Send Valbullion?
1. At a high level
2. Advertising your roleplay
3. Skipping in roleplay
4. Posting orders
5. GM styles
6. On the subject of recaps
Have you ever started a roleplay, or established a storyline, or organized a clan or syndicate, only to find the idea fizzing out and floundering about until quietly bowing its head and fading from existence? We create magnificent worlds and characters and concepts for others to participate or use, so why don't they catch?
Some of you might be asking yourselves how, in a place as choked with activity and creativity in Valucre, something like this could possibly happen. Well rest assured there are reasons to this kind of stagnancy and there are ways to address it to keep your roleplay activity happy, healthy and moving along at a decent pace.
If you've noticed, I never have a shortage of RP's to participate in, either created by myself or created by others, but it isn't for the reasons you might be thinking of. You see, there are a few things I do to ensure I am never behind the curve. Interested? Keep reading.
Although originality is always welcomed and encouraged, one shouldn't feel pressured to be original in the conception of their ideas either. Execution can be just as important, if not more, as the idea itself. There have been some marvelous roleplays that revolve around rebooting a pre-existing storyline, or using pre-existing characters.
As a writer, you should celebrate if others write well, even better than you do, rather than feel intimidated. It takes diamond to cut diamond, and surrounding yourself with excellent writers is a great way to refine your own ability.
| At a high level |
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- Patience: Don't expect your ideas to catch fire right away. Don't give up on an idea just because it hasn't become the most popular thing since Valucre. Learn to wait, take the time to flesh out your idea; people respond to well thought out concepts. Post a Water Cooler thread, wait a week. 20 people might say they're interested, 10 people will join, and 5 people will be active. Not what you expected but five people can work wonders if they really want to. Work with what you have.
- Impatience: Never sit on dead RP's. If your character is in a stagnant thread, don't let the inactivity lock you in. Either push the thread forward yourself, pulling in new people to help you, or exit your character and do something else. Roleplaying is a collaborative effort and hence cooperation is essential, but you also don't want your character's growth and development stymied by the inactivity or carelessness of others.
- Activity level: Forum roleplay, particularly when compared to chat roleplay, moves a bit slow. The trade of immediate interaction for well-written, thought out responses is happily accepted by many. A good way around forum ennui is participating in multiple threads, a fairly common practice in Valucre. 3-5 threads is a decent workload, some taking less and others taking more. But if you find yourself being bored on Valucre, find another way to contribute, and if you find yourself stressed by how much you have to do, lower the load. Don't spread yourself too thin. When you're running a thread, 3-5 players is a good max capacity. Any more tends to hit the thread with doldrums.
- Unreliable people: Don't let your threads stagnate for no reason. Occasionally people get busy. You might be in a thread with four other people and one of them will get sick, or have to study for a midterm, or lose their internet connection. On the one hand you don't want to leave them behind but on the other you don't want the story to die. When it comes to writing the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few. There is no reason why a story should die because of the inactivity of a single person, and you'd be surprised how often just a single person's absence can bring a story crumbling down because people aren't bold or motivated enough to keep going.
- Try again later: If you make an attempt to start something RP related, and that attempt fails, don't get disheartened. Try again later, in a few weeks or a few months. Valucre gets new members daily, all of whom might be interested an idea and not have been around for its initial advertisement, or people may have been interested that were at that point in time too preoccupied to join another roleplay, or some member's tastes may have changed and an idea they weren't interested in before might be right up their alley now. Don't let your idea die just because of a wrong place, wrong time scenario.
| Advertising your roleplay |
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I've made a thread. This can be the beginning to an intricate storyline, or a wanted ad for a random adventure, or an informational on a club or a clan I want people to join, a description for a village I want to get more activity to, a market or a blacksmith or anything like that. What now?
- Make a thread in the Water Cooler, linking to your thread(s) and containing sufficient information to engage readers new and old. Include a hook with that link to snag the attention of the passing reader.
- If applicable post this in the Open Threads, which can be found in the Water Cooler section. You can bump your thread every 2 weeks, aside from organic bumps, such as new users asking questions or announcing their involvement.
- If you have Facebook and are a part of the Valucre Fan Page and/or the Valucre Group, then you can use these as avenues to advertise as well. The Fan Page and group are also a good way to keep up on Valucre news in general.
- Linking to your clan/market/storyline in your signature is a good way to advertise your stuff across the forum. Please note we don't allow cross-site advertisement.
- Reach out to new members. New members are not only eager to play but, being new, likely aren't tied up elsewhere with other roleplays. They're a great wealth of activity if approached the right way, and with an engaging enough premise.
Being active is an important part of any community. More important than just being active, however, is being polite and engaging in a positive manner. Nobody wants to invest the time it takes to write with you if you're a ludicrous asshole. It's about being responsible, even if just a game or hobby. Don't start things you can't finish, and if something happens halfway through that you have to jump ship, don't get offended if things continue without your involvement. Valucre is about more than just you, it's about us.
| Skipping in roleplay |
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My personal grace period is 3 days. After that whoever is holding the thread up must be ignored in the interest of pushing the story forward and giving those writers who are still around a chance to write.
Some people consider this rude. Most often, those people are the ones being skipped in the interest of preserving story and plot architecture that are so desperate to remain involved they don't care if the story dies completely as long as they get their way.
