Forums » RP Discussion » Pet peeves - Let's rant about RP stuff we hate!

It's absolutely fine to not like it when people do this, but to each their own, yes? If people are happy and content playing their characters that/in an overly flashy way and they find others to play this with, then there's nothing wrong with it. Saying things like "I'd hate to be mistaken for these people" makes it sound like people who enjoy or simply do these things are lesser and in some way bad or ridiculous, which is not true; there merely have a different preference than you. To chastise them for that is very destructive for their self-esteem and encourages them to box away the things they enjoy, only to be more liked by their peers.

I did and I know. I just wanted to parade it.

Nah. (Well, a little.) I actually do have trouble knowing where the line is on a lot of things is, and I seem to get self-conscious about the wrong things.

HNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNGH

My pet peeve is having too many pet peeves. I understand preferences! I have my own. But honestly I got a little sad at some of these peeves.

Flashy characters are fun sometimes. Having a sort post length is sometimes necessary. Not replying for days is normal because life. Preferring to play one race or sexuality isn't bad either. Hell most of my characters are pretty pale and asexual cis females. I just happen to think pale skin is underrated and beautiful and fun to draw. And I don't play relationships when I'm in one.

It's all about what they want. each individual.

I think the best route to take is to just compromise with other rpers for a lot of these problems or be selective.

I'm unfortunately very selective, but I don't play much. I like to make large posts in a plot filled role play so I have something to daydream about. To inspire me artistically too. And my brain is really picky about what it finds exciting or entertaining or inspirational.

Just reading over these again made me so sad when I got to some because of how frustrated they sounded. I saw a lot of people calmly debating and that's great!

I dunno. Sure I have my peeves. We all do. Sure I have my preferences. Again, we all do.

But a lot of these are making other people sound in the wrong. That's not really too fair is it?

I'm a big old squishy baby so I figured I'd throw all this in there. I'm also on my phone so I expect a lot of errors.

I'm just concerned sone people may feel attacked is all cuz ilu guys.

Actually I disagree with this entirely.

This mindset is kind of a double-edged sword. It is true that games are most fun when played with friends who are supportive of your taking risks and having fun OOC, and as RPers who explore the mindset of others, we should be good at exploring the worldview of another and understanding it.

On the other hand, the point of RP is that it is a collaborative effort -- otherwise, what you are doing is creative writing on your own. Which means that any single player who decides that what makes them happy is being the most unique/shocking/strongest/special and needs to prove that they are that by outdoing/embarrassing/belittling/not acknowledging/not sharing the spotlight, they are not doing a good job of playing with others and by that standard are, indeed, doing it wrong.

If something you are doing is making the game unpleasant/unplayable for the rest of the players, then you probably need to be told that thing isn't appropriate and find some other outlet for it. It does not necessarily need to be in the form of chastisement, but there are friendly ways to ask people to consider playing in another way, or finding another group. In fact, I would say that people who try to "be nice" by not saying anything at all about inconsiderate RP habits are in reality not being nice - they're more avoiding the momentary discomfort of confrontation at the expense of your future happiness and success. RP is impossible without other people (even "show up" RP), so if people stop playing with you, your fun stops, no matter how you derived that fun in the first place.

To each everyone's own sort of character, but at the same time not always being the spotlight character is a life skill and sort of a requirement for successfully maintaining long-term RPs. I am grateful that people told me how I was being inconsiderate when I started out as a wee bairn, because it improved my RP AND my fun vastly.

To the wider thread, though, I'm going to leave this here:

There's a lot of venting going on here, and more than likely if you are someone who thinks at all about whether other people are having fun while you're playing, it isn't directed specifically at you and it doesn't mean you're doing it wrong. No need to be sad or as if you are being called out to defend yourself!

My personal theory is that 90% of the people posting here can think of exceptions to whatever it is they hate, and much of the time the real underlying annoyance is not vampires or post length but rather feeling that the person on the other end was not thinking very much about others in the way they chose to portray and play their character. I've personally broken damn near every rule I have about RP whenever I ran into people who were thoughtful, and been happy to do so.

Excessive post lengths is one, especially on Furcadia where the chat window is pretty small. There's a lot of scrolling involved and usually a lot of unnecessary filler. Sure, I can open the logs and read the post in its entirety but Furcadia logs aren't very nice to read and I just can't reciprocate that kind of length. It's not necessary.

Long post times. There are exceptions to this rule, such as RP on Skype, which I usually go at a slower pace, but if I'm RPing on Furcadia I get impatient when posts take 15-20 minutes or more to be written, and that applies to myself as well. I don't often have a lot of time to RP, and I often don't have the mental/creative fortitude to RP for several hours at a time so it's frustrating that at the end of 3-4 hours only a handful of posts have been thrown out and nothing has really been accomplished. I usually lose interest in the RP entirely at that point.

Poor sentence structure & grammar. I don't look for exemplary writing skills, and I don't even know the names for the different parts of a sentence like predicates and whatnot. What does bother me is when the RP is littered with excessive sentence fragments and run-ons, or putting things in the wrong tense and using the wrong conjugations/adding -ing where it doesn't belong. For example, I have roleplayed with people that will use sentences like the following regularly,

Instead of:
He cupped his hands and drank the water.

