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As an outgrowth of its enormous fandom contingent, LiveJournal, and now InsaneJournal and Dreamwidth, has a large and lively roleplaying community. No, not that kind of roleplay. Or that one. Or, well, mostly not that one.
Essentially, it's a cross between the Play By Post Game and Character Blog. Original characters may also be seen, but these are less common, and banned entirely in some games for fear of Mary Sues.
Also, roleplayers have a penchant for drama. Then again, so does the rest of LJ...
A (by no means complete) list of games:
Closed games:
Tropes applying to LJRP in general or very commonly used in games:
- Alternate Character Interpretation: Given LJRP's fandom roots, players
sometimes constantly come into conflict over whether a given player's interpretation of a character is true to the original.
- Alternate Universe: Most games that aren't "spooky jamjars" are AUs where the canon characters' backgrounds have been altered to fit the setting.
- Or are Dressing Room type settings. (Which are arguably alternate universes that "steal" characters from many other alternate universes into one setting.)
- Applied Phlebotinum: Many games have 'events', handwaved in different ways depending on the game, that influence characters against their wills. Common events include:
- Archive Trawl: "Canon review", the process of re-experiencing a series (or portions of a series) to better play a character.
- Artifact Title: While so-called "Livejournal Roleplay" originally took place mostly on Livejournal, certain business practices on the site's part have pushed a large number of games and players over to Dreamwidth and Insanejournal.
- Back from the Dead: Many games do not treat death as permanent, so that a player can keep on playing them.
- Brought Down to Normal: Many games tend to depower or nerf overpowered characters to put them in line with other characters. However, there tends to be imbalances due to the state of different series.
- Cast Herd: Inevitable in big games (who can interact with everyone?) but tends to lead to accusations of cliquishness.
- Chuck Cunningham Syndrome: In big games, the friends of dropped characters may angst for awhile about their friend's disappearance, but then they are sometimes never mentioned again.
- Closed Circle: Most dramatic R Ps forbid characters leaving the setting of their own volition (because many of them have no plausible motive for staying).
- Comic Book Fantasy Casting: Generally called 'Played Bys'. A typical custom among Original Characters (and fandom characters who don't have visual media to draw from) is to take a celebrity or a character from an actual work who looks like the character and use them as a general appearance aid.
- Crack Pairing / Crossover Ship: So, so many.
- Cross Player: The vast majority of LJRPers are girls who only or mostly play male characters. There are also male players who play only or mostly girl characters, though these often are (fairly or not) seen as creepy.
- Cut Short: The fate of many a log due to the fickleness of the players.
- Death Is Cheap: Many games without permanent death impose a punishment of some sort (e.g. memory loss) for dying; some don't.
- Did Not Do the Research: A common complaint about players getting something about a character's culture wrong or speeding up something for the sake of plot.
- Double Standard: Guys that RP mostly girls are seen as creepy. However, it's perfectly alright for a girl to RP mostly guys.
- First Girl Wins: For some reason, characters don't often date around, but tend to settle down with the first person they hook up with.
- Funetik Aksent: How characters with accents are often handled, sometimes to the chagrin of other players.
- Game Master: The moderators.
- Honorifics: Japanese ones are often retained by characters from Japanese (often anime and manga) fandoms.
- In and Out of Character: Due to player schedules and posting speeds, real time is generally not exactly the same as game time.
- Insufferable Genius: In contrast to Small Name, Big Ego below, there are some roleplayers who are every bit as good as they claim to be, despite being unpleasant out of character.
- Its Popular, so It Sucks: Every time a series gets big on LJ, it gets a Hatedom that rivals the fandom in size. Bleach, Death Note, Katekyo Hitman Reborn!, Axis Powers Hetalia, Homestuck, and My Little Pony Friendship Is Magic have all had this happen to them.
- Kink Meme: Given that these often appear on LJ, many games have their own kink memes focused on pairings in the game.
- Left Hanging: Individual RP threads rarely continue to the point of completion.
- Limited Wardrobe: This tends to happen when characters are brought into games with nothing but what was on their person at the time.
- Loads and Loads of Characters: The more popular a game gets, the more characters it gets.
- Loads and Loads of Roles: Some players manage (or mismanage) to play several characters across several games.
- Mean Character, Nice Actor: It's an unwritten rule in almost any game that "IC =/= OOC". Meaning, even if a character is a complete Jerkass, the player might still be a pretty decent person. That doesn't stop some people from taking it personally, however.
- And therefore in many games it's stressed at every opportunity that if a given character is a Jerkass to your character it doesn't mean the player hates you.
- Mega Crossover: Panfandom games, by nature.
