Forums » RP Discussion » Bad Experiences in RP

I agree with sundial and hollies replies wholeheartedly and would like to add that with difficulty and over coming misunderstandings or hurdles essentially gives us as people opportunities to evolve in to more concise and conscientious individuals when we partake in hobbies like rp. But not only that it will equip us with tools to communicate more effectively in the real world.

The main problem I have in the rp world is finding the right partners. I'm very selective about who I rp with, and for the most part avoid all public or group rp instances. I'm old and shy, and don't have much faith in my abilities to scrawl up a decent post already; that aside, when I do finally land a partner, I've found that the rp tends to taper off into nothingness pretty quick, be it from lack of direction or simply lack of responses. My partners just stop replying eventually. They want to jump to a different character or rp entirely, or feel my post lengths are too long or too constant. As such I put up a fight when people want to rp with me anymore, because I'm relatively certain it's a neverending cycle. As much as I adore rp, it's just too much to ask of most people. Don't get me wrong, as a full timer I completely understand that life comes first, and that rp is strictly for fun, but getting into one just to have it dropped or ignored just drains all the fun out of it for me. I try to keep my responses posted at a polite but casual pace, and I never push. Maybe that's my problem.

The other issue that pops up once in a blue moon is when I'm forced to stop an rp because I'm uncomfortable with the direction of the ooc banter in between posts. I'm extremely hard to make uneasy, but the one thing that'll do it is when the other person starts to treat me as the character I'm portraying; say as a lover or a villain. I've had to halt the rp entirely just to stop things from getting too far out of hand on more than one occasion, with more than one person. That's a big no-no!

I would like to point out that that for me and probably others too simply don't log out. This is my personal computer that no one else ever uses so I never bother to log out of RPR.

When people just stop in da middle of an rp and stop talking to you
Thats gets me so mad and then they start another rp and want to rp with you like... WHAT!!!!

Not interacting with any of my characters
Like I joined the rp for a reason NOW LOOK AT THEM!! (Lolz)

Peoples charcter related to a cannon charcter of some sort
Like I get it thats how some people want their characters but jesus.... Im no pointing any fingers but I was rping with someone and they turned into Deliah Cipher...... just why.... I dont remember who is was but please dont hate meh

When someone tells me to fix how my charcters are to make their charcter like them more.
I use to rp on a lot of websites til I decided this is my main one. So this person literally told meh "You charcter is to boring get them better then I'll continue this rp" I got so mad I wanted to punch them.

Thats all I got right now... thank you for reading I guess

Yeah... The same thing is kinda happening in my RP's that all my partners are really busy with their real lives and won't tell me about it...or at least reply back... (Even for just a little bit to see if everything is fine with them since I worry a lot otherwise...) I'm a very patient person...perhaps a little too much...and I'm very accepting of breaking off the RP's due to any reason, just so as long as people tell me. I won't hold a grudge to anyone here. But not telling me anything, even for a little bit, is just rude and adds up a lot to my worriment and stress of waiting for them to reply back to me...

How about thread invaders? Ones that spoil the fun by posting things such as "*kills everyone in the RP*" or causes some un-needed IC drama?

THOSE people. I had one person tell me they did not like my character's hair for some weird reason.

Events like this, during my childhood, were suffered any time my brother saw me playing. He found it very funny to pretend he was a giant and walk through whatever I was in the midst of. Legos. Figures. Whatever I did on the floor. I began trying to hide whenever I played anything.

As a result, I've always been extremely reluctant to engage in anything considered "public" play. The mere idea of being observed enjoying something becomes stressful.

Building upon that, I've run into varying people who enjoy playing especially young characters who--for whatever reason--have to have the spotlight. If they see two people playing and they're not involved, they either demand cuddles or start doing something deliberately destructive and disruptive.

When I was a rookie RPer, I was more open with who I interacted with. I met some seriously rotten people. Allot were either snobbish, arrogant or "Too Good" for their own. I met one who pretty much mocked people who had Asperger's or any disorder and would challenge them to an RP fight.

I am pretty selective now when it comes to RPing and with certain people. I like to get to know my RP partners better than just host an open RP for it to get ruined by some dumbo who can't mind their business. I mean. I use to be not so picky, but with stalkers, twinks, creeps, God modders and really petty people who mix RL and RP together, I kind of handpick nowadays. Some RPers do think being selective is a bad thing, but if the said person who is selective had some bad experiences with toxic users, then they have a reason.

