Pokemon Roleplay Discussion

[Getsumei]

Well, I DID think of making a Silph character besides Getsumei in Turia... And he'd be like this middle aged crazy scientist type guy who'd use a large number of Porygon's(seeing as how it was made by Silph) and other artificial-looking pokémon. He wouldn't be much of a battler though XD

 

[Anti-Hero]

Both are fine by me but lately, with the trend of new trainer RPs cropping up, I'm more inclined to sway towards the experienced trainers spectrum. One of the main reasons for that is the age issue. Teenagers are fine and all, but I love seeing older more mature takes on characters in the pokemon world. Sounds a bit redundant, seeing as how pokemon is a kid-friendly enterprise but the manga itself is a testament to that opposing notion already. 20's, 30's, 40's and heck, even the elderly have a lot of potential in diversity that I just don't think is explored enough. Plus, with that amount of experience already under the belt pre-RP, seeing how they interact and develop from there is a pretty exciting concept to me. Of course, being able to play that age range requires a rather...open mind, something I'm sure some people might struggles with, myself included.

Playing more experienced trainers is fun. It is too difficult to not unload all the knowledge of Pokemon that I have gained over the years. Playing children tends to get rather boring, rather quickly. When Age limits are given, and they are considered child ages, I tend to go for the highest age possible.

Age diversity for the win! b(*_*)b It's funny how in the Turia RP, the characters could be any age over 15, and the context hinted that they should be pretty experienced people (the researchers, anyway). But no-one created a character over 30. I like the idea of other people playing older characters, but the characters I design are young adults by default. Most people tend to roleplay characters their own age. Plus, no-one likes to be the odd one out, and a 40-year-old in a crowd of teenagers would really stand out. So, to make a RP with older characters, I would have to pretty much force the sign-ups to be in a particular age range.

Pssh, now I'm going to join a journey rp, and when everyone else is 10-14 I'm going to be eighty. (: Unless they clamp on age requirements.

 

[Rabbit]

Pssh, now I'm going to join a journey rp, and when everyone else is 10-14 I'm going to be eighty. (: Unless they clamp on age requirements.

I will love you forever if you do that. *_* There's an open journey RP right now. I dare you to sign up with a character over 30. I'll do the same! It will be totally mind-bending, revolutionary!

 

[white lancer]

Well, I've only ever participated in one RP, which was very promising at first but fell apart after the GM vanished, but I have RPed on other sites (not Pokemon ones) so I feel qualified to share my input. ;)

I really prefer it when RPs are a lot more open in regards to characters. Character creation is something that I really enjoy, and I feel like more RPs should allow a better amount of freedom in that area. Best case for me is that you get a choice between experienced and non-experienced RPs, with some stipulation in the RP to make sure the experienced characters don't start off with more Pokémon than the newbies (i.e. the new league's rules require you to start over from scratch). I think the combination of experienced characters and newbies could really add some interesting interactions. It also enables players to be more creative with their histories--characters who are just starting out on their journeys are not likely to have had a super-interesting life beforehand. As for age ranges, I'd rather play older characters, mostly because I can relate to them better.

 

[The Mega Champion]

Looks like trainer RPs win hands down. Let's narrow the field down a bit. Do you prefer trainer RPs where your character is an experienced trainer, or a newbie? If the latter, are you comfortable with playing a 12-year-old, or do you prefer an older character?

The former.

I like my character being an experienced trainer.

I don't like starting from scratch and I like to pick what pokemon I get with little or no restrictions, like I already said.

It's still pretty picky, though...

>_>

 

[King!]

A newbie, definitely. I take waaayyy too long deciding teams and stuff, and being a newbie gives you a whole plot to develop with your character and Pokemon. And I really don't mind the age, as long as it is somewhere over 13. :/

 

[Anti-Hero]

I will love you forever if you do that. *_* There's an open journey RP right now. I dare you to sign up with a character over 30. I'll do the same! It will be totally mind-bending, revolutionary!

What journey RP is that, exactly? :P

 

[Rabbit]

What journey RP is that, exactly? :P

The Johto one.

 

[Anti-Hero]

The Johto one.

Oh, well, they had age requirements and it would do no good to be that age if I wasn't going to be accepted. (:

On another note, as soon as an RP catches my attention, I'll be all over it.

 

[Rabbit]

Aw, snap. I didn't see that. :|

 

[Mika]

mmm... I think you need a bit of boundary with age requirements.

I mean sure you can play an 80 year old character but if you actually play him/her in character aren't you going to be limited like an actual 80 year old man/woman would be? I mean I have a 89 year old Grandmother who can still go out and do things and she's pretty healthy for 89 but she can't drive a car, she's very very forgetful and she has a huge chip on her shoulder about certain 'whippersnapper' stereotypes.

