rpanons | but my main character syndrome

but my main character syndrome

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nah, i play in murdergames and 1-2 hours a day is plenty to be active in a murdergame outside of saturday trials

my god, how does anyone manage to balance a job and social life and hobbies outside of rp while being active in a game?

... how long does it take you to write a tag? i usually average around eight to ten tags per night in my inbox and it takes me a little under an hour to knock those out unless i have a bunch of lengthy log tags.

if you don't go here anymore why are you hanging out on rpa, in flatview no less

i'll say it's not required for you to tag that much, because yes it can take that long IF you choose to tag more than you can handle. i'm in games throwing out around 30 tags a day on average and if i do it during lunch, i can finish half. the other half i do at night. so that's less than two hours a day so long as i'm focused. this is about the length of a movie. some tags take a lot longer because i have to think more but on average i can throw out a tag in less than 5 minutes for easy threads (not ecats).

i think the only reason it would take 6 hours is if you have too many tags + are a slow tagger. in that case, you either do less tags or pick up your speed.

n...o, not at all. i spend maybe eight hours a week on tags.

now art. lemme tell you about how time-consuming that one is

It's also a healthy sleep hygiene habit to have a period of time set aside for "wakeful resting" (aka not actively reading or watching something) and just giving your body/mind time to relax .

It's kind of an emotional heat sink for an active imagination (directing thoughts into something pleasant instead of keeping yourself up worrying about stuff) and a signal to your body that it's time to sleep.

Surprise, some of our quirks are actually really good for us!

that's a wild amount of time per day to be devoting to rp, yes. i'm pretty active in games and i rarely spend more than an hour on it in a day, and most days much less. i wouldn't be capable of spending much more than that unless someone was sitting down and boomeranging with me. how much work are you doing on your icons and journals??

mostly just checking out of curiosity, why you mad?

da, but that's a good question.

OP may not realize just how much graphic/web design they've taught themselves.

Maybe it's because I'm utterly shit at that aspect of the hobby, but I feel the need to point out that churning out tons of icons (especially ones that end up being useful for portraying a character's emotional state) and designing neat-looking and reader-friendly journals is a skill you're putting practice into when you spend time on it.

You're never wasting time if you're learning, OP. But it does sound like you might be close to burning yourself out by approaching it as such a grind.

oh same here! i also spend a lot of time daydreaming about where the thread might go and playing out various possible scenarios in my head

- if an idea doesn't work for one or both of us or our characters, we can talk about it and troubleshoot to figure out workarounds

OMG this. OOC communication is a big key for me. I've tried to play with more standoffish players who wanna just improv everything, and I'm sure that works for them, but I need to talk about different possible outcomes and which ones might excite a partner more than others.

I don't need to be someone's constant discord chat buddy or have a million tag commentary/planning plurks, but even just being able to shoot ideas back and forth via PM or hashing out mundane offscreen/handwaved CR can be a huge boon for being able to write for my RP partner and their version of the character rather than trying to guess what would work best.

Basically, I need RP partners to be pretty chill and casual about OOC communication, or I end up losing interest.

^^^ all of the above, but especially these: 'i'm excited to tag back, i really want to know what happens next' + 'we have similar interests and priorities in what we want out of a thread'

when i have good writing chemistry with a person, i both have a sense of where and how the thread will go next (because we plotted it out or because we decided on a premise/kinks/whatever) and am also delighted by whatever flourishes they add that are unique to their character. when i pitch additional plot or ideas for where our thread should go next, we're inspired by each other's ideas and can build off one another.

for me, I click when

-We can mix and match characters on our muselists regardless of fandom, medium or genre just by being excited about seeing what the characters make of each other, even when we're both canonblind.

-We end up getting in to each others canons because we recognize each others tastes well enough to know what to recommend.

-OOC communication is easy. I can't feel like I'm disrupting your sanctum of solitude by asking if you want to do abc or xyz in our thread.
I don't need daily check-ins or constant plurk chatting, but I need to feel more like I'm asking someone what they want me to make them for dinner than setting up a job interview when I approach them about some RP stuff.

