Discussion Past and current experiences with other roleplay communities?

[Tefka]

Inspired by Caedyn Arenais

Question: How has your experience been with other RP communities, both Star Wars and non?

Some of us have been at Chaos so long (me), we've forgotten what the world of Jcink, freeboards and other sharks in the sea even look like. The Wild West can be exciting, excruciating, glorious, or leave bad tastes in our mouths with the amount of hours devoted.

Obviously you're here, so we're your current preference at this moment, and we can make a separate thread to moan and groan about Chaos's flaws. So let's stick to the outside of this realm for this thread, for the most part.

But the question does arise every so often. How was your experience? Did they do things better or worse, were the people way more chill or super try hard? Any ridiculous rules you came across? Any tangible experiences you made?

Feel free to share.

 

[Caedyn Arenais]

So glad to see this!

I was first introduced to Roleplay via Pirch98 - Talkcity. It was a live chat with various rooms including a Starwars one where everyone used it for RP. The concept blew my mind at the mere age of thirteen and I quickly become addicted much to the dismay of my parents who needed the phone, running on a 15kb dial up connection xD

I later moved to Teenchat.com (Yes it's as edgy as it sounds) and from there moved to create my own forums a few years later using the basic proboards.com and Forumotions.com. I had always wanted another Star Wars based site to roleplay on but with Pirch98 having shut down, I struggled to find anything that really fit until Tirdarius brought me across to SWRP Chaos.

I'm 32 now so I've been doing this for a while. I've seen all kinds of drama and ridiculousness across the various sites and genre's I've been a part of but I can honestly say that nothing has stuck with me as Chaos has. For all the frustrating times that might potentially crop up (This is the internet), there's just nothing that can compete with the experience I've had here on this site.

I still think very fondly of my early days on Teenchat though, back when PvP was using Tech2 based rules, and each day could bring a new experience where someone could easily kill your character. The rules were very few however and for those who didn't care so much, character death could mean very little and they just "lol-nope" their way out of it.

I've met my share of writers who's writing skill and creativity has varied massively from one to the next. If it wasn't for Chaos, I'd probably be over on our affiliated site Chronicles RP, but then I'd probably have never heard of it either if it weren't for being here.

I'd love to know if anyone else has been on some of the same sites as I have.

 

[Quartz_Soldier]

One roleplay a non-star wars community (I can't even bring myself to say the fandom's name) was so vile and abusive that it left me with traumatized paranoia that I am doing everything wrong and being an awful person.

 

[Varloc]

I have had alot of experience with Roleplay's. This one is definitely one of the better ones with a very dedicated group of members. I have had quite a bit of fun with both this one and others, more recently I have been working with others more actively than this one. A thing I notice is the great grave yards of RP's, I have found numerous dead servers and communities, this one is still very much alive and showing no form of slowing down.

 

[Desmundor Alcademon]

To my personal experience and belief, it is -NEVER- a matter of topic. Being a roleplaying community has several abyssal things that can deem a whole experience toxic to Nal Hutta levels of hazard, as much as smooth and perfect like Oricon's sweet magma falls.

After 6 years in SWTOR roleplaying community, 2 years in Archeage, WH40K Discord RP as well as being actual host of a WHF open roleplay server, I came to the conclusion that the health and experience of the specific ship is always fully on the community.

In SWTOR, the excess levels of toxicity and out-right evil several individuals look to purposefully discharge upon the experience causes the overall community to push strict rules, overlordship of cliques, as well as open bullying masked in "criticism" in some cases, when creativity kicks in, aiming to keep -all- parties involved in a somewhat equal ground simply for the feeling of "controlling". As I am sure most can guess, this to me is a very negative behavior to most cases, regardless if this is DnD, Strategy, Open World or any of the like. Roleplaying is about creativity and interraction, storytelling and creation of emotions through words and odysseys. So far, a great deal of people do not share this vision.

Truth is, i was drawn into Chaos by a friend of mine who has been in one of the guilds I happened to run in SWTOR. Part of the reason I gave up in any community-based activity as well as storywriting around it was due to the simple fact that the very playerbase of the game was rather aggressivelly toxic for no particular purpose. This led me to more isolated DnD-styled storytelling and roleplaying within friends circles I knew and enjoyed playing with. When I first heard of Chaos I was rather ignorant, by then considering that any such community shall eventually prove yet another downdarting host, besides the fact that regardless creativity, fleshing and work put on any form of idea, when it came to community level it was always being "frowned upon" for the sake of "keeping it balanced". Something that I was proven wrong, when joint Chaos, and a major element that has kept me so hooked in the forum. Roleplaying is about imagination and storytelling, not about discharging of toxicity.

