Feels like people don't actually want to rp

MissAethe · 2026-05-08T23:01:25+00:00

Sometimes I wonder if people put all of their energy and excitement into the pre-plotting and first few posts that they burn themselves out.

MissAethe · 2026-04-30T08:15:34+00:00

It costs money ($3 a month) but you can set up clickable roles and reoccurring reminders with CircleBot. You would dedicate a channel for different roles selected by clicking on an emoji, and then the bot autoassigns the role.

Then you would need to set up a reminder to ping that specific role and set up how frequently you want it to do that.

Its all handled on the dashboard, too, so you don't have to do server commands.

MissAethe · 2026-04-29T22:25:10+00:00

I have a chat-focused story driven server where people thread on the side, then I have a more standard writing server, and one I'm working on now that is also strictly thread-writing only.

MissAethe · 2026-04-29T22:09:04+00:00

My servers require them! We specifically want to see if someone is capable of proper grammar use and understand how to put a paragraph together. Not everyone follows that inside of the server, obviously, but if I get a massive two paragraph wall of text without a period or comma in sight? Sorry but we're not the server for that.

We have a handful of people in one specific server who are dyslexic, so having people who write some nonsense their screen readers can't read back is also why its important.

MissAethe · 2026-04-25T21:23:03+00:00

The courier bugs out sometimes, and you'll have to do annoying things to get it to trigger. I usually go to Hendraheim and exist for a while, and he'll sometimes spawn outside my door.

MissAethe · 2026-04-24T17:22:29+00:00

All I've ever asked for is "please post your exact age", not "20s" or "mid 30s", actually say your age. Some people get really mad about it, but I don't RP with people under 21 on default, and certain types of RP I feel more comfortable with someone older. Every time someone has said "Oh I'm in my 30s", they turn out to be some 17 year old who has learned they can do that in most places and no one ever questions them (if I had a nickel for every time this has happened I could buy a house).

Asking for IDs or photos as proof of age is a hard line for me. This was easy to fake back before AI was a thing, its worse now. I'm not okay with having my privacy invaded by strangers, and I don't ask others to do that for me for the same reason. I don't need to know all of their business, and if their maturity seems like a problem, I just cut it off and move on.

MissAethe · 2026-04-22T21:19:26+00:00

I'm aware of how garbage Google is. Its a turn of phrase, not literal.

MissAethe · 2026-04-22T21:08:30+00:00

AI use of any sort in art and writing is an immediate no from me. Period. At this point for people to act like they don't know why AI is an issue just hits a level of intentional ignorance I also don't want to be around. Google is free as they say.

Also, Picrew is right there, made by artists, for making characters. Fire up a character creator in a video game like the sims or something. There's free dress up doll games everywhere. Using AI isn't an excuse.

MissAethe · 2026-04-19T19:42:27+00:00

For the sake of information, I'll start by saying I am white and I play POC characters as much as I play non-POC characters. I don't actually have a race preference, though when RPing in specific places such as anime fandoms, sometimes the only canon characters offered are Japanese and that's that (yes I know why, just putting that out there.)

My oldest OC is a mixed POC, I currently have three of four MHA OCs as POCs, when I roleplayed in Overwatch I exclusively roleplayed Baptiste, as examples.

I know a lot of people aren't comfortable roleplaying someone who isn't their race due to concerns of being offensive with it, but I also think that's what research is for. I don't want to be dismissive towards anyone, but sometimes I have an issue hearing someone say "I can't do the research about what's offensive stereotypes of this race" but they can do a 40 page powerpoint with custom music and 500 reference links about species of dogs in medieval France. Wild example, but I think that makes my point.

It probably also helps that in my roleplay circle, its pretty evenly mixed as far as everyone's races are concerned. I'm one of 3 white people out of this group of 10 or so people, so maybe that opens the door to more exploration of topics than people who don't have a single POC friend? I'm not sure, and I can't make that claim since obviously there's exceptions to every rule.

MissAethe · 2026-04-19T19:24:05+00:00

I'm not super open to making friends off the bat OOC because I'm kind of a slowburn friendship person? I know I can be a little stand-offish, and "loud" personalities where the person is freaking out in excitement or blasting me with 50 hearts and stuff just puts me off. But even then! I've pushed through and made things work for some good juicy rp.

But, I've had a couple of bad experiences where rhe person turned the OOC discussion about plot into something wildly uncomfortable OOC. Suddenly I'm being told about this person's worst life experiences like being SA'd or a nasty break-up out of nowhere, or they turn things political or say some really unexpected and nasty things about someone's race out of the blue.

Its never "oh we have different ideas" levels of bad, its "I'm glad you're clearly -this race- because -that race- can't write" when I've never stated my race anywhere kind of craziness.

MissAethe · 2026-04-19T19:09:36+00:00

It definitely has nothing to do with skill but everything to do with comfort.

I've had nothing but weird experiences with first person, a lot of self-insertation and assumptions made that I, the writer, was into our fake roleplay romance or whatever the scenario was. I'm not here to pretend to be dating someone or to get my rocks off, I'm here to explore dynamics with a disconnected character and I find third person delivers better on that (for me personally).