I see:
Cupping his hands and drinking the water.

That's not a section from a complete sentence or anything, that IS the sentence. There's nothing to complete it. It bothers me so much

Character language that doesn't belong with the character. This is a minor thing and I can usually overlook it, but when a character's dialogue doesn't seem to match the character, it's a little weird. For example, a 20 something character in a modern setting speaking and using language that really only seems to fit someone from an earlier period or century or vice versa. It's just kind of weird. I just think that if I met the character in real life I'd think they're a weirdo.

Alpha males. These are characters and players that have to be the top dog. They have to win every fight, they have to lord over everyone, and they're usually dicks ICly. I see this a lot with werewolf communities and while I understand that having pack hierarchy and whatnot associated with wolves makes sense in that respect, I find all the huffing and the puffing really exhausting. I do enjoy power struggle but there's a point where it's like 'can you just calm the hell down please?'. I really like werewolves but now I just don't participate in those communities for that reason.

I think most of mine have already been mentioned in one way or another so I guess the one I'll throw out there is people that are weird about IC vs. OOC relationships. A looong time ago my best friend (and I hate to drag her into this but I doubt she'll even read it but if she does I'M SORRY BB ILU) was with a dude who got weirdly jealous because she was RPing with me and our characters happened to be in a relationship (which they had been since before he came along anyway?) and it was just really weird. Like okay I've been friends with this person for over a decade now and you're gonna pull that? Hahahah nooo go away. It was just really gross and bizarre!

Uhm are we living on the same planet? Because I'm preeeetty sure we have a global /problem/ of pale skin being held above dark skin as better (let alone in countries that have white people holding whites above all else...?). I think what you were trying to say is "my comfort zone is white and thus I only play /draw white because I am white"? I really am at a loss as to how anyone can misconstrue pale skin as underrated. It's like literally everywhere and almost every character ever.

That's sad :C I had the same problem! My husband was a bit iffy about me RPing at first, but after I let him read what I was up to, he realized it was just fun fiction and not... well, smut.

You don't have to be snappy. I'm preeeetty sure she said what she meant- that she likes pale skin because it looks appealing to her, not just because she is white.

I literally only replied to her saying pale skin is 'underrated'. Not her aesthetics.

Eh? Not... necessarily. On magazines and stuff it often goes on about 'how to get that lovely summer tan' or whatever. And no. I'm half Cherokee, and tan very easily - I just like the pink flush and how the colors melt together when I'm painting. Doesn't mean I think any other skin color is less beautiful (I have characters with different skin tones, it's just skin, it doesn't matter to me) but I like painting pale white. I do most of my own art so most of my characters reflect what I like to paint. Hence why I also don't have furres. No problem with furres whatsoever, just don't play them because I can't draw them.

It's not my comfort zone, I just like it. I don't hold it ABOVE anything. Hell, I'm half Cherokee. How can I? It's just skin tone. Being pale or favoring pale skin on your characters doesn't mean you hold it above o:. I don't understand why you thought that.

But I dunno, I don't know if we're straying off topic or not. c:

Masha is right, to be honest. And really, the notion of pale skin being seen as more attractive is often deeply rooted in racism. Yeah, there's talk of "summer tans," but a summer tan isn't to make a white person look non white. They still very much enjoy looking white.

However, there are plastic surgery clinics out there that will charge you through the nose to get your skin professionally whitened so that you can be taken more seriously. My home town has a very heavy immigrant population. It also has a billboard for a plastic surgeon promising he can make you look perfectly white with a few easy treatments and two thousand dollars. The billboard has before and after photos of an Indian woman with dark hair becoming a pale-faced blonde haired beauty. And the overabundance of white people in media is symptomatic of that.

There have been cases of people being told they're too black to play a hobbit. They cast white people to play Native Americans. The saturation of pale skin in the media can easily slip into roleplay. It's easy to get it into one's head that a fantasy race is 'supposed to be' white for that reason and many players who don't know any better then settle on white as the default for everything they make even though it's not reflective of the real world. It's reflective of the media they consume. Pale skin is very much not under-rated. It's idealized to the point where magazines lighten the skintones of black actors in photos before publishing them and to the point where women are paying thousands of dollars just to not look like the race they were born as. I've yet to see similar billboards aimed at white people who desperately wish they looked Latino.

Hi guys!

I can see you are really passionate about your opinions and that this is something that you really want to be heard over. The intensity of the last several posts made us a bit nervous, however, so we're temporarily locking the topic.

You aren't in trouble, and it's very likely that we're going to unlock it again soon! The moderators just wanted everyone to take a quick breather while we put our heads together and came up with some ground rules for continuing, to make sure that you can all be heard in a way that helps people to hear, rather than just tensing up and feeling offended while fingers are pointed about. Plus it will make the mods feel much calmer to go forward with a game plan for referreeing should spirits get too high! Make sense? I hope you'll bear with us while we huddle. I'll have an update for you ASAP!

Thanks for understanding. Go get yourself some food or tea in the meanwhile?

Good afternoon, everyone!

Thank you for your patience while the moderation team got together to discuss this topic's lockdown this morning. Since these topics put people on the defensive and we noticed hurt feelings before this recent turn, we have decided that it shall remained permanently closed.