Oftentimes, when it came to SWTOR guilds (which i am rather sure several people will share this view) tend to be ruled by a player overlord who is a plot-armored figure who most of the times doesnt really support his or her post with the quality of either management, or storytelling one would expect. More so, the less experienced or incapable a person would be, was usually visible by the strict rules put in their guilds. Most famous being "Everyone starts as Acolyte, and no character can be stronger than the GM". Yes.... that was a -roleplaying- rule enforced. Something which, to be honest, I never truely shared.

Moving from more OOC-ish elements, another somewhat interesting to me fact is that both in SWTOR as well as in Warhammer Roleplaying communities I had been, people were very hardbased on character skillsets which were sourced by hard numbers. People frowned upon going into a "free-emoting" engagement (basically, a very basic form of what Chaos is all about. Explaining scenes without rolls and dice dictating the progress), while it was renown that players were always abusing any possible absense of rolling system (dice, skill trees or the like) to avoid any possible attack, or consequence from their actions taking into little account any In Character Element (an acolyte spitting or talking back to a darth simply because the darth didnt have cemented proof he or she was able to do something about it Out Of Character speaking...)

In Warhammer communities, the people tend to be rather simplistic (which no, i never judge or criticise anyone's RP. If I do not enjoy something, I may choose to not participate) But this wasn't such case. There was a rule that specifically stated that if the server owner said "this battle has to end up with A side winning" this was a must. Irrespectivelly what happened during the event, or through Roleplaying, the Server Admin or Mod could enforce an event to take a certain turn regardless whether or not he or she took part in it. This was also a rule I experienced and caused me to leave.

Damn that was a long rant.

But yeeeeeeeeeeeeah. I believe the overall management of a community, through personal experience, is close to a full time HRM office work which doesn't always end up the way you'd wish, or to the community's benefit. The hardest task is to deal with people who intentionally act against the aforementioned health, which as far as communities go... oh boy thats a very hard task....

 

[Kiara Ayres]

I've been here in the past. I have an account from 2015 (which I forgot the login for) and I joined another site while looking for this one because I had forgotten the name of it in my 4 year hiatus.

I find the creative freedom on Chaos to be unrivalled. On my previous forum, I think this has since been changed but during my time there you had to work to earn your IC ranks through training threads and you would get approved to be a Knight/Master (or other corresponding positions). While not an awful idea in itself, allowing for the development of characters and that the most experienced and dedicated writers were corresponding with IC dedication and experience, this was coupled with timeline changes which would jump and reset the site.

I had gotten my character from Padawan to Knight about 4 days before the timeline change was announced, rather unexpectedly, and I had 2 weeks before my character was wiped in the change - I knew this was the nature of the timeline changes but I did not expect it to happen so soon. This was also the beginning of December so as a student I was pressed for time with end of semester assessments. The lack of warning and timing of the timeline change irked me. Not long after, I left and came here.

I've been on a few other forum RP sites in my teenage years but Chaos has been my favourite so far. I enjoy the sense of community and I made some friends here 6 years ago who I still keep in contact with through social media. I've also made some new friends recently who I hope to keep in contact with in future.

Edit: I could go beyond but this is just my Star Wars roleplay experience. I've been in several other fandom roleplays.

 

[Caltin Vanagor]

Not going to go into how long I've been doing this game we call RP, but I have been in and around all sorts of communities (from D20 style SW rp, to "Second Day" style Star Trek, to Fantasy Wrestling... Hey! Don't judge! )with all levels of "freedom" and "structure". There was a site I was a part of that was basically run like a classroom (the owner was a teacher, go figure) and any levels were accomplishment based, not necessarily RP ("level 3 requires 6 months RP time, 3 physical, 3 mind training threads" for example). It was easy to game the system, get everything out of the way quickly(and I did), and then open up RP ideas. What is difficult about that is that when rules are so stringent, it's hard to run with ideas you might have, and if you do, they were shot down mid-thread.

