Staffing What do you see too much of? What do you see not enough of?

[Morrigan 1,826]

Ahhh! I never see that but that could be because I play women 28-45.

[Death Kitten 200]

I do agree about young characters being very common in RP. Some settings it isn't as bad, though it certainly would benefit from a wider range of ages. Others it's almost world breaking, particularly the Star Trek games I play in. Before JJ Trek, Captain Kirk was supposed to be the youngest Captain in Starfleet, and Shatner was around 35 when TOS launched. Now it's common for commanding officers to be 30 or younger in these RP, and JJ Trek's interpretation of Kirk only re-enforces this hella young Captain thing with Kirk getting his command right out of the Academy in the first reboot movie and Chris Pine being south of 30 when the first of the new movies released.

 

I'll admit my main character is guilty of this, though she only ranked Commander, but she'll probably get promoted before she's 30. This was partially a symptom of things that were outside of my control, but I probably could have done things to mitigate some of them. That said, she was an early recruit into the Academy, so it's not as unusual she'd be this young at a high rank... there are others who are recruited and graduate on a normal timeline and still achieve brass ranks before they break into their third decade. o.O The fleet I originally created her for had a very very fast promotion policy (only about two or three months ooc quality participation to qualify for pretty much everything up to lt cmdr), and the fact that it's been on a major decline the last half a dozen years leaves them hurting for good command staff, and means a lot of people get promoted into command teams way too quickly. I understand they need command teams to run the sims, and I know that people are impatient for promotion so the promotion policy has reflected this, but people grow attached to their characters and instead of creating characters suited to the positions they've been moved into ooc, they bend the rules to make their beloved character they've been playing with already fit good enough.

[Robmin 10]

I see a lot of people not wanting to play with the cruel/villainous/prickly character type. Its like they don't want to play with any character who won't immediately warm up to their character, I also see a lot of people wanting instant plot device to jump in with (which I guess is where playing a damsel in distress character would help).

[Sara-Zorah 18]

I see way too many characters with a tragic past. Also characters who treat mental illness like  fashion accessory? If that makes sense?

[Icewolf 258]

3 hours ago, Robmin said:

I see a lot of people not wanting to play with the cruel/villainous/prickly character type. Its like they don't want to play with any character who won't immediately warm up to their character, I also see a lot of people wanting instant plot device to jump in with (which I guess is where playing a damsel in distress character would help).

 

I've had bad experiences with writers who did characters like that. It may be a problem with twitter rp and not forum rp, but playing with characters like that started to get really frustrating because the writers used the 'in character' status as a way to bully people they didn't want participating, and this was from people who wrote characters that were supposed to be 'good', or friendly, as well as characters that were 'evil'. If I ever rped with characters like that again, I'd have to know the writer well and have 'negative' interaction/relationship between the characters agreed to or partially plotted before the rp was done. It's not very nice constantly having insults hurled at your character/getting into fights when you're unsure if you can trust the writer behind the character. Parody rp can also go too far in this regard as well at times.

Edited May 31, 2016 by Icewolf

[Robmin 10]

3 minutes ago, Icewolf said:

 

I've had bad experiences with writers who did characters like that. It may be a problem with twitter rp and not forum rp, but playing with characters like that started to get really frustrating because the writers used the 'in character' status as a way to bully people they didn't want participating, and this was from people who wrote characters that were supposed to be 'good', or friendly, as well as characters that were 'evil'. If I ever rped with characters like that again, I'd have to know the writer well and have 'negative' interaction/relationship between the characters agreed to or partially plotted before the rp was done. It's not very nice constantly having insults hurled at your character/getting into fights when you're unsure if you can trust the writer behind the character. Parody rp can also go too far in this regard as well at times.

See I've never roleplayed on Twitter (I don't tend to roleplay on any social media type sites - I'm happy with forum rping) but I can see how that would be a problem. The advantage of forum roleplay is that most have some form of "OOC Account" and "IC Account" to try and keep a line between OOC and IC. 

