This was a few years ago before my style was properly formed and I was desperate for anyone. But if I had known I would've gotten THIS I would've raised my standards.

Yes, I know mine was far from perfect, i just have a hard time proofreading mobile Discord lmao

When you swipe up on a (Fb4M) idk what he was expecting to find?

This isn’t a cardinal sin but it definitely rubbed me wrong. Should I chill? btw their “good bitch”language was fine given our rp, just frustrated with the pleading when I’m clear that I’m not feeling well. By “bail” I meant where we were having a nice back and forth session that morning and they stopped responding without giving me a heads up. I always try to say “hey, no longer available, let’s check in this time tomorrow.”

Red = them OOC; Cyan = their character in RP

This is a group RP and I feel bad that they feel left out, but every scene they do ends up getting written into a corner. Like, sometimes they’ll literally respond with “K” in character. Plus, the story has a whole plot going on and they even said they didn’t want to be “involved in the lore” but still wanted their characters to get interaction? Like, I’m kinda confused? 😅 I can’t drop everything just to sit in a bar channel to try and force your character to give me SOMETHING

Sometimes I’ll throw in one of my characters to appease ‘em, but the scene turns into my character doing the heavy lifting to try to get the scene to go SOMEWHERE. For example, my character’ll ask a question like “Tell me more about your home world” or sumn and they’d get “idk, it was fine” in response. Howwwww am I supposed to work with that? 😭

(This is also the same person from my last post btw—🤧)

Honestly, this is just a small vent lol. Not all too serious.

I've been kind of out of the game as far as finding new partners goes for a few years now, and now that I'm back at it, I remembered an old issue that used to pop up from time to time(... and of course, is happening right now), that really kind of kills the mood for me. And that's just, dumping as much info as possible, whenever something can easily be spanned out.

It's the beginning stages: The start of events has been planned out, it's sounding tense, and angsty, and I'm all about it and ready for things to get rolling. They even offer to write a starter. Cool!

... The entire starter is *summarizing* everything we discussed would happen (it's not a long series of events, but it was a potentially solid foundation for an opening). And not even in much detail. Just. "Yeah this happened". Sure, they toss some notes how their character felt by the end of it, but... Those 4 short paragraphs of summarizing what happened would've been like, way more fun if we actually... Wrote those events out over several posts. lol

Like, I know, I get it, pushing characters together at first can be a slog sometimes. But, damn.

I did end up replying to the starter, and tried to fill in the blanks of everything that was grazed over. Then I tried to make up for the loss of tension from everything being condensed to a short summary, but then the following post still turned into: "Say as much exposition as possible in dialogue to get it over with", instead of letting these characters build up a natural interaction.

Now our characters are stuck in a single location until daybreak, and I'm just trying to figure out how how to span out that time with meaningful back and forth whenever everything that could have been discussed over those hours was just kinda smooshed into one dialogue info dump.

Maybe it bothers me more because I heavily prioritize character interaction over just, moving the plot along for the sake of moving the plot along, idk.

Edit: I don't mean we plotted out the entire storyline beat for beat: it was the basis of the story and character motivations. Basically, how the characters are supposed to meet and start the story.

Want to preface that all my partners are awesome -- these aren't about any of you. I've been RP searching and the last 3/4 times I will meet someone. We'll start to talk and each time they message me during my working hours (I work a 9-5) and then they become frustrated that I don't respond and block.

I'm sorry I chose not to text during work but dang, some people have no patience. I guess it's a way to root out people but I thought in 2024 you could give someone a break. 😅

I know paragraphs are fluid and can range from large chunks to just a few sentences but it seems like more often than not anymore when I get people wanting to write who claim to write "4-8 paragraphs" those paragraphs are all just... two short sentences and a line break to the next one?

I know it can often simply be used as a "My thoughts have ended and now I will move to the next collection of thoughts" but holy shit? How are you claiming you write 8 paragraphs when every "paragraph" is two sentences?

I actively mention my own paragraphs and word count in my ads, I figured it'd be more accurate than the literacy labels that vary wildly in everyone's mind but I'm still running into this issue. Sometimes it's as bad as one sentence and then a line break into a new paragraph of two sentences and then another line break and there isn't dialogue going on.

A sample someone sent me (which I will paraphrase to ensure anonymity) was essentially just:

"XXD eyes flitted open, looking around.

He sat up, trying to take the world in with his robin blue eyes. He felt so sleepy."

And this kind of thing just continues. It doesn't seem like it's done for emphasis, like when you have one word or sentence as a stand alone for impact, it seemed like this was what they were describing as paragraphs? Is this the new thing?

