rpanons | I'm bad at this

I'm bad at this

Rundown:

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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hey i guess im spitballing for the hell of it but:

my roommate and i are working on starting a game together & we're considering moving from tumblr to dreamwidth. ive got experience in lj rp (from when i was like 14) and tumblr rp (from past groups we've run as well as one really terrible indie experience); my roommate has only rped on tumblr as both indie blogs and private groups. weve run a private tumblr group together that fell apart because of inactivity & because tumblr sucks to rp on, so we're looking at our options.

i'm having some trouble finding resources on how to start a game vs just like... apping somewhere else... so if any of yall can direct me to guides or just give me advice on that it'd be sweet as hell

i also wanna know if anyone would even be interested in apping to this. its gonna be a panfandom jamjar sort of deal where characters are transported to an island (solomon island from the secret world; picking an established video game island because i know the lore Extremely Well, the island has a massive wealth of locations and history, and also i just really like this game) but almost all the sapient life has completely vanished, so the characters need to establish bases and team up to survive and shit. ive got Actual Plot kind of planned out but i really want a focus on player-made conflict and plot; characters fighting over limited resources and establishing their own factions and shit.

ive pitched this to my usual rp group who was receptive & im guess just having the same 6 people in my games is fine and all but id really like this to be... actually active... especially when all of us get busy. so if this sounds at all interesting to yall id like to hear it

i dont have much input to give since ive never built or run a game in my life and im just a passerby from the flatlands, but welcome to dwrp at least! you sound like a nice and sensible anon and i hope your game manages to take off ok

off the top of my head taking a gander at the other games we have running here might be a good start tho, if you haven't done that already. a lot of our pretty active ones are listed in the games thread here, and their comms usually go by the same names. taking a peek at how rules & faq pages/applications & reserves/general comm format are set up by other games might help start pointing you in the right direction for putting together the structure of your own game

hey anon! I used to mod a game someone else started/was kind of watching when it was formed & eventually modded a game my friends started, so if you've got any specific questions, hit me up @partysockanthem

I know that my experience isn't EXACTLY 'starting a new game vs. apping somewhere else' but at least I can give you advice on modding if there's anything specific you've got questions about. :)

welcome to dreamwidth! i'm gonna second a lot of what the other anons have already said, definitely go thru and look at our most active games right now for a general sense of how they're built.

the main pages you are gonna NEED are rules, faq, application, reserves, taken, activity check, drops&hiatus, and mod contact. anything after that is whatever you need to expand on for the setting. personally, i don't see the point of premise pages since it's usually just the blurb from the profile repeated but they've stuck around this long for whatever reason. also MOST games have a network comm, log comm, ooc comm, and meme community. they're pretty much what they say on the tin, network is ic skype honestly, log is face to face interaction, ooc is out of character, and meme are non-canon threads just for fun. as a suggestion, your game could work well without a network and i say you should break the mold and just have one main comm for all interaction. like you can still have characters make announcements about trading supplies thru walkie talkies or notes but i don't think they need magical halogram wrist watches.

out of all the games we have open right now i think the closest to what you're thinking about might be snowblind? i'm not in the game but i remember it being mostly survival in a icy wasteland with bonus evil monsters so go look at them. i would also suggest starting out with a character cap of 100 like them, especially since you are new to dwrp modding. it will keep everything manageable while still allowing good growth to keep it active.

my last bit of advice is don't back down to anon whining. build the game you want to build and the players interested in it will show up if you handle it well. i am so tired of interesting premises being neutered by people whining that they can't make THEIR character work there. also the game you are building has built in power imbalances with the fight over supplies and people are gonna be babies about it but just stick to your guns. we need this slap in the face honestly.

holy shit, thanks so much for this response. it's really long and reaffirms a lot of what we've been doing. we have the primary comms set up and are currently working on getting enough set up that we can advertise on the next rpanons post & open the game up december 1, so i guess look forward to seeing us soon.

wrt the network stuff, we actually have something that i hope is cool and/or innovative planned. the canon we're working from (the secret world) has player characters hooked up to basically a hivemind of bees that harvest knowledge, and most of the lore of the game is delivered by them. we have a network comm being prepped right now, and it's going to be opt-in, in that characters need to in canon consent to being hooked up to that hivemind, and are fed information to each other that way. so there's ways for people to organize & communicate across the island but you have to like, be alright with some bees picking at your brain in return, so there's a tradeoff.

i'm checking snowblind out right now! ive linked it to my comod who has already said that it's helping them understand things quite a bit.

ive got some questions still, if you don't mind!

