Wanted Ad Horror Stories

[Morrigan 1,826]

Wanted ads are great and evil all the same. From finding your best RP Partners to flakers to people that steal the wanted ad to have the PB but not play the character they took.

 

Share with us some horror stories.

[Gothic 307]

I took a wanted character once and they pretty much gave me a strict script to follow. 

 

And insisted that I post every single day for them. 

 

Eventually I told them that I couldn't keep up with it, dropped the character and left the site. 

[Huskerdust 625]

So I put up a want ad for a boyfriend for my character. I had joined the site taking an admin's want ad but I also wanted to bring along my regular dude. Since my BFF who usually plays his boyfriend was busy, I decided to put up a want ad. It was pretty loose and I made it absolutely CLEAR that I'm not about finals and that if the chemistry between the characters wasn't there, my character had the right to break up with the dude or whatever. That's how REAL LIFE works too. Since I made that shit clear and the person still took it, I was hoping that meant there would be no drama later on when my BFF did eventually join. 

 

See, their boyfriend character was kinda difficult to mesh with mine. I tried in vain but eventually when my friend asked where I was playing, I told her and she brought over the usual boyfriend my character normally has. They were not dating but of course, as two people who have written these characters before together, they had instant chemistry. But my character stayed with the other guy because I didn't want to start drama. My friend's character was just a friend to my character, they just had insane bromance chemistry.

 

The other player got really weird and insecure though and they had THEIR character break up with mine. Or well, he confronted him about his friendship with the BFF character and it ended up in a break up. But after that, the admin seemed pretty weird toward my friend. She started sending me PMs telling me that my friend had to play with other people and expand beyond RPing with just me. (But she joined just to write with me--at the time, we didn't own a site and this was the only site we were on). When I relayed that info to my friend, we both decided it was best for us to leave and that's honestly how WAB came to be a site. We wanted to keep playing the characters we made on that site without having the admin and her friends breathing down our necks. 

 

Like I was fine on the site, because I had been playing with pretty much every player on the site and had answered a handful of want ads and jumped into opens. So they were cool with me. But once my friend came along, there was animosity and people wanted her to play with everybody when she didn't want to. 

 

So that's how a want ad snowballed into something completely different. Yikes. 

[Snickerdoodle 51]

I've never had a negative experience with anyone that has answered a want ad. My nightmare is that my want ads just sit there for months and months and no one answers them. Eventually, I have to scrap entire plots because I don't have that character for the plot and the game moves along past the point that it was supposed to happen. 

[blinkster 20]

Many, many moons ago I had a medieval fantasy game focusing on an ancient fortress. I had a wanted advert up for the generic leader of a local wild clan of people who had a bunch of mysterious stories about the history of the fortress. Someone joined essentially wanting to play this leader to have a sexual interest in the building and how he would kill anyone entering the building (completely negating the WHOLE PLOT OF THE GAME where people were living inside of it)  So yeah! Building sex, no thanks!

[The Seven 32]

On 2/16/2019 at 5:05 AM, blinkster said:

Many, many moons ago I had a medieval fantasy game focusing on an ancient fortress. I had a wanted advert up for the generic leader of a local wild clan of people who had a bunch of mysterious stories about the history of the fortress. Someone joined essentially wanting to play this leader to have a sexual interest in the building and how he would kill anyone entering the building (completely negating the WHOLE PLOT OF THE GAME where people were living inside of it)  So yeah! Building sex, no thanks!

 

I have no wanted ad horror story and am posting solely because I need the world to know how much this deeply fascinates me.

However, since I feel bad for undermining the Thread Purpose I will steal my friends wanted ad horror story.  So there was an important canon character on the site that was the sister of the very important late Emperor. She was a big deal and had her own kingdom so it was pretty good when someone came along and took the role. And hey, they were even pretty good with it, they were using the Wanted Ad as a good starting off point to develop the character.
 

Anyways, then they vanished. Mysterious as to why. Since the character was important the ad was put up again, with the hope that that a new player to carry on the good work. Someone once again took the ad and it seemed good. up until the point they announced that this character was having a secret affair with the Emperor and all her existing children were a result of this. Which...uh... was... not really what we were looking for to be quite honest? In fact that had pretty major consequences for you know... the... site as a whole... and stuff that has already happened...? Like people had already made characters who were the children of this canon so that was a little awkward for everyone involved. Luckily this player also vanished and so it was quietly scrubbed from the record.

[Huskerdust 625]

There is a person who always always always tries to take my wanteds and I don’t like writing with her. So I always have to make up some excuse not to. When I finally said “hey we don’t mesh” she got weird. 

 

But she still keeps trying to take my requests. 

[Josie 198]

It has happened more than once that I have had people take up wanted ads exclusively as an opportunity to get near a particular character and try to murder them. 100% of the time it has ended poorly for them.