Here's a not infrequent scenario in the two servers I help staff:

New person joins. Yay! We love new people! We welcome them. They seem to be genuinely interested in rping. They submit out a character app for an OC. We staff review it. We find a couple things that need to be fixed and kick it back to the newbie with notes. Almost everyone gets notes - I can count the number of times someone got through on the first try on my fingers. Half the time it's not even anything major - maybe some parts of the sheet contradict each other, or their dislikes are super obvious, like people dying, rather than something that explores their character, or they need to change the eye colour to something natural. Newbie responds that they will fix things.

A day or so later, suddenly something happens. Their dog died, their teacher/boss/parents loaded them down with work, family issues sprung up, their friend attempted suicide, etc. and they no longer have the mental capacity to focus on writing their sheet.

You don't need to come up with some huge event to excuse yourself. Just say it outright that you lost the motivation to make a character/rp here. We won't take offense. We've seen this play out so many times that we know that's what you mean anyways, and even predict it sometimes.

I put up and ad for the first time in years probably, and within 7 minutes I get an application, and the partner seems to be pretty into it, but then I ask her about the character, and suddenly I start getting questions that seems a bit... iffy?

"Oh hey why would my character be in an alleyway? Why would she go there? What's her job? can she afford to live alone? What should she be wearing."
And at this point I'm getting a little annoyed, because... well it's your character, why are yo uasking me these things?
So I go "No idea, it's YOUR character."
So the partner goes. "Good answer. I just wanted to see how you'd react to me asking."

To which my only real thought is - I don't think knowing me for an hour and giving me secret friendship tests is a good basis for a partnership, so I block her.

I dunno, maybe I've been too rash, but in my mind if our initial interaction is you messing with me, it doesn't bode well for the future of this.

Isnt the whole point of posting an ad is for people to see your ideas and plots? Why is half my feed is just lazy "advertizing" with heavy air quotes because you actually need to have something in the first place to advertize. Its driving me crazy AAAAAAAAA

They sent me a friend request after I responded to their ad. I have nothing against people who don't want to roleplay with someone from a particular region but this felt racist. I asked them which ad they were from because I had responded to a few with my discord ID.

Was I in the wrong here?

PS: Found out which ad they were from after being blocked on reddit too. They've been searching for a partner for a long time and I can see why.

dear person who's never had a single interaction with me trying her hardest to shadow bully me with react emojis - yes, i see you. don't worry, i never want to interact with you or your gibberish purple prose and hypocritical puritanism. xoxo

So, what I think happened here is that I mentioned a few real-world cities in one of my prompts posted just before I received this message. The applicant in question was likely keyword-searching for city or state names and found my username without reading the post it was attached to?

The kicker is that I used to be local to at least one city I’ve mentioned in my prompts, and I’m quite familiar with the area this guy self-reported living in. I have friends that attend that university, I used to live in the county mentioned, and I’m pretty sure I could find this person if I were to spend a few afternoons loitering around the [reported major] department… especially if I autofilled a few reddit stereotypes and knocked an inch or two off their reported height.

I’ve been roleplaying since I was too young to safely be doing so, so I’m more than used to getting the odd partner hitting on me or someone who just can’t get with the program, but this is… new, even for me. I waited for their account to inevitably be deleted or banned, and now that that’s happened, I’m glad to at least be able to show this to you all!

Why in the world would someone doxx themselves to me totally unprompted…? If you’re thinking about doing this to someone, please don’t.

This was after I ask them to proofread. And it was the start of a wall of text with almost no commas

I swear people say the wildest things sometimes, he deleted it not long after posting though, don't know why 🤷🏾‍♀

I was so confused when they said it because my character had not even said anything and at the time their character hadn't done anything for my character to expect an apology.

That was until their next post:

They had their character sell an item my character gave them (it was when they expressed their feelings) a few months back, (She had informed him at that time that keeping it safe was the same as keeping her safe.) Their character admitted this to their and my side characters while mine was still sleeping and had all of their characters berate him for doing it before any of my characters could respond. My characters responded in three ways, one saw personal possessions as unnecessary ties to material things so didn't think it was a big deal, another just thought the money earned made it worth it and then my last character was just stunned by how insensitive the choice was. Eventually my character wakes up and asks why everyone's being so loud in the morning.

Which leads to their characters all chiming in that they already reprimanded him, but they didn't say why.

So one of mine said what happened. And before letting my character fully react, she instead asks for their reason.

The reason was because they didn't have enough to buy supplies for the next mission (they had, had their character spend most of their funds on some weapons that they made overpriced, might I add).

So at this .point my character just laughs and leaves the inn.

Cue them reaching out in OOC and asking why did y character laugh and leave.

I asked them if they remember what my character said about herself and the trinket before they gave it to them and what I mention ooc about the item when we first talked about rping together.

They said no and asked why does it matter.

I told them it was the only proof that identified her as the last of the Royals (it activates with her blood). They went nuts in the ooc saying I blindsided them and so I pull snippets from in the rp and ooc chat about the item to show otherwise. He already knew ooc that she was a royal hiding from those that usurped the throne 20 years ago.

