A Bazillion Characters

[misfit 0]

I have issues when people make a character to fill a certain plot that takes place in one thread (I've had personal experience with members like this and they had somewhere around 18 characters and many did not make it past 15 posts). In my opinion, if this is how you want to rp on a site, why not join a multi-verse rp? That isn't to say that I don't think people should have a lot of characters if they want to (I've had 8 on one site myself) but if you don't think you'll be able to keep up with them or at least put in the time to FINISH their stories, you might want to consider sticking to less. Currently, I have a maximum on my site, but after you reach the max, you can request a new one and it would be done on a case by case basis, and I have no intention of limiting anyone who asks unless I see some big reason to. What I'm hoping is that it will deter people from making characters left and right without much thought into how they want to see them on the site, how they want them to grow and interact, and how they want to see them change the actual site.

[Josie 198]

I'm one of those people who plays lots of characters! On my own forums, at least. The greatest amount I ever played at once was 26, and while there were times when I would write with all 26 in a given week, it was more common that only 60 - 80% of my characters were being used.

 

That being said, I'm not someone who invests a lot of time in plotting things out with other players. When I create a character, I know what I want from them and what their purpose in the game is. I go out and do that thing. If other people want to join in, then they're welcome to. I create characters to drive greater plots, so some of them are only meant to stick around for a little while, and eventually fall out of use. I don't always kill them off or stop playing them entirely, as sometimes they can become relevant again in another plot that crops up. For that reason, it doesn't usually bother me if a character I'm playing isn't getting lots of plots or interest from others.

 

However, even though I play a lot of characters I can understand why it would be frustrating that other people have many of them as well. It bothers me mostly when people have a lot of characters but aren't doing anything with them, and when there is no point to the character. On a mafia forum where there was an emphasis on conflict between the crime families, I would be very bothered if someone made a Starbucks barista, a department store worker, a Walmart greeter, and other characters in such lines of work because they are not particularly relevant to the story and likely don't have much cause to be involved in it. Especially because there are all sorts of interesting character types that could be made within that setting that aren't a straight up mafia goon- like a dog kennel owner who uses their facilities for illegal dog fights, a professional diver who makes sure that bodies dropped at sea stay hidden or aren't tied to the mafia, a veterinarian who fixes up wounded mafia crew, etc., etc.

 

Useless characters that get nothing done stress me out more than the amount of characters involved. Lots of useless characters make me anxious.

 

I'm also moving this thread to RP Confessions, as this is more of a confessions thread than a discussion it would seem.

[misfit 0]

35 minutes ago, Gothams Reckoning said:

I'm also moving this thread to RP Confessions, as this is more of a confessions thread than a discussion it would seem.

 

Lol that's where I originally posted this but it was moved.

Edited March 26, 2017 by misfit

[Josie 198]

2 minutes ago, misfit said:

 

Lol that's where I originally posted this but it was moved.

WELP back to where it chat & discussion with ye, then!

[Uaithne 543]

Once I joined a site and had 12 characters, far more than everybody else.  This really, really bothered people.  Some were upset that I was "inactive" with some of the characters.  In reality, I couldn't RP the characters because it was a one-thread-at-a-time RP and they were stuck because the other people weren't responding.  So yes, I had 12 characters.  And then the staff made up special rules just for me to prohibit me from making more.  One staff member refused to approve my characters even when I was still "okay" to make more.  (Nowadays, I am fully aware that I was in a very bad environment, but eager, younger Uaithne just wanted to RP, damnit.)

 

It's been years since then, but I never understood the obsession with keeping people at limited characters if they can handle more.

 

Another thing I don't understand is why every character must be played at the same time.  I don't RP my characters equally.  They don't all deserve the same amount of attention, some of them don't have as many RP opportunities, and sometimes I just don't want to RP them all in an equal number of threads.  And why am I required to post with each character every X amount of time or I lose that character?

 

Personally, I think people have control issues.  They believe that things need to be a certain way because that's what they're familiar with, and they're unwilling to see that not everyone has the same abilities and limitations as everyone else.  I fully understand that there need to be some guidelines in place, but I don't understand why having 20 characters is so often seen as being a bad thing.

 

I think I got off track.  Did I get off track?

[Verridith 66]

I'm not bothered by it because, well... I like making characters LOL xD I am nearing 100 again on one site alone, though I often have 75% of them in use at any one time. I love tossing characters all around and also like keeping some in the wings to toss at newbies and oldbies alike, if the plot serves to get my muse going, haha!

 

...of course this one site I'm on just hit its fourteenth birthday but... xD

[xexes 108]

Also, sometimes you have to .

 

Some games are set up with social or geographical divides in a way that you really have to have a bunch of characters to have the kind of activity that you want to.

[Kaycakes 78]

I have a similar question to this topic: Is it bad if admins have a whole bunch of characters? I personally don't think so, but I was given the impression before that it was bad form to have more than 5+ characters as an admin. One of us was upwards to 12, I was about at 8-10, I think, while most people were 5 or below. Bad form, is it? I can see how, from this particular perspective, that if admins are held to this standard, members are, too.