[sid 5]

3 hours ago, Madame Superfly said:

I see way too many characters with a tragic past. Also characters who treat mental illness like  fashion accessory? If that makes sense?

 

This. So frustrating. I think this is probably more obvious for people who have mental illnesses, though. If it's something you've dealt with most of your life it's harder to just throw it in the bio because it "makes the character interesting". Um, why isn't your character already interesting? If they're boring before you slam OCD onto them, I can guarantee they're going to be boring after. Also the inverse is annoying... the people who create a character with a mental illness and that's ALL the character seems to be about. Like a depressed character where EVERY POST is just soaked in wallowing self-hatred. I don't mean a few threads... I mean Ever. Single. One. That's just... not real life. Having depression doesn't mean you haven't laughed in eighteen years. Actually I would say that for some depressed people, cracking jokes and laughing is a defense mechanism. I recently created a character who has depression who is always cracking jokes and never taking anything seriously, because that's how I am. I would love to see more of that. 

 

Also what's with people who play a mental health professional even though they have no interest in psychology whatsoever? I had one person playing a psychologist, but did not know what schizophrenia was. Did not know anything about addiction, or that it was even considered a mental health issue. Did not know depression was an illness... Like??

[Death Kitten 200]

1 hour ago, hades said:

 

This. So frustrating. I think this is probably more obvious for people who have mental illnesses, though. If it's something you've dealt with most of your life it's harder to just throw it in the bio because it "makes the character interesting". Um, why isn't your character already interesting? If they're boring before you slam OCD onto them, I can guarantee they're going to be boring after. Also the inverse is annoying... the people who create a character with a mental illness and that's ALL the character seems to be about. Like a depressed character where EVERY POST is just soaked in wallowing self-hatred. I don't mean a few threads... I mean Ever. Single. One. That's just... not real life. Having depression doesn't mean you haven't laughed in eighteen years. Actually I would say that for some depressed people, cracking jokes and laughing is a defense mechanism. I recently created a character who has depression who is always cracking jokes and never taking anything seriously, because that's how I am. I would love to see more of that. 

 

Also what's with people who play a mental health professional even though they have no interest in psychology whatsoever? I had one person playing a psychologist, but did not know what schizophrenia was. Did not know anything about addiction, or that it was even considered a mental health issue. Did not know depression was an illness... Like??

I think part of the thing with tacking mental illness onto a character to "make them interesting" is very much a combination of people who don't live with these conditions not understanding them, then mistaking all the efforts to raise awareness of these conditions to mean that these things are cool, instead of what they really are: an effort to get others to emphasize and understand. It's also a side effect of someone with little or no wilting experience trying to do the "easy" thing to make their characters more interesting. Not all the weight of this problem lies with the inexperienced writer though, there are also a lot of people running games with little to no experience handling these things, so they don't realize how harmful they can also be, and try to guide the writer in a better direction.

 

I am very lucky that the person playing the role of counselor (and forensic psychologist) on my star trek sim actually is knowledgeable in these areas (I believe this is her RL area of study and profession), but I've seen so many people take these sorts of positions in star trek sims because  of a combination of the mistaken impression that it's easy to write and it's often one of the last department head positions to be filled. I think the poor writing for Deanna Troi in TNG, particularly how she was mostly used as a plot device to warn everyone else when the bad guy was about to betray the crew, gave a lot of people the mistaken impression that the counselor doesn't actually do anything but talk and crash the ship. It's frustrating because I think we get better counselors behind the bar in Hollywood than someone who's supposed to be an actual professional, and this is the source most people learn about this area in.

[sid 5]

1 minute ago, Death Kitten said:

It's frustrating because I think we get better counselors behind the bar in Hollywood than someone who's supposed to be an actual professional, and this is the source most people learn about this area in.

 

I agree on all points, but this one line is such a good one. I never even realized this but it's so true! 

[CovertSphinx 710]

On 5/18/2016 at 4:52 AM, mellomeme said:

I stick primarily to Superhero RP's as of late.