I think with the young character thing I rarely see. I see the behaviour with various sets of users. More so I see allot of "NOTICE ME, SENPAI!" RPers on various sites. Like the one who will post a one lined/word post in a thread that has multi paragraphs.

^ This is basically everything I feel in one grand nutshell.

Man these are so bad.
My worst was probably playing about 12 different female characters for this ONE dude, he was barely illiterate and was a 'god'. It was a l s o a anthro MLP type roleplay. Well, he was human. I look back and go "Why was I like this"
(No hate on MLP/anthro roleplay here people, it's just a factor of the experience)

Two of my worst experiences were
-Some guy I did a wolf roleplay with could and would not spell to save his life. I don't know what is language was, but it honestly seemed more like laziness then anything. I say this because I had included the word 'whining' in a reply just above his next one, and he responded with something that included 'yning' and it took me a solid ten minutes to figure out he had meant whining. I left after that.
-Another time I was in a creepypasta rp group and this girl's first language was Spanish, and she wasn't too fluent in English. There were a lot of language barriers and one of my friends suggested that she could talk in Spanish, and we'd google translate it, or we'd just google translate our replies to Spanish. She didn't seem to understand, so my friend sent her a google translated reply that was something like 'Should we try to to translate our replies in Spanish?' The girl kept denying us so we went on like we had been.
Her character was honestly really stupidly over powered and prone to breaking physics, and it was pretty obvious the girl just wanted attention trained on her at all times. (At some point her character had a baby out of no where. The baby was then forgotten completely.)
Anyways, we pointed out her crap and were trying to give her ways how not to do that dumb crap, and she threw a fit, left (or got kicked?) and called us racists who didn't know how to roleplay in a group chat of folks who didn't really know us. Also in that group chat was another roleplayer who was honestly really homophobic and generally a shitty roleplayer too, so they basically just worked together to spread shit about us until the one person we had in there showed the screenshots of the original group chat in way that was pretty much saying 'shut the heck up'

That's rough buddy but I honestly giggled at that part. It's just. "Yning"

Well, where do I start?

Here's my pet peeves. All of which have happened before.

--People who can't spell for their life/use unnecessary textspeak. I'm a little bit of a grammar Nazi but not as bad as spelling. I have typos every so often too but if every third word is misspelled I cringe way too much.
--PEOPLE WHO RESPOND TO MY MULTIPARA WITH A ONE-LINER. GAHD PLEASE PUT SOME EFFORT.
--People who insist I write more than a para during a portion of the RP where short replies are expected. (i.e. characters are arguing, combat, etc)
--***People who RP in script-style. Please, no.***(i.e. Molly: --goes to her room-- Hello?)
--People who don't put much thought into their characters.
--People who who don't put a lot of thought into psychological implications of a character's backstory on the character's personality, such as trigger events like rape, suicide, drugs, even simple things like divorce. Please, your character needs to be believable.
--META-GAMING (people who mesh OOC knowledge with IC knowledge). Please get to know my character in a regular, believable fashion.
--people who don't read the char profile before wanting to RP (unless its a valid reason)
--people who vanish for 1+ week without any sort of notice. Zero. Nada.
--clingy people who beg for me to stay in an RP when I've specifically told them that they've done any of those things above several times.

And the number one pet peeve of all:
--people who don't contribute to the story of an RP. If it's been made clear that the RP is strictly smut, I don't mind. But otherwise I can only shoulder the story-weight for so long before I get bored and/or burn out.

That seems blatant. It makes me think of those who constantly refer to role playing as "just a game, bro." The kind of players who find it silly when someone wants to take their role playing a bit more serious and be proud of the work they do. I refer to such people as "Deadpools."

Deadpools don't care what other people think. They see a chance to fool around, mock those who take it seriously, and enjoy themselves through the expense of others' enjoyment. You can typically spot the kind of player when they go for "insane" characters. "Insanity" being used as a justified pretense for "whatever I feel like" rather than a mental condition creating unique challenges for a character.

I abhorred the movie Deadpool because of how much it reminded me of such players. While everyone else tries to be serious, they just sort of bounce around--defeat henchmen with their backside, and make it all into one massive joke. And if you dare call them out on it, they tell you to chill.

This draws to mind what may be the worst experience I ever had in RP.