Those that take offense at being skipped should take the time to realize this forum revolves around more than just one person and their character.
And if you've managed to make a storyline where your character is the crux, and the story stagnates because of inaction from yourself (whether simple negligence or legitimate loss of ability), bite the bullet either way. 3 days, 72 hours, is ample time all things considered. And if not, then maybe you shouldn't be trying to master intricate plots and storylines. It isn't as if you are being permanently excluded. Likely by the time the next round comes around you'll be able to integrate yourself into the story a gain as if you've never left.
Everybody knows what it's like to be busy. When something like that happens, everyone should not be waiting on everyone else. If a while goes by in a storyline or thread, rather than saying to yourself "Oh it's been a while since someone posted in that thread, I guess it's dead oh well!". Go make a post and push the story forward. One person's, usually, temporary absence or negligence should not bring to a halt the efforts of a collective of people. If a storyline started with six people and it's dwindled down, realize you only need two to keep the story going.
| Posting orders |
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The beneath is taken from the Formal Questions and Answers thread, made to answer some of the more immediate questions that new users may find themselves with.
Strict order: Exactly what it sounds like. Threads follow a strict posting order. ABCD will always be ABCD. C cannot post until B does and B cannot post until A does. The customary wait time before skipping a person is three days.
Once per turn: The order is fluid, as in not fixed, but each person may only post once per turn/round. So, ABCD one turn could be ADCB the next turn and BCDA the third turn. The advantage of this pattern is that if A talks to D, D doesn't have to wait for B and C to post before D responds to A.
Nested: Even more fluid than the above post. A loose sense of order is still adhered to with the exception of character-to-character interaction. So, example using ABCDE. The five players are in a tavern. A approaches E and they engage in a dialogue and get to know one another. So BCD engage in customary post order to do whatever they're doing, and inside of this A and E are going back and forth at their own pace and internal order.
The advantage is obvious; no waiting just to talk. The disadvantage is that the nested pair or trio cannot really move the story forward without the remaining characters. It makes no sense for A and E to talk and have a 7 hour adventure in a thread where BCD are still engaging in a single hour's time.
GM focused: The GM of a roleplay determines what the posting order is for the next around.
No order: Self-explanatory. Chaos, but not always unproductive. Some internal or nested orders are bound to crop up, but they don't usually remain throughout the course of the thread. People just post when they want to post.
| GM styles |
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Note: GM = Game Master.
Central GM: This is the traditional style and the one made popular by, and almost necessary for, the formal pen'n'paper RPG game. One person controls the flows of events, and hashes out details for the NPC's, the town and setting, the events of the quest and so on. This keeps threads interesting, as majority of the people find out information as their characters do.
Communal GM: The responsibilities of the DM are spread out to every participants of the thread. Fleshing out details for NPC's and the way they interact with the group, details of the quest as it develops including the final resolution and steps leading up to it, and spoils and such. The standard practice is that if a character is actively DM'ing a specific element, that they gain control of that element but this is not always so.The staff considers Communal DM this to be the best option.
Backup GM: This takes the bits and pieces of the above two styles and combining them into a unique gestalt. Namely the major theme is the communal dm, while one player of the group can act in the faculty of a central DM should the plot sag or reach a state of imbalance or drudgery.
| On the subject of recaps |
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Whether you've been skipped, and a lot has happened in your absence, or whether you're a new player trying to elbow your way into a comprehensive storyline, there are a couple of ways you could go about getting a recap and save yourself one heck of a headache.
- Fast and dirty: Skimming through RP posts and throwing yourself in headlong, then asking or expecting people to correct you. This isn't a big deal. We're all writers and editing is our bread and butter. If I enter a thread at night, but it's actually high noon and I didn't have time to read 4 pages of RP for what might be only a single sentence describing the time of day, it shouldn't be a bother for someone to send me a quick message letting me know and for me to make a quick edit reflecting this.
- High-level details: You PM a principal member of the storyline, either the creator or someone that is active, and ask for the critical, pertinent details of the thread as it stands. This might be nothing more than what is going on currently, or it might include critical details from earlier on that would have an impact on the thread but aren't being spoken or written about at that very moment.
- Summary: In a long thread, I'll usually just read the last few posts and go from there. My rationale behind this is that, especially if my character is being introduced fresh into the scene, he wouldn't know anything that happened particularly early on in the thread. In some cases this does me nothing but buy me time to read through the thread at a more leisure pace, but in other cases it's all I need to get my foot in the door.
Note: Something one of our members has found particularly helpful is going back to the first post, say every page or so, and editing the first post with key plot points. Locations traveled, party relations, current circumstances, or anything else someone coming in for the first time might find informational. This makes the idea of jumping into 10 page roleplay threads much less daunting.
This is, for of course, people that want to join an already existing thread. Something that the thread creators might want to do to make it easier for people to join in spontaneously, with a bit of guidance from the creator naturally, is to use the template below to include high level information at a glance. This does not exclude weaving these factors and variables into the writing itself, but simply makes it easier for someone to pick a thread and run with it.
You can include it just at the very first post of the thread, or you can post a new one at the end of your post every few rounds or threads as the details change.