1. i don't really want a separate meme community; is there a ton of issue in rolling it into the ooc community, so there's just the log & network & ooc groups?

2. how does backdating work? you just comment on an older post? or is this something that depends on the game's rules. i don't totally understand it.

3. what are the average size of dwrp games these days? i'm having trouble finding like, ways to gauge the size of individual games by just browsing their comms. i'm really wondering how necessary having a character cap is going to be if i'm not going to ever reach it.

passing through and figured i'd help a little, too.

1) no, there isn't. tbh i find the meme community sort of useless. imo they don't get as much mileage as they used to and majority use them for test drive purposes. so it's not a Must Have for gaming purposes.

2) did you mean back tagging -- unless this is a part of back dating? though forward dating is a thing. idk if you mean back tagging, it's basically when you continue to tag a post/thread beyond the date it was posted. for activity purposes, most games only allow 1-2 month back tagging to count. ie: character a and character b have a thread on a post created in march that they use for march ac. in april they use the same thread but only the comments they made in april.

3) it varies from game to game! some games instill a character cap from the gate because the mods know what they can handle. some don't. there's pros/cons to both sides of the fence, here, so it's really just preference.

the other anon answered the same way i would have so i'll keep this brief.

1. yeah ooc and meme comms are both ghost towns in all honesty so you can merge them together easily.

2. other anon got backtagging explained. backdating as i use the word explains the process of making a post and then changing the day it should ic happen. so say you make a post on november 3rd but it's for a halloween party, you would backdate the post to october 31st in the when tab so people would know. in the world of your characters this post happened in october, your character didn't throw a late party. it's just to help a bit with timelines. forward dating is saying something should happen on november 8th but you might not be able to get on that weekend so you make the post on the 3rd instead. that's honestly because we're all insane and ocd and try to make our threads make logical sense on a timeline. (which i personally don't do cause wow so much work)

3. this is a non answer but there is no average size. we have a ton of smaller games that average anywhere from 8 to 20 characters. we also have medium to large games that can easily go 100+ in character number. ryslig has a ridiculously high character count for example. it depends on what type of game you want to run and what would make it run most efficiently.

it's also a pretty subjective thing since every player has a different definition of what makes a game large or fast and make makes it small or slow. sorry i can't be more definitive on this.

"keep this brief"

way to go, self.

Really Tumblr is hard to RP on, but I don't know if I'd recommend DW.

A lot of people here are elitist divas if you even mention an off-DW RP history that wasn't like one stupid memebox on LJ in 2009 and they don't really have the writing talent or flexibility to back up being such assholes.

At least tumblr can be a supportive community. DW in my experience is a pretty sniping hive of harpies who have no interest in OOC friendship or novelty. I don't know if there's a better platform either though. Maybe IJ? It doesn't have this culture of anon catfighting.

i'm probably going to get shit for this but i refuse to go to ij because the branding of the website itself (Insanejournal & your blogs being called Asylums in particular) disgusts me

In my experience, IJ RP is either celeb RP or Harry Potter. Sometimes X-Men, sometimes OC stuff, but everything is just the same old crap once you've been around for a few years.

idk i feel like dw and tumblr have their equal quantities of elitist divas

they just come in different flavors

besides, op has already gotten three perfectly civil responses to this post alone despite outright stating that they're from tumblr. if you have any kind of thick skin at all and do the bare minimum of research needed to fit in and be civil about it, dw is no more drama-mongering than any other site on the internet

tumblr can be just as bad if not worse in other ways with petty sniping and getting into bitchfits if someone plays a pairing with someone else or isn't around when they want them right at that moment or "disrespects" their headcanons

honestly the golden rule here is be IC

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I'm bad at this

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