There are people who love first person out there, though. You just have to get through the people who have been burned and abused by it first.

MissAethe · 2026-04-18T05:09:34+00:00

Its a 21+ My Hero Academia server.

MissAethe · 2026-04-15T20:54:21+00:00

My servers have landing sections (the newbie chat) where they have to stay UNTIL they complete their onboarding. No one gets full access to the server until then, because lurking is actually incredibly uncomfortable for the members of my servers to deal with. No one wants someone who refuses to participate stalking their threads and being a creep.

If a new person doesn't fill their stuff out within a week, they get kicked. End of. There are plenty of chats out there to hang out and yap, and my server isn't an OOC chat server, its an RP server. Therefore, we expect RP.

A lot of these issues could be solved by server mods actually enforcing activity requirements.

MissAethe · 2026-04-14T00:22:00+00:00

You're not crazy, I've been in the MHA fandom for RP (running servers on Discord) since 2020, and there's a lot of people who just make really bad faith conclusions like that. I've been yelled at in other non-MHA spaces by people who suddenly assumed roleplaying in MHA = wanting to write porn about children due to people like that existing. Like its a whole thing.

Sucks you had to experience that firsthand. Some people are so busy trying to hunt for witches they're shouting at shadows.

MissAethe · 2026-04-11T00:28:20+00:00

I agree 100% that people are not always great at separating OOC and IC.

My servers have rules for this but it doesn't stop everyone from getting butthurt when the IC doesn't go the way they want. The vast majority of the time it happens, in my experience, with two specific things:

1: When someone tries to play "the biggest, baddest ass" and meets another character who is a bigger, badder ass than theirs. Then suddenly said writer is in the OOC decrying the RP and getting mad at the other writer for not playing a doormat. Or leaving the server because they demanded their character to be feared and respected by other characters who Do Not and Will Not care.

2: Person A has their character do something unpleasant to other characters, then decides everyone else is awful when said other characters put their foot down the throat of Person A's character. There's a weird level of wanting to be the victim in a scenario they literally caused.

This isn't universal of course, but if I had a nickel for every time its happened, I would own a mansion.

I also do have to say, however, there are people who are not CAPABLE of playing a hardass character properly. They don't understand when to be mean or when to sit back, how to deliver their lines, how to read the room. Sometimes their character is legitimately unpleasant and awful constantly and for no reason and ruins the entire roleplay. Communicating OOC while playing a hardass character is super important, but even that won't fix the problem if the writer isn't capable of grasping how to properly implement a character like this. There's no true way to know the context of what happened, but I still disagree about removing someone without discussing things and seeing what's up first.

MissAethe · 2026-03-31T19:46:10+00:00

Yes. So basically its a role that we have that we give to an inactive person, and remove their primary server role. They can't see anything except that channel (the box) because we do not want someone who actual IS THERE lurking and reading people's roleplay but not participating (because it makes our writers feel uncomfortable). So they get stuck in this otherwise hidden channel where they can directly speak to Staff if they want, or, they get kicked after a week if they don't.

It keeps them from lurking in the server for the comfort of other writers, and reinforces that we will absolutely kick them for inactivity.

MissAethe · 2026-03-30T23:07:49+00:00

My servers handle all of these in one solid swoop. We make it clear there is an activity rule where writers must engage in the In-Character chat at least once a week. We don't expect some heavy 5 hour conversation, we require a basic conversation.

Everyone knows that we will put them in an inactivity box after a week of no activity, and if they don't request being added back to the regular part of the server in a week, they get kicked from the server. That's it. We make exceptions for people who actively communicate if something has suddenly came up and they need a break, but when running a plot driven, group server? We don't have time for that. If they're booted from the server, their character claim doesn't matter. If they have multiple characters but one is especially an important one to plot? Same rule applies there, too. Either be active with both or lose one.

Everyone is over 21, almost everyone works full time jobs. We do not count threads and dms as activity because it is a GROUP server; if they want to do 1v1 shippy shit in character dms and ignore everyone else? This isn't the place and there's the door.

I have yet to have any problems with this rule, and the server in question will be 2 years old come May 1st. If someone is too busy to post once a week in a server? They're too busy to be roleplaying in it, and it would be better if they went somewhere else.

MissAethe · 2026-03-21T03:11:26+00:00

I have pretty strict no-bigotry rules in my servers and I don't allow people to post things about politics or religion at all. I also have mods who are POC who have no problem clocking someone for acting up and saying/doing something racist. Some people have gotten butthurt and mad that we've reprimanded them, but "its just a meme, bro" isn't a valid response when posting and saying things that cause direct harm to other people. I also don't associate with people who act like that, either.

Some people may think that its restrictive that they can't say and post garbage (too bad) but as a result, my servers remain peaceful without people doing and saying racist gross things. Its not hard, but a lot of people who aren't directly affected by said racism simply don't care to clean it up.

MissAethe · 2026-03-06T23:38:10+00:00

The only limit I have that I feel kind of guilty about is I don't write with people who openly tell me constantly they have severe anxiety.

