Animation Source Forums

Guys, seriously. Stop. This topic is going to get locked for good this time if we don't stop fighting.
Anyways, no problem Rose. Hopefully this will go very well!

So what does everyone think of the tutorial so far? I'm trying to get some feedback since the discussion topic is empty right now. And I know it is slow right now, but thats just me and the others working some things out. Once it gets started, it should move along at a faster pace.

Frankly, I didn't even know it had begun. I wasn't provided with a link or anything so that I could follow...

I am so sorry! I thought I sent you a link! Here it is: /board/roleplay-tutorial-t33905.html

Oh don't be sorry. It's very likely I just may have missed it in all the crazy stuff I am trying to keep up with! I will check in shortly and see what I can do. Thanks for everything, including the kind kudos!

I highly disagree with your opinions on the quality of roleplaying on this website.

The role plays in the "Balto Private Roleplaying" section featuring wolves turned human with Justin Bieber are hugely entertaining. I don't see what you are complaining about.

I think there is a difference between entertaining and well-thought. Role-playing is about creating a story and perfecting your writing. I am just annoyed when a role-play has no plot, unoriginal characters, and one-liners. I am begining to see that the roleplaying section is being split into two groups. One of them enjoys thought-out plots, unique characters, plot twists, character interactions both good and bad, a paragraph for each post, and a story that actually makes sense. The other group only joins roleplays that have a very loose storyline so they can have their clone characters do whatever they want. It doesn't take a lot of effort to be in the latter.

Haha!

I was being sarcastic there for just a second. It's one of my favorite things to do, both online, and in real life. Unfortunately, my voice can come across as extremely deadpan and difficult to detect in both instances, so I apologize if I came across as offensive or anything like that.

In all seriousness, I completely agree with you regarding the quality of roleplays. Now, I'm not very experienced in writing them yet; the first one I started participating in about nine months ago (you might remember it) is still the ONLY one I've worked on. I might not be the best judge of quality as a result, but I can definitely see how you would be frustrated based on what I HAVE seen.

I've read several of the older and archived ones that my co-author (and one of your featured RP Tutorial editors!) has participated in from years back, and the difference is night and day.

My thought process when I had very first started with "Truth and Consequence" and had NO knowledge on what a roleplay was, was that a roleplay was more of a co-operative fan fiction, with certain users locked to certain characters. I thought'd it'd be an interesting challenge. That's why I tried to put as much detail as possible into it and to always keep a sense of forward progress.

That's something I see that kills a lot of roleplays; a lack of direction. People talking for the sake of talking, but no real story. Me and GodzillaWolf already had a general outline for our story before we even started, and on practically every post, we send a message back and forth to tell one another what we were aiming to achieve in our most recent post, and what we are aiming to achieve with our next one.

It's a much more complicated process than simply typing "boy get po-tarz from tooster and offers them to girl here you go he says", but I think the results are worth it.

Haha, you'll have to excuse my blondness. Now that I read over your previous, I can see the sarcasm now. Oops...

I am in complete agreement with your points. Roleplays should be treated more like fanfictions/stories than just a game. This is how things used to be here on AS. I am also disappointed that most roleplays now consist of talk. I forgot to metion that before, so thank for pointing that out.

Maybe people think "Role Playing" and associate it with "Turn Based Role Playing Games" ala Final Fantasy, where almost all of the action is delivered in one sentence bursts saying "I took this much damage." -break to other character - "I used this ability." - break again -.

I don't mind a lot of dialogue really. Actually, I quite like it. Some of the most powerful moments I think I've written in ours stemmed from heated exchanges of dialogue between characters.

Granted, those instances were made much, much easier by the fact that I had control over both the characters speaking in question, so I could effectively throttle and control the pacing. Open roleplays I would imagine to be a much more different story, where speaking to other characters without overloading them with a million questions at once essentially becomes a waiting game for a reply, than a reply back. Continue ad nauseum, and I can see where it might get a little ridiculous.

Me and Godzillawolf had considered at one point writing a long dialogue sequence ahead of time between two of our separate characters, and posting that in one post in lieu of the long series of back-and-forth's that can bring the story to a crawl. We decided against it in the end, choosing to communicate dialogue in the form of a song, but it was nothing if not an interesting solution to the problem.

But again, it requires a modicum of effort. I'm surprised the "RPG Discussion and Talks" boards are so vacant. With open Role Plays, I imagine those would be a god send for setting a story structure in place without having to rely on private messages.

I think you may be right about people misinterpretating what a role play is, or at least what is mean on this site. I never really thought about that before. Maybe we should all make an effort to counter this misinterpretation and telling new memebers exactly what a roleplay is. Just a thought.

Anyways, I don't mind a lot of dialouge in a roleplay either. Sorry if I made it sound that way. What I meant is a post after post of this:

"What is your favorite color?" Johnny asked.

"Yellow," Susie said.

I think that conversation is essentail for a story to progress, but there also has to be more to it. It is also not too hard to make simple conversations creative. Simply replaceing "asked" with "questioned" or "asked out of curioustity." And "said" can be replaced with so many different words, but a few good ones are "replied," "stated," "demanded," "wondered," and so on.

Also, just writing a sentence or two about why this person is asking the question is also helpful and creates more depth and interest. It also explains things more. And how many people do you know that talk without moving? I think if the conversation is light and not too critical, it is nice to add what kind of hand movements they are making.

I love that you and Godzilla use songs in your roleplays. It makes the story so much more entertaining and just shows how much work goes into the story.

People hardly ever you the Discussion forum for some reason. It is a little harder to plan things in an open roleplay, granted, but I am surprise it isn't used for more often for people involved in private roleplays with three people. I am starting to wonder how many people on AS actually know about this forum...

