RP SG's...where have you gone?(also, lore.)

Agonus, you hit it on the head so well... RP is a two-way street (Actually, it's spread between every single participant, anyways...).

In the Paragon Universe, we're set up to house any number of smaller sub-teams (Originally intended to be like a comicbook company's many different titles: Marvel Universe: Fantastic Four, X-Men, Avengers, Independents and so on and so forth, whatever origins, whatever styles, whatever power levels).
There are no side characters (Unless you wish them to be as such).

I've seen so many players come and go that, many times, shy away from jumping into things, creating their own content and/or biting on existing content.
Honestly, my favorite brand of RP is just simply being our characters and stumbling into whatever nondescript adventures occur (Okay, maybe not favorite... but I prefer this on a more regular occurrence than endless soap opera every twist and turn).
The reason for this mini-semi-rant is just that our RP SG has always been all about every member being equals and being leaders and creators of all of our shared content. Most of our more focused/particular arcs have been focused on a few characters, but open ended enough for tons of room to join and do whatever anyone wishes to do with.

Sadly, it seems that most just want everything to be set up for them, and if it isn't, they look elsewhere.
Yet, the things that are set up, they avoid because they feel that they'd either not fit, be welcome or not be in the spot light enough (perhaps?).

I don't say this with so much negativity towards any other players... Just out of disappointment that so many, seemingly creative, players have shied away, despite our efforts to provide an open sandbox for mutual participation.



tl/dr: When you find a group, jump in, be respectful, bounce ideas OOCly and ICly, and (If the group is anything like the Paragon Universe) recognize that you're all equals and all there to both join and create the fun. The responsibility, as role-players, is all of ours.

I think...I might have been mistunderstood, I'm in a small mostly active RP SG now.

but....like...The fallen, which disbanded after a while because our leader left me in charge and then everybody stopped logging in because they barely knew me...

and then villains of paragon, we interacted ALOT with other SG's and stuff...

It seems like everyone's so enclosed now.

odd ._.

it might change a bit once GR comes out though, because alot of people will be forced to interact with eachother if they want to go praetorian.

._. jussssst curious.

We (The Supreme Society, I'm the "co-" Agonus mentioned) tried to interact with other SGs, tried to get another group to play foil to the Society's plots and do some back-and-forth fights and arcs and such, but it just never worked out. Those other groups wouldn't set aside time for us, would mostly miss any appointment agreed upon, and most of them vanished off the face of the earth (one more or less told us, "Sorry, we're going to go play the new shiny and forget all the stuff we've done with you, bye!") leaving us back where we started.

So we pretty much keep our plots to ourselves these days. We venture out to the D to cause trouble every now and then, but the effort taken to try to coordinate things with other groups has just never seemed worth the cost.

It is TOO early to even try this thread <goes back to bedz> z_z

As has been conclusively provenish, RP SGs are still out there. The Reciprocators are doing some stuff for our 4th birthday this month, so we're a little more out and about in the community than we usually are. Generally we like to hide in our base, RP in small clusters and aren't so public about our RP.

Which can be a lot of fun at times. Public means you get walk-up randoms who add a new element. Public also means, though, that you get walk-up randoms who want to spam you with powers and the word 'LOL'.

I think a lot of groups are out there, just not as publically visible as they have been in the past.

Incognitus is good stuff btw, on the rare Thursday I'm not DJing I have stopped by and chatted and wished I could hang around more, anyone up for some mystic bent fun should check it out

BrandX, PMed some questions about your group. Please reply back when you get a chance. Thankies.

For the OP:

Lately, I don't see as much blueside RP as I used to. I've so far attributed it to my having become a villain player almost exclusively, but I even seem to see fewer hero-side characters around Pocket D, and don't see alot of super-group tags that I used to see often. Again this might be self-selection too, as I don't spend alot of time on the "blue" end of the bar cause the text scroll there often makes it hard for me to follow my own conversations.

I see fewer of the 'bigger, older' villain group tags too, but not to the same extent as hero groups. Anyway, bottom line is that in my opinion many of the older, heavier RP groups on both sides have fallen off in public activity. And I do know for certain that several long-standing RP groups have effectively collapsed due to population loss and/or leadership neglect.

But groups are still out there, it might just take more of a determined effort to find and contact them (looking for their guildportal pages might be a good start).

For the general discussion:

Having lead an RP supergroup for a stint, and having experience leading guilds in other games, I can say that I think RP groups in particular really have a certain 'maximum size' beyond which they cannot effectively expand. Actually I think all online groups of any nature can only get as big as a singular charismatic leader can motivate and unify the members, but because of how heavily grounded in personal relationships online RP is, an RP group has a different (and probably smaller) limit - the individual members' monkeysphere.

Once there are more people than can create and maintain relationships between their characters, the group starts experiencing problems, where people feel out of touch overall and new members feel particularly unwelcome. And RP monkeyspheres seem to me to be ridiculously small, in part due to alts, timezones, play schedules, the demands of real life, and so forth: keeping up strong relationships between the same characters over a long period of time is often more difficult than simply moving around and forming new ones.

Throwing that in with 'us-vs-them' mentalities and I think it's easy to see why groups might fade out of public spaces and into more private base-centric RP circles, as well as fail to be good 'organizational partners' for inter-group events like 'battles' (though RPVP in specific has significant additional hurdles, IMO, due to a general dislike of PVP).

Finally, other than Pocket D, there are no places that people really expect to find RP in the open in any concentration. Even people who RP elsewhere, often do so in 'out of the way' places or in channels other than local (team, SG, coalition), effectively rendering it invisible to anyone who's seeking, or even just interested in, RP. And while because of the monkeysphere issue, the D doesn't need to be full of alien-robot-vampire-demon-catgirls and people trolling both IC and OOC to drive away groups who are looking for more-serious RP, it certainly doesn't help any.