"Lawful Good" paladin kitsune who Deadpool'd the entire game, then lied and manipulated everyone whenever it caused drama or stress with the other players. She didn't give a damn.
This is really enjoyable as long as it's done with others who are using the same format. But it's inexcusable in instances of para-play where the expectation is to write in paragraphs and grammatically correct fashion.

Not sure if this technically counts since it wasn't in a roleplay, but on another website, specifically a Sonic themed one called Chao Island, there was this one specific roleplayer who messaged me and a friend. MY friend and I were usually really quick to reply in our rp's since it was just the two of us. But this roleplayer told us to stop posting in our rp's so much because he was tired of seeing our rp threads at the top of the rp page.

Another time on said forum, I was in another rp with the friend mentioned above, and we had a third partner for this rp. The Rp was about a group of animals, normal animals not anthros, who fought to stop these giant monsters that were suddenly appearing. The first giant mosnter was made of water or something like that. I don't remember the line of reasoning exactly, but I had one of my characters decided cat litter would be a good way of combating the monster(Just for clarity this particular scene in the rp was right next to a grocery or a pet store or something). The other person in the rp kept having people run up and take away the cat litter my character was taking, despite the pretty clear fact that a literal Giant Monster was rampaging not far from where things were, or that nearly everyone but the people the third partner was controlling were the only people putting theft of a bag of cat litter above the giant monster. It got so ridiculous that freaking animal control showed up and took my character away, again despite the very obvious fact that there was a GIANT MONSTER RAMPAGING AROUND. The REALLY frustrating part was that I was the one that got chewed out. Admittedly, I did godmod a bit there by having my character escape a point blank tranq dart from animal control, but I wouldn't have godmodded had the third partner not had half the people in the vicinity put a raccoon stealing cat litter above a giant monster in their priorities list. And I swear it felt like the third partner was doing this explicitly to spite me.



On the topic of "Deadpoolers' I had a friend from my time in highschool, let's call him Edgy Teen since I don't wanna give out his real name, who I would occasionally roleplay with. His character Makuta, they had a far longer name that I never bothered to remember, was crazily over powered and pretty much was Deadpool if Deadpool was an anthro fox or wolf or whatever as well as a master thief. Anyways, I typically tolerated it cause I didn't roleplay with him much, but one of the only times I did his character went around doing whatever they wanted. They moved into the house across the street from my character and were constantly moping that nobody trusted him, even though he wasn't exactly quiet about being a master thief/assassin. My characters pointed that out and he just brushed it off if I'm remembering correctly. Then his character sexually assaulted one of mine. I don't remember precisely what led to it, but the rp ended shortly after that, and Edgy Teen was complaining that my characters didn't like Makuta. Again, I pointed out Makuta was a master thief/assassin, and had literally sexually assaulted one of my characters, and he mentioned that it was just a joke, and htought the rp wasn't a serious one.

Edgy Teen was also incredibly proud of his Anthro wolf/fox/coyote/whatever, master thief, Deadpool. Me and the friend mentioned above in the first two paragraphs would suggest ways to improve the character and tell Edgy Teen he was op, and Edgy Teen would always freak out and throw a hissy fit about the criticism. He'd also constantly be trying to force Makuta into our individual projects, even if him appearing in said projects made no sense at all. Eventually we cut ties with him. Despite this, he kept messaging us trying to apologize. To this day my block list on DA consists almost entirely of his alt. accounts, granted there's only three people on my block list.

Quoted the ones I experienced.

I have a massive pet peeve when people use script styled in a multi para RP.

I can see people not adding any effort into their characters if they are rookies, but the whole "Well I been RPing for so many years and I am just too lazy!" is not an excuse. Same with the ones who don't give me anything to work with their character. So how would I know their personality?

I am kind of selective when I RP with people. I don't like people who act like they know my character.

I know MANY who do that. They are extremely annoying. Allot of them turn into cyberbullies after a while.

One of my massive peeves has been mentioned, but when scrub RPers who can't take criticism OOC wise and start to pick fights IC wise. I remember in a Discord server, a scrubby Admin was mad that someone blocked them for being extremely annoying, stalkerish and childish. They were making their character behave in their "Rage mode" and would mix RP and RL together.