 

I'm not at all against someone trying to kill my characters! I think it's fun and exciting. But like... that wasn't... the point... of the wanted ad. I wanted a particular sort of plot, and another one got thrown at me instead. Maybe ONCE it would be fun... but more than once it's not.

[Jaxx 317]

tw: mentions of murder, sexual assault, rape

 

I put up a wanted for a character's boyfriend. Someone showed up and was talking with me about it, everything was cool, and then after a while they told me they had an app up. Sweet! And so I go and read it. Well, there were a couple parts of the app that made me pause because of the tone/wording, especially parts where the character was described as killing people (it was a post-zombie apocalypse site where he 'put down', for lack of a better term, a couple of people). Eh, it wasn't anything major, so I decided to give the app my stamp of approval, and not long after that it was accepted by the admin. 

 

Well, that was when things started to get weird. The new character was a gay man and the player started pushing hard for threads with the handful of teen male characters to the point of several people referring to him as obsessive. He also got very possessive and demanding about other peoples' plots with characters that his hadn't even interacted with. In one case, he said it was unfair another character gifted their friends things but hadn't gifted the new character anything. Yeah, that'd be because your characters are complete strangers to each other. Admin told them off for being rude and pushy a few times, people were kinda not wanting to deal with him. 

 

And then the player started going off the deep end. He got really fixated on this one character. Talking about how he liked the playby's eyes so much that he wanted to take them out and keep them in a jar. That came up several times and only got weirder and more detailed each time. It also became very apparent that there was zero OOC/IC distinction for this guy, since he was all but referring to the character as himself. He was rapidly getting on everyone's nerves with his behaviour. I was kind of toying with the idea of telling him that if he didn't shape up, I'd reopen the wanted ad.

 

Buuut I didn't have to think about that very long, because then he started talking about how his character would rape other characters, and referred to several other characters as 'molesty bait' for his. Hahaha no. I immediately DMed him and told him to remove all mentions of my character from his app because he wasn't going to keep my wanted and I wasn't going to thread with him. I told him his behaviour was completely unacceptable and there would be no appealing my decision. He told me to grow up, I blocked him and sent the admin screenshots, and he left before he had a chance to get officially banned. 

[Belle 53]

I took up a wanted ad that made references to some past incesty themes on the understanding that we would not be playing it out and it was all in the past.

 

Literally the first thread, the requester was trying to push me into smut.

 

I killed the character off shortly after. Simply dropping them would've been too kind; it needed to be burned with fire.

[Drewsopher 4]

I have no horror stories besides the fact that... my want ads are rarely picked up. I did have a scare once, just this person who came and showed a lot of interest in it, but the player just gave me all the wrong vibes. Hit all my red flags. I was dreading having to read that app. But they lost interest, and the want ad was never taken. So, I wonder, is it better that someone take it? Did I judge too harshly?

[Legends Are Lessons 9]

I've only done one wanted ever and it went surprisingly well but this thread makes me so scared lol.   I've had a lot of people I RP with have people being very picky on the FC, wanting someone "hotter."

[Yggdrasil 6]

My horror stories are more just the usual. Someone takes it, plays it a little, but then vanishes into the night. I've had a few stick around and are great RP pals now. But as the usual, there are always a collection that are less than reliable. 

 

I am glad I haven't had some of the above horrors... Big yikes. 

[HanSoulo 15]

My horror story is not so much about the person who took my wanted ad, but rather the person who took their wanted ad. I have a character who is polyamorous, and he has this old flame that he had a child with. For reasons that are too long to explain, he had to leave them, but they've recently come back into his life.

 

At some point, the person who took my wanted ad decided that she wanted to make her own that would be her character's other significant other. Cool beans. Had no problem with that. The problem was the person who took her wanted ad. He started to drop red flags for me that made it passive aggressively clear that he was not okay with my friend's character being with her baby daddy (my character).

 

But like...this is my wanted ad! Their relationship wouldn't even exist if I had not made the wanted ad. But, all of sudden, this new random seemed to feel the need to insert himself/his character in our conversations, giving the feel that his character already doesn't like mine without having even met the man! Mind you, I got a bad vibe from him from the get-go because of certain things he would do, and I told my friend this.

 

Turns out I was right. He got the banhammer because of several offenses.  

[Let-make-nice 39]

@blinkster - that is an amazing story. 😹

 

My only horror story regarding a want ad is always the same.  I make an LI, on the premise of lovely feelings and interesting plots and interactions, and then the poster expects immediate love and smut.   It's happened enough times that I usually avoid taking such ads unless it's clearly stated that the chemistry will be established in-game and that there are no promises on it.  

 

Following one too many of these, I've also started fading to black or handwaving intimate moments to avoid getting stuck in smut hell.