Ammokkx

I Wanna Hear Your Opinions On The Different Wrting Levels/Forums.

<Snipped quote by Ammokkx>
Honestly, if we had to restructure (like if it was possible). The aforementioned pitch of setting them by dedication would be a good idea; that or sort everything by audience/genre. As oversaturated a "Anime" section would be I feel like combined with the tag system it'd be a lot easier and better than what we have now.

@Inkarnate

Honestly not against this idea. RPNation does something very similar. Instead of sorting it by writing levels, each board has its own genre. Fandom, Fantasy, Sci-Fi, etc. and it works pretty well. I just don't RP on there because the average quality is way lower and player retention is pretty yikes.

The problem then becomes 'how does guild adopt this' as we've kind of been with our system for a fucklong time now.

I Wanna Hear Your Opinions On The Different Wrting Levels/Forums.

time for the casual/advanced/MASTER rename

I Wanna Hear Your Opinions On The Different Wrting Levels/Forums.

You could just all drop the subject and exchange it for the original purpose of discussion.

*shrugs* But what do I know?

@HaleyTheRandom

I mean.

I did.

I Wanna Hear Your Opinions On The Different Wrting Levels/Forums.

Well, I think there's some merit to a point having been brought up by Dynamo, still. Not judging people solely based on which subforums they frequent.

Ironic from me, maybe. But the fact is, yes, you shouldn't just judge a player's worth based on which subforum they're in most of the time. That's a silly notion, no matter your perception of the community.

However.

This shouldn't discourage people from doing the 'ol "Facebook screening" method of things. With which I mean, if you know the guy's not used to wherever he winds up at, it's poignant to go through his profile and look at some of his postings in other sections. See how they behave, how they write. Even if every sub has different standards and culture, you can get a good glimpse into a person by analyzing what it is they do in those other subs.

So in that sense, rejecting someone because they come from free, casual, advanced, 1x1, tabletop or arena isn't baseless in the sense that you can see they wouldn't make a good fit just off what they do in said frequented place. GMs hold the right to keep the order, so keeping you out because you write too much fluff in Advanced or don't seem like the organized type from your 15 1x1 checks in different threads isn't exactly what I call a bad thing.

Sum up your week in roleplaying in just 3 words

"go to sleep"

I Wanna Hear Your Opinions On The Different Wrting Levels/Forums.

@Dynamo Frokane But maybe you should keep this thread on-point about the topic, aye? The matter of whether or not your RPs are worth joining are best settled in interest checks and PMs, I think.

I Wanna Hear Your Opinions On The Different Wrting Levels/Forums.

To chip into the whole 'hey write gooder' debate myself, writing is inherently super subjective in every sense. Sure, there's some basic guidelines and objective standards you have to follow, but getting past that means all bets are off. You have your Hemmingways and your Tolkiens. It comes down to what you're looking for in a story, and writing on a forum is no different. Shaping your writing is mostly knowing your audience; I get a little irate at myself when I find half my paragraphs are nothing but fluff(read: all the fukkin' time) and would prefer to go a bit more minimalist, but at the same time, I am a lover of detail and expertly crafted scenes.

Padding it out like an essay is the worst thing you can do because nobody likes reading an essay, but if you can delve into the psychology of your character with flowery writing and convey their emotions through more than just inner monologue, by including things like body movement and facial expression, I think a good job can be done.

It also entirely depends on 'How much shit can I react to," because not always are you going to have a forest of material to work with. In an RP I'm in currently, I'm finding players are having a hard time posting simply because there isn't a lot to post about. We're def in the most rail-roady section of the RP and that's fine given current circumstance. If, instead, we had an entire apocalypse and a 1 year timeskip to work with, I bet everyone would crank out posts that are way larger due to just having more to work with.

I actually don't think I've said much of anything that hasn't been said already, and that I may be a bit of a victim of the essay syndrome myself here... but I think there's value in not dismissing certain lengths as a whole and instead look at it on a case-by-case basis.

Sturgeon's law prolly applies too, tho.

I Wanna Hear Your Opinions On The Different Wrting Levels/Forums.

@Dynamo Frokane

Thanks. I'm not arguing this. If you want an argument, take it to PMs.

I Wanna Hear Your Opinions On The Different Wrting Levels/Forums.

I'm going to guess @HaleyTheRandom wanted your opinions on how you felt about the categories of the forums in terms of writing as apposed to personal feelings you have about people who frequent sub-forums. Because then it quickly turns into the Roleplayers bitchfest thread again and we all know what happened to that.

@Dynamo Frokane

You can't talk about it in a vacuum, Dynamo. I stand by what I said. A community makes the subforum what it is, and the community of Arena is yikes.

Even if I glance at it in a vacuum, I see the game-ification of Arena in terms of the leaderboard and go 'This can't go any other way than terribly.'

To draw parallels with a tabletop game, in tabletops you have a shitload more systems. Aside from just punching a guy, you also have speech, investigation, smarts and any other manner of skills that could be useful and apply. At the same time, you're still playing in an actual world, so doing something stupid will get you punished, and this encourages, y'know, roleplaying.