 

Lately I've seen an influx of people wanting to play something that can, and will, be able to defeat half the 'heroes' on the board. It's like, nah. Dude. Play the little guy. There's never enough of the little guys on a super board.

 

I mean, I'm happy to get an awesome original villain on a site, but not when they can practically just rip the canon's limb from limb if they wanted to and nothing can beat them. Nah. Let's work on some balance darling.

 

On 5/27/2016 at 6:55 PM, Amelia said:

This so much, it is something I noticed on my super hero rp as well and have in the past. While I have a love for some canons I would love to have more little guys and I have some awesome ideas for storylines for them as well if people were interested.

Anime forums too. I've always noticed a trend of All-Powerful-Hero or All-Powerful-Villain, with very few people starting from the bottom up or playing "group" minded characters.

[Death Kitten 200]

The related to canon in the fandom thing is frustrating even when you don't have anyone playing canon characters in your game. So many people love trying to claim they're related to Kirk, Picard, or Riker in star trek sims where people aren't allowed to play canon characters, it's crazy. I mean, they live in a society where there's easy access to birth control methods that work reliably, the chance of an unexpected child is very very unlikely for a Starfleet officer. It's happened twice in canon that I recall (David Marcus, and Sisko's child with Kasidy), both were within the context of a relationship, and the former was only hidden because she found out after breaking up with Kirk. Men like Kirk and Riker may have a reputation, but the easy access to solutions to prevent these surprises make them very very unlikely.

[txernest 0]

One thing that I see waaaaaay too often (specifically in Marvel RP; not sure how often it happens in other places) is people doing "alternate interpretations" of villainous characters to essentially make them the good guy (*cough*90%oflokirpers*cough*). 

 

Like, I'm all for alternate interpretations of characters. But can we, like, make good guys more misguided for once? Let's get more antiheroes and antivillains in the works! Personally, I love taking Clint Barton from one of the multiple times in comics where he was almost-the-bad-guy and tipping him the rest of the way off the scale, though I let him keep his idealism. Villains usually think they're doing the right thing, after all...

 

As John Rogers said, "Nobody's the villain in their own head." 

[Morrigan 1,826]

1 hour ago, Death Kitten said:

The related to canon in the fandom thing is frustrating even when you don't have anyone playing canon characters in your game. So many people love trying to claim they're related to Kirk, Picard, or Riker in star trek sims where people aren't allowed to play canon characters, it's crazy. I mean, they live in a society where there's easy access to birth control methods that work reliably, the chance of an unexpected child is very very unlikely for a Starfleet officer. It's happened twice in canon that I recall (David Marcus, and Sisko's child with Kasidy), both were within the context of a relationship, and the former was only hidden because she found out after breaking up with Kirk. Men like Kirk and Riker may have a reputation, but the easy access to solutions to prevent these surprises make them very very unlikely.

You can get around both of those (technically) with a Trill without breaking canon. But it's a technicality at best. I know I like playing a successor of Dax.

 

I've seen too many vampires that have given up on life but not ended themselves. Like what the hell do they have to live for?

[txernest 0]

7 minutes ago, Morrigan said:

I've seen too many vampires that have given up on life but not ended themselves. Like what the hell do they have to live for?

Lol, that one's especially funny because there's usually a disgustingly easy way for them to die. That was one thing I really appreciated about an early Southern Vampire Mysteries book; Godfrey actually went and "Met the Sun" because he hated living. They did the same scene in True Blood with Godric. Before the show got bad.

 

On a similar note is the term "vegetarian vampire". Like. I don't care what they're drinking it from, it's still blood and its still from an animal? Like. Call them something else. Come up with a term. Like "bovinitarian" if cows are their drink of choice. They're not eating veggies though, so where did that term come from?

 

[Death Kitten 200]

14 minutes ago, Morrigan said:

You can get around both of those (technically) with a Trill without breaking canon. But it's a technicality at best. I know I like playing a successor of Dax.

I lock that down in my sim too, because I'm a meanie. Joined Trill are a limited option that requires command team approval.