Sunday 5 June 2011

How not to fill in a role-play application...

I co-admin a couple of role-play forums, and you get all sorts of weird shit in there. Some of it is awesomely cool weird. Some of it is... just... no...

An example of this turned up on See You At The Show, a town/equestrian site. When you're plugging a site you take in the good and the bad. The bad you GENERALLY help and encourage if you can, but sometimes there are indications that someone is beyond help... or trolling. Well, we got one. 

Our application isn't long. We're pretty easy going that way. You can choose to have it long, or you can make it short (but within reason). This is a good application. However, this also cropped up. And having had a bad couple of days - the Big Boss Admin had her almost (but now actually) boyfriend visiting so was taking a week's leave - with a newly opened forum, a lot of advertising and some hideously embarrassing people dropping by the site left to Donte and I, the junior admin, it just about sent us over the edge. 


There are a few things wrong with this: 

  1. The glaringly obvious one is that they have destroyed the template that Irish had made. You do not destroy the template and it is achingly easy not to. Also, in order to destroy the template, she has created more work for herself, adding in colons.
  2. Their play-by. It is perfectly alright not to have a play-by but if you do want one, know their name. Or at least just enter 'n/a', if you're not sure exactly who they are. 
  3. Don't steal characters from books or television. If it's on a role-play site for a book or a film, and they say use canons, that is obviously fine. But if this isn't outlined, either use some imagination or cover it up better than this individual did. Donte and I do not read the series that she came from, but we were trying to find who the play-by was and stumbled across the character. 
  4. Punctuation - I'm a little too keen on the comma and the hyphen but proof read you application before posting to make sure "tattoos" isn't "tattoo's". 
  5. Don't have your character in a relationship with real-life people. It's weird and awkward. It's fine to say they've met such-and-such a person at some point in their life e.g. John Smith has a signed book from Tom Baker, who he met when he was six. Or that they enjoy the work of an individual. However, it is an enormous no to have them engaged or married to someone.
  6. Personality is all positive. Try adding in a flaw or two. No-one's perfect. Except me.
  7. The character history fails realism completely. Even where we don't go with realism, they should at least be interesting. One of my characters is from a poor background, lost his parents in a car crash and was split from his siblings to live with his grandparents. He's now a psychopathic lunatic. Not your average person but he is interesting to post with.
So there we are, some advice if anyone is planning on making a roleplay character married to Bieber, super rich, perfect and nicked from a novel. Oh, and screwing up an application template.

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