I've seen people play a 40+ character before that's been played well but once you start pushing that number it gets iffy.

And if you're doing a genre roleplay, like a school or something roleplay, then you need to set limits or you're going to get like Chris Hansen on your case. :< School is limited, alot of journey roleplays are sorta like that age-wise so I sorta understand the agelimit and minimum.

It depends, imho, on the situation and on the way you want the roleplay to go as the RP Master.

 

[Rabbit]

mmm... I think you need a bit of boundary with age requirements.

I mean sure you can play an 80 year old character but if you actually play him/her in character aren't you going to be limited like an actual 80 year old man/woman would be? I mean I have a 89 year old Grandmother who can still go out and do things and she's pretty healthy for 89 but she can't drive a car, she's very very forgetful and she has a huge chip on her shoulder about certain 'whippersnapper' stereotypes.

I've seen people play a 40+ character before that's been played well but once you start pushing that number it gets iffy.

And if you're doing a genre roleplay, like a school or something roleplay, then you need to set limits or you're going to get like Chris Hansen on your case. :< School is limited, alot of journey roleplays are sorta like that age-wise so I sorta understand the agelimit and minimum.

It depends, imho, on the situation and on the way you want the roleplay to go as the RP Master.

Oh, I agree completely. Roleplaying an 80-year-old probably wouldn't work. Adder was kidding. Probably. But I don't think it's really a problem if you don't set age limits. No-one really wants to play an elderly character. XD Not only are they limited in what they can do, it doesn't make sense for them to be in a journey situation in the first place. I mean, if anyone's Grandma actually decided to become a Pokemon trainer, her children would think she's gone senile and try to lock her up.

Same for school. If the setting is high school, most people will give their student character an appropriate age, age boundaries or not.

 

[Anti-Hero]

mmm... I think you need a bit of boundary with age requirements.

I mean sure you can play an 80 year old character but if you actually play him/her in character aren't you going to be limited like an actual 80 year old man/woman would be? I mean I have a 89 year old Grandmother who can still go out and do things and she's pretty healthy for 89 but she can't drive a car, she's very very forgetful and she has a huge chip on her shoulder about certain 'whippersnapper' stereotypes.

I've seen people play a 40+ character before that's been played well but once you start pushing that number it gets iffy.

And if you're doing a genre roleplay, like a school or something roleplay, then you need to set limits or you're going to get like Chris Hansen on your case. :< School is limited, alot of journey roleplays are sorta like that age-wise so I sorta understand the agelimit and minimum.

It depends, imho, on the situation and on the way you want the roleplay to go as the RP Master.

Oh, I agree completely. Roleplaying an 80-year-old probably wouldn't work. Adder was kidding. Probably. But I don't think it's really a problem if you don't set age limits. No-one really wants to play an elderly character. XD Not only are they limited in what they can do, it doesn't make sense for them to be in a journey situation in the first place. I mean, if anyone's Grandma actually decided to become a Pokemon trainer, her children would think she's gone senile and try to lock her up.

Same for school. If the setting is high school, most people will give their student character an appropriate age, age boundaries or not.

Yes, I was kidding sorta ;P. Eighty would be too old, the oldest I would go for a journey rp type thing would probably be the mid-forties. But, eh, if it was just like a strictly tournament RP, then I might go with 80 ;p.

 

[sandeon]

I need input. Do you think a RP with one participant being a trainer and the others being the pokemon would work?

 

[Cirrus]

...It might. Depending on how you do it.

Or it might just crash miserably. More likely the latter because only the main character gets to decide a large part of the fate of many other individual characters.

 

[Spearow]

I definitely forget if I've broached this issue before in this thread, but what do you guys think is an ideal length for a post in a forum roleplay? Or more generally, and as I write this I realize more to my point, what is necessary to make a long term forum-based roleplay fun and successful (ie, entertaining for all parties for the longest period of time)?

When I do play-write, I generally do it on a forum because it's more convenient and involves less coordination and progresses more steadily than real-time chat style roleplays, but sometimes the culture/expectations of forum roleplay just... confuse/mildly irritate me. I remember roleplaying on MU*'s (basically programs that allow you to interact with others in a text-based environment), where I experienced some of the most fun instances of collaborative writing of my roleplaying career. I can't think off the bat of an experience on a forum I've had to match that.

I try to put my mind to the question of why forum RPing seems on the whole less rewarding, and I think, although I might be mistaken, that much of the time the culprit seems to me to be length. I feel like the idea that gigantic posts are necessary should be discouraged, at least in groups of writers who don't know each other that well. If you want to write a novel with a group of close friends, that's cool, and it'll probably work. But if you want to play a game with strangers, in which each character is controlled independently but interaction between them still plays a key role, you can't have everyone writing five paragraphs of their character doing a bunch of stuff, then passing the baton to the next person to react to all the things the first character did, and so on and so forth. It just doesn't work - nine times out of the ten the chemistry and trust between writers is not strong enough to keep the sluggish, unnatural pacing of this system moving. The roleplay becomes boring, people drop out, etc.

