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I'm going to try and narrow down why RPs are fail so quickly and easily. Lets start broad.

Why do you think RPs are dying so quickly?

I have no idea, people like and want RPs, complain when they die, but die in the first place because people stop or the GM stops (looking at you Cats).

Vinyl wrote:I have no idea, people like and want RPs, complain when they die, but die in the first place because people stop or the GM stops (looking at you Cats).

Ok, now tell me why do they stop?

4 days isn't dying, I've played in a campaign where the players didn't meet/talk for 4 months, and the game is still going.

Vinyl wrote:I have no idea, people like and want RPs, complain when they die, but die in the first place because people stop or the GM stops (looking at you Cats).

I had stuff to do!

Exams

and...

Stuff!

Wings is back on rail.

As for the other ones that've recently died under my Mastery, they were highly experimental.

Well story RPs got little to no point in my opinion. The interaction with other players is limited to almost nothing and in most cases your decisions don't effect much. It is basically a large community story writing which in my experience just doesn’t work here, people don't write nor read. It is basically an activity you can perfectly do on your own just like I do.

In other words what the passage above says is that there is no gameplay in those RPs, nothing to interact with. The RPs that survived the longest in the story genre are those that kept players together forcing them to interact with each other.

The Empire RPs on the other hand are much more interesting ... and complicated. At their very core they are built around player interaction allowing you to do something that no other media was capable of achieving, this level of freedom. The main reason why those RPs failed so far is because the rules were not defined properly. The problem is that with so much freedom everyone wants naturally to be the strongest, that is why the RP should limit their powers in a manner that wont hurt their freedom. When the engagement or development rules were not defined well the RP failed.

The most successful example of an RP in this genre is the second Empire RP which could have lasted much , much longer if not for the forum falling due to the well refined engagement rules and the interesting story developments.



Oh and finally another common reason why RPs die is because the GM is missing.

Iv121 wrote:The Empire RPs on the other hand are much more complicated.

Which is why I prefer the one-player-one-character RPs.
I don't like it when stuff has to be overcomplicated with stats and stuff.

I prefer empire RPs.
I simply prefer painting big pictures.

I prefer the existence of gameplay in my RPs, which is why I don't take on character RPs too often. It is true Empire RPs got high entrance barrier as that is basically a global strategy game, not everyone got what it takes to win there, however when you manage to pull off what you planned the results are satisfying ...

Well so far all of our empire RPs have had one big exploitable flaw that nobody has bothered using yet.

Which flaw ? And the number of laws and limitation an empire RP has is wholly dependent on how you play, so rejoice proto ! The community was mature enough to never need that law, whatever you're even talking about O.o

Iv121 wrote:Which flaw ? And the number of laws and limitation an empire RP has is wholly dependent on how you play, so rejoice proto ! The community was mature enough to never need that law, whatever you're even talking about O.o

Yeah, rule could be made in an instant

There's not been a format of empire RP that I've enjoyed, it's just limited enough to be uncreative and has few enough rules to be pretentious.

Well can you paly creative and remain fair ? If we all could we could have reduced the number of limitations.

When Iv is in charge, I have to research math formulae. When people who are not Fenway, Iv, or a few others are in charge, ponies have instakill god mode