RP Help Wanted

So... I'm having a bit of a conflict. See, I've been out of Role-Play (RP) for a whole year again and the itch is starting back up. Admittedly, I think the itch to RP is a lot less vast these days, and a lot more selective. I really only find the fun in RP when it comes to specific stories that I haven't played out 1000 times in the past or characters that introduce something new to Aries. The problem with that is that over 20+ years of RP... it's insanely difficult to find themes and scenarios I haven't already RPed.

The problem is: As much as it may be hard for me to find active long-term RPs that keep me interested, I also really want to run a positive RP community of my own again.

For anyone who doesn't know, I actually used to run a RP website called Role-Player's Guild, or RPG. The site ran for a few years and at our peak, we had four-digit membership counts and five-digit character counts. I ended up shutting the site down, though, because the community's toxicity became more than I was willing to deal with or put my volunteer staff through. We weren't making money, but we were getting treated like trash by so many people for providing a free service that it made me lose all passion in that kind of project.

I also tried making a Discord server for RP, but even that became a bit more than I wanted to deal with... and now I'm stuck between a desire to continue building a community of creative writers and world builders... and wanting to stay focused on my own creative endeavours.

SO! Why am I writing this blog post? Well, I think I'm asking for help.

If I had my perfect world, I would be able to add a Role-Play section to our existing community server... but I wouldn't be the one in charge of it; at least not directly. I would be able to hand this off to someone else who reports to me. I would still be in charge of the ultimate canon lore, I would still be allowed to continue working on crafting the universe I want to build, but I would be able to rely on someone to help me run the RP community aspects. I realize I'm asking a lot of someone and am unable to provide them any compensation in response, so I don't expect to be drowning in applications or anything... but in a recent conversation with a couple of lovely folks about manifestation, I thought... hey, why not?

Now... what does this look like? I don't totally know, but I have some ideas. I've run RP servers, I've joined some, and... I'll be honest, I haven't seen any communities that work the way I would want.

From what I've noticed, the servers that use all the fancy Discord bots and tools end up with large member counts but... I don't see any major RP actually happening on the server. It's mostly just people chatting about OOC stuff, sharing selfies, or secretly discussing internal server drama between people who can't seem to tell the difference between RP and RL. I kind of miss the days of Yahoo! Chatrooms where I would pop into a chat and see a small community of writers all RPing with each other in a chatroom... but even then, it was just how you meet people. Once you met someone you liked, you'd just move to DMs anyway.

Meanwhile, the smaller RP servers, admittedly just end up looking dead. They end up feeling like two or three people put a ton of work into lore and stories and building an insanely complex universe that gets so complicated that no one actually reads it and then the server just ends up being a small ghost town.

These observations had made me wonder: What do I actually want from a RP server?

And so I decided to make a list. It's a bit selfish, and it's definitely up for discussion and debate... but hey, I'm tired of thinking all of this into the ground and am ready to just move forward with communicating and dealing with the results of that later.

First, I want the Villanite family to grow. This is my most selfish desire, but the Villanite family has been something I've been working and building since I was 13. Groups, Guilds, Clans, Servers, etc... I've used all forms I could to slap the Villanite name on people and things. But man, has it evolved over the past couple of years. It's become kind of a weird thing for me these days. There is the RP family, which grows and shrinks constantly. Sometimes people want to make Villanite characters, sometimes people realize it's not for them, sometimes people make the characters just to put them on a shelf and look at them (which is fine, too). Then... there is my RL family. Trance, Lalith, Mercedes, Varia, Hestia, Adoratrix, Elizabeth, Sage, Lueria... the list goes on, but these people mean so much to me in real life and I want to be clear that the RP Villanite family and the RL Villanite family are two different things.

Some time ago, I tried drawing a line between these two by calling one Viliatti and one Villanite... and I might actually go back to doing that... but the problem with me doing that is that I've spent so much time making my name Villanite across the internet, that abandoning that name (or changing it) is going to be quite difficult... so maybe there's some thinking I gotta do on that. I even pushed this desire into another family a couple of times in the past, too, using Vaterio or Regulus as names that were used for those growing RP families... But I digress. This part is mostly included because I want to settle the nerves of my loved ones while also drawing a clear boundary for newcomers. When I say I want to grow the Villanite family, I want to be clear that I mean the RP family.

Moving on, though, I also want this RP community to be a group of people who are interested and excited to read about and write around the main canon lore while also understanding that retcons happen. If I had it my way, the Avilium universe would be a Fan-Fic-Driven universe. I want to make a universe that is made from the ground up to enable and encourage fan-fic material to be created without having people feel discouraged whenever retcons happen, but rather, instead of treating them as retcons, treating them as AUs.

Third, I want kinks, fetishes, and sexuality to be celebrated and exposed in an open-minded, healthy, educated, and safe way. I don't know what this looks like and maybe it's something we put aside for some time until we know what it really looks like, but it's something that is important to me. It took me many years to find a healthy way to do it, but I do believe that kinks helped me get a grip on my trauma and take control of it, and the reason I was able to do that was because of RP. Exploring my kinks, fetishes, and traumas via RP taught me so much about myself that it still brings me to tears when I think about how much I wish I was emotionally intelligent enough to thank the people who helped me RP some of those unorthodox and strange things I've written. I want to help people understand that being kinky doesn't mean being broken, a degenerate, or ashamed: It means being proud, loving, and creative.

Fourth, I want it to be part of the overall Avinadal community. Right now, I honestly am most strongly leaning towards saying that I'd love to add the RP side of things to the existing Content Creation side instead of keeping them as separate servers. Many of us are VTubers, and I think that VTubing is a fascinating middlepoint where RPers and Streamers meet. So... imagine... a whole content creation community that streams as a lore-driven family who does it for the passion of the work instead of trying to min-max engagement and monetization... which leads me to my final point.

I don't want this to become a job. This ties into my previous blog post, but my point is that I don't want to do this to make money, collect server members, beg for subs, or demand likes. I want to do this because it's something the people involved care about and truly enjoy. I know I'm asking to find someone to do a ton of work for me in return for nothing besides my friendship and affection, so I don't expect any responses from this... but if anyone is interested in helping me do this, send me a DM on Discord telling me your thoughts on this list. I'll pay for your dinner delivery and we can talk about it over a call.