Hmmm. I'm not too sure where I'm headed with this. Maybe what I'm trying to say is, would an ideal roleplay be one in which short, succinct posts are encouraged, while still maintaining a certain standard of quality of the writing? I feel like it would. But it seems to me like short posts are often demonized by forum roleplayers, and not just in the Pokéfandom. For what reason? They just seem to me to make more sense, but then maybe I am misjudging the capacity of this medium of roleplay, I don't know.

 

[white lancer]

^I agree with a lot of what you're saying. I think length is the most over-emphasized aspect of texts RPs, even though I rarely have any problems creating a lengthy post. Generally, I like to make my posts however long they should be to convey the content effectively; sometimes, I find, this is multiple pages long, but other times (as in a dialogue), I don't think you should really need more than a couple of sentences. I mean, seriously, if you're RPing a dialogue with someone else, the only real way you're going to get a huge post out of that is by padding your post unnecessarily (i.e. restating what the other person just said, making up random, unnecessary actions, having your character think unnecessary thoughts, etc.).

Having said that, I realize this forum has specific rules on post length, and as long as those rules exist, I will comply.

 

[Rabbit]

... I feel like the idea that gigantic posts are necessary should be discouraged, at least in groups of writers who don't know each other that well. If you want to write a novel with a group of close friends, that's cool, and it'll probably work. But if you want to play a game with strangers, in which each character is controlled independently but interaction between them still plays a key role, you can't have everyone writing five paragraphs of their character doing a bunch of stuff, then passing the baton to the next person to react to all the things the first character did, and so on and so forth. It just doesn't work - nine times out of the ten the chemistry and trust between writers is not strong enough to keep the sluggish, unnatural pacing of this system moving. The roleplay becomes boring, people drop out, etc.

Yeahhh the baton passing you're describing is really strange and annoying, though it is the way things are generally done. It gets worse when you have a larger group of characters interacting, and everyone has to take turns. I have to imagine that my character has glued her lips shut to keep from interrupting! The problem is that the sensible standard of one-two paragraphs per post is being applied to all situations, not just those where you have something important to expound. I would definitely support a different standard for character interaction. One-two lines for dialogue per person is much more realistic. (By the way, did you know that 'dialogue' isn't in Google Chrome's dictionary? It's showing up as a spelling error!)

 

[Alter Ego]

Post length issue? Yeah, yeah I'm going there.

First off, I actually agree whole-heartedly that length is not a virtue in itself, and for the benefit of those who are going to tl;dr this, I would like to point out at this point that this is the reason why I have loosened the length rule. As long as your post is accomplishing something meaningful by existing, I am personally not going to go about slapping you with an infraction over it. People writing a paragraph where a single sentence would get the point across far more effectively are a peeve of mine, especially as they tend to get wrapped up in all sorts of playing with themselves and their own NPCs to pad out the post length, making their writing look less and less like RPing and more and more like some kind of bizarre soloing fanfic writer went and posted in the wrong thread.

The reason this rule was put into place originally was actually a concern of quality, namely that the average post looked something like this:

hi said joe. pi pi said pikachu.

fillerfillerfillerlolthischaracterlimitisstupid

Simply put, they were posts both short and inane enough to not really contribute anything to...well, anything and again this was the majority of posts in RPs at the time. A post length minimum was introduced to force these people to either A) get literate and have to include enough words in their post for it to at least mean something B) go do something else since they couldn't be assed to put in more effort than that. Granted, we do indeed have the opposite problem of needless waffle, but the section standard was shifted from illiterate to literate as a result of the change, so I can't say it wasn't a good move at the time.

As for why we're still enforcing it? In all honesty, it's mostly lack of a better rule. Quality minimums would make for a ridiculously subjective and unfair rule, not to mentiong being very, very hard on beginning RPers, whereas with no rule at all...well, I'd rather not see this place slide back to the level of Neopests. :\

Length is an easy rule to enforce objectively, hence why that's whats' being used right now. Though, again, I've shifted towards enforcing it leniently, much like certain other rules in the section have. It's still there, but as long as you write meaningful, relevant posts you shouldn't be too worried about it.

 

[Yatsu]

pupupupu
just wanted to say hello to everyone here.
I'm still reading all the sticky threads, I'm kinda a procastinator so it might take some time.
The last time I rp'd was back in 2008, I think. meh.

Hope you guys like me; and if you don't I'm so going to rip of your organs and make you eat them ♥
Anyways, yeah, that's it "hello, everyone"; now I should go back to the sticky threads.