass for everybody involved, including existing players who I'd prefer to see tagging more stuff in game than test driving. Like, apps are fine. Two samples is usually enough to get an idea of how good someone is; on the occasion I'm not sure after reading them I just ask a player for another one.

Honestly, most of the players I've ever let into games I've run that I've regretted have been ones where I knew from the app that something was up but decided to cut them some slack, and the more I mod the more I learn not to do that. I can think of maybe one player whose app impressed me but who turned out to be garbage, and the thing is that person didn't show her ass until months after we let her in. She had loads of great threads and then abruptly took a one way turn into garbage town and started making everybody uncomfortable. So... we booted her. It was a pain, but if we'd had some kind of test drive vetting system like people are talking about here she would still have passed with flying colors.

I can count on one hand the number of players I've seen who wrote an app that was good enough to get accepted and then ended up really sucking at the character. And like in your case, it didn't come to light until they'd been in the game for a few months, so requiring test drive threads would've been useless.

honestly it's the principle of the thing. i get so exhausted when i think about having to write an app, because it's more a measure of how well you can write an essay and not how well you can write prose or how well you can characterize or how well you play with others. i would like to see apps focus more on tags and samples personally.

i do not understand why so many people act like apps are this huge endeavor. i have never spent more than three hours on an app and that was for a game where i had to write out a history. they usually take me an hour, two hours at most.

i've apped to more than two dozen games and never even been asked for revisions. apps aren't hard to write if you know your character.

congrats i'm so happy for u no really

writing prose and writing structured essays are two totally different things. i am decent at and enjoy the former, but the latter has always and likely will always give me trouble. in school, i could blow through exams like they were nothing, but i got really stressed out whenever i had to do a paper because i always struggled with them. a lot of other people i knew would panic over tests and say they'd rather write essays. it's almost like everyone's strengths and experiences are different or something.

so you're proposing like just samples as a complete alternative to writing personality sections etc? Because I can see the appeal of that in theory, but in practice it sounds kind of difficult to work with and not nearly as efficient for the people actually reviewing the apps.

^ different anon ftr

no, i think personality and history sections definitely have their place, but i wish they'd be downplayed more. right now personality sections are considered the main part of every app, but imo they should be placed more in the background and used to reinforce what's written in the samples section. i wish things like bulleted lists were acceptable in lieu of an essay.

what i would like to do personally for an app would be to sort of mash the two sections together. give a brief overview (and i mean brief) of the character's general personality just as kind of an introduction, and then write out their role in canon in a timeline format, expanding on specific important events and how they affected the character/how the character reacted when necessary. entranceway kind of has this system in place, but they're still looking for an essay. barf.

you could argue that that's going to cause problems for people with huge canons (bleach comes to mind immediately), but the advantage of doing it in a timeline format is that you can downplay or even cut out all of the minor events and keep your focus specifically on the moments in canon that are relevant to understanding your character. you don't need to write a big huge description of everything that happens in canon. just explain the important parts.

i think what's important is to be able to see that the player understands the canon and understands how canon events affected their character, and i don't think that writing huge essays are the best way to go about doing it. i've modded games before, and it often seemed like so much of what was written in people's personality sections was unnecessary, because people try to cover all bases of their characters by drawing on specific events, but they know it's a personality section and not a history section so they don't really extrapolate on the events themselves and instead give a vague "in certain scenarios" description instead. i want a way to cut out the fluff and focus on what's actually relevant.

I like this, actually... I like this a lot. I'm one of those people who feels like I'm constantly struggling to decide which details I should include and which ones I should exclude when I write my personality sections in order to keep it from becoming redundant or bloated, but if we did things the way you describe them, the canon can speak for itself. I could cover everything and give solid context for it, to boot.

but personality sections aren't like structured essays at all. they don't have a thesis that you're trying to prove/back up, you're literally just describing the character to someone who isn't familiar with them. how can you rp a character if you can't even describe what kind of person they are?

so do you think that the only kind of essay in the world is an argumentative one or like what's going on here because i don't think you know what the word "essay" means.

and i never said i can't do it, just that it takes me a while and i find it to be an exhausting task

different people have different levels of tolerance and ability to sit down and write shit out, and it varies on what kind of shit they need to be writing.

and not all apps are the same, or require the same amount of effort from everyone-- i can crank out history just fine, and prefer to write out my histories myself over linking a wiki because i find it invigorating and a good excuse to catch up on canon and clarify anything that's gotten foggy in my memory, but if they want a writing sample, i almost always end up struggling, because i find fanfic harder than rp, but usually don't have rp samples that i'm comfortable sharing.

because writing in a writing hobby is hard

mte. rolling my eyes at the anon whining about how personality sections are like essays and they're so hard... you are literally just writing a list of traits in sentence/paragraph form and giving canon examples. that's not an essay, that's a description. you kind of need to be able to write descriptions in order to rp...

