This is an open letter of sorts not to any user specifically, but to a handful of users who I know frequent this board with admirable regularity - those who consistently RP over in our Realistic Roleplay section!
Y'all are the unsung heroes not only of Gateway, but of the roleplaying world in general. In my many hours of perusing the Roleplayers Wanted and Interest Check forums, without a doubt, I see more fresh, new ideas generated there than even the most shiny, gimmicked out fantasy or sci-fi idea. On top of that, the Realistic Roleplay forum was the most consistently active RP forum seven months ago, when I was still checking every day. Has it changed since then? Probably not too much.
I don't know how much I can stress how importance of the following statement - your stories are about people. They're not about magic spells or wands or items that bad guys scramble after. You are telling a story of individuals interacting, which is what all writing is at its barest bones. Some writers forget that. Some stories are crafted around the mechanics of the world rather than the mechanics of the people within it.
Why are there so many more Realistic Roleplay RPs happening, still happening, and being completed? Who knows, but it must have something to do with the way you guys throw yourselves into your characters, whether you like them, can identify with them, or not. There's something to learn from that. There truly is.
More than characters, too, it's situations. When done right, things in a school, home, or office setting can be as powerful and or damning as any epic battle waged out on the Fields of Justice, if you play your characters right. In a realistic setting, it seems to me that all of that can be stripped back, and play more freely.
Some of the best "romances" I've seen in the Realistic Roleplay section were not in threads tagged as such. The best "romance" (understand I am reading that word to mean "relationship between two characters") comes from your stories. Writing characters who are multifaceted, who can interact and are relatable in an interesting way just by putting them in the same room together. Brothers, friends, cousins, uncles, teachers, that crush you had in 6th grade who never actually knew your name. The many layers of being a human, of living. You write it all, you tell these intricate stories, and you do it again and again.
Okay. Now I gotta switch gears. Thus far in this post I've been using hard and fast terms like "you" and "them" and "us", so it's time to haul back on that a little bit. Writers are writers. Genres aren't cemented things, I understand this. The setting of a story shouldn't matter when it comes to quality, but writing in a "realistic" setting is certainly more challenging on some fronts, as I mentioned before.
Yeah, yeah. Sometimes I roll my eyes at the number of "<3 <3 <3 <3"s and dramatic layouts I see, sure, but there's a familiarity in the bubble-gum pop. There's also a gritty edge of realism that cuts deep, too. I've seen some of those threads, believe me.
Right, well, I'm gonna awkwardly bring this rant of a post to a close before I embarrass myself even further.
Seriously. Don't think I'm not watching you guys over there in your little corner of RPGateway.
-VV
