rpanons | I thought it was a chocolate chip

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rpanons is an anonymous community for role-play related topics. This place serves as a forum for game discussions, canon discussions, RP solicitations (ATP, game ads, open memes), and advice. The occasional off topic comment is inevitable, but please keep heated social and political topics to their respective communities. Posting them here will only get them frozen. Subsequent threads made to bypass a freeze will then be deleted.

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I mostly remember the horrendous spat that lead to the talesofdressing/abyssdressing split.

what happened? o:

It was years ago so I might be misremembering things:

But at one time was a massive surge in activity from Abyss players on the DR, to the point where they were crowding out everyone else. AUs, genderbends, "evil" counterparts, minor characters with two lines, you name it.

Eventually the person running the DR made an announcement that tried to prune the Abyss activity. I don't know if it was a limitation (eg five Abyss characters per player) or just some badly-phrased words of discouragement ("please play from other games") but it caused a shitstorm and led to the Abyss players forming their own Abyss-specific dressing room.

thanks for filling me in! wow, that sounds like a lot of trouble. it was probably when abyss was localized and got really popular?

i personally wouldn't have wanted to segregate the abyss players, but i definitely understand the desire to limit the amount. if it's a tales dressing room, you'd want to see more than one game from the series. it's just unfortunate that back then, tales wasn't nearly as popular or well-known as it is now, so you can't really blame there being so many abyss players. the big titles were pretty much abyss and symphonia, and symphonia was already old. hopefully we can start to change all that now!

The split happened before I got into RP properly, but IIRC it happened closer to the release of Vesperia than Abyss. Words can't express how utterly and ridiculously popular Abyss was in the RP community at the time.

Most of the big drama in TOD came from the owner attempting to exert control over the DR and imposing unpopular decisions. The Abyss thing was one of them, and compounded by accusations of hypocrisy because the owner had like three active AU Lloyd Irving accounts. There was also a PSL that the owner came down on hard because it destroyed a part of the setting, even though the setting had an "everything regenerates" clause. This being RP, there were accusations of favouritism and other related drama.

That's all I can remember. In retrospect the drama was stupid and it was a shame that TOD went the way it did. The owner made a really strong effort to advertise the comm on things like dear_mun, and in general was very hands-off (which is how a DR should be).

you're missing some deets here.

the people most popular in the abyss cast were also playing out some seriously squicky stuff. iirc, there was a pedophile guy walking around and when one of the young gailardias was aged up, he and and another aged up abyss character either had sex or got very close to it. there was also just a lot of posts revolving around grimdark happenings from their aus and threadjacking about it. i'm sure that they were just having fun but there was a lot of unrest and unease about it and i know it made more than one person leave the dressing room completely because of how rampant it was, and most of it was untagged and plainly out in the open, if not having its own post. so there was more going on than there just being way too many abyss players at the time. when the abyss cast split off into their own DR that material went with them or disappeared.

that being said the mod was weird and particular about things and had a very my way or the highway style of handling things. they aren't bad people but i can't say i'd play in their sandbox again if the opportunity arose.

though i do wish for a tales of dressing room to come up again. efforts have been made but i don't think the interest is in DWRP anymore to keep it alive.

Thanks for filling in the information. It happened years ago so I was upfront about how I was probably missing some deets. I think you're spot-on about the mod too.

i got into the fandom after whatever caused the split, but all i remember was that tod was completely inactive by then, while the abyssdr was still getting posts every few weeks or so.

i do wish there could be a big active one for everyone, since i have a lot of aus i'd like to play with, but they'd seem out of place anywhere that isn't a psl or a dr setting.

I'd be interested in opening a new one! But I'd be new at modding a DR, so what would you guys expect to see there? Don't want to see?

DRs should be, by their nature, very open-ended and hands-off. Step in if someone starts to actively ruin the game for other people or plays some excuse to throw around racist slurs.

Otherwise your main task should be to stir up interest and activity. Proper games can run events and stuff to interest people; DRs and mingle threads live and die by the activity of the players. Most of your "modding" will be spreading the word on various comms or ATP threads, and encouraging people to use it. Memes are popular these days so posting them every so often would help as well.

The number one reason that DRs fail is the lack of promotion. This is what tends to happen:

1) Anon asks "who wants me to run a DR?".
2) Gets a massive and positive response from people who genuinely want a DR.
3) Anon actually makes the DR.
4) Anon posts one "now open for business" message.
5) Anon either gets a massive response that drops off quickly, or fails to get a response that matches the initial interest.
6) Anon fails to realise that, with any DW comm or game, success is born from sustained effort and advertisement, and a gradual accumulation of renown.
7) Anon abandons DR as a failure.
8) Wait four months, then go to Step 1.

Thanks so much for the advice, I feel better about handling this now. I have I can do promotion. What comms are proper for advertising dressing rooms?

I will love you if you did this! Tales of is such a big fandom as well.

*I can do promotion.

no idea where the 'I have' came from

Treat it like a game and advertise everywhere that allows game advertisements. See if you can get tags on places like dear_player: the old owner of TOD would post a lot on dear_mun and namedrop the DR. A game tag also lets any of your DR players mention it when they post on dear_mun.

Mention it on here every so often, or in response to a question ("are there any Xillia 2 players?" "I've seen a Ludger on talesdressingroom"). Plurk is also a powerful tool for word of mouth as well: the recent Role Call and Mingle Logs blew up on Plurk and gained a ton of attention.

Keep in mind that DRs are not games: you can provide a setting and moderation to prevent abuse, but you're not obligated to dispense events or storylines or whatever. You're providing the canvas, not the painting. As I mentioned above, regular memes might be the exception to the rule just because they're so prevalent, but encourage others to post them too. I also highly recommend a sister OOC comm for introductions and general chat.

Cool, I can handle that. I don't post at dear_mun or dear_player or anything like that unfortunately, but maybe people who do could advertise instead.

I was interested in modding a DR precisely because not a lot of work is required for it haha. I'll be happy to keep an eye out and make sure it's running smoothly. As for memes, I'm thinking a 'one per month' thing could be good. Or at least some kind of mingle post per month, to stir up activity and new players. OOC comm's good to go too.

I thought it was a chocolate chip

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