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pronounsthey/them
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balancing a site is so stressful like what do you mean you don't know if all the disparate pieces work well together until you actually have people play in your sandbox. arrghhhhhh i just need to remember that i don't have to get everything correct in the first week but also: I Gotta
pronounsthey/them
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2023 was sort of the “i’m still kicking” year.

- got a new job that paid me 50% more than my last one and requires me to work 50% less. this was nice because 3 years ago i was straight up convinced that i was permanently unemployable lmfao. there are a lot of frustrations but i’m giving myself permission to coast for a little bit
- i’m working on my first site in … almost a decade! i’m kind of nervous about how much the rpc has changed during that time but i hope everything goes well
- went to japan by myself!!! and realized that traveling by myself if i don’t speak the local language is very boring lmfao. next year the travel plans will be better…hopefully
- started getting into watching movies at the theater. i always thought it was a huge waste of money. now i get it’s not about watching the movie, it’s about being able to talk to people about new movies.
- i’m starting the paperwork to buy a house!!! just gotta wait on some tax paperwork next year but man i did not think that i would be in the financial position to buy a house in a major city at the beginning of 2023. i do feel a little weird doing this while single but i feel like there's a point where you have to make life happen instead of waiting for life to happen to you
last edit on Dec 25, 2023 9:40:25 GMT by ink
pronounsthey/them
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i tend to write kinda edgy characters (ex child soldier, unethical politician, war criminal) and using real people's faces for that icks me. i don't judge people who rp those tropes in rlrp obviously but psychologically it's hard to get over it.

i also like that animanga art has more of a "vibe" or "mood." rlrp can do that with fashion photography but it's harder to find exactly what i'm looking for. i also think illustrations encourage my brain to think beyond what the hover looks like, and more what the actual character looks like. photographs feel more "solid" and "settled" if that makes sense. i also play a lot of gender non conforming characters and i feel like that's easier with anime art.
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as someone who's done the transition in reverse + helped people go from discord to forums before?

tbeh, i wouldn't probably wouldn't recommend moving a community from discord to forums (proboards, jcink, or any other host) unless your existing community is heavily biased towards wanting to make that shift + the staff team have enough previous familiarity with forums to handle the transition.

i could go on for a good long while about how forums are a huge learning curve for people to first learn how to navigate compared to discord (since even if you are using the new forums feature for discord to minimize the base navigation differences solely on the user end, tupper is getting rid of so many clicks and menus you have to go through to update accounts/images and make posts + the admin controls for the main hosts are both pretty unintuitive if you're not familiar with the base software) and how forum-based rpers have very different expectations out of sites than discord rpers do (rules + lore information is typically far more extensive on forums than discord and the web design aesthetics arms race that is skinning is probably the biggest thing i was glad to avoid in transitioning over towards discord).

but i won't because all of that is a huge deep dive into rp meta that largely doesn't matter. because the reason i wouldn't recommend it essentially boils down to that the animanga forum rpc community is by and large a much shallower pool than the discord one - which will make it a lot harder for you to expand your community, especially if you're having to fight an uphill battle with discord rpers getting frustrated with the learning curve to get started + forum rpers being turned off because your site doesn't check boxes that they largely consider standard at this point or are checking ones that have largely fallen out of favor.

it'd also be a harder transition to make since a lot of rp resources are either disappearing entirely (like the big jcink resource site, caution to the wind, closing their doors soon + blocking access to their 10+ year library of various codes and their ad directory) or are becoming less easy to find if you don't already know where/how to look (via shifting resources into tumblr ad directories or coding discords). advertising your community also relies a ton more heavily on personal networking (since most long-term members tend to come via word of mouth), which you may not have, and takes a lot more effort too (since posting ads on other sites is a lot more time-consuming than just bumping the server on disboard every couple of hours).



i can feel the rest of the animanga community trying to deathglare me into oblivion for having said all of this, but i also couldn't in good conscience say anything else in my answer - not to dissuade you if this is what you and your server ultimately want to do but so that you'd be able to step into the wider forum community knowing it's going to be a lot of effort and huge learning curve. if you're willing to put in the work to get over that higher barrier of entry that forum rp has, it can be a lot of fun and it opens you up to a very different community than what discord rp typically has (i've found, for example, you tend to get a younger crowd with discord than forums). but it's also enough effort that i don't think the decision should be made lightly by any means + i would never recommend making the jump one way or the other if they weren't absolutely sure of it.

(honestly, if you want me to ramble more about my personal experiences with making the transition between the two + what the experience is like on either end, i'm more than happy to delve into stuff more, i just don't want to slam down so much text that it just gets skimmed/ignored or for forums to kick me out as a filthy traitor to my people for becoming a discord convert.)


I agree with most of this but also I think this is like an argument for the community needing to come together and put together some resources. I'm currently trying to open a site and if it doesn't explode in a few months then I'll come back and make some.

Forum RP is not a one-to-one replacement for other types of RP platforms. It's a format that allows you to tell different types of stories. I would focus less on "are forums easy to use" (They are not. Banish the thought from your head right now) and focus more on "What kind of narratives does my community want to create?" Go browse some forums and read the threads. If your members want to write stories that way, then I think making a forum could be worth it.

I think the main reason to pick forum rp is if you want to write longform stories with a focus on character and setting development. I've never been on Discord RP but I tried Tumblr and Twitter RP. I bounced off both because the posts were shorter and the focus was more on brief character interactions and comedy. I like those things too, but I don't like them enough to maintain an entire character muse just to write those kinds of posts. I'm also not a very social person and I would rather write someone a post every three days instead of having to keep up with a talkative community.
pronounsthey/them
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make your SO rp. i wanna see their ocs
He skipped every cutscene in every story-based game that you loved, and hence can't be trusted.
He has funny OCs in tabletop campaigns though.
make him bring the funny ones
pronounsthey/them
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- RP. I've been on hiatus x hiatus because apparently when I RP too hard my SO gets lonely, so how sway
- I'm in my hooligan tales era. I just want to be that person on the periphery who doesn't talk much but uses a whacky fc or whose character says whacky things and generally acts unpredictable circa 2015. Will they fight? Will they fuck?? Will they defenestrate the previous BBEG, ushering in a new era of affably evil???
make your SO rp. i wanna see their ocs