Audience reactions for roleplays

There was an ATT query a while back raising the question of whether roleplayers should be allowed to add YMMV and moments under the Auto-Erotic Troping policy, which didn't come to a conclusion.

Anyone have input? I can kinda see it both ways.

At the Roleplay Cleanup Thread, we were forced to table this discussion for later. Check out the Roleplay Cleanup Thread sandbox for a list of pages with subjective subpages, which we'd have to fix later if we decide Roleplays are more like Fanfics than any other medium.

The point of the rule, as stated on Auto-Erotic Troping, is "Creators are not objective about their own work."

The person roleplaying Character 1 in Roleplay A wouldn't be objective about Character 1. But does that mean they wouldn't be objecive about Roleplay A as a whole?

See, the debate goes between asking if Roleplayers qualify as the audience as much as the creators. Roleplays are created for the Roleplayers themselves and not an outside audience even if one happens to exist, so you could consider the Roleplayers themselves the audience- but they're also the ones creating the content, so they have some sort of a bias.

Again, referring back to Auto-Erotic Troping, roleplays having an outside audience is the exception.

The list of untropable works includes "roleplays (other than ones intended for publication and documented as works)".

As someone who has partaken in roleplays, I do feel divided. On the one hand, it's collaborative writing, so people can have different views on certain characters, events, and so on. In one roleplay I used to be in, a player introduced an overpowered villain that completely ended the RP, so if a YMMV page was created for the RP (which is unlikely, as, while it is accessible, nobody, including me, seesm to want to make a page for it in general), it'd be safe to say that the character was a Scrappy.

My main concern is that this would allow authors to trope their own contributions to the roleplays, adding "appealing" YMMV items like Ensemble Dark Horse and Complete Monster to their own characters to make them look better, even if it's not the case. In an ideal world, we would be able to moderate this, keeping track of who adds what examples and for what reason. The only thing I could think of would be formatting an example like so:

• The Scrappy: Mary Sue, Alice's first character, was met with hostility from members of Troperville: the Roleplay, due to her overpoweredness and Jerkass personality. A large portion of the discussion thread devolved into begging Alice to remove Mary from the story.

A relevant post from the thread in question would likely be linked within the example. That way, we have objective proof that this is how the playerbase felt about the character. Of course, players would be forbidden from adding an example about their own specific stuff. As for plotlines, those would be the property of whoever started the plotline (mostly the Dungeon Master), and will be treated as their work when talking about YMMV.

Does this sound too complicated?

We had to have that rule in the first place to weed out all pages where the RP is literally inaccessible to anyone not involved in it. However, as long as the RP isn't private, it's tropeworthy, even if no actual audience exists.

I used to Roleplay too, albeit on a different site in a much more casual setting where it was just me and some friends. While I can say I have some very strong opinions about events and characters from the RP, a lot of the less biased ones came years later, when I was re-reading older posts. While posting new content, I was much too biased. All of us were. We were also constantly plotting things out and were mostly all on the same page about how stuff would go, so we didn't have anything like what happened in your RP.

It'd be impossible for me to have made a valid YMMV page for one of these, because obviously I'd see things in a very biased way. I wouldn't intentionally shoehorn positive tropes, but I'd be a lot more relaxed on what qualifies as valid. If I tried to make an Awesome, Funny, Heartwarming or Tear Jerker page... oof boy would it be full of nonsense.

I think your idea is good, but difficult if not impossible to actually enforce. We can't always tell who was even a part of the roleplay when looking into the history, let alone who was responsible for what character. It'd be up to the Roleplayers themselves to self-enforce it, and, well... let's just say we've had a lot of issues with Roleplayers not actually understanding how the site works and not wanting to follow our rules even just for things like example context. This is usually because people who make Roleplay Pages come from off-site and just want to make a page for their game, not considering the rest of the site.

Edited by WarJay77 on Apr 14th 2020 at 3:35:46 PM

Yeah, I thought as much. Thanks for the response.

I'm a current participant in an RP and sometimes we'll have, within the community, threads for basically gushing to each other about how cool that thing was with their plot or character. If that bled out into TV Tropes... well, we're not private-locked, but we sure aren't writing for an audience outside the game.

But Back in The Day, Harry Potter had the livejournal game Nocturne Alley which actually had lots of readers, a watcher community coming up with theories and reacting as the game went on, group chats among the audience, etc. Pretty sure that's rare! I was later a player in a game inspired by NA's format which also developed a watcher community, but if I or another former player were to start writing about how our audience reacted to stuff, I'd consider it Auto Erotic Troping and crossing that line about creators and YMMV.

To me, it's analogous to a Writer A (or even a showrunner) who has left the project, and been replaced by Writer B. Does A have direct, creative involvement for B's scripts? No, but their perspective as an "audience member" is in no way representative of an audience reaction. With that in mind, I'd say roleplay participants should not be writing YMMV's.

How often do internet roleplays attract an outside audience? I don't think I've ever heard of such a thing happening outside of unusual cases like Critical Role (which was intended from the beginning to have an audience). I'm definitely leaning toward "roleplays shouldn't have YMMV pages" because I seriously doubt any of them were written by outside observers.

Some roleplays are intended for an audience and accumulate fans. These are usually relatively easy to tell from private ones because of how they are presented. I would certainly say that most of them are not, meaning they should not have YMMV or Moments subpages.

I'm more of a "DND on some weekends" roleplayer, and my analogy is not that Writer A has left the project, but A and B are working on the project at the same time (with the DM as a 'head writer'), so no, I don't think roleplay participants can be writing YMM Vs as they are intimately involved with the way the story is going. The same way, say, Neil Gaiman can't write an audience reaction for Good Omens, although he has commented on parts that were written by Terry Pratchett.