Unfortunately, as exhibited by the numerous topics on role play tutorials, even if the material is there, I don't know that people would peruse it. Or even if they did glean the information, putting it to use is a whole different story. It was mentioned in this post earlier, it can be chalked up to laziness.

I definitely agree on the variety of word choices there. Even outside of verbs related to dialogue (of which there are many), I've caught myself relying on particular phrases a lot, and have actively worked to try and change them up.

Sometimes, the replacements can come across as heavy handed (a term I used to describe my work often), pretentious, or maybe changing the tone of the sentence completely, so I'll lean on a more simple word like "said" or "asked". I don't know if that's a reason why others overuse those words, but it's why I will use them sometimes.

It's a lot of fun writing the songs for them. Even recorded myself singing it, and sent it to Godzilla so he could hear exactly how the melody went. Again though, unless you are incredibly good at impromptu lyricism, it requires a preemptive knowledge of what's going to happen.

I'm not sure if I'm using the Discussion board properly, but I've turned the one about our specific roleplay into a behind-the-scenes sort of topic, citing inspirations and quotes, and defining character roles. For two person private roleplays, I can see why it might be easier to message back and forth. For larger groups of people (three or more), it'd be so much simpler to just post ideas on a message board like a bulletin board.

On this topic: /board/post1406847.html#p1406847 : I have started some discussion questions. I hope you guys check it out and respond to the questions!

I wanted to kind of up-date this topic, now that the tutorial is well on its way to becoming a success and the roleplaying seems to be improving. There are a lot of things that still annoy me, though.

My biggest complaints right now are grammar and one-liners. I think we pretty much said all we can about one-liners, but there is still a huge problem with it. A lot of people come up with the arguement that "There just isn't anything else I can write." I feel bad correcting the younger members who probably don't know how to write a descriptive paragraph, but I really want to encourage them to write more. Also, the grammar is really, really horrible. I know that in all my posts, I have my fair share of misspellings and typos, but at least I use puncuation and capital letters. Has anyone else noticed posts were people write with no periods at the end of a sentence and lower case names?

Despite my constant posting on open roleplays with suggestion on how to make a plot better, I am seeing no results. The worst part is that all those horrible plotted roleplays that no one was joining before? Well, there are people joining them now. I really don't understand how any of these people are having any fun roleplaying in this topics, but they are gaining more and more pages so they must be enjoying themselves somehow.

Anyways, has anyone else noticed anything improving or getting worse since the start of this topic? Just wondering.

EDIT

And now new members are calling be out for "moderating" the roleplay forums. I am sorry that I am a senior member and an experinced roleplay who knows the rules very well and is happy to report a topci that does not follow them. Yes, I know I am not a mod, but the actualy mods are busy looking over the ENTIRE site! They need people to report things to them, otherwise, nothing would ever get done. They can't find every problem going on in AS. And don't complain to me when you are the one not respecting the rules and other people. Just saying....

Ah, okay, I feel much better getting that off my chest.

Well, since the Tutorial is the "latest" topic here, I'll just say this: I consider the efforts of the members involved a success in creating an interesting and thought-provoking example. Unfortunately, I have not seen anywhere near a "dramatic" increase in post quality (though don't get me wrong; I find it extremely helpful!) If anything, I'd say that certain members use its existance as an excuse to "boss" or "instruct" other members on what to do (even though they are the inspiration for its creation!)

Now, perhaps I am not much of one to talk; my first and only (successful) roleplay is The Legend of Kyathro, which I created when I first joined. When I created it, I really didn't have much of a "direction" for it to go -it's more of those "let's see what happens" types. However, this was also my attitude when I created it; I didn't really expect anyone to join, let alone for it to still be thriving! (Since then I have reworked the basic plot to have more of a direction but still be "roomy".) In many ways, roleplaying for me is a way to practice and develope my writing and further develope characters I have already created. Lyllii, for example was born from a time of my life that wasn't so great (though fortunately nowhere close to being anywhere near as severe) so she ended up with a rather angsty past and personal baggage, but still strives to rise above it.

Now, what REALLY annoys me is the lack of grammer, creativity, and (dare I say it) excess of topics being posted. I'll admit it, I'm very picky about which topics I'll join, and I tend to become aggravated by heaps of one particular genre. Though there are always exceptions, when there is a fad, the few creative ones of that particular genre get pushed to the bottom while the cliche ones gain rabid popularity with cliche one-liner posts. And though I often choose to ignore this -by not joining them, obviously- these posts are all that new members see, and as an effect, copy. And so the cycle continues to repeat and decay (don't ya just LOVE cycles?)

While some may try to say, "Well why don't you guys post a bunch of new 'good' topics and flush out the bad ones instead of ranting about it!" it is honestly not that simple. Although this has already been eloquently said, it takes time and effort to create a good post, and in effect, a good roleplay. The problem is that too many people simply don't care, and will always be able to post a bunch of "mediocre stuff" faster than "quality stuff" can be. Artistry cannot be rushed, and good writing is an artistry.

Now, about the "Mary-Sues". The type of characters that annoy me the most are the "I'm an abused emo kid that says whatever I like but still has a great personality and everyone loves me" types. Um, hello? Logic much? If a character has had a terrible upbringing, they will have scars! For example, if a child is abused, the resulting teen/adult will either act extremely mousy, violent, or have some other psycological issues. As Windancer has already expressed, it is not a crime to have a "normal" character. However, what disturbs me more than anything is the gradual increase of teen-pregnancy charcters. Do these members honestly think they can "work around" the rules by having this as part of a character's personal history?