What would you roleplay?

[Jonathan Meer]

I like how you say 'Nothing was done,' and then you make a pretty sizable list of a lot of stuff that was done.

A lot of discussion on these elements went on behind closed doors. The primary annoyance of RPG Discussions of the site's ills, though, is that while everyone has an opinion on how the site can be improved, they don't want to hear any criticism at all of that opinion. It's why those discussions tend to get pretty heated. Further, just about every idea has been discussed/debated to death.

Every time there's a thread in the RPG Discussion with members discussing the site's problems, there are at least three accompanying threads in the Staff forum, analyzing these issues and testing the proposed solutions to see if they'll work. Often, we aren't satisfied with the trade-off of switching to some of these new systems, and will quietly express that dissatisfaction in the RPG Discussion thread, only to be argued back at. Which is fine. It's good to be argumentative for your position (that's how Community Grading got implemented in the first place; I'm still sad that the community couldn't sustain it). But realize that a lot of thought goes into our response.

Ultimately, I think this site should be for writing. That isn't just a truism; what I mean by that is this: Regardless of stats, regardless of mechanisms, your fundamental drive should be to just write. Write with people. Write about things that matter. Write with characters in new and interesting ways. Don't rely on ethereal nonsense-concepts like 'closure' to be impelled to write. If that's what you require, you're not really potentially-active.

I've seen it time and time again. I saw it with the saga. We had a huge spike of initial activity, and about half of the people just flat-out stopped writing. Half of the people who said they would write again if we had a saga. This isn't to say the saga was a failure (three different groups of multiple people wrote pretty-damn-interesting storylines), but it definitely showcases this dynamic I'm referring to: Chubbs-folk will blame their own inactivity on anything and everything.

And I just don't think that's useful.