If you want to have more success with wanted ads, you gotta lower the bar. There is a good chance that people are going to flake within a month, and I would tailor the plot towards a real kick in the door to get the major things you want out of it quickly before that character becomes an NPC again. This is good because it will get you some of what you are wanting and possibly hook the other player into the game so that they do become long term.

I use wanted ads to attract certain members and if it pans out then it pans out. If I have a long term thing I really need a player for I either use my spouse or someone i've been rping with for ages.

Wanted ads were something I didn't really put up in the past, but after a surprising string of recent successes, I've actually grown quite fond of them. I'm still absolute trash at filling out other people's, something I'm personally trying to work on, but no longer can I say I dislike them or the people who have taken up mine after... well, those recent successes!

Do people flake? Yes. Are those abandoned plots discouraging? Absolutely. But for as many flakers as I've gotten, I've also gotten people who were really dedicated to the role. On Catch-22, I played a very obscure canon character whose history was majorly impacted by the Bosnian Wars; through my wanted ad for his best friend (who he met through said war), I met an amazing friend who not only had second-hand accounts of the actual war in real life (which helped us both with trying to keep the story telling as accurate as can be expected from forum RP), but was as excited about the characters and the plots we had as I was. It was amazingly refreshing, and I loved every second of plotting with this person.

I also totally met Beetle through a wanted ad seven trillion years ago, and while we aren't currently RPing together anywhere, the couple of threads we did were top tier. I cri evrytim. Even if the plots themselves don't pan out, you can still make amazing connections with writers that you wouldn't have gotten otherwise.

Something major to consider, though, is that wanted ads shouldn't be the be-all-end-all of your character. As was mentioned earlier, if you need the character in your wanted ad to properly play the character or maintain interest on site, just, like... play another character. Wanted ads should be icing on your cake, not the cake to your... icing. You need to prepare for the chance that you won't get that role - but that doesn't mean you shouldn't try for that role all the same!

Jul 24, 2018 23:13:36 GMT @iota said:

Jul 24, 2018 23:00:53 GMT Sharp said:

If you want to have more success with wanted ads, you gotta lower the bar.

Done that ('lower the bar') and then once in play the chemistry really isn't good. It's kind of hard to explain without using examples, and I don't want to use examples.

Also, I personally prefer plots to happen gradually (like a book or a movie). I've seen someone who threw several major "bombs" at their partner (ICly) and they basically wasted an entire, interesting plot in a single post. On top of that, it was too much of a shellshock for the other character. I'm not for super slow, but I do prefer building up. I do post fast, though, so my plots do tend to go by quicker if I have someone who is speedy as well but very few people I've met post as fast as me. XD (Edit: and sometimes, I can't use my amigo who is my most consistent/fast RP partner. XD)

If your method works for you, then I'm glad.

I'm not sure I would go for a plot bomb out the door, maybe like a plot firework I guess?

A lot of people do like plots to be very book or movie like. I have found it to be disappointing to treat roleplaying in similarity to that kind of medium.

To me threads are there own medium and they are naturally very fragmented nuggets of a story, if I had to compare forum roleplaying to another medium I think I would say it is more like an episodic series than a movie. I think that the prevalence of liquid time tends to agree with me. In that regard I don't try to capture every detail of what is going on in the characters life, rather a thread is just a glimpse to me and they do other things when i'm not around to pilot them. I jump in for the cool parts.

But lets say roleplaying is more like a book to you. Deeply paraphrasing a creative writing class from a long while back (that I can't remember well) your first couple of paragraphs of the first chapter should utterly captivate your reader. If you start a wanted ad with an intent to build up to some grand plot but you've invested nothing in your opening chapter it isn't going to capture your reader enough that they get to the center of the book.

So to really expand on what I am getting at is that you should focus on an opening plot with your new partner that will get them invested up front. Bored new players leave sites.

From my cynical point of view I would guard my heart and expect that person might get through that initial plot and then up and leave, or not at all. Lowering the bar may not have been the right word because i'm not saying to take someone you aren't satisfied with as a wanted ad, what I really mean is lowering your expectations for how long term the pot will be where that character is anything more than an npc in the background again and making use of the time they are being piloted by someone else to best effect.