On the flip-side, I was on a site where one of the owners was the Sith Emperor, he portrayed himself as so strong even non-Force Sensitives could detect his presence. He wore Force Enhanced (not imbued, enhanced) armor that literally made his abilities that much better. He could fly with it, he had the repulsors, two lightsabers (on the vambraces and on his waist), the armor was Beskar, Cortosis, and Phrik and somehow immune to Ysalamiri.

That should give you an idea about THAT site.

Anyway, ideas come and go. What I like about here is there is immense freedom to write, it's great (I mean, this character visited the Wellspring of Life) and crazy (every other person is Force Sensitive it seems, lol) but you guys allow people to be themselves and only drop the hammer when you have to.

I do miss D20, but I haven't had this much fun in a long time.

 

[Darth Metus]

I once dabbled in a community called Mizahar.

Met some of the coolest people I know to this day. However, the experience in terms of interacting with site leadership was absolute dogwater.

The community was one where the administration was to be feared or kissed up to. If you became part of the "it" crew, life was good. You'd get the stamps where you needed them, help as advertised, etc.

But God help you if you weren't part of the "it" crew.

Miz was very restrictive in terms of rules. To do most things required some form of site staff approval. If you weren't groveling, you drowned. To date, that site has about 4 or 5 spinoffs due to how the leadership treated its members and junior staff.

That experience colored my perception of Chaos quite a bit circa 2015. A far younger and angstier me used to shake my fist at the #tyrannyreigns meme that was prevalent at the time. But when you actually hang out on a site where new folks were banned for the crime of asking questions? Sure makes the "tyrants" back home seem a lot less evil.

TLDR - Miz was literally middle school politics all day, everyday.

 

[Exodus]

I started roleplaying on Roblox when I was a child. There was a game there called -22 and Dropping, and its whole basis was a sort of futuristic post-apocalyptic winter wasteland. I enjoyed hanging around there and making up new different characters and watching as the lore developed for that place. Most of the regulars were pretty easy-going and even though things weren't planned out, you could get some decent enough storylines going on with folks. The steady stream of newcomers helped too I imagine even if it was a small community.

It's actually where I learned about concepts like powergaming and godmode-ing and things like that wherein you make your character indestructible. There were a few iterations of PVP rules that were provided, but I think the ones they ended up settling on toward the end did allow characters to die without their permission if they had openly consented to joining into the fight. Since the characters came and went so regularly it wasn't a massive deal to lose a character, and young me had a blast just making new ones all the time to fight with everyone's mutants and other oddities.

Anyway - moving on from there I joined a Star Wars forum that was different from this one. Much smaller community and it felt like very little happened on the day to day. The only thing I really remember about it was that there was a stock market of some sort and that you could purchase different assets like droids and starships, but that they didn't do anything. It was a roleplay with odd game mechanics like that, but again, very little seemed to happen while I was there. They did have a pretty kicking wiki though.

After that I came here. Wrote for a little while. I joined up with a Sith faction on the site but I don't recall which one. I ended up losing that account, and frankly I don't even remember any of the characters I wrote for it. I just know one was a gunslinger of some sort and I remember fighting a Force Dead Mandalorian who told me in no uncertain terms that I wouldn't be able to sense him shooting at my character and thus couldn't dodge- I still don't know how I dealt with that particular issue.

I was also part of the Utterly Mad Forums for a while, but I'll be honest and say I don't remember where exactly it fits into my personal timeline. I think it was around this period though. See, they were originally part of the Cataclysm Dark Days Ahead roleplaying forum (fun game, very recommend). If you can believe it, there were several people there who both enjoyed the game and liked writing stories, and I remember they were very good at it. They had a knack for strange free-range strategy sort of roleplay wherein someone would basically DM for you and you could accomplish all kinds of zany things. I still remember that one of them was really really good at it, and we all loved playing his threads.

Well - at some point the CDDA staffers decided that they didn't want free speech or something like that in the roleplaying forum. I think it was basically an issue of being able to swear, ridiculously enough. I didn't care - I don't swear anyway for religious reasons, but I did enjoy writing with all of them so when they started their own forum I went along with the group.

