Most people, including myself, dont necessarily like being randomly PMed out of the blue for a RP like a vacuum salesman.

Most people do "read" it, it's just not our type of rp.

I’m sorry! I have been trying to re-arrange the upstairs, planning homeschool schedules for the upcoming school year, while also managing summer camp things and an end of the summer out-of-country trip. Keeping on top of the normal day-to-day life routines and responsibilities has taken presidency over reading your game. I don’t seem to have time to read it atm. I am sure you put a lot of effort into it.

Personally, being DM’d made me feel special, tho. Thank you and best of luck!

@tealrootssss You hate those people? I don't know why, they actually bothered to respond to you.

You're not wrong. When you PMed me I didn't bother looking at it. I'm GMing 2 RPs of my own and am participating in several others. I know my limits and have no reason to look at another RP that I know I won't be able to join. So I wrote "no thank you," which I felt was a polite enough response.

Do you feel wronged because I didn't bother to look at your RP? Your invitation was two sentences long I've had no interaction with you prior to you PMing me. I figured you were just a new user who was more interested in getting a +1 for your RP than someone who wanted to RP with me specifically. Because if you spent as much time writing your invitation to me as you did looking at my profile you'd know better. I write at Advanced and Casual levels and participate primarily in Anime RPs. Your Free level Victorian era RP is well outside my wheelhouse.

I have asked people to join my RPs before Via PM, but I didn't wing out those invitations like a kid on a paper route. I read their posts, their comments. I took their avatars into account, how they interacted with people OOC. When I PMed them it was to talk about the fandom my RP was based on. We talked for about a week before I revealed I had an RP idea brewing. But I didn't ask them to join, I asked them for ideas. I would explain how parts of the RP functioned and take their comments and criticisms to heart. More time passed, and eventually I posted it. Not only did they join, they brought friends with them and we ran the RP for about 4 or 5 years. But if I said "Hey you wanna join an RP I made?" And then linked them, falsely believing that they would look at it out of curiosity? It never would have gotten off the ground. I didn't throw an invite to random strangers, I became friends with them and then showed them something that was relevant to their interests.

I do hope you have better luck in the future. Turning your frustrations into a pie chart meme isn't a great recruitment strategy.

@BrokenPromise i didn't mean this in a way directed at you, and yes, i do thank you for telling me good luck, and the places are already full in the Victorian roleplay, so thankfully i did get people interested in my roleplay (and we even developed a group chat on here), i am very sorry if this offended you. and i know an apology may not be enough, but i did just mean this as a joke and i also know that would seem like an excuse, but i really do mean that. again, i did not mean to anger/offend you, and i'm very, very, very sorry about it. i hope you understand.

@tealrootssss I'm not offended. Articulating wordy and (hopefully) helpful RP advice is just something I do from time to time.

I understand you are a younger person, and likely don't have as much experience with the internet as some of us. I'd like to give you some advice about sharing jokes. Each one has a specific audience, and often comes at someone's expense. You risk your joke missing the mark or offending when people of the wrong audience hear your joke. If you shared this with your RP's OOC or on discord where most of the guild would never see it, it might have gotten a chuckle out of someone. But placing it prominently in a section where many people look, including a lot of people you likely advertised to, is going to give your joke the wrong kind of attention. Moreover, jokes of this nature tend to have an element of truth to them and most people can see that.

I share some pretty wild stuff with my RP groups, but I can maintain this appearance as a psudo intellectual by keeping jokes where they are more likely to be seen by the right people.

Most people on this site have interest checks up, whether in one subforum or a multitude of them. Lurking these, and reading their IC posts also, one can get a pretty good sense of each individual's tastes via genre, influences, writing style.

Doing this isn't just a courtesy; it's efficiency. Every roleplay has a target audience, and it is impossible for one single RP to have a target audience of "everyone." In other words, it cannot possibly appeal to people who write one-liners and those who write passages long enough to fill whole book chapters, those who want wish-fulfillment and those who want literary realism, those those who want chill slice-of-life and those who want actiony grimdark.......et cetera. Diametrically opposed tastes and interests mean your RP, once you've decided what its core premise is about and who it wants to impress, will always alienate some people. Which is not as bad a thing as it sounds—it means your game has already self-selected for players likelier to remain invested throughout and actually see your story through to its natural conclusion, because they were already interested in other games like it.

Speaking for myself, a quick glance at my posts lays my interests pretty bare at this point. I write an easy, breezy couple thousand words per post, and mostly in Low Fantasy, pseudo-historical-ish type secondary settings. But with various writing partners and across other accounts/communities I've also dabbled in a few specific cyberpunk, milsim, gothic/vampire, high fantasy, and anime SoL subgenres. With the exception of that last one, one can safely infer that I like high-concept but relatively grounded and [historically/scientifically] plausible speculative fiction. That is my flavor profile.

So the first reason I did not reply to your PM is that the core premise intrinsically does not interest me.

The second reason is that you could (and, tbh, should) have known that, had you tried. If you had respected people and valued their time, you would've already done your research. Thus, you would've already known who such a plot idea would interest and who it wouldn't, and furnished the PM list accordingly. Thus, you would've only reached out to members of your target audience, and not dozens and dozens of users indiscriminately. It didn't take a PhD to see that you hadn't done this, because I, for one, haven't posted in the Free section and/or written one-liner replies in the better part of two decades—since when I was your age, in fact—and certainly not on this year-old account. And since you obviously hadn't bothered to read my interest checks or really, put any effort at all into understanding my tastes before reaching out, it stood to reason that you didn't really respect my time, nor care about getting to know me before you tried to throw me into your cast of wacky and colorful characters.

You can see how being spoken to like that—not as a prospective friend and writing partner but as an item on a checklist—another faceless door in some door-to-door sales route—might deter some from taking such an inquiry seriously.

In summary, every game, just like any artwork or piece of media, has a target audience. Knowing your target audience before you pitch the game will result in fewer rejections, more synergy in players/cast, and hopefully, less frustrating times for everyone, including you.

Hope this helps

On my own end, as another of the people you pmed to ask if I was interested, I did not mind the pm itself. I can appreciate an attempt to generate traffic and find people who might join. I will say that it took me several moments of suspicion before I decided to treat it as not spam though, given as this site has had some history of random links not always leading where you think they will. So, that's my reason for initially just deleting the pm without replying. When I saw your name in the Recent Checks list and clicked the link there, I thought it was an interesting premise but not wholly my cup of tea, similar to what others have said, and didn't have the time to join another rp either way.

So, I don't think you did anything wrong in that regard. You took the initiative. As others are saying though, and as your pie chart shows, it isn't always the most efficient route.

As far as this pie chart itself being potentially offensive, I have to admit that when I first clicked the link and realised what it was referencing and who had posted it, I did find it a bit insulting and confrontational. Having read through the thread and your own intentions, however, I now realise the meme itself is not the problem. It's just a pie chart stating facts. We've all dealt with the issue of having a story we want to write and having to find people to write it with amongst the numerous strangers on this site with so many varied interests. The bigger problem is the way you've titled this thread, which very much does imply a negative connotation to the meme itself, and as BrokenPromise previously mentioned, with it being in a public forum for us people you pmed to see, I'm not surprised it received the response that it did.

Your frustrations are fair. Your pie chart is spouting facts. But with the only other context being how you hate these kinds of people.... I hope you can see how that might fall flat to, well, those people.

On a brighter note though, it is good to hear that you've been able to find people to write with, and I hope you continue to have great success. :)

I looked, I didn't like, I said no. Simple as that, don't be mad.

I don't roleplay with children.

@ChronicleMan i do understand