What I'd like to see in a roleplay are standards. I find it a lot more enjoyable to roleplay when people around me aren't forgetting what grammar is, making their characters do irrational things, and contradicting what's already been said. Rejecting one-liner sign ups would do a lot to raise quality.
Amen to that. Been preaching the very same for a couple of years now...with very little tangible success, unfortunately. But yes, an RP that would take
anyone with no regard for any measure of quality is not one that I would touch even with a ten-foot barge pole, and I'd like to think that I'm not the only one who feels that way.
I couldn't have said it better myself.
That's why I like invitational RP's. That way you don't have to worry about bad RP'ers
That depends an awful lot on who's passing out the invites, though, and let me tell you: I've seen some pretty awful things on that front. D: Besides, invitational RPs are rather too...insular for my tastes. There's a bit of a coerced cast assembly (a direct invite is usually at least somewhat flattering, which makes people more likely to join) instead of one that is born of genuine interest when people read over the RP and then decide (without any external influences) to put in the effort for a sign-up. Also, overly distilled casts usually consist of the same old combination of people doing the same old things with new faces and names tacked to their characters, and that tends to be a bit...repetitive. If you want an invitational, then at least make sure to include people outside of the usual clique in the mix. It makes things a lot more fun for all concerned.
That is certainly something I would love to see and participate in as well, but if it were to be invitational only that might cause a few problems. For instance, what must you do to get an invite? Must it be simply friends? Or, perhaps, people you have RPed with? There are plenty of people whom you or others may not have played with, but is excellent with grammar and tries to make it at least a little realistic, but they may not be allowed to join in simply because you don't know how they are.
Now, I'm simply asking this because I am knew and would like to know how things work around here. I've had a fair few ideas on a certain type of storyline I would like to make into an RP, but at the moment I am unsure. Quite a bit (pretty small, actually, and not noticable) of drama has already occurred, so I'm wondering if this is why certain people are more interested in invitation only. For me, it seems as if a good, lengthy RP sample should be enough to show you how a person writes, depending on how well it is written.
...Hmm, I think I've just answered one of my own questions. Ah well, I'm still curious and I just needed to get this out.
Umm...you do realize that Rabbit never said anything about it being
invitational, right? That was added in by other people. What that post advocates - at least the way I understood it - is simply standards, and standards allow for anyone to prove their worth. Personally, I am - as stated above - not too wild about invitationals, but I have to agree that an RP master with standards is a huge joining incentive for me. Why? Because a person who maintains their standards and doesn't admit underachievers is one who genuinely
cares about the quality of the RP, someone who has probably put a lot of
thought into what they want to make of their RP, and someone who really wants their RP to succeed. There's a lot of really promising looking RPs out there that I chose not to sign up for simply because it was plainly obvious that the RP master did not care, at all, what kind of people got into it or what they were doing there. No matter how intriguing the base idea is, the execution will never be better than the writers, and I personally can't respect the authority of an RP master who will whore out their RP to anyone who can be assed to copy-paste a few lines of generic nonsense onto the sign-up sheet and slap on an anime picture. To me, it's just proof that this person will be okay with
anything and probably won't manage to keep things under control or interesting at all. :\
Demand quality and you will get quality, really. I've always placed standards on the people I let into my RP and my usual problem is overcrowding; not shortage. In fact, I've had some people who signed up because they wanted to see how much they had to improve on and what, and a lot of them improved their profiles far beyond what I expected simply because they were asked to do better. This, I'd like to think, implies that most people are capable of far better than what they are actually doing but aren't living up to that potential either because no-one is demanding it from them or because they are selling themselves short and don't believe in their own writing ability.
So yeah, seriously; no RP that gets past basic quality control is so bad that they need to accept anyone who stumbles into the thread just to survive. Have some confidence and
demand some quality; you'll probably be positively surprised by the reaction.