I brought those guys here at one point. A lot of them. Like ten. We all joined up into a ship's crew and accomplished about a single thread before a lack of drive in the Star Wars universe and the fact that they had their own forum (and about half of them were dealing with some crazy IRL problems including at least one of them becoming homeless, and possibly staying with one of the others) came up. Eventually I slipped away from the site - not out of any problems, but because activity waned. One of them has a Youtube channel now called "Spicy Chicken God". I checked in with him a few years later to see if he still remembered me, and he did, but we didn't really have anything to talk about. Funny how times change.

Anyway - I met up with a nice writer here who was always very friendly and when she left I ended up noticing that she had gone to a fantasy community that was up-and-coming (It was the first big spin-off of Mizahar that Metus mentioned above). I wrote there for... three years or so, and had quite the story arc as one of the few PC villains on the site. I even joined their staff team and helped design a city (it was location-based... and with travel times and dates... that could be a nightmare sometimes). Eventually there were some disagreements among the community and since I was an "advocate" I brought them up with the site owner and the other staffers. Keeping everyone up to date on the opinions of others eventually got me fired, and they revoked my right to moderate my city anymore. I lost the several-thousands of words of lore and history I wrote up for it per the site's charter - later on I learned they deleted about half of it anyway, and left it as a more aesthetically pleasing but vapid thing. Lots of great art, but nothing I had worked to explain now actually had explanations.

That was irritating, to say the least. After that I just hung around a bit before being invited by a splinter group from that site who had suffered similar problems with the first site's administration team. They worked hard on their site and I'd known them for years, so I joined in for a bit. Enjoyed some nice character arcs - playing as an undead was neat.

Eventually, one of the old owners of the site suddenly appeared out of the woodwork and approached the other three current site owners. He decided that since "Ransera" (the site's name) was his original work, he would use his reseize the domain despite the fact that he had been absent for several months and had quite literally stepped off of the admin team and abandoned any pretense of ownership. He wasn't even the guy paying for the site.

Anyway, part of his seizure involved deleting lore that didn't fit with his original vision - which was basically everything - and also the rollback of a couple of months worth of threads and posts. Pointing out that that was a scummy thing to do didn't seem to accomplish much. The others ended up taking all of their lore on backup and moving it over to a new domain name. I was invited to come along with them, but frankly the drama of it all was a bit much for me and I just told them I might be back sometime in the future when it was all settled.

And then I came back here. Meta Jedi hit me up one day and asked me to write a Draelvasier. Some crab-alien he'd made, and I didn't really have any better ideas so I went with it. Been hanging around as a part of the community again ever since.

I don't know how long I've been roleplaying really, but I think it's been about one decade now.

Chaos is still the best site I've ever been on too.

 

[Yula Perl]

I’ve written on a lot of different venues (large forums, small forums, text-chat based, 1-on-1, etc.) and you see a lot of the same issues crop up no matter where you go. Egos, sandcastles, etc. are all to be expected and are honestly a normal part of the experience.

What’s kept me on Chaos for 5ish years is how free-form it is. I no longer have the brainpower to learn a complex combat/leveling system or spend hours writing up a bio or registering abilities just to be able to interact with other writers. On Chaos, if I have an idea for a character, I can slap up a bare-bones bio and start roleplaying. That is a huge draw for me.

Also no one on Chaos has stalked me IRL, which is a huge plus over some other forums lol

 

[Tiland Kortun]

I mostly started forum RP on the NaNoWriMo YWP site, which was just a bunch of threads all combined you had to find an rp to join. Then there was a fantasy one that was the first one I joined, I think, or could have been Chaos. Not entirely sure.

I’d bounce on and off the fantasy one for a few weeks, but could never make it stick. The first reason was because it was such a grind. Skills were point based on a scale from 1-100 and you couldn’t start any much higher than 10-15ish. You were instead rewarded skill points for a thread, between 1 and 5 points per thread based on skill use, depth of detail, and how well the thread was written. Here’s the thing- they needed to be judged. Every thread. Also, you had to keep track of living expenses and wages per season, which also meant threads doing your career, typically three to four of them to earn the full wages required for you standard of living. Which sucked if you were busy writing weird Star Wars rp where you fought other people or were occasionally doing your schoolwork.

Then the leadership was atrocious. The admin was super micromanage-y and thought they were an expert on medieval life and knightly duties because they jousted in the SCA. Hence, plate armor required a super high strength because it all weighed like 80 pounds and was barely movable in. Which, for tournament armor, was entirely appropriate and realistic. But combat armor? That was totally different. But they refused to listen to it. And other people in DMs basically told me, don’t bring it up or challenge them because they mad.

