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How does your site compare to what you think would be an ideal site?


Jaxx
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Where do you draw the line and say, "this is what I like and I'm going to have it in my rules even though it will dissuade a lot of people from joining" as opposed to "I would prefer A but I'm going to go with B so that I can appeal to a wider variety of potential members"? How many things are you willing to compromise on when you're writing rules or lore? Which things would you refuse to budge on? Overall, how does your site compare to what you think would be an ideal site? 

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Yup, what Kit said. Basically don't make a site for other people. Make it for you and maybe consider your friends. Because the fact of the matter is you and yours are the ones that are going to have to deal with it for sure. Them? They're maybeMaybe they might have to live with it. I've actually seen a few sites with frequent activity requirements and high word counts. Even mixed together, they're not a guarantee you're going to fail, and here's the thing, you'll like that site even more for it, which will show and people will be attracted to that.

 

Anyway, idk, I run a site on Jcink even though I hate it in effort of attracting new people so I guess I'm one to talk. xD I bend on some pretty stupid things if I was being honest with myself. But nothing that makes me absolutely miserable, at least. I guess there's my line. If it makes me miserable to be on my own site, then it's a no. Otherwise, free game. (I'm pretty flexible and open-minded, so not much falls under that header.)

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I'm going to agree with what has already been said. :) 

 

You have to do what makes you happy and where you want to RP. There is no point in making a site that goes against your RP desires and needs in order to cater to the mystical future member who may not even join. You're there already and from the beginning. I've done this in the past, and it can lead to frustration and seeing a hobby as a chore. 

 

There are people who still love 400+ word sites and having weekly activity rules, and your site will attract those sorts of people. For me, 400 words + isn't my thing. But that's perfectly okay. 

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Okay, so like everyone else has said you have to be happy on your own site, period. I actually think that like, having a word count, while it could reduce the pool of a specific type, most likely you don't want to roleplay with those people either. Just like I don't like a word count and I find roleplaying with people that post a ton all the time very daunting and quite frankly frustrating.

 

Activity is the key to success for any RP, inactivity equals death but you could make compromises that don't necessarily compromise what you want to the point that you're saying it is. Like instead of 1 week activity versus 1 month go in between. 2 weeks may be a better pill to swallow for some people than 1 week but if 1 week is what you have your heart set on, set that as long as you can reach the same goals prospective members will see that.

 

I personally discuss compromise on some points with my co-admin sometimes, things that I know I will hate adding, for example, an advertisements/spam board, but at the end of every time I bring it up I remember that it's really not worth that headache for one reason or another. The cost/benefit of doing it isn't worth it in the end. The cost being my sanity and the benefit being more people might see my site but advertisers aren't my target audience so in the end my loss of sanity does not reach a goal that I feel justifies the means to do it the way people "expect" or what I think they might "want".

 

So keep smiling and make adjustments that will make you happy:

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I'm not asking for advice on making sites, I'm asking how the sites that you have made line up with what you think is a perfect site and what you will and won't compromise on.

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If you are involved with more than one person on an RPG site...co-admin, staff, members...you are going to have to compromise some. Unfortunately, I am the sole admin at all three of my sites. This means that rules, lore, 99% of the layouts, etc., are all my decisions. My members are welcome to complain. I will listen and I will look at their complaint. If it is a minor change and it makes sense, I change it, if not, I don't. I also think that the ideal site is a continuing work in progress.

 

What I will not compromise on... my zero tolerance of OOC drama and BS and expecting my members to deal with one another as adults. I want to write and have fun, not manage the Daycare of the Damned. I will not compromise on having an RPG platform that is easy to manage, does all the annoying lists and things for me, has a good character management system, and, since I am technically challenged in my old age, I want to have good set of themes and mods to choose from. 

 

As far as how my sites compare - since we are all still writing together and I'm still having a blast, I'd say my sites come close to RPG paradise for me.

 

Roleplaying is a hobby and social outlet for me. When it stops being fun, I'm done. Not doing this to make the rest of the world happy.

 

 

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I always tell myself that I want a big site and I want a ton of writers but when I have reached those spots, I found it cumbersome and difficult to manage.

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I think I more-or-less run my ideal site, and that's why it doesn't attract the masses. xD

1. Its genre is very niche (animanga + soulmates + action etc)

2. It promotes fast posting (at least one IC post per week per player, but almost all of us post several times a day)

3. It promotes communication (i.e. need to take a break for any reason? Just drop a line to staff and friends and all is good)

4. Doesn't allow teenager-looking FCs to portray 50+ year olds for the sake of realism (people really hated this one in the past XD)

5. Positive behaviour is a must (I don't have the patience for people being unnecessarily rude, entitled, or judgmental)

 

When we had a lot more members (between 20-40+ players), most of them didn't post within the required time (most posted once a month, once every two months). A few comments I received within the first year of running KD was "oh, I didn't appreciate the posting requirement. I figured it wouldn't actually matter." When people started to appreciate it's one post a week minimum, I think they started to get overwhelmed. After the newness wore off, a lot more continued to leave because our posting requirement was too high for them.

 

I did consider expanding the 1 week to 2 or 3 weeks, but that wouldn't make me happy and with a site that's so reliant on pairs, I don't think it'd be that good anyway. So, I decided that it would be best to have few players who posted consistently versus many who rarely posted. If it was a different site, like a more sandboxy fantasy site, I would compromise with the posting limit for sure, but I just don't think it's good for this type of site.

