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JellisOP

Blaming Myself

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So, I'm going to talk about something that's been bothering me for quite some time. Ever since I joined up back in the YCM days before the split, every time I joined an RP, it never ended up going anywhere. It crashed and burned, whether that be because of lack of time, enthusiasm, or what have you. However, I noticed a trend. In most (not all) of these canceling, I was the last to post before it ended prematurely. It had died, and the way I saw it, it was my fault for not writing well or what have you. I mean sure, I made jokes about it, "The Destroyer of RP's", Haha, very funny. But I think that this has gave me hesitance to write, because I feel like that if I can't take the plot somewhere interesting, than it will just end up crashing and burning, which honestly sucks, but I love writing, I have so many narrative ideas to create and want to create. I know that these are not my fault, they are just a set of unforeseen consequences I hadn't expected, but if I know this, why do I feel so terrible about it? Why do I feel like if something fails that I touched that I was the cause of it?

Is it normal to feel this way?

Are these even the right questions to be asking?

I don't know, but just talking about it certainly makes me feel a little better.

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I'm willing to bet that's just a coincidence. Sure, the fact that it happened a few times might signal a pattern, but that doesn't necessarily mean it's your fault. There's definitely more reasons for an RP to burn out, and that applies to anyone involved, including the hosts. Plenty of people might just not feel like making a post. The host might just not know where to go with the story. Or both. It really depends, and it doesn't have to be singled out each time.

I know the feeling, though. There were a couple times where I would join an RP and it would either slow down significantly or stop. Hell, sometimes that'll happen in Discord chats I comment on, and sometimes it's just too much of a coincidence. But I don't really take it personally. People have lives, so they have their reasons for not keeping things active, even if it's a collective effort.

But if it's bothering you, I agree, talking about it definitely is a good thing to do, if not just to let it out. Like I said, though, you shouldn't blame yourself.

Edited by Thar

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I will be blunt

As it stands 70-80% of RPs die off or slow to such a crawl they're basically dead

There's many reasons for this but I can for sure say it's not any one person's fault

I could go into a ton of the whys but probably won't go that detailed.

But I wouldn't say you should blame yourself. As long as you post when you can and are open to talking about things if you're worried there's a lull/you need help getting a post out then that's all you gotta do

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I'm not gonna repeat the points that Cow and Thar brought up. Instead, I'd quite like to address one that both they and (the other guy) have all skipped. Not just why it shouldn't be you, but why it can't be you. I also will refrain from saying such things as "you're not that bad of a writer" not because I believe you are (I don't), but because such things are highly subjective and people love to self-deprecate in the face of praise. Plus, the following can apply to writers of any degree, be they Ernest Hemingway himself or an illiterate preteen from fanfiction.net.

A bit of critical thinking dictates that RPs where you're the last post can't possibly be RPs you've killed unless you're the host of them, and I don't recall you hosting anything that got to IC phase. If your post was truly so bad as to derail everyone's trains of thought, the host would either ask you to edit your post, ask a mod to hide it, or in a worst case scenario, kick you out of the RP and retcon your post entirely rather than close up shop because of one person's poor writing. If they do none of those things, that is their problem for being quite a bit too lax in their management; not yours for creating the RP post equivalent of 50 Shades of Gray. So an RP where you're the last post - no matter how bad - cannot have been killed by you. Let's look at the other possibilites. Perhaps you were the last in the round and the RP slowly was lulled into the big sleep by the host not host posting and advancing the RP to start the cycle of posts anew? That means the host killed the RP through great inaction, not only not advancing the RP, but also not communicating instructions to get someone else to do it for them. Therefore, not you. What about second-to-last then? Say you posted, and the RP died out while waiting for that one last person? In the interest of not ultimately blaming everything on hosts, we'll blame that one last person for this - who still isn't you by the way - for the same general reasons as the previous scenario.

Now how about the opposite? What if you're the first person to post in the round and nobody else does before the RP dies off? It certainly can't be you in that case, for the round's possibilities are still up there. Unless you've done something that chokes out anything everyone else in the cast can possibly do - which is not only very difficult to achieve but would hopefully result in the edit/hide/retcon scenario we talked about earlier - there's still a whole new round of posting to go around, with all the possible actions, reactions, and collabs that entails. You being the only one to post in the RP's death round makes you the exact opposite of the problem. A loose combination of this and the case where you're second-to-last apply together in cases where your post is somewhere in the middle of the round. However, there is one scenario where one can reasonably say you killed the RP.

Let's say a Big Important Collab™ is happening this round, between you and someone else, be it the host or another player. If the RP dies out because the collab took too long because you did not respond or contribute to it, that is on you. However, this situation is the exact opposite of the problem you're having, since it requires you to not post, and your concerns are about RPs you do post in dying. While you're certainly asking yourself the right questions, I think you've been coming up with the wrong answers, and hopefully I've managed to coherently explain why that is. Of course, you shouldn't take all this as an excuse to hold grudges against RPers or hosts who were the cause of RP deaths. Everyone has lives, and sometimes it just gets too in the way, and as NCM's RP regulars are getting older, this is more and more the reason RPs living or dying is mostly up to chance in the early rounds.

Edited by yui

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