So, I left after a second attempt couldn’t stick, and never looked back.

EDIT: Turns out Darth Metus beat me to naming the thing. It was Mizahar.

EDIT EDIT: I forgot I was also on Jon’s fantasy board, Kingmakers, which was a ton of fun until it fizzled after a few months. Really good writing there, lots of creativity. Plenty of freedom to do stuff. There were a couple others after Kingmakers, but did end up at Chronicles, but still bouncing in and out from there from because I’ve not really ever found a niche there. Probably because I’m picky when it comes to fantasy worlds that I find super compelling.

END EDIT SNIP
I’ve tried to make a few boards myself, one fantasy sandbox based on a world locked in an eternal war between the living and undead, one a steampunk space opera like Treasure Planet, one more gritty low fantasy based on post-Roman Britain, and currently one that’s a flintlock fantasy/basically fantasy Napoleonic War, which might actually make it if I can find the time to suffer through JCink or Proboards admin and design panels.

 

[Elpsis Kerrigan]

Having a very good time on Myst of Avsalom. Friendly members and staff, cool lore, very freeform.

 

[Jacen Nimdok]

My first and only other experience with RP besides Chaos was a site called Pandora. I joined back in the fall of 2013, when I was fourteen years old. Without going into too much detail, Pandora was/is a "sandbox" RP where instead of creating a character, you would submit an application to bring a fictional character from a piece of existing media into a fantastical world called Pandora, which the user base had built up over time. Once you were approved by staff, you could write as your chosen character and do whatever you wanted with them.

Anyway, I was only there for about a month, at which point I realized what I was getting into. Explicit depictions of sex, extreme violence, torture, and so on were allowed, within certain limits (i.e. no underage characters, all the writers had to consent, keep it to private threads, etc). My memory of what exactly I was exposed to is mercifully foggy, but it was pretty bad and definitely no place for a baby like me. Whether I was just a dumb kid who ignored the warning labels and got more than I bargained for, or if the site was poorly managed and had no such safety measures to deter underage users from joining, I don't remember. But I didn't try RP again for 7 years after that, when I stumbled upon Chaos.

There isn't really a moral to the story except... I don't know, the Internet is a weird place and not for kids? R-rated boards are icky and should be avoided? Chaos is a blessing to the greater RP community? Eh. I look back on it as an unfortunate (and bizarre) learning experience.

 

[Tefka]

My story is pretty basic, though long.

CHAT RP - AOL/MSN/YAHOO

Angsty teenager who makes exuses to not hang w/ friends so he can spend late nights going ham in AOL chatrooms. Chat RP is where I started, and it was pretty vicious. But my fingers could blaze, and "Rhydin" - a fantastical world born in chatrooms - had various groups that were pvp-oriented and man was I invested in this gangland. Weird stuff was also happening, which I ignored, I was in it for the blitz and the W's.

Time progressed, internet was changing, Yahoo and MSN became the chat havens. Bans were happening all over the place, wholesale of chatrooms, because these weird people were becoming the common denominator these companies were forced to pander to. But for those of who only joined to flex those imagination muscles, our fingers were blazing away. Concepts like "T2 para-posting", where you had to churn out paragraphs of rp faster than your opponent, were the mainstay. I started in Resident Evil RP, and progressed to Star Wars chat RP. I was never a Jedi or Sith, I was a Yuuzhan Vong bounty hunter. OG snowflake. I remember my tutor's name, Eidan. He was a good dude, showed me the ropes, commanded my respect.

We didn't spend nights talking social issues, debating WW2 history, our favorite tanks, or what games we'd play. We spent nights flexing our internet muscles and immersing in the chats we kept safe through our sheer ability to challenge people to T2 duels on threat of character permadeath. The wild west was ours, in our poor socially deprived escapist probably-needs-more-vitamin-D minds. During this time I transitioned to becoming Smooka the Hutt's personal bodyguard. He was a big deal, had his own personal chat, basically Jabba's palace. He was personally kind of a douche canoe and not the kind of company I'd keep around me these days, but back then he gave me purpose and valued my dueling skills highly enough that my ego was always happy and the roleplay was always fun. I got my fights, got to witness and be apart of Smooka's roleplay, and we had a lot of good times together. I hardly knew the dude outside of RP, but we spent a lot of time together too.


