rpanons | sorry that people are sick of your majestic mcus

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i feel like i've outgrown dwrp.

except idek where anyone else rps these days so i keep coming back one way or another. just to set myself up for disappointment ig.

in a way i feel like dwrp is the thing most other people are supposed to grow into as they rp-mature

we don't have weird offensive race bending or trans headcanons like tumblr, don't rp in pretentious mix-and-match fonts
we don't get batshit about underage or problematic ships like twitter
we don't blur ic/ooc like reddit or f-list
we have, ostensibly, better writing and rping quality miles above ij or message boards or anywhere else rp typically takes place

so if you feel you've 'outgrown' dwrp it's probably more that you just need a break from rp in general because i'm not sure where else it's really (consistently) better. so we keep coming back.

I cannot think of any RP environments that are an all-around upgrade from DWRP. They may have different downfalls, but pretty much all RP cultures are bad/immature in their own ways. It's just the way it is with this sort of hobby.

true. tbh i've been away from dwrp for a long time and only came back to see if anything has changed.

- last i checked we are still p dependent on plurk for OOC communication & game announcements. plurk's format isn't exactly my favorite tbh.

- blurring ic/ooc is debatable. while we're not as bad as other places, there are still cases of people getting too attached to their rp/ship partners even here.

- sometimes it feels like pulling teeth to find decent writers who will not drop threads five comments in and/or are clearly just threading just to meet their activity requirements.

- not sure if this is an unpopular opinion but i really don't worry too much about writing quality. then again i'm not sure most people here care either but. idk. as long as the other person is trying and not being treegate levels of OOC, i can roll with it even if their writing isn't the best.

that said i think you and other anon who replied to you have a good point. rp culture itself can be p immature sometimes. maybe it's time to move on. :(

what i did when i was feeling this way anon was i cut out rp as my main-ish hobby and focused on other things, and whenever i do feel like it i have a couple of friends i thread with who don’t mind delays and who i don’t mind delays from. then i started checking out memes and found a couple people who looked like they reliably tagged back and whose writing i liked and tagged them. i got rid of plurk and i communicate with bakerstreet strangers via pm or even just subject lines, and that’s about it.

taking out the largely performative social aspect of rp, outside of friends who i talk about things other than rp with anyway, and being realistic about my time and interest have made me enjoy the hobby much more. varying my hobbies has helped a lot too.

idk if any of this will help you but fwiw i don’t think it’s bad to have grown out of the hobby either. it happens sometimes and think of it as having time to pick up something new you might enjoy!

I think we were supposed to rp-mature into having enough social confidence to make friends and start tabletop games.

As you can see, we chose to instead remain social rejects in rp purgatory.

Some of us maintain both tabletop games and journal RP. They're different experiences and fill different needs.

I know. Wouldn't have mentioned it otherwise, I just wanted to make a stupid joke.

That said, tabletop campaign structure in general seems to be the way dwrp is trending now. Games are smaller and more plot focused, while OCs have become an expected norm. What I've seen keep a lot of people here is the social aspect. Theoretically, we have enough options here to pick and choose so we can get what we want with little to no compromise, we can opt out of interactions with players and characters we don't like, bigger games give us the opportunity to expand that to things that just disinterest us, and there's a lot of freedom to pick up and drop (characters/plots/threads/games/etc.) as the mood strikes us.

None of those reasons are inherently bad reasons, either, so despite my shitty joke please don't assume I'm making a value judgement. They are what they are, and there's a hundred different sources to motivate any of them. But it does take a different level of social confidence that I've never seen to be the norm here to both start and maintain a good table dynamic.

This is also just one person's observation, so if none of that is true for you and/or I'm totally wrong: cool, feel free to dunk on me. Just tell me more about your own observations because I think it's neat.

It's really surprising to hear that you feel OCs have become more of a norm. To me, DWRP definitely feels like the home of fandom crossover RP still. OCs are tolerated, but OC players on anoncomms are very much told the onus is on them to do outreach with their character because no one's looking for them. Restoria is the only OC-only game I could name.

Meanwhile, I remember ~8 years ago on Livejournal, at least in the pockets I frequented, OC cliques and games were a common thing, with groups starting up from MMW inspiration posts or people jumping on the fandom OC bandwagon. Example: the Harry Potter next-gen group that was around SWS, Grimm Units, House of Cards. (Yeah, I know each of those were disasters in one way or another.) I don't think any of those would get the same buy-in and traction here and now that they did back then. The death of SWS (and perhaps of musemostwanted) sort of led to the death of those groups.

However, I didn't participate in many actual games in that era, so I'm aware my own perceptions may be non-standard on this matter.

You know, I honestly completely forgot about SWS and MMW because they always felt kinda separate from the rest of LJRP at the time. From what I remember, though, a lot of that group splintered off to IJ. There's always been a higher concentration of OC games there, even if some are thinly veiled RPF.

And you're right, I don't think 'OCs become the norm' is really that correct? It's probably more that there's an expectation now that they *will* be tolerated, compared to what I remember from back in 05ish to just before the migration where they did not mix with canon rp, at least when it came to larger established games. Those OC's (from what I remember of SWS and MMW) also tended to be based not only within a popular canon, but also directly involved in canon events/related to popular canon characters. What I've seen of OCs now is that they're from a player's original worldbuilding or a game's setting.

That seemed to be the defining feature of LJRP as a kind of culture, compared to other booming rp sites at the time. All the other platforms I remember playing on were excluding canon characters in favor of OCs. And compared to places like forums or chatrooms, LJRP and then DWRP is the only place I've seen that has a community both as large as this is and -- idk how to phrase this exactly? Coherent, I guess? There's a community across the individual games that interacts regularly and formed a kind of super-community.

Somebody way smarter than me could probably write a really cool paper about this.

Also as a fun note: there are members of the cosplay community on TikTok that consider that to be rp, and that's super interesting to me in terms of the shift away from narrative storytelling to putting the emphasis on aesthetic mimicry.

I'll add it to the list after the paper I keep promising myself about the different terminology used for similar concepts across roleplaying communities. (Example: "TPO [Character]" vs. "[Character]-mun")

Fuck yeah, papers!

but tabletop games are boring

sorry that people are sick of your majestic mcus

Re: RP WOES

Re: RP WOES

+1

ayrt

da

Re: RP WOES

Re: RP WOES

Re: RP WOES

ayrt, in good faith

stupid joke anon, also in good faith

ayrt

ayrt too

Re: RP WOES