It's even better if we're both suggesting ideas and getting excited about stuff.

-No one's taking anything too seriously and we can laugh at ourselves if something goes off the rails instead of getting mad about it.

-There's a willingness to discuss problems clearly and calmly.

-there's an RL > RP understanding and no hard feelings when stuff has to be dropped

-similar sense of humour and timing. Being able to have a setup in one tag and the punchline in the next without planning. That's a sweet spot.

-Bonus points if we get along while talking about non RP or fandom things. Most of you folks are pretty neat people and I like getting to know more about you.

I use a lot of my dropped threads as jumping off points for new internal "adventures." Some have gotten a lot longer and complex than what started them!

"Setting up a journal" can also mean scrolling endlessly through layout options and icon communities, and not learning a thing. I don't know what op has done but I can understand if some people feel pressure to have the perfect journal and therefore wasting time on those things.

yeah but even so, how many journals are they making here that it's taking them that much time on a daily basis?

this week i'll have my first psl to ever reach 100 comments and i'm really happy about it! i used to be the type of person who'd idle out of 5 comment a month ac, so i'm really proud of myself for how far i've come considering this one's been going for under a month. it helps that my partner is an amazing writer and we're able to introduce all kinds of random elements to the scenes so far.

Some of us are just slower at coming up with responses and writing them. It's not a crime. We just need to adjust our rp habits accordingly and it can mean no games at all even if finding meme or PSL partners is a struggle as well. Writing 8 tags in less than hour is a pipe dream for many.

Eh, they're still making choices about aesthetics that I have a mental block for, so I can't really speak to how much value that does or doesn't have. It's only time wasted if it's causing more frustration than satisfaction.

I do have to say that I've never felt like my messy journals with basic layouts, no navigation pages and modest icon collections have ever held me back as an RPer here. It might be that I've never noticed what I'm missing, but it's never caused a problem.

once i realized that overthinking tags doesn't actually make them better and just wastes time, i started just going with my gut instinct for tags and sticking with the first response my brain comes up with instead of second-guessing it and rewriting it multiple times. it's made my rp life so much better.

What I meant was that if someone is feeling anxious about being a perfect rper, it can leak into everything they do, whether that's taking too many threads and taking too much time writing those tags etc. When they eventually burn out doing that, everything starts to take even more time. That doesn't have to be op's problem specifically but it's clear they aren't enjoying rp as much as they probably used to.

"It's only time wasted if it's causing more frustration than satisfaction."
I wasn't trying to deny that. I only wanted to point out that spending time on something doesn't necessarity mean you learn anything.

A few to go through here.
I've just started putting effort into RPing again after a bunch of stuff made it too hard to do much more than the occasional casual meme thread for a few years and it's going pretty well.

I'm not game-ready quite yet, but despite most of my characters being either on the obscure or low-demand side, I've gotten a lot more bites on both meme toplevels and tag-outs than I expected. I kept hearing about how obscures have such a hard time on memes, but I guess I picked some pretty adaptable ones and/or really lucked out when I picked who to tag out to.

Despite mostly obscure characters, I recently started voicetesting a supporting character from a major franchise that I've loved all my life but never had fandom involvement with before.
The character is one that gets a lot of hate in non-rp fandom places, but all the castmates and xcanon people I've played off have been really nice and encouraging about them and how I play them.

Got a really cool xcanon CR thread where we're both playing rare-as-fuck characters who turned out to be a perfect match for what could be some neat plotty stuff.

Have found more than one castmate for my most obscure muse. That I didn't beg or enable. Just a total stranger who also picked a blorbo from the same lesser-known source.

This. I've tossed out a few that I knew were duds as soon as I hit send, but I've had so many more good tags that my occasional Ralph Wiggum-y ones are easy to forget.

Agreed, sorry if I came off argumentative there.

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