FORUM ROLEPLAY - The Gungan Council

I've told this story a thousand times it feels like, but what's one more.

I joined, still had the spice. Chat RP was all but dead, the chat creeps had pretty much gotten all of them banned and trying to find a solid place to call home was pretty difficult. In comes Ezboard, and on it, a Star Wars website named The Gungan Council. They were big dogs. Lasted 10ish years. Survived and exploded during the Prequel Trilogy. Survived several spinoff forums. It was a haven for roleplaying, even if the Owner was a total ass.

I kept my head down and just focused on the roleplay. It had all my attention, I loved it. Joined the BoO - Band of Outlaws - refused to play a Force User, again. Don't know why, it just never jived. Again, I was snowflaking, I guess. Yuuzhan Vong bounty hunter. I kind of treated it like my character left Smooka and found himself in the larger Galaxy, one with factions, wars, etc. It was pretty wild, and my immediate tutor upon seeing my try-hard character application was a foxy, gothy popular girl.

Teenage me couldn't be happier.

The PVP mindset never left, either. Made my way through the ranks pretty quickly, got into faction leadership pretty quickly, helped turn BoO (with the help of an old friend, some of you might know as Beth. I knew her as her other name there, Saede Taggart, her pirate character.) into a juggernaut of a Non-Force User criminal faction. We went ham. Again, PvP was my forte, and being hype was my game. Whether it was a 24 hour raiding of the Pirate Queen Saede Taggart's ship overnight while she was getting drunk in chat, or whether we were forging alliances with the Sith and the Dark Brotherhood to launch the Knightfall campaigns and Tantor Aden and his Jeedai brothers, or whether my character was finally dueling Kane E Smart or Malice Draclau for the 50th time - it was a blast. Our stories were wild, I was in my prime.

Fast forward, I become moderator for Staff, witness the backroom, see some f'd up stuff and decisions. Cry foul, get ejected, cry foul again, get banned.

Build Chaos in a torrent of man baby rage, creativity, and signing a blood oath with a primeval deity in the Congo under a crescent moon.

And here I am.

 

[Matsu Ike]

I have been on a lot over the years more when I wasn't working and able to be on the computer all day... the few big ones

Msm/Yahoo groups were fun and simple
Star Wars Online Cantina was where I met and experienced some of the more underbelly of fans and their war with the chamber of grey
Dark Shadows was shortlived but dedicated
Gaia online when it had guilds just forming for role play sites
New Age/Legacy was maybe one of the best
Thestarwarsrp.com which was much more strict but unless you were an admin or friends you rarely seemed to matter.

 

[Heinrich Faust]

I haven't done this sort of RP since high school (I'm currently 30). I used to RP on a site called World Broadcasting System. It was a lot of fun. It was set up with different rooms with different settings, so there was a lot of variation. Eventually I got distracted with other things, and didn't come back to this kind of RP till now. I didn't even think that people would still be doing it today, until I randomly poked around on google. I was pretty stoked to find that there's still a large community for it.

WBS was a chill crowd. I definitely had some homies there and had a ton of fun playing. They were super open to facilitating larger stories for players, despite the freeform nature of the chat rooms. Definitely a good experience. I just looked, and apparently the site is still there, though it looks like it isn't getting used anymore. Funny thing though, one of the rooms still mentions an old, old story that I had set up for that setting. Oh boy... the nostalgia. Definitely good times.

 

[Gren Blidh]

My first ever forum RP was a Dune RPG, in about 2000. I was just a kid.

Eventually since Dune is a pretty small market, I moved on to Star Wars and eventually found myself at The Gungan Council. I'm not going to list all the characters I had there over the years, it would take paragraphs to recount all of the stories, and who cares really. Long story short, TGC was fun until it wasn't. Unfortunately, pretty much everything that made TGC a worthwhile place to be in the early 2000's is no longer there, and nothing has really changed. But at least I came away with some lasting and close friendships that have spanned decades now (<3 Natasi Fortan )

Tried a few other places over the years, mostly fantasy-oriented. I've been searching for a good Lord of the Rings board for years, but with forum RP being a dying hobby, mostly anything that isn't Star Wars is pretty hard to find.

