🚨A (Non)In-Depth Study of the "RP"🚨

The idea of a roleplay is not a new idea. It's been around for a long time, but we're not here to discuss the origins of the RP for twenty paragraphs.The earliest RP I could find was one in 2011 by @runeprincess .One of the earlier and one of the most influential examples being "The forum of sneaking" made in the May of 2023, when it wasn't even called an RP. This, I suspect paved the way for the modern RP.

Another influential RP was "Rainy Forever", accumulating 23,000 comments, and a whole club(I hard carried). This caused a severe uptick in RPs actually called RPs. It was a snowball effect, some people joined an RP, got an idea for an RP and created an RP, causing more people to RP. (take a shot every time I say RP in this study. I dare you.)

There was also Interactive Odyssey by fan request

THE TWO TYPES OF RPS

There are two types of roleplays. One is the Freeform. A Freeform RP is one that relies more heavily on the roleplayers to create the content, such as giving a prompt on the world and allowing the roleplayers to run wild. This kind of RP is more common among the lower-effort RPs, but with a dash of effort and luck, this kind of RP can become one of the most commented on the site. Rainy Forever and The forum of sneaking are two examples of Freeform RPs.

The other type of RP is a Guided RP. Guided RPs are those with an end goal in sight, and a beginning, middle and end. These are more heavily regulated and typically have more effort put in them opposed to Freeform RPs. Because there is a set end goal, Guided RPs will most likely not get as many comments or last as long as Freeforms. These types of RPs rely heavily on the activity of their creator to function. An example of one of these is Interactive Odyssey

RPS IN OTF

In this era of OTF, there is a great many of roleplays, most of them not high effort, unfortunately. While there are exceptions to this, most RPs nowadays are more than likely non-capitalized unfinished ideas made by unsupervised 8 year olds which die off in a week or so. These cause harm to other RPs in general by turning away potential RPers from the already small enough pool of OTFers willing to RP.

A problem with hosting RPs in general on OTF is the nicheness of it. There is a small percentage of total people who have access to Chess.com, an even smaller percentage of people who come to the forums, and an extremely small percentage of those who venture to OTF, and out of all that, an extremely small amount of people who actually RP. This is a trickle-down effect that results in only 1-4 long time roleplayers, causing the main death of RPs.

In conclusion, was there a point to all this yapping? no. I was just bored for 30 mins and decided to create this mockery of an essay or study or whatever. comment down below for more videos and algorithm support

almost forgot the attention emojis

You've completely forgotten Interactive Odyssey unless it's in the part of the post I can't see.

#fixed

bump

b-b-b-b-b-b-u-u-u-u-u-u-m-m-m-m-m-m-p-p-p-p-p-p

this died fast

*cough* skill issue deal with it *cough cough cough*

Looks like my ww1 in otf thread is a guided rp

Too bad no one is doing calculations

depends if it's an RP or not

This is a good thread, it shouldn’t die so soon

"two types of rp"

bub you are missing one other type and it starts with an e

E... uh... Electric chair?

erotic

I think op is giving people too much credit when they say "low effort rp" when this is a forum on a massive site dedicated to a board game. these kinds of board are always really interesting imo, you get a crazy collision of people from so many different walks of life and it's always chaos. the most milquetoast and plain normies interacting with people who are terminally online. you're not going to see much creativity from that first group lol. and besides, there are far, far better platforms online for rp.

Great essay, Dead! Your writing shines as always.

I think they should make a forum here on Chess.com exclusively for Roleplay, because:

1. Having an entire section dedicated to it will help RPs gain traction
2. It will also cause more RPs to come into existence
3. People who don’t like RPs will stop complaining, and people who do will be left in peace
4. Why not