Hi, hope it’s alright I’m performing some minor thread necromancy!

I’m going to be honest here: I am chomping at the bit so hard for the establishment of a roleplay subforum that I have chewed clean though it and am now rapidly eroding my own teeth. This is partly because I’m a GM, and the “forum adventure” I most want to bring to this space can only be executed on a roleplay forum. I doubt I’m the only GM out there who would be thrilled to make use of such a space!

That said, I’ve been doing this shit for like 20 years, so I absolutely understand how thoroughly difficult it is to moderate an RP forum in a manner that maintains its integrity as a fun and collaborative space. People get REALLY invested in their OCs and the stories they want to tell with them, to the point where it can lead to some dysfunctional behavior. Toxic cliques can form in RP communities, leading to a wider abusive dynamic that can ruin the fun for EVERYBODY. While an issue like “my partner/GM is taking the story in a direction I don’t like” seems trivial on the surface, in reality that statement can be the tip of a horrifying iceberg of drama!

So it really is important to have a sound ruleset from the beginning — otherwise it can take years for a community to recover from the damage if something goes wrong.

However, I have seen some wonderfully positive and mutualistic RP communities rise up from the ashes of the trauma caused by dysfunctional past experiences, and that leads me to believe it is both possible and worth the effort to try and build a roleplay community here. If it’s done right, a roleplay forum would play a major role in cultivating Fruity Rumpus as a space where every single member’s creativity is valued. There’s also the fact that roleplayers are a HUGE segment of the customer base for your average commission artist, so giving RPers a dedicated space on FR would benefit the artists on this forum too!

I think BracingStripes has a good point with the compromise he’s suggesting. In my experience, one of the keys to a healthy RP community is understanding which issues need to be escalated to mods, and which issues should be left for players and GMs to settle among themselves. The latter would be easier to achieve if we had two subforums instead of just the one.

One subforum would be an OOC (out-of-character) subforum where people can look for other folks to RP with and negotiate how they want their RP to go. The other would be an IC (in-character) subforum where the RP scenes actually take place. If something goes awry in your IC thread, the first place you would go would be to your OOC thread to figure things out. The right time to bring in a moderator, then, would be when the discussion in an OOC thread becomes irreconcilable. Having a forum for OOC communication (and encouraging people to use it BEFORE starting an RP) would do a lot to prevent the various forms of the “this is not the story I wanted” problem, since it gives people a way to know what they’re getting into in advance. Anyone who wants to skip the OOC step and improvise a scene would be doing so aware of the risk it entails, and be responsible for the consequences.

Generally speaking, “keep OOC and IC separate” is the golden rule for roleplayers I learned on Gaia Online, and a lot of potential problems can be simplified and avoided by making that rule the base priority. It promotes open communication among players, discourages players from using their characters as weapons of passive-aggression against each other, and also helps prevent the etiquette-breaking act of metagaming (in which characters display knowledge they should not realistically have).

In conclusion, I hope y’all keep the possibility of an RP space on the Fruity Rumpus table. It’s a truly daunting prospect, but also has a lot of potential to bring some good into the community you’re trying to build here. (TvT)