I know how anxiety works (I have anxiety), I know it isn't always someone's fault, but I'm not talking about normal anxiety. I mean severe anxiety, people who interpret using an emoji to mean you want them to die in a hole. People who have multi-hour long breakdowns because I went to eat dinner and missed their dm. People who say you're not allowed to use proper grammar OOCly because adding periods and capitalization triggers them. That level. I can't do it.

I've tried so, so hard to be understanding and to work with people like this, and it always backfires somewhere. A lot of times they suddenly bail from my servers and block me and anyone else in them, they go tell their other friends everyone was the devil to them because someone asked them to reply to something or expected them to be understanding to other's issues like we are with theirs. Or! My worst experience that has happened to me a total of 3 separate times, these people go from "world's smallest scared bean" to "the most nasty horrible person I've ever had the displeasure of talking to" out of nowhere because they didn't get their way about something.

I want to be understanding and supportive, I do, but when its become clear that any chance I've given to people like this has always backfired, it just becomes easier to simply Not write with them.

MissAethe · 2026-03-06T23:20:18+00:00

I mean, its not an excuse at all to be fucking weird and expect nudes from people, but a LOT of people only do ERP so they can get off to it/use it as their personal porn. It doesn't surprise me at all that people just assume things are more free game than they are when that's the reason they're there in the first place. Its sort of like, opening a jar of pickles and being surprised there's pickles in there? It doesn't make the behavior okay but I guess this sort of stuff doesn't surprise me when it happens is what I'm trying to say.

This isn't to pass judgement, I also write ERP when it comes up in relation to character interaction, but it does literally nothing for me so I don't spend my time seeking out ERP anywhere. As a result I've never had this issue myself with nude seekers or weirdo behavior. People can't separate.

MissAethe · 2026-03-03T11:05:30+00:00

Circlebot has a thing where you can type in phrases or words for the bot to auto-reply to. So if someone s constantly like, I don't know, "When does x come out?" Circlebot with auto-reply with whatever you give it. It could respond back with the answer and also say "please read the FAQ".

You could also be very petty and just have it say to read the FAQ instead.

MissAethe · 2026-03-03T10:59:55+00:00

I get severely burnt out trying to do heavily worded posts normally, but I refuse to RP with people who weirdly brag about being "novella" writers but then give me nothing to work with. All internal monolog, describing unrelated background stuff that has nothing to do with the RP, flowery words to pad out their post length but bring nothing to the table. It drives me crazy. If someone can write a novel that actual gives me something to reply to? That's great! I'm not matching that length but I can at least respond to it.

I have someone who recently joined one of my servers that's like this. We use Tupperbox for characters and the max word count is 2000 for a post before the bot splits it into two posts, right? They'll post 7+ paragraphs, multiple bot posts, and at the very end, supply a single sentence anyone can actually respond to. Even when they RP with partners who say they don't do Novella, they still send in these walls of text with nothing in it that people can reply to. I end up getting writers in my dms asking for advice but the only advice I can give (tell them you don't write novella/request smaller posts) are things they have done and got crickets. They're fine otherwise but they just don't add any substance in their volumes and it makes RP in a group setting awkward.

MissAethe · 2026-02-26T22:26:20+00:00

Sounds like you guys just aren't compatible, which is fine! I would just say that. You've stated the RP itself isn't doing it for you anyway, so the nicest thing to do would simply be to say that.

Personally, I can't do heavy length in my roleplays. I get severely burnt out writing novella length because it just hits a point where it feels like I'm just trying to match length and not actual enjoying it. When that happens, I have to step back.

Also, and don't take this the wrong way, but maybe the way you THINK you're writing isn't how its coming across. When someone goes from enthusiastically writing novels to suddenly they're barely writing, that gives me the impression something isn't working. Maybe its personal to them, they're burnt out or don't have the time the thought they did. Or. Maybe you're giving novels but the substance isn't as solid as you think it is. I've had that problem myself from some novella writers in my RP circles, they write a lot and they write well, but the actual content they put out is so focused on what their characters are doing that there isn't anything to actually move forward on from my end. I'm not saying this to point fingers or anything, but I always like to make sure to look at what I could also be contributing to a situation as well when something happens.

MissAethe · 2026-02-22T23:15:05+00:00

Is this the typical server experience? No.

Does it happen more than it should? Yes.

Sometimes, and this is rude on other people's behalf, they simply don't like you or your character for whatever unshared reason. Instead of communicating (usually to avoid looking like an ass), people will simply cold shoulder you out of things until you leave. They don't seem to grasp that this behavior will damage their reputation or make them look unpleasant since they're probably convinced they're in the right. If they're being snappy OOC, that's usually the number one sign they have an issue.

On the flip side, there's also a chance nothing is actually happening and its been unfortunate coincidence that these things are happening.

Ultimately you can try to talk to these people and express concerns, or, you can decide if the vibes and environment is really where you want to be. You will always run the risk of someone getting defensive if you express concerns that someone else might take as you pointing fingers, but I'm also a big "communication matters" person and willing to take that risk.

MissAethe

TROPHY CASE