Arena, however, has one goal: Winning. This does not lend itself to RP, it lends itself to powergaming and the aforementioned ego-contest going on in there. I'm avoiding calling out specific individuals, but I do mean it when I say it's *the* elitist subforum. The people there I would rather stay there, because the infrastructure of the subforum combined with the community creates an incredibly toxic environment, and when I say I want them out of my RPs, I want them out of my RPs. You can hang around in there all I want; my opinion of the subforum won't change, and this thread gave me an opportunity to share said opinion.

I Wanna Hear Your Opinions On The Different Wrting Levels/Forums.

Free is kind of alright, as far as I'm concerned. If you've absolutely no idea what to do or where to do it, it's always a good place to get your bearings on stuff even if it may initially set a bad precedent. It's also what I consider the most 'harmless' of any of the subforums, with its userbase being mostly self-contained and generally open and friendly from what I've seen. I say it's the best section you'd never see me caught dead in.

Casual is a pretty hot mess, and that's alright. It's the 'general' of RPguild as others have mentioned. While, yes, there's a fair bit of Superhero and Fandom RPs (Myself being no exception to this), there's also more standard fantasy stories and general RPing going on. It's got one hell of a fractured community though, and if drama happens it's 9/10 either here or in Arena(lol). You get a good feel for what everyone is like after your 15th or so RP, and even then you might run into somebody new still. It's house to a lot of bad GMs and flaky players though. I'd argue it's got the highest dead RP ratio compared to any other subforum (except arena, lol). I don't see why people take issue with its range of skill- it's honestly something I'd personally encourage. You can more often than not gauge how competent someone is by the mere title of something, and even if you couldn't, a quick glance at their first post tells you all you need.

It's also not like RPs are a constant flood over there. You get maybe four in a day at best, which is a reasonable enough amount to keep up. RPGuild isn't so flooded with activity that interesting concepts get buried instantly- and if something's interesting in casual, you'd better believe it's got an active thread that constantly makes headlines. Casual's just a good section, and honestly, I feel the term 'casual' fits the best as I don't see too many people there take it overtly seriously and they rather just have a good time instead.

Advanced is just a casual re-skin. I'm honestly not even joking. Anything you can find in casual, you can find in Advanced and vice versa. Sometimes the advanced subforums are even used to advertise a casual RP. I'd say the only difference is a small sub-section of elitist that don't know they're elitist making their nest in there, but honestly, this is in every subforum. I don't get the argument advanced somehow has more idea diversity- For christ sake, it had a persona RP going the same time one was running in casual, and an RP concept I saw not too long ago was very reminiscent of a casual RP I played in eons ago.

The only reason people perceive advanced as different is because it, generally, houses the more competent of casual RPers, but again, I've yet to see anything that couldn't happen in the casual section. It's all about audience, and there's a huge overlap. Some who find themselves to be Advanced residents even write like they'd fit in just fine with one of the more competently written Casual RPs- and I've seen this. This may all be anecdotal evidence, sure, but I'm not going to just put in a single example from a single RP for each of these and call it evidence either. Advanced is just less saturated, but in the end, not much different from Casual.

Oh, and sometimes it's also a dick-measuring contest.

Arena is lol. This is the true elitist section. RPs here, if they're not dead, aren't driven by the want to RP, they're driven by a want to win which defeats the entire purpose. It's a section made to flap about your giant ego and talk your way to victory. I honestly have no idea why a subforum this toxic would exist, but I'm glad it's a congregate for the people I'd rather not see in my own RPs.

Nation is weeeeiiird. To me, it seems like an overcomplication of a simple idea. From all I've seen and heard, Nation tends to devolve into excel-spreadsheet madness keeping track of every little thing as if we were playing crusader kings II: Electric boogaloo. Even then, I don't see the appeal of playing an entire country. Characters are already physical embodiments of certain ideas, kind of like how Greek and Roman gods used to be. You could easily convey the idea of a whole country in the manifestation of one, two or three at best characters with their own motivations and goals, thus streamlining the process. Then again, I don't know why anyone would submit themselves to the torture that is trying to play Crusader Kings II, so what do I know? Definitely not a section for me.

Tabletop is... eeeeeh... I don't feel it's terribly creative. Often it devolves into using already existing boardgames for their RPs, which I find you're better off doing in roll20. The few times I do see an original idea with an original system crop up, it's usually short lived. The section's harmless, so by all means it can exist, I'm just kind of 'eh' about the whole thing.

1x1 is something I have no experience with on this site, but I used to do this style in the past. It's been with a different community, but it was definitely easy to find a good partner and just have a fun time, and you could do any range of things. Nowadays I'm more a fan of group RPs because they allow for more creative visions and ranges of skill, but I liked my time when I still did it and encourage people who enjoy this with all my heart.

And finally, I'm going to include Expanding Horizons because it's also a subsection where people write in. EH is kind of a meme, but a meme that was doomed from the start. You can't really have a persistent world unless your site's dedicated to the concept. Guild is not. Guild also had much too small of a userbase to garner enough traction to kick it off. E.H. was better suited to just having an entire forum created for it and have its own userbase, rather than trying to insert it on the guild. Definitely an interesting experiment though, and one of the better things to happen to this site in a while as it has tried to innovate without taking anything away.