Wanted Ad Horror Stories

[Shades 676]

I have all but stopped putting up wanted ads because I have the worst lucky with them. Whenever I put up a wanted ad and I'm not looking for a female for my male character, I'll inevitably get a taker whose first question is "so, can you make your character a male? I have a female that would be perfect". Even when I do have a male character and am looking for a 'position' (something like a criminal to my cop), I'll still get someone go "can you swap and play the criminal? I want to play the cop..." Tantrums and guilt trips are usually part of the package.

 

My own taking a wanted ad horror story was this person who had a very, very, very detailed script for what the character was like, her personality, looks, actions (including letting me know I couldn't do or say this because character wouldn't act this way), job, everything... because they had based the character off a real (private/non-famous) person they couldn't be with IRL and wanted to play this out via RP. - shudder  - They also got suuuuper attached to me and kept sending lots of guilt-trippy messages whenever I didn't post until I ended up blocking them and eventually leaving the site altogether.

[Mab 58]

Honestly i think iv been super lucky when it comes to wanted ads. I think the only thing that iv ever found is those who take/or request and i take, and then they just disappear. Leaving you hanging and like what am i supposed to do now?

[Trouble 36]

I've never had an issue with anyone who picked up a wanted ad from me, but I had a MAJOR issue with someone harassing me to pick up one of her wanted ads (including calling me a bad player).   It got to the point where I just ghosted the game rather than deal with it.

[Sora 29]

So one of my friends put up a want ad for her characters twin younger sisters. I took one, It was great. After about a year, someone joined and wanted the other twin.  The person that took the other twin power played CONSTANTLY. It's worth noting me and the friend were also staff members, so we were not only dealing with her trying to power play our characters but also had to jump in as staff to tell her that was a big no-no and she needed to rewrite posts. She then started trying to intimidate and blackmail Professor's of the school to do her bidding.... Then jumping into threads that didn't involve her and physically attacked another character.

 

Yes, she left, thankfully and someone much better took the character.

 

Unfortunately the story doesn't end there. I found out a year ago that she has actually been playing this character on other sites (not a problem) but had actually copied some of my and my friend's writing and was passing it off as her own on other sites, trying to get people to make our characters. And she's done it on at least 3 sites that we know of so far. So she's plagiarizing our writing, all stemmed from a want ad.

[NFT47 40]

Several years ago, I had a want ad for a love interest  that was loosely based on the 616 comics (this was on a marvel site) and wanted to stick fairly close to the main points of the character but was okay with a few creative decisions here and there. I got a response to that ad but the person wanted to completely rewrite the character to the point it sounded like an OC and not at all what I was requesting, from changing the powers, the age drastically (they were supposed to be early to mid 40's but this person wanted to make them 18), their job, and whole personality/history. Overall I am pretty chill when working with people to make small changes to want ads, but when it seems like you just took the whole concept and rewrote it, that is a hard pass.

Edited August 11, 2019 by Toastie
words are hard

[Arceus 1,082]

This is actually about taking an ad. Most of the time I don't have biters for mine.

 

Anyway, so I basically overhaul existing characters to suit wanted ads a lot of the time. It's very rare that I'll make a completely new character for an ad because chances are there's a character in the back somewhere that fits with some reworking. I reworked one character to suit a really short simple want ad someone posted for a plot that wasn't going to last very long anyway, the character they were asking for was supposed to suicide later. I said something in the chat-box about plans for said character on another site.

 

Queue a three day war over whether I was allowed to reuse that character and PB.

I dropped that shit so fast it made my great grandma dizzy in Spanish. cccccc:

[Morrigan 1,826]

I joined a site based on a Wanted ad that I believed I could fill and with the promise I could fill more in the future as long as everything else worked out well.

 

It was going fine, great even. Then I communicated with another player that their character was involved in this wanted ad and I found out there was about a 2 month gap of which I wasn't aware of in the relationship that I was supposed to just accept as "yes your character accepts this" without any other information prior. I would have probably not picked up the wanted as it was knowing that I had to swallow a pill of "you've been seeing each other off and on and the character ghosted 2 months ago".... No.... That's not how my character works.

 

Why wasn't I told this prior to apping the character.

 

She's not Bella from Twilight. She's not going to pine after the Edward in her life forever.

 

If this was a part that I needed to accept then I should have been told. This wasn't a miscommunication, this was a misrepresentation of the character I was applying for.

 

You want a triangle character romance you need to properly represent where the characters are in their relationships otherwise you're just baiting someone in to either:

1. Be the person that causes fights between your intended and yourself.
2. Be the person that steals you from the other person because you don't like them.

 

Either way. Be upfront.

[Jaxx 317]

Had someone lost their shit on me because I reused a character I made for their wanted. I'd made significant edits to what had originally been described in the wanted (which was basically the character's childhood and young adulthood with a few other details) and left the rest alone as I'd made up the rest of the character. That wasn't good enough for them, and they proceeded to call me a thief and backstabber, and demand that I completely rewrite the character including many things that I'd originally come up with myself. When I refused and blocked them after several messages full of swearing and insults, they then went to staff and proceeded to lie about me and say I'd stolen a character from them. Fortunately it wasn't long before staff agreed I'd done nothing wrong, but the whole situation was absolutely nuts.

