How Do You Handle High Ranks In Roleplay?

[Former Member]

Hello!I had a question and I wasn't sure, so Im wondering what y'all have to say about it.

How does one manage high ranks in a RP? I am planning to do a Zelda roleplay, and I'll need people for characters like Dark Link and Ganondorf. So maybe people can claim them, but then what? They get that charactor forever?

I thought about only letting them control that character for say, 6 months (or something else) real time, but that leaves more problems:
1. What if the previous owner of the character was planning something in their RPs, and the new owner doesnt want to continue the plan? That would be odd and weird.
2. What if the new owner RPs alot differently than the previous owner?


So let's say the member can claim a character for as long as they're active. But what if they're active for years? Can no one else get a chance at that character?

Then I thought some more and considered: what's wrong with letting someone claim a character for as long as they're active? Would that be good or bad? Would new members like joining (as there are canon and nin-canon characters) ?

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I wasn't sure how to do this, so I am asking if you guys have any ideas or suggestions. Thank you!

[Former Member]

bump!

[Wolfe]

For ease of language and to make it consistent with how others use it, I'm going to separate 'high ranks' and 'canons'.

Canons are pre-established characters within a fandom. IE in a Zelda game Marin, Zelda, Link, and Proxi would all be canons.

'High ranks' is whatever you define them as, and usually sites do not really make that distinction. Obviously Proxi is not going to have the same effect on the world as Ganondorf, but they are both pre-established characters.

The norm is to allow people to take canons for as long as they are active. Expecting six months out of a player is very dangerous because that will likely simply not happen. Much more likely is popular canons like Link will be tossed around from person to person and have a bunch of different writers who write for less than ten IC posts before leaving in some fashion or another and some like Proxi would never get claimed at all.

If you get that unicorn member who not only sticks around but sticks around to play a canon character for six months and you kick them off of the character 'so that others get a chance to play them', chances are you just lost your unicorn because they'll just leave because you took their character from them for essentially no reason.

Generally speaking every time the author shifts, the wanted ad changes. For example, if you were to make a medieval fantasy and wanted a King to rule over a certain land but didn't really care what type of king they were the wanted ad might have look something like this:

The land of X is currently looking for a King! Some Face Claim suggestions are A, B, and C and the player will be able to decide most aspects of their personality and history. The only things set in stone is that they have 3 kids, have a wife with <insert relationship here>, and are generally seen to be <insert basic reputation here>.

If a player took this canon position for any length of time and made a persona of an alcoholic playboy, for instance, the wanted ad would update if that canon position still needed to be filled. It may read something like:

The land of X is currently looking for its King! Face Claim needs to look something similar to <insert last FC used> and their personality/demeanor can be described as <insert description of how they were played last time>. They have accomplished <insert any achievements done by previous author> and the people have responded with <insert responses, if any, to the accomplishments made>. Their relationship with their family members is <go out and briefly describe what happened on this front>. Etc.

The wanted ad updates to the personality/plots that were already in motion, in other words. Can they back out of them or have a change of heart? Generally speaking, yes, but retconning is a surefire way to make sure nobody wants to plot with canon roles because the erasure of previous work sucks and nobody likes it. Editing the ad to reflect the changes the past authors have made to the character is basically required if you want any form of consistency, because if you simply reuse the old 'come up with what you want!' the new person's interpretation might be that of a quiet scholarly type raised by the clergy... which would clash heavily with the alcoholic playboy persona other characters interacted with.

As for the new members 'liking' joining, that has to do much more with the layout of your site, how accessible it is, and the health of your fandom as a whole. If you run a My Hero Academia site, for example, you're going to receive far more success than with a Gen:Lock site if your metrics are members gained and posts had simply because MHA is so darned popular right now and people are flocking towards it whereas Gen:Lock is behind a paywall so doesn't have the same outreach to the public as MHA does. If every other site in your fandom has a certain range of members, you can be pretty reasonable in thinking that if you have similar layouts and accessibility that you will have that level to look forward to. I know in my own fandom, for example, that I'm not going to get a giant explosion of 300 people because RWBY isn't a huge fandom to begin with and thus a smaller pool of potential members. (A quick look on Reddit has the main RWBY sub being at 88k subscribed, whereas MHA has 261k subscribed. The pool is over 4x bigger in MHA which is why they have more active sites.) The only relevant metric for 'how good you're doing' is to compare how your site does against others in your fandom, in other words.

I'm not familiar with how Zelda roleplays are or the climate in those, but look to see what they are doing. What platform do they use? How do they generate activity? How have the long runners sustained activity? Is it big rushes of new people with massive turnover, or is it a small and dedicated community that refuse to quit? How do they run events and canons? How will your site be different than theirs, and what will your pitch be?

To give an example from my own fandom, the oldest and most successful RWBY site I'm aware of is World of Remnant. They run canons and OCs alongside each other and have the entire world open for play. It's a model that works for them and has sustained activity for multiple years, and every other site within the genre that I was aware of copied that exact model to little success. Why would they go there when World of Remnant is there longer, has more systems in place, and has the members to ensure that you get off the ground running with plots immediately? If your pitch is 'the same as <insert more successful site with a track record> but newer and without any track record!' you're going to need to be part of a very active fandom for that to take off generally speaking.

With my own site I did the opposite of basically everything that World of Remnant did. The playable area is much, much narrower to the point of being a single town at the moment and the focus wasn't on an entire world but essentially focused it down to what was a 'superpowered school' setting and that's the pitch. Go from zero to hero in a progression system focused entirely on students who are training to be heroes. You can't play a villain or a civilian, every character is a hero candidate basically. That makes the entire complexion of the site different and ensures that every member can roleplay with each other. It's the same fandom nominally, but we have entirely different pitches and appeal to completely different audiences and thus don't really compete with each other. Find what niche isn't being catered to and make it happen.