 

In any case, I think that if the player is active, even if not all of the bazillion characters are played at once, then it's cool. We don't have a character cap on our site because I think it's a case-by-case basis. If someone is making characters in a row that aren't getting any play at all or I see signs of a burn-out, I'll privately PM them like hey, I'm not approving this app until you're actually playing what you've got or hey, I'm not approving this app until you feel more like you've got a handle on things. I can be negotiated with, however. Show me you got this and I'll push your char through, or tell me you want to drop a few characters to focus on your new muse. The thing is, too, is I trust my peeps to do what they want to do without harming the overall environment / play of the site.

 

I guess it depends on the goals one has for their site. Like, mine? My goals for my site are: 1) Community, 1a) trust and 2a) friendship, 2) full-blown creativity and muse, encouraging all sorts of stories in the game, and 3) progressing different subplots at different times to achieve the main story arc. Now, if I can put one subplot on the backburner and push another, what's to say that we can't also do the same with our characters? Like I said, if the player is active, their chars are a go even if some are quiet and others are being posted more.

 

 

[Death Kitten 200]

1 hour ago, kay said:

I have a similar question to this topic: Is it bad if admins have a whole bunch of characters? I personally don't think so, but I was given the impression before that it was bad form to have more than 5+ characters as an admin. One of us was upwards to 12, I was about at 8-10, I think, while most people were 5 or below. Bad form, is it? I can see how, from this particular perspective, that if admins are held to this standard, members are, too.

So, the thing with an admin with a lot of characters. It's bad form if the admin's characters outshine the players, steal all the focus, and hold all the primo spots in the RP. But if the admin is running a lot of characters so that they can be around to help when players get stuck, or make sure new players have someone to write with until they get adjusted, or just to keep plot things happening big and small, it's good.

 

I easily lose count of how many characters I'm writing in my game, but then most of them only show up occasionally, do something for the plot or help pull a new player into the game. I hold down a couple of the department head spots in my roster, just because I have trust issues and I want to make sure I can trust a player to not just go poof on me if they make a character and join up at that top spot. It looks kinda implausible for a Starfleet ship to have rotating department heads after all, but I do promote players up into these positions when I find people who have the time and enthusiasm to fill the role for the long haul.

[misfit 0]

Y'all convince me maybe I should scrap my max. And just deal with it on a Case by case basis. I don't want to push potential, GOOD members away cause they wanna play a bunch of characters 

[Kaycakes 78]

I do have some limits. Like character ranks. Play a few chars, get some threads going, show me you're committed, then you can take up a bigger ranked character. So there is that. But as far as how many chars? Nah. Not yet. I wanna keep the trust going. You don't have to scrap the max if you're not comfortable with the idea of players having more than 10 characters. You can also reach a point where too many peeps are having burn-outs or are randomly making characters without giving them enough screen time, and be like, screw this, I'm putting a char cap.

 

It's what works for you! So far, the way I'm doing things seem to work for me.

[Death Kitten 200]

A compromise worth considering is putting a soft cap in place? Like, on my sim each additional character needs to get authorized by the command team, and we outline in the rules that players taking on additional characters need to exceed our posting requirements regularly before they can ask for additional characters. That's the only threshold I have. That way, players who aren't keeping up with the speed of others aren't bogging down multiple players with their slow response times, but active players can be in multiple logs at the same time without having to mess with the juggling act of keeping timelines and repercussions straight.

[Uaithne 543]

5 hours ago, kay said:

I have a similar question to this topic: Is it bad if admins have a whole bunch of characters? I personally don't think so, but I was given the impression before that it was bad form to have more than 5+ characters as an admin. One of us was upwards to 12, I was about at 8-10, I think, while most people were 5 or below. Bad form, is it? I can see how, from this particular perspective, that if admins are held to this standard, members are, too.

 

 

 

 

As a member, it only bothers me if there are no posts or very few posts on the accounts.  The exception would be if you're on an RP where the locations are so divided that you're making a lot of characters so that you have more opportunities to RP with people.  But other than that, if an admin has a bunch of characters with few posts, it makes me think that they flake on one character before making another, and then I start questioning if 10 characters can't hold their attention, how are they going to handle running a site?

[jenneral_jennson 154]

I guess I'm a more lax member. Like I couldn't care less how many characters an admin (or any member really) has or how many or few posts each one has. The way I see it is, if your admin team is stilling doing admin stuff and still running the board in the manner it was run when you joined, the amount of characters (active or not) they have or don't have shouldn't even be relevant. 

 

For the record, when I talk about how having many characters doesn't bother me, it's in general reference to unranked, OCs. This isn't including ranked or canon (which I can't stand anyway) characters. I understand why an admin team wouldn't want members making a butt load of characters and leaving ranked or canons untouched. This is an entirely different thing. But that being said. Your site is your site. Do what ever makes you feel comfortable. 

Edited March 31, 2017 by jenneral_jennson

[Elena 546]

13 hours ago, kay said:

I have a similar question to this topic: Is it bad if admins have a whole bunch of characters? I personally don't think so, but I was given the impression before that it was bad form to have more than 5+ characters as an admin. One of us was upwards to 12, I was about at 8-10, I think, while most people were 5 or below. Bad form, is it? I can see how, from this particular perspective, that if admins are held to this standard, members are, too.

 

I agree with you. Staff having many characters in various factions says they are invested into the story, they want to write with everyone and they want to be able to push the story forward when others abandon - because let's be serious, abandonment is an issue.

 

Me and my co-administrator have over 10 each.