I also don't think private roleplays should be troped at all (or maybe be in Darth), but that's another discussion.

Edited by Synchronicity on Apr 15th 2020 at 1:19:27 PM

That's the current policy. A roleplay can't have a page on the main wiki if it's not publicly accessible, such as being on a private Discord server or an invite-only internet forum.

That's not quite what is meant by "private" in this context. A public roleplay is intended to be experienced by and presented for an audience. A private roleplay may have an audience, but is mainly conducted for the benefit of its players. We want to discourage troping these. If a roleplay is inaccessible to anyone but its members, then it should not have an article; that's core wiki rules.

Edited by Fighteer on Apr 15th 2020 at 3:24:43 PM

Right. In our cleanup, we've actually been moving a lot of pages to Darth, after a thorough attempt to find if they have any publicly available content.

That said, I'll ping ~whizzerd and ~𝕋𝕒𝕓𝕤 as two other regular contributors to the thread for their input here, because once we manage to get the thread active again, the decision we make here will change what happens at the thread.

Another thing with many YMMV entries is that there's very few where it might not be the worst if the rest of the members see it actually there. I wouldn't be opposed to cutting that portion.

Besides, if it's invoked in-universe, that's easy to add. And there's character entries anyway as normal that still cover some key stuff. That can include the character being portrayed in kind of an eh way. Not that it much matters, since many are alternate character interpretations, and that's kind of the closest thing to an "okay" YMMV entry, except that's also effectively in-universe either way.

Unless there's actual YMMV options that wouldn't be a problem to include, cutting it wholesale seems fine to me.

Just for the record: while one person isn't an audience and I shun YMMV pages anyway, I personally do enjoy reading online PBP games and certain other types of roleplay in my spare time. I don't think it's such an unimaginable concept.

Edited by nrjxll on Apr 16th 2020 at 5:36:06 AM

It's possible but rare, and Roleplays aren't usually intended for an audience. That's just the way it is. Even if they manage to acquire one, it's not their end goal, and the fandom that might exist probably wouldn't be large enough to warrant things like YMMV pages and stuff anyway.

Basically, it's not an unthinkable concept so much as something that you just don't see very often.

Depends on the format. There's podcasts (e.g. The Adventure Zone). There's stories/games designed to be driven by audience participation, like imageboard quests^note that's two links - one on "imageboard", one on "quests" (e.g. Ruby Quest, Questden) and Interactive Comics. The ones on the latter page are mostly under Webcomic/, but some are under Roleplay.^note Around November of last year, it seems a bunch — including Ruby Quest — were moved from Roleplay/ to Webcomic/ in an effort to standardize a namespace for the "quest" format.

We're not talking about those roleplays. You can tell from the medium that the creators intended to find a larger audience. ^note Also, I personally think that Interactive Comics don't really count as roleplays because everyone is controlling a few characters, rather than each character being controlled by one person.

What we're talking about in this thread is Play-by-Post Games hosted on a forum that is technically open to the public, but aren't really intended to be read by anyone other than the participants.

So should we put this to a crowner?

As Twiddler said, there are Quest-style roleplays (including text-based ones) that come under the same Roleplay/ banner as Play-By-Post Games. Whether you personally consider Quests to be Roleplays or not, they are regarded as such in the roleplaying community (as can be seen on big-name roleplay sites like SpaceBattles.com and Sufficient Velocity.com) and in the clean-up we've been treating Quests as if they were roleplays.

Which puts them in an interesting position, as they're geared more towards an audience participation style of play compared to play-by-post games- the 'players', at best, can suggest actions for the main character to take, and its mostly up to the GM how the story unfolds, along the lines of 'choose your own adventure' stories. Regardless of how the conversation ends for play-by-post games, I believe quest roleplays are different enough from them to warrant further discussion.

Anyway, as an active roleplayer and (not-so-active, regrettably) member of the clean-up, I'm of two minds. In the past I've contributed to and edited Moments pages for roleplays I've participated in, but I've never done so for the purpose of self-aggrandising. I've added Moments for characters and storylines that I've had no more input on than a casual reader. If I knew that every audience reaction page was edited in the way that I did, then I'd be all for keeping them.

However, I know full well that many people I've played besides do only add moments and YMMV for their own characters. They don't treat the wiki of tvtropes with as much seriousness as frequent editors (though, to be honest, neither do most people on the web); creating a page for the roleplay and contributing to it, either in the mindset of a participant or as an audience member, is considered just another part of the fun.

But then there are editors like me, and sometimes straight up people who are just fans of an RP and aren't affiliated with it at all. I hate throwing the baby out with the bath water, which is why I joined the clean-up in the first place, though regrettably I have to admit that combing through audience reaction pages would be much more difficult, if not impossible, than the main pages.

(My actual position, to be completely honest, is if a group of roleplayers think that something that happened in their game is cool and they add it to an Awesome page, and they aren't excessively gushy about it, then what do I care.)

So, TL;DR, it's not something I have a concrete opinion on since I don't really think it's something that warrants a concrete opinion.

Should I put together a crowner for this?

Obvious relevant choices:

• Roleplayers can unconditionally add to YMMV/Moments pages for roleplays.
• Roleplays cannot have YMMV/Moments pages at all.
• Roleplayers are forbidden from adding to YMMV/Moments pages for roleplays they're part of.
• Roleplayers are permitted to add to YMMV/Moments pages for roleplays they're part of, provided that they're only discussing portions written by other players.

Edited by wingedcatgirl on Jul 2nd 2020 at 12:39:13 PM

I'm not sure a crowner would be useful here. This is a matter of properly applying our policy, not a popularity test.

I'd formulate that players shouldn't add Audience Reactions for their roleplay. Leave that to non-players.