Alright, so let me first tell you all a little about me. I am the leader of a RP that has been active for a little over a year. With this information, I can go on explaining. My RP is private. That means I am in a map I have made myself whenever I log on. That means I only interact with the people in my group. Sometimes I feel like a FH shut in. If you're in a map all the time, are you really part of the community? Every once in a while I'll check on what's going on, but other than that I am completely absorbed in my RP. I feel that I'm not really a part of FH unless I go into the public maps and actually talk to people. What do you guys think about this?
Here's the next bit of my discussion. Making plots, after a while, is so incredibly taxing. My brain is fried. It is hard to be creative! Now, my RP is unrealistic, okay, so you think it'd be easy...but after making so many plots it just gets exhausting and I can almost feel the creativity being drained from my brain. When I ask my fellow staff members in my RP to help me think of ideas, it goes something like this:
Me: So, what do you think we should do about this? We need a plot that has something to do with this horrible disease, any ideas of where we should go with this?
Mod 1: Uhh, have everyone go out and try and figure out how to stop it?
Me: Well, that doesn't seem very interesting and blah blah blah, it wouldn't work.
Mod 1: idk
Mod 2: beats me
Me: Well I'll brain storm and we'll talk about it later then. *que hours of laying on my bed, trying to think about what the heck I should do next*
Like that. Pleasant right? When you have an unrealistic RP, the members get used to fun and exiting things, like killing bad guys with magic. So what you have to do is think of even more fun and exciting things, which..well, like I said, gets taxing. I'll be sitting around for weeks, thinking and thinking until I get a bit of inspiration and then I finally squeeze out another plot. But it's hard. Does anyone else struggle like this?
And my last but more trivial topic...The members. Oh the members. You can't have a role play without one, and yet they are the most exhausting aspect of it. You have to please everyone. Make sure everyone gets along. And most importantly, keep everyone in line without making them hate you. It's like juggling ten balls on your head. One member will always have an unfavorable side. And you know what you gotta do, you gotta deal with it, make sure not to get them angry, be mature and not argue with them, and you also have to make sure no one else ends up hating them. A private RP is a very tedious and exhausting thing, and yet the fun of role playing assures that I and everyone else keep coming back.
But then there's that other thing called getting more members. Let me tell you about this one. This is how it goes.
You get a new member.
They join the RP, and hang around for 1 hour before claiming that they have to either just go, or head over to another RP.
You come online the next day, and they are in another RP.
They eventually come on, hang around, and apologize as they let you know they have another RP to attend to after a few hours.
The next day they don't even come on, and you rarely see them online, and when they are, they're busy at that other RP.
Look, I understand if you have another more important RP to keep up with, but when you make the choice to join a RP, you have to make sure you stick with your decision and remain active. This scenario just happens way too many times. It happens even more times than the traditional 'the person only sticks around for one day and never comes online again' scenario, for me at least.
Before I continue to ramble on about my struggles, I'll end it here. If you can sympathize with any of this, feel free to reply below.