 

Ideally, I would like to have 10-15 core members for any site I make. (I don't think I could run a massive site, tbh.) Right now, with our size, we kind of feel like a DnD group that's open to newcomers jumping in at any time and that's really nice even if it is small.

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It doesn't.  I think I have always been looking for a group of friends to write a story together, and discuss it, and get inspired about it. Not more social than other RPGs; some are more social than I would have wished, as in mindlessly gossipping and socializing instead of writing. I can also accept and I don’t mind being a small writing community. It happens. What saddens me is when people stop talking one with the other, stop saying “Happy birthday!“, stop plotting together the next steps of the story. I am mostly disappointed in the lack of involvement, of interest, of enthusiasm, of a real writing community. This means that the community spirit is lost, and it makes me think that what I actually wanted for the community doesn’t exist and I failed. I have been living in a dream, or maybe in denial.

 

It seems that when people are involved in your own goals and they aren’t for yourself alone, the outcomes tend to turn out differently than you imagined, if at all. It also means reassessing what is possible to happen (and making it happen), while keeping everything else as my dream of an utopic group of friends which doesn’t exist in reality. I know other sites have this community: people who actually communicate, discuss plots, twists, play games, see movies together… I achieve partially this – I am talking to all those who want to talk at least a little, but no others actually do, and the feeling of a community doesn’t exist. This is exactly what I am missing and longing for.

 

Each of us has a different personality and a different life. But instead of looking at each other as extraterrestrial beings, we should focus on what unites us, then expand our knowledge about the other aspects which are less familiar to us.

 

“Why would I care about someone else except myself?” some may ask. “Why should I be interested in building a community?” Just because you are human, and this is what humans do. Loneliness is not good. We have been designed to live in groups/ packs since early Stone Age. And community is good. 

 

“Why should I be interested in making friends with the other writers? I am here just to write. I have friends by my side, from school/ work/ neighbourhood. I had friends who backstabbed me and I am shy about making new ones.”

 

It is possible to have bad experiences; but if you aren’t trying (with caution, of course), you will never find good ones. And if you already have friends by your side, what harm is it in having some in various corners of the world as well? They can offer you a different kind of support and sounding board than the ones who are closer to you, just because their life experiences might be radically different. You can discuss with them about different subjects than the ones usually discussed with your friends from school/ work/ neighbourhood. How many of your friends who are so close are into writing and can understand you in discussing characters and plots?

 

Moreover, you are a writer. And writers do care about other people’s lives, details and circumstances in order to find later inspiration for the most diverse characters. (Even when writing in genres totally different than contemporary life, they can still be adapted and twisted to fit).

 

And we all are writers too. This is what unites us into forming a community and what should give us enough subjects to talk about, even if some of us aren’t exactly twin souls. A writing community has as purpose writing a story together. When this purpose doesn’t exist, and when the people don’t talk as much either, aren’t much of a community.

 

A writing community has as purpose writing a story together. When this purpose doesn’t exist, and when the people don’t talk as much either, aren’t much of a community. Writing with others has a social aspect, and it needs communication even for those who don’t become best friends (even if it is nothing bad with making friends, but not everyone is compatible with everyone), at least in the writing field: from plotting and synchronizing ideas, to getting inspiration, headcannons, exchange experience on research and on different aspects of the writing process. Until now, this has functioned with most people… and exactly when they stopped communicating, misunderstandings arose, because nobody is a mind reader. They just fill in the blanks with what they would have thought/ done./… and they aren’t the other person, to think identically.

 

Yes, we are here to write, and writing together means planning together, analysing possible outcomes for various options and choosing the best one, not only for one character, but for the whole story. And by planning together we are getting further involved in the whole story, not only in one character’s life. We are also mobilizing ourselves to to progress steadily the story towards the next episodes, instead of waiting passively to be entertained by reading others’ stories.

 

I have always wished for a dedicated community of writers – as many or as few as they happen to be. The activity, the involvement (including the community feeling) and the number of characters actively written when they are needed, instead of being left to pickle somewhere in silence, are more important than the number of members.

 

I wish the members to be involved in the story they are writing together. To be willing to write THE STORY, seeing the whole picture, beyond a character or two. To share characters freely (be they NPCs or other shared custody characters) and to discuss in groups plots and twists, planning the next stories, agreeing on outcomes by meeting half-way after listening to the reasons why a thing should happen or not and how. To discuss literary resources and aspects of the writing craft, to actively exchange experience. Maybe also to read books or watch movies in the same field like the story and to discuss them together, including from the perspective of enriching our story (without plagiarising, of course. Borrowing basic ideas only, especially if twisted and spinned of, is NOT plagiarism!).

 

A writing community should have been like NaNoWriMo all the time – in respect to the community atmosphere, not in number of words/ competition, neither in number of members. In the smaller sense of a community group of writers, who actually talk about their characters, plots, support each other. And I know RPGs which are a community too, smaller or bigger, but I failed making mine the community I was looking for. 

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Well I mean... since I built them? My sites are my ideal sites? 

How they stack up to others in their genres? Not well, I imagine. I've never run a site with more than like 15 active members at a time, ever. And that was back in the day when people weren't as picky as they are now. These days, it's lucky to even say I have 7 active members on my two year old site. (Which is fine with me, I don't really want to deal with a hundred people.) 

 

I have views that are in direct opposition with the majority of the RPC, too, which makes it even harder to get new members. But that's also fine with me, because I'm done bending over backwards to run a site that isn't 100% what I want. If I wanted to budge on certain things or compromise, I'd just keep joining sites that make me unhappy, which I end up ghosting on, so what's the point in that?

Reality is an illusion. 


 
 

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