[Somniac 207]

Morrigan, your ad horror just took me back.

 

I took a wanted ad once that was, by the ad maker’s own declaration, open-ended.

 

Except it was not, which became clearer and clearer as things went on.

 

What I jumped into as a vague psychological horror plot hook turned out to be a lovely trap to play out an elaborate sexual fantasy that revolved entirely around their own harem of characters boning each other + whatever PCs they could trick into it. Noped out as gently as I could after they forced a character through multiple things intentionally disrupting their timeline (for things they insisted they ~weren’t even into~, and thus I'd figured were safe to assume didn't happen).

 

Later on tried to pressure me into consenting to have my fleshed out character outright deleted rather than renamed, even though my character was in multiple active threads. Talked them down from that weird hostage situation, hoped for the best and figured we’d both find things more interesting to us now that our characters were both freed up to do other things.

 

I did. They didn’t. So they banned me without a word.

 

Bonus points: blamed me for their RL loneliness and implied I was transphobic for not immediately bangthreading with their desperate sex worker. I guarantee, "man, if only their fucks-anything-that-holds-still-long-enough sex worker was cis!" was not what was going through my head. 

[OvalDoughnut 11]

I took a wanted ad once but the poster gave pretty much no information about the character. I thought I'd be given more information after taking the character, but nope. Poster just thought the name matched the playby really well, then wanted nothing to do with threading with the character. 

[Kara 3]

There was an author who made a wanted ad for members of a large family. The members were picked up by myself and another player. Apparently, the ad poster wanted to hoard the males I was writing for her other characters and became really weird about everything when mine were connecting with other characters more. There was no future romance with anyone listed in the ads, and they were very general, so the personalities were created by myself and that other player that took the ads. When the ad poster couldn't get her way by harassing us, she had a fit and told us to give up the characters we developed and connected to to others because they were hers stating that 'someone else could write them exactly the same way' when we told her it wasn't fair to others. 

 

Needless to say, we have added in wanted ad guidelines to our rules section.

 

Also, that awkward moment when you go on a site and see that a former author from your site has  created a wanted ad for a character exactly like yours and has stolen your plot. 

Edited September 19, 2019 by Kara

[Deacon Frost 196]

I should have seen that this was going to be bad from the start. I joined a board that was based on the TV show Supernatural and noticed that most of the people were playing hidden monsters or hunters. So the board had no civilians. A couple people were complaining that they couldn't play their bad guys the way they wanted too. So I made a character and in her backstory I gave her 4 siblings. 

 

So I gave her a want-ad for her siblings and their family was pretty f'd up. Demon possessed their father. So the three oldest siblings grew up to be hunters and the youngest girl had been sheltered from all the drama. My character was a train wreck. I made her specifically so monsters could have a terrified human to chase around, etc. (not kill her or do anything too insane; but do monster stuff) 

 

So the little sister got taken by an awesome RPer and we've gone together to a couple boards now. That connection worked awesome. But on the first board I had 5 people in a row take the oldest brother, flirt with the main admin and then vanish from the board without ever posting to my character. I started to feel pretty jinxed about it. 

 

The silver lining though is I tried the want-ad again on my current board and all four siblings have been taken. 

[Zelkova 12]

I have one character at my soulmate site who went through three partners before finding his match in the fourth.

 

Partner #1: greater writer, jived with her OOCly perfectly. Her character, however, was the exact opposite of my wanted-ad and it just didn't work out. Character didn't even fit the "true name" they both shared at all. I had 2 or 3 variations of what would work for character. I knew it was the opposite, but I figured to give it a shot. I was wrong. So, we broke them up.

Partner #2: the character was amazing. He was perfect, I loved him, my character started to respect him... But the player and I didn't match up. Kept giving me passive aggressive comments towards me OOCly, wasn't very friendly towards me, and ended up only posting once a month to once every two months despite my wanted-ad requirement of posting every day or every other day (with the occasional lulls being fine). Started to feel like they only went for my ad because of my character's "true name," which would also be his character's "true name." Ended up breaking them up because I was starting to get uncomfortable with the acidic remarks and because of how unhappy I was with how infrequent the posts were.

Partner #3: uhm... I really don't have much to say. They posted to me maybe twice... and they vanished.  At this point, I didn't have a wanted-ad for him for a few months and wasn't sure if I ever would again because I was burnt out and discouraged.

Honourable Mentions: I had quite a few offers between #2 & #3, but they all poofed before they came to fruition.

Partner #4: is actually the current partner and the happy ending for the most part. The player is great (I'm very fond of them!) personality wise, very good at writing, and the character is the best rendition ever. On top of that, they feed me posts quickly whenever we have threads. I think there will always be one or two complaints no matter how good a match-up is, but I don't think I could've ever asked for better.

 

For one that I took up: I took the character, was given a powerpoint on family line and that stuff, filled out the ad, blahblahblah. After I spent eons writing up the app, they pretty much wouldn't play with me for the character the wanted-ad was made for... She'd play with him (with a character I could not stand), just not for the person he was made for... It felt like pulling teeth trying to get one thread from the character he was for from her. After a while, she stopped playing with him all together because I just wasn't interested in threading with this other character of hers.

Edited December 5, 2019 by Zelkova