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Dealing With Roleplay Setbacks


Bellosh

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This blog is dedicated to Elderflower: may she return to Canterlot one day with bows and eternal happiness.

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[colour=#FF0000]DEALING WITH ROLEPLAY SETBACKS: A COMMENTARY BY BELLOSH101[/colour]

Today, I’ll be talking for a little bit about a sort of subject that’s been nagging me throughout this week. For the most part, my RPing experiences in World of Equestria (WoE) have been pleasant and very fun ones, and personally I’ve ever encountered a user who I deemed to be excessively annoying to deal with. That said; there have been a few times now when I’ve had to grapple with the specter of RP failure too, in one form or another. If you’ve been RPing on these forums long enough, then there’s a very good chance that one of the following unfortunate things has happened during the course of your RPs. Hopefully today, I can help provide you with tips on how to bounce back from such setbacks in WoE (or FFA for that matter).

Your Thread Is Less Popular Than Expected: One unfortunate reality of WoE is that no thread is guaranteed to be interesting for users. Sometimes only one or two people show up in an open thread you create, or maybe nobody shows up at all. Thing is, we all can’t hit home runs every time; inevitably some RP concepts that we create will be inferior to others. The best ways I’ve found to encourage interest in a RP is to invest time and effort into the thread premise and to avoid standard meet-and-greet scenarios. Just because WoE is a slice-of-life environment doesn’t mean the only situations that can be RPed are character-to-character introductions and purchasing goods/services; think outside the box!

Your Thread Fizzles Out: Even if you’ve got a good RP thread going, sometimes all of it comes crashing down through the menace of inactivity. Now, the fear of your thread dying does not give you the excuse to ceaselessly pester your fellow RPers to post; sometimes, they just may be busy with real-life or struggling with a massive backlog of other RPs they’re in. However, the occasional friendly ping (never more than once a week) just might come in handy when someone forgets it’s their turn; I myself had to be pinged in a couple instances when a thread completely slipped my mind. In the event that you’re dealing with a chronic absentee RP participant, you really don’t have much option other than moving on without them... but make sure you give their characters room to come back out of courtesy.

Your Character Plans Fall Through: We all put love into the original and cast characters that we apply for, but it can be quite disheartening to see all the story ideas you planned for your pony to derail one by one. Sometimes, I think of my first OC Spin Tale as my greatest failure; a whopping six out of his ten RPs found themselves abandoned, with two of those being threads I anticipated highly. The important thing though is to never blame the character, since users wouldn’t RP with them in the first place if the character was extremely ill-conceived. In the case of cast characters, giving an unfun one up is a perfectly valid thing to do too... especially if they’re in high demand.

A RP Partner Is Hard to Work With: For whatever reason, you and another RPer have totally different ideas concerning a thread’s direction, and sometimes the two of you can really find it hard to tolerate the other. While I find that whole Love & Tolerate mantra to be nothing but feel-good hooey invented so bronies can pat themselves on the back, one thing to take from it is to never let the other person get to you. If you run the thread, politely remind them of that fact; if not, respect the OP’s wishes. If necessary, feel absolutely free to have the RP Help Staff resolve the dispute. However, never feel ashamed to cut off all ties with a troublemaker should it prove necessary; no matter how saddening it may seem to you, it is a preferable state of affairs compared to letting your seething anger negatively affect your enjoyment of Canterlot.

A RP Partner Leaves Canterlot: This potentially may be the saddest sort of experience on the forums; working with a user you’ve bonded with very well only to have them quit RPing for important reasons (job, school, finds absolutely enjoyment in RPing anymore, ect.). But alas, real-life is always much more important than the virtual one; even if a number of your most cherished RP threads suddenly die without your partner, you must always accept that they have to leave WoE for months or even forever. The best way to handle this situation is let your partner go while continuing to maintain off-site friendships with them. Who knows; he or she may return one day. ^_^

You’re In Too Many RP Threads: Get a life. :D

That’s it for today. That probably isn’t a complete list, but it covers most of the basic pitfalls of RPing. I hope any disillusioned RPer who reads this blog becomes more motivated to keep on participating in our RPs.

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