An "Old Fart's" Lament.

[Keaton 133]

@Let-make-nice  @StormWolfe  So I had to look up what the heck JP was, haha. We always used to call them logs, probably because journal RP has different meanings for words like "post," but hell yeah, I fully agree this needs to make a comeback. I now intend to use it more in my RP when I can.

[Gothic 307]

There have been a lot of changes, and culture shocks for me. lol I started rp when I was 11/12 and I am 32 this year. I have had some breaks on and off throughout. 

 

I came from a boards2go/voy? There was another one, too, then self-hosting background. When I made AeRo on proboards I barely knew about IF RPing and I found a lot of the hoops people made potential players to go through to be utterly insane. Face claims/playbys were not a "thing" where I came from, and neither were claims on them either. It was not uncommon for people to have the same playby but people tended to alter eye colour, etc. I remember a lot of forms, and a lot of emphasis on tiny fonts, post length, and restrictions. 

 

I remember joining forms on a lot of the earliest sites I had where people would make their characters. It tended to be basic stats, bit of personality and history, pic, and off they go. I remember the emphasis on larger applications, although there have been variations over the years. People seem to be less picky about massive applications, and from an admin point of view, they take more time to read and review. I'm too old for a lot of this shit. -shakes fist- 

 

I remember shipper plotters being strange for me when I came over to Proboards/IF rping. 

 

To be fair, some things are handy to have. Cheat sheet/Who's Who is handy to have to see your memberbase quickly. Shipper plotters are good options for people who organise things that way (not for me, though), and there seems to be less of an emphasis on huge posts. 

[StormWolfe 557]

 

@Gothic  I had to look up what shippers/plotters were when I came back to forum roleplay after being on Nova for several years. I still don't use them and probably won't. My sites do have a place for Wanteds but, to date, none of my crew uses those either. They prefer chatting on Discord for plotting and planning things. This is fine with me. I am seriously considering removing those forums from my sites. They are mainly there in case we get a member in that really does not want to join our Discord.

 

@Keaton We still do post-by-post threading too. However, for dialog intense posts, we allow people to simply add their reply in (JP) rather than lots of shorter posts. JPs can get really long really fast so after 1500 words or so, one of the players will start a new post and they'll continue the JP. We don't care about member stats and all of that so it works for us.

 

As far as apps go, I've tried everything to get a good balance. I tried no apps, got burned by a psycho member. I tried moderate apps, got burned. Finally, I lengthened the apps although I do not demand each section be a certain length. Since we don't use separate shippers/plotters, the apps now serve that purpose to a large extent.