Now I'm here. Just remember, I'm not trapped here with you. You're all trapped in here with me.

 

[Kadan Scipora]

Long ago, in the days of dial up, I didn't know what a computer was, being like four years old. Crazy, I know. But originally, I had no idea what I was doing, as many of us do. My first attempts into roleplay were pretty evident of it, as I think I first was using Oomegle, and then attempted other sites, but was too intimidated by the layout to continue. I started using another star wars site back in 2014, which at first was nice, but it had and still has a community problem with toxicity that hasn't gotten better. So after effectively being driven off that site, I came here, was here for a time, before running out of people to write with, and just figured the older site was the way to go; clearly it wasn't. So I'm planning on staying here for my star wars writing fix.

Regardless, I've met alot of awesome people and made friends via both these experiences, and it's been a wonderful aid for my writing skills. Writing with all you talented people is just a threat, so much appreciated for being here y'all.

 

[Cay-Yo]

I've been text RPing since I was in middle school, started with Gaia Online, and moved onto several other places. Those stories can be summarized as "nobody cares about you or your character story". Things were disjointed clique fests masquerading as open RPs.

Chaos section

Spoiler

Chaos though, and most likely you don't remember this, was the first place where my activity was actually noticed let alone rewarded. And really still is. You named me Member of the Month for February back in 2019 and I won't forget the gist of the reasoning. It was because I was new and I was trying hard to bring something to the table. I had just been essentially abandoned in my very first thread in my very first post (aside from my character bio) to carry a PvP thread for the largest faction via activity at that point in time. Otherside were great sports about it. I was really thinking about jumping ship until I got in with the right crowd and I got a discord message to look at the board.

I have yet to see any community do that. Most I've been apart of would have let the newbie leave and never given them a chance to see what made the community special.

I've been trying to give Discord RPs a go for over a year in an attempt to get into something a bit faster paced than Chaos (so I have something RP related to do between waiting posts here) but nothing matches the quality - and I'm pretty dissatisfied with the dozens I've given a chance. Ranging from posting length/rulesets to OOC atmosphere.

All in all the communities I've been with in the past don't quite have the post quality, activity, or community orientation. True community on a larger scale than 8 or so people.

 

[Beltran Rarr]

Started roleplaying when I was 13 or 14 (I'm 34 now) on a TeleNet MUD called Legends of the Jedi (which, as far as I know is still going strong). It was a great experience for the most part and I played on there for over ten years. Eventually I got tired of some of the more irritating aspects of it and found over the course of those ten years that the staff were becoming very controlling and players were very cliquish. Eventually I left for greener pastures.

I also did some Vampire: The Masquerade/World of Darkness Roleplay on TeleNet MUDs and forums during that time. My first play-by-post experience was on a Star Wars forum called Jedi.net. I think they're still up and running. It was great and that was actually where I created the Beltran Rarr concept. Eventually I just moved on. After that, I did some roleplaying on a smaller forum called jedi-masters.co.uk.

I then moved to some more adult themed roleplaying (Read: Smut) on a forum called <Redacted>. Great community there but definitely not for children. I was there for probably about 5 or so years off and on. Still log in occasionally. Stumbled on Chaos about 4 (I think?) years ago, looking to get back in to some Star Wars roleplay. What really stood out for me about Chaos was the Factory/Codex system and the Map Game.

I breathed new life into Beltran Rarr, fully expecting him to follow my old characters' route (mischief and mayhem) only to have him do a 180 and join the Silver Jedi. Rather than have Beltran become the redeemed Jedi with a tortured past, I chose to really delve into his neutral alignment and explore what might turn a former contract killer into a military officer.

It's been a pretty great ride all in all.

I am continuingly impressed by the level of transparency and fairness that I see from the staff. Tefka , you've shown yourself to be an exceptionally capable leader. You know when and how to delegate authority to others and how to allow the people you've placed in staff positions do their jobs. I think you're very fair when handling problems and problem players and you strike a great balance between building a community of creative people while still maintaining a standard of conduct that is the same for everyone regardless of their position. That's a hard thing to do, I know that from experience. But you do it, and you do it well which is one of the reasons why I think this place has continued to thrive for so long.

Anyway, that's been my experience up until this point. [/endasskissing]