Roleplay forum?

That's a quite interesting idea and I'd support it, while warning the mods they're gonna need to recruit a little if they want to do it. Roleplay forums are notoriously difficult to moderate. Maybe they just don't have the numbers yet, and also don't want to further complicate their job.

god i would

love that

i hit add reply early on accident

I would support this. I wasn’t around back in the day and I’ve liter never roleplayed before, but I‘m all for it.

I'd be shocked if it hasn't come up in the behind-the-scenes discussions for what this forum will look like once it sheds the (beta) next to its name. Oasis is right though, it's probably a moderation thing.

I was surprised that there wasn't a role-playing forum added. As a Homestuck fan, I'm faaaarrr from the average Homestuck 'experience', and I think a lot of people are due to a lack of conventions and roleplaying. Even with the comeback of cringe culture, this fandom feels dull sometimes, and I just wanna have some fun

roleplay subforum would be fun... i havent roleplayed in a good while

Ive roleplayed ONCE, and im constantly chazing that high whenever i can, so HELL YEAH!

don't get me wrong, i think roleplay's great. i did so much roleplaying back in the day and i turned out................. fine..........

we also have plenty of mods for it at the moment. or at least i think this, maybe users feel differently. the issue isn't in the number of mods willing to do the work. it's as oasis mentioned, it's in the complex ruleset those mods would have to enforce. public hosting of collaborative writing introduces a lot of potential rules and conflict that can range between "this person took a story in a direction i don't like" to "this person keeps doing creepshow Dare You Enter My Magical Realm stuff i didn't sign up for".

all kinds of things can go wrong here. it's a thing i would love to foster, but actually crafting the perfect silver bullet ruleset for managing it and making sure it's a good experience for everyone is difficult work.

I will point out you're already doing "public hosting of collaborative writing" with the forum adventures section, though I understand it's a different (but related) beast from straight up roleplaying. For one a forumwide ruleset isn't as relevant since each adventure runner kind of sets the rules and boundaries for their own adventure.

@Victoria

The idea in my head was less.. unified concept then what you're envisioning. I would have left specific rulesets to the threads that govern them and moreso use the forum as a stop shop for roleplays. Organizing chatrooms or roleplays contained within their own threads, or just developing OCs. So having to balance the headache that is canon handle swapping or whatever would be less of an issue.

It would still take some work, though.

>AwSnapz404

In the same boat as u!!

I'd love 2 learn to roleplay; i feel like that's a major part of the internet fandom experience i missed out on. But I can scarcely imagine a better time and place for it than a burgeoning new forum for homestuck fans right on the cusp of a new series that would likely bring in more people interested in the fandom.

I think it could work by having a "forum-wide" rules list that would apply to all RP threads (high-level rules, what's allowed and what's not allowed generally, can incur moderator action if they're egregiously violated), and then having it be standard practice to include thread-specific low-level rules in your OP (what characters you can play as, the AUs, formatting, et cetera). It would incentivize people to be thorough and clear with what they want when making their RPs. That way, you leave much of the minutiae to the people taking part in the RP.

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)