- Memetic Mutation: Spooky jamjar, tit o'clock, THAT Patchouli...
- Most Fanfic Writers Are Girls: It's not uncommon to see complaints about people "ruining" games with sparkly buttsex.
- Naked on Arrival: Not uncommon in Spooky Jamjar settings.
- Nice Character, Mean Actor: In contrast to above, there are plenty of people who play nice characters in comms, but are complete Jerkasses out of character.
- No Social Skills: Some characters arrive with the little knowledge they had in social conventions. Part of the fun in their Character Development is having them win them with cross-fandom characters that, at times, could even be complete Foils.
- NPC
- OC Stand In: Generally known as "Canon OCs", these are used for all they're worth in many games. On the other hand, others may only accept characters that have a sufficiently distinct canon personality or history. Matt from Death Note was, at one time, particularly infamous for being used this way.
- Odd Couple / Odd Friendship: Many!
- Omake: Players sometimes play out extra scenes with their characters outside of the main game, or draw art, write fanfiction, make fanmixes, etc. for their game characters.
- Some RPs have "crack communities" for silly stuff outside outside of the main games.
- Ontological Mystery: Very common plot device for a lot of games.
- The Other Darrin: The result of different players playing the same character over time.
- Painting the Fourth Wall: font color, face, and size is sometimes played with.
- Especially in Drama Drama Duck, whose internet-based premise means you can assume the characters are deliberately using big font, sparkle text or whatnot.
- Many players go as far as mimicing a character's style, such as various Homestuck character's computer typing and Deadpool's "little yellow boxes".
- Perspective Flip: Inevitable when characters talk about their past—not everybody was the main character back home.
- Plot-Relevant Age-Up: Sex games usually require the aging up of child/teenage characters to legal age to protect the players from legal shenanigans and/or squick.
- Real-Life Relative: Siblings do occasionally play together.
- Replacement Scrappy: When apping a character who was previously at the game you're looking at, it's considered common courtesy to wait at least two months after the previous player has dropped, three if they dropped all their characters in one go. Otherwise, you risk becoming one of these, especially if you're a new player.
- Romance on the Set: Very often, players seem to form romantic relationships...
- Screw This, I'm Outta Here: On a game scale, it's when a person decides to flounce from a game, usually from a number of things, from the stupidly simple to the complex. On a net-wide scale, the many games listed here actually jumped ship from LiveJournal to DreamWidth when their system changed to the point where playing there was impossible.
- Serious Business: Just look at brps, roleplaysecrets, anon, memes, rp vents, and quit role play .
- Shoot the Money: Many people are reluctant to drop dying muses until their paid accounts run out.
- Small Name, Big Ego: For anyone who's dealt with LiveJournal roleplayers for any length of time...this is pretty self explanatory.
- SoCalization: LJ's servers are in California; this is the stated reason that sex games and some horror games have a lower age limit of 18.
- STD Immunity: Outright stated in sex games' rules.
- Well, the popular sex game "amatomnes" does have STDs, but the game notes say that due to the nature of the setting the resident NPCs have researched STDs enough that they're all curable and avoidable. Pregnancy is possible in the game however.
- "Stop Having Fun" Guys: Even dressing room games, which are made to be laid-back and casual, are not immune to anonymous backlash. Hell, even some museboxes (private games in which only a select few players are allowed) get this. Combine this with the GIFT (courtesy of the aformentioned memes) and it gets ugly.
- Strangled by the Red String: Ships can often be forced and/or rushed and seem out of character for the character(s) in question.
- Summon Everyman Hero: How games end up with the most overpowered shounen/video game heroes...and ordinary high school students.
- Talking to Himself: What happens when a player with Loads and Loads of Roles in the same game has their characters interact. Often called "playercest", it is generally looked down upon, though a few games take to it with enthusiasm when done well.
- There Are No Boys On The Internet: Well, there are male roleplayers, but they're definitely in the minority.
- The Wiki Rule: Some games have their own player-made wikis.
- Translator Microbes: These anime characters must be chatting with those comic book characters somehow.
- Some games it gets zig-zagged in that the characters can't understand each other but there is almost always something that acts as a translation device, usually text-based. When that device stops working Hilarity Ensues.
- Trapped in Another World: Probably the most common setting. Sometimes derisively referred to as "spooky jamjar games" after a secret template was submitted to roleplaysecrets, in which one of the complaint options was "games set in a spooky jamjar."
- True Companions: Sometimes formed between characters, but these aren't always the most stable...
- Also formed between players, which more often than not leads to complaints about people being cliquish.
- Watch It for the Meme: A variant — many people get into new series because of the characters they've interacted with in panfandom games.
- What Is Going On: The cry of a new character to a jamjar game.
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