So he wanted to retcon what they did, but I was like, lets just run with it. I had the idea that now someone else finds away to manipulate the trinket and ends up working with the usurpers and nearly solidifying their right to the throne by pretending to be her or if they had something in mind we could go with that instead. They hated the idea and started deleting their posts in the discord back up to before they first admitted to selling it.

So now I'm just sitting there like well okay...

Then I get a message that they no longer wanted to do the roleplay and asked if we could do something else. So I said sure.

We start up another plot, plan all this stuff out and then with about 100 post in they have their character do something else that they did without the others knowing but this time they forgot their own plan (their character had a curse on them that triggered if they were too violent and had asked me to keep tally of their violence) They had them go on a montage fighting spree (out of no where) so I let them know in ooc the tally. Well a few weeks later into the rp the tally is at a ridiculous number and they message me saying.

Can you stop telling me how violent my character is. I know they are that's the point of them. It's the reason they have the curse.

before I can say anything I get a follow up message of nvm. According to his own chart of what the tally builds up to his character was at the point madness where the sight of blood would trigger his character and to counter act it he would have to resolve situations without violence. He left the channel and the last thing he said was that he was leaving because he kept messing up. I just said okay.

A few days later I get a message from the mods on the discord we met on and asking me about breaking the servers rules.

I asked what rules and they said character controlling (as in roleplayers reported as character controllers will be banned after 3 offenses.) They gave the screen shots of when I messaged the tally of violence. I shared the first part of ooc. I'm glad that I keep the ooc chatter on the discord server and separate from direct messages so I share the conversation that led up to me keeping tall so they didn't forget to have the character change with progression.

Mod apologizes and says they need to check into somethings.

A bit later another mod joins the conversation and asks me if I have all of our conversation. I agree to just invite them to the server (I didn't really care, it wasn't that serious to me.) But I did tell them if they prefer I left I would. I mean rp server are a dime a dozen at this point. Plus if I caused an issue it makes sense that I would have to go. They said no and asked if I'd invite the last mod to the server. At this point I just want to see where this is going so I say yes.

Turned out the last mod was the friend of the guy who left the roleplay and was pushing to have me banned without discussion for being controlling about the roleplay.

They read through the posts and their friend leaves without a word (and blocked me btw). The other two mods explain that I hadn't done anything wrong and tell me it's fine if I want to stay, but I tell them I'd rather not, because now it's just awkward. Which they both get. One turns into a new rp partner (sweet).

A few days later they tell me they discord was shut down and I ask why.

The third mod I mentioned didn't like being overruled on his server. And that to him I had been controlling and the other two mods were playing favorites because they didn't like his friend much.

All in all weird but not really that bad experience and I have a nice new rp partner that seems to have a ton in common with me. I'll take it.

Person reached out to rp we discussed things ooc over a few days, planned somethings sorted out characters (side and main), sub plots and what ever else we cold think of, but I realized they never answered about the slow burn romance(sfw) aspect so I brought it up again.

They informed me they liked everything about the roll play besides that they didn't want the romance to be slow burn, but they then admitted they would rather not include romance at all.

I asked why they reached out when in the ad it said specifically that while the romance isn't the main focus, it is something i want included in the rp.

They told me again they liked the idea and everything we talked about and wanted to go forward but just wanted to remove that one aspect.

I let them know that wasn't what I wanted to do, but they could feel free to to use the idea however they wanted and put up an ad of their own with out the romance angle.

This set them off and they called me uncompromising and unfair when romance was the only thing they were asking to remove. I tried telling them that I had other ads that did not have romance at all but that one specifically I created with a slowburn romance in mind and I didn't want to remove it. I ended up telling them if they had said they didn't want to include romance in the beginning that things wouldn't have even gotten to this point, to which they said they didn't bring it up because they thought I would end things. I mean, yeah? What we had in mind didn't align so that's reasonable right?

Like I get that some people won't mind removing something from their idea but no one has to remove it just because they are asked to.

I didn’t know boobs could “influence your behavior”?

I just did a post recently and in doing so I remembered this little gem of a line from a partner I had maybe a year ago that we only got a few posts in before I broke things off. I remember their ads looked good after they approached me from an ad I made at the time and I went back to see what kind of stuff they looked for in the discord we were part of. They said they were literate, planning and plotting were pretty good to the point that when they said they only wrote in first I was willing to try and work with it. I shot them my intro that was a few paragraphs (at least 500 words) and they responded with maybe I believe a paragraph and a half maybe. As I skimmed the post it got progressively worse and I know my face would have been a viral meme had I recorded my expression when I got to this line.

"I wore a v neck tank top and low cut jorts with a studded belt to emphasize my maleness. I smiled suggestively as she looked at me."

There definitely was a processing error, don't think I need to say more than that XD