Back to the Deadpooler case. Not sure if this is considered, but I met abuse mods and admins who go cyberbully mode and would challenge people to RP fights for minor misbehaviour and would permanently kill their character, even if they could not RP fight well or at all. Regardless they want to or not. That happened to me when I was 11, going on 12 and it almost made me give up RPing, because it really hurt me allot.

OOC drama with people who dislike your character based on what or who they are.

I reject small communities and circles for those reasons. A good admin is never seen. Unless I am the organizer and admin of the community, I won't go into them--professionalism is extremely important to me, even at play. Any administrator of a role play community who doesn't strive to prove to me why I should put my faith in their administration--instead of having to prove myself as a "good enough roleplayer," is immediately forfeit any of my interest in their community.

Allot of user run communities tend to be rather like that. I think because a user thinks they feel more "higher" with some sort of authority on their end. That or the whole "I'll get to it! I can handle it!" type admins and promptly do nothing. That or you have admins who are a no show and their co mods/admins take over, but the ship sinks after a while.

I tend to stay away from RP forums that have a public chat box. While I do like talking to people. I always see chat boxes explode into drama. I honestly don't mind if someone wants to run their own RP forum. I just don't wanna deal with their drama and petty actions where it hurts others and makes a person leave after a while. This also goes for the whole "Apply for a character and get approved" thing.

Favouritism and letting people who misbehave get away Scott free is bothersome as well.

There are admins I met who are seriously bossy. I do understand some want to keep a thread going or activity, but some people have lives such as school, work or need time to themselves.

LARGE forums I tend ot stay away from due to it is easy to get lost in. RPR is so small and it feels comfortable.

Oh. My. Gods. This. I had one old roleplayer friend that I used to play with one and off right? We fought, we broke up, we got back together, started RPing again... And they said to me when I mentioned using Lexi as a character in a RP, "I don't RP with phoenix characters." Why? Because Lexi is a phoenix character, and back then when we RPed avidly with each other, I was a noob and used her regen powers a bit too much because teen angst reasons. But I grew from those noob days and revamped her skill so her reincarnation isn't a full-on "Death is Cheap" trope.


However, the real reason they said that was because I officially made Lexi a "bad girl type" that does what she wants. This person's character was a so-called "bad girl type" that does what she wants. They targeted Lexi with the phoenix character bit not because she's a phoenix, but because they didn't want another "bad girl type" stealing their spotlight, and Lexi is the only phoenix character I have. It's understandable that you may be iffy about certain character types after playing with someone like that, but Lexi's the only phoenix character they've run into from what I've learned. So it's not a matter of, "I ran into other phoenix characters who had similar or worse tropes/characterization issues." It was their roundabout way of saying, "I don't like your character no matter what you do to her or how much you've 'grown,' because she's a bad girl character, and that's my thing." (If Lexi was still that one random and girly pushover self-insert who was a yes-man to their character like she was when I started RPing, then they wouldn't have said anything.) Needless to say, after a few more conversations and a huge argument, I told them what's good and left.

Lexi's been one of my most played characters, and she's seen a lot of growth and development in the past three to four years. But sometimes their words still get to me to this day and affects my self-confidence with playing her from time to time, because of the fact that she's a phoenix. But then I have to remember one thing: tropes are tools, and tropes are not bad. It's okay to play a phoenix character as long as it's played well.

But then again, this person was also the type that wanted all of the attention on them. If they didn't get it, or if you were talking to someone else, they'd disappear. It didn't matter if you tried to include them into a conversation or a RP, that's what always happens.

That's another bad experience and a pet peeve, actually: people who steal the spotlight or mope ICly or OOCly because another event is going on and you can't RP with them, even if you take pains to include them anyway. It's always gotta be about them somehow because they think they're the main character and every other player is a supporting actor.

I don't like people who take RP too seriously.
Like, people who don't take it seriously at all are annoying because they remove any sense of character or meaning from an otherwise-good RP.
But people who get really up in arms over RP - or try to resolve OOC issues via RP - are just kind of sad. I could care less if you RP'd my character's violent death, I can just ignore that. It means nothing to me.
In the same vein, people who are absolutely rock-solid concrete about their long, long list of rules for RPing with them are annoying.
I've played with a lot of people who are far, far below average in terms of both writing and storytelling, but we both had fun and I'd rather play with them any day than a professional writer who insists on 5 paragraphs minimum and no characters between the ages of 20 and 24 or some other arbitrary crap.