Now in the right place. Damn it.

It sounds like your personality sections are shitty if that's how you write them. People are more than just a list of traits. If you're seriously writing those sections like "X is brave. We see this in canon when she stands up to her father. X is also smart. She has a master's degree and solves xyz puzzle halfway through the story." that's boring and shitty and mods probably hate reading your apps, and the only reason why you don't get rejected or asked for revisions is because you technically never say anything that's untrue or ooc. I'm saying this as a mod. To me, that's barely even a personality section. It's just a simplified history section with adjectives slapped on it, and if it weren't for my co-mods I would ask for revisions on that shit every single time. A good personality section flows well, is cohesive, and there's a logical progression from thought to thought and from paragraph to paragraph. It also should have a reader-friendly introduction and a well tied-off conclusion. You know what that makes it? A fucking essay. I don't have problems writing apps myself, but I completely understand people who do.

Wow, I am so glad you aren't my comod. As another mod, I don't give a shit if a personality section is well written and flows well and has a logical progression from paragraph to paragraph or a god damn conclusion. What does that have to do with how well someone can RP the character? I tend to write personality sections for my own characters that conform to what you describe here but that's because that's my idea of fun, and it doesn't need to be everybody's – I'm not going to be having essay-offs with my players after they app in.

I don't care if they're good at writing an essay. I care if their samples show good writing, and I care if they convey all the necessary information about the character so that I know what the character's deal is when I read the samples, so that I can tell if they're being consistent. Yeah it's nicer to read if it's well written but ultimately that's not the kind of thing I'm going to ask for revisions for, why the hell would you do that? I would be just as happy to look over a list of bullet points about the character's personality, honestly, it amounts to the same thing in terms of actual function.

As long as the personality section covers all of the important aspects of the character, I really don't care whether it's an essay or a list of bullet points. I'm interested in whether what the player writes matches up with what they portray in their samples.

I write my own personality sections by making a list of traits, grouping them together into related groups, and then expanding each one into a couple of sentences and pulling in examples from canon to back them up. I don't know why you think you need an introduction and a conclusion when you're not making an argument - the progression from trait to trait should be logical, yes, but it's ultimately just a list in descriptive paragraph form.

Honestly, because it comes off to me like the person rushed through the app and didn't really give a shit about what they were writing. idk about you, but personally I like to think I'm pretty good at judging which apps were written with care and which ones were just slapped together at the last minute. They don't have to be A+ essay of the year all years with the most flawless writing skills of all time, but I would like to see a little polish. If it feels like the person's attitude while writing the app was "w/e just get it done idgaf apps don't matter anyway" then I'm sorry but that's not really what I'm looking for in a prospective player. Why should I give a shit about your app if you don't give a shit about your app?

I also want to tack this on and go back to the whole "people are more than a list of traits" thing. To be perfectly honest, I'm more interested in the way the character grew and developed throughout the canon than I am in seeing "X is brave. X is smart. X is good around children. X is charitable. X has a phobia of bees." That's all very nice and everything, but I'd rather know what caused your character to grow and change and how they react to certain situations, since ultimately that's what RP is, too. Tell me how your character thinks and functions so that I have some kind of a reference somewhere down the line if another player comes to me and says "I really don't think X's character development is very IC anymore."

And people can and do easily get more in depth than that with lists, I've seen it done before on multiple occasions. You don't need an essay for what you're looking for here.

You just admitted that you can see how some people wouldn't enjoy writing an essay for their personality section, though. I can knock out a 1000 word personality section for fun in less than half an hour for a character I don't actually intend to app, because writing that kind of thing is something I enjoy – that doesn't mean I'm more invested in my character or in the idea of playing at that game than someone for whom that would be a forbidding task. Not formatting it like an academic essay doesn't mean someone doesn't give a shit. Seriously, I really want to know where you mod so I can avoid ever apping somewhere run by someone with such a pointlessly snobby attitude.

I'm just speaking from personal experience, and ime I've never seen it done in a way that didn't read as being horribly lazy. I believe you when you say you can do it and do it well because I have no reason not to, and that's fine, but I've never seen it.

For example, what I said in the comment upthread about people not going into detail about a way a character develops or grows from the start of their canon to their canon point. You say that you include that in your list apps, and that's perfect. That's exactly what I'm looking for. However, as far as my own playerbase is concerned, the people who have given me list apps have never done that. It has literally just been a list of traits with a brief reference back to a canon event that means nothing to me if I'm canonblind. I want the hows and whys in addition to the whos and whats.

To be clear, I don't want it specifically to be an essay. It's just that I've never gotten what I've wanted out of an app that wasn't one. That doesn't mean I never will. I just haven't so far.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Your privilege at any time is only as strong as the wifi signal

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