here comes lovelorn to drop her 2 cents. my qualifications? i like slice of life AND social events and i've been staff for social events when i was younger and they didn't go very well. but hindsight is 20/20 and i've learned from my mistakes !!

foreword: ngl if you don't have a playerbase that likes slice of life social events are probably a no-go unless you specifically hear otherwise from ur members. if ur a dbz site with an emphasis on combat mechanics and pvp and ur members come specifically for that maybe a costume party for the outrageously rich and elite isn't up ur members alley (but maybe it is). i think it's just important to understand ur community's tastes going in!!! also another note before i say anything else - everything here is based on my experience, and thus may be incongruous with yours.

anyway! moving on!

i think it's important to have conflict in any event or some kind of catalyst to get things going in social events, but almost all of the time in my experience its usually a physical kind of conflict - like, villains are crashing the ball, someone started a food fight, etcetera. imo i don't really consider events like that - ones that erupt in action towards the end? - as purely social threads. im not rly a social thread purist or anything but i just wanted to provide some food 4 thought and some context to my next statements.

i think in social threads emotional conflict is really important and what really makes them interesting to me rather than physical conflict, and i think rpers are less - imo - inclined to...write people being mean or not getting along to/with each other if their character isn't intentionally meant to be mean or not get along well with others, which is where i think staff come in? i think staff involvement is super important in every event, but i think staff actually posting in threads and participating in events thru npcs or chosen characters or just [omnipresent narrator voices] is REALLY integral in creating interesting situations in situations like that - where rpers don't have their own conflict in their threads, and their characters are just going, "yo, what's up with your life, characterb?" and "not much, character a, hbu?" back and forth, which, coincidentally, is what i think kills social events.

but getting back on topic: here are a few examples! say there's a board for a "beach cleanup" event and the admin jumps into one of ur threads and rps this annoying highschool kid that goes around throwing trash onto the beach right as you clean sections up. maybe you're rping in a fantasy historical world and ur rping some daughter of a duchess at a debuante ball except the staff make all the rich ladies laugh at your character's dress and now ur character is humiliated and flees into a corner and the rich ladies now gossip to the rest of the characters still in the main hall abt how ugly ur character looked. make rpers make choices! make them confront negative emotions!

with social events, too, i think there's a lack of...like...variation in ridiculousness. either nothing is happening out of the tea party at the town hall, and everything is idyllic, or people are rioting outside and throwing stones and the villains want to destroy the building while ur partying inside. personally, i'd like to see stuff in-between: like a woman who starts screaming her head off about her girlfriend cheating on her and accusing a random bunch of characters of being the one that her significant other cheated with, or someone spikes the punch at the highschool grad dance with way too much alcohol and the teachers found out.

i also think its really important to take advantage of the nature of a social event too. social events mean that ALMOST EVERYONE is in one place (if people participate!), which is something that rarely happens ever, since threads are usually 1on1 or in isolated situations where 1 character meets another, with only npcs around them. it'd be cool if staff encouraged larger groups of characters to interact with each other, or characters to interact with people different from those they initially were talking to: like maybe c and d are talking, and [staff npc] wrenches c's drink out of their hand to throw it at a from where they're hanging onto b's arm. now c, d, a, and b have something else to respond to other than their conversations, and something out of the norm is presented. since lots of people are in one area, it's probably much more crowded, so if someone pushes f or g, maybe h falls over too.

overall, though, i think it's important to have something that makes your social event unique. if it's a party, why should your members post in it instead of just making a 1on1 closed thread where they say their characters are at a huge party and are interacting? if it's a pet adoption event, why can't my character just go to the animal shelter with their mom? 

tl;dr / comprehensible version: it'd be nice to have action in social event threads that were more in line of "theres a hysterical man crying about the state of his tuxedo on the balcony" rather than "pew pew pew" !! even though pew pew pew threads can be fun in their own right