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I find that elitists are a big issue in roleplay. Not because they're self indulged pricks. x.o;... although that plays an important part.
They also tend to suck the fun out of a roleplay, think that they can get away with any thing because they think they know how to use the word 'optics' and they generally run away people from trying to roleplay all together.

I know- AOL used to be a big roleplaying spot until the elitists started showing up and made it their occupation to snuff out newbies... Which makes no sense. You won't have a roleplay very long if you don't TEACH someone who is new. e.e;;... So any way.


We know how we deal with newbies, noobs, noblets, noobix cubes and the like-
How do you deal with... *ahem* "ultra advanced", "urber- literate" , roleplayers?

>> Only the blackest of hearts

Can feel the purest of love <<

they're still annoying, though, eh? i mean, sure, its fun to watch their egos blow up in their faces when you can catch a huge mistake they overlooked and explain to them why (like a fandom-based RP and they make an incredibly huge mistake plot-wise and think its correct and you get to sit there and explain what really happened, why, and how they were wrong XP thats always fun) but theyre still incredibly irritating.... i have to deal with people in school who think theyre better than me for various reasons (never academic-wise though, most of them are too stupid) so online too just pisses me off mad stupid elitists!

I'm not sure if I'd call myself an elitist, but I am certainly a self-indulgent p***k.

For me, it's just goddamn confusing and annoying if people are being inconsistent or otherwise doing strange s**t in a roleplay.

Permit me to back up a bit. In every RP, there's a certain amount of fudge-factor. Let's say we're having a 'Medieval RP'. The exact year isn't set, but we are a bunch of knights fighting dragons and s**t like that. Now, I'm no expert on the Middle Ages. I can't tell you exactly what cloth was available and which goods came from where and how much everything should cost. However, I do know that Christianity was the dominant religion, anyone who wasn't Christian and lived in Europe was treated like s**t, and running water existed only in rivers.

If I'm in a 'Medieval' RP, and someone is acting like they've never even heard of feudalism, Christianity, or anything else even remotely Medieval, but they do seem to have picked up on modern American music trends because their character manages to be 'emo', then yeah, I get annoyed. Maybe it sucks the fun out of the game for other people for me to point out that Medieval peasants didn't have running water, but it sucks the fun out of the game for me to play with someone who isn't sticking with the time period/genre.


I think it's a fine line. I don't want to be all a**l and be like "OMG that kind of cloth came from Venice not Milan!" because s**t, I don't know that much about the Middle Ages. So at what point does one become an elitist p***k? I don't think it's elitist to insist that Medieval peasants don't have running water. But people certainly act like it is.

One of my pieces of writing was torn up by a critic who pointed out that King Edward of England had died in the winter -not spring- of such and such a year.

Still, it is very easy to become overly picky. I try to look at the situation in context:

Some of the people writing these stories are a little younger, a little more naive, and a little more in it for the PG-rated whacking material than anything else. Fretting over an older roleplayer who makes obvious mistakes might just be a waste of time, because if they don't have the effort to do it right, they probably won't have the effort to change their ways.

It's understandable to be angry at someone who's dicking about in a tank top in Victorian England, but in a way you have to be thankful for it. Those kinds of roleplayers are the little red flags that warn which roleplays are overly-tolerant or poorly managed. It might be better off to start fresh than continue playing said game, rather than just taking the fun out of it for others who don't seem to mind what could be a recurring error. If you're the author of the thread, it's a sign of a roleplayer you misjudged.

Not every eleven-year-old roleplayer is conscious of the technicalities behind the water systems of a feudal society, or the details of period dress. When you think about the objective behind their writing, it is not such a far-flung notion that they would substitute their own world in the gap of ignorance instead of spending hours on Wikipedia, the Mother of All Knowledge. They're having a good time, without it feeling like homework. Why criticize them for it? I'm sure they would consider the perpetrators of such a slander to be quite the elitists themselves, not in the sense of examining style, but in refusing to let alone what does not appeal to their sense of good writing, even if it is directed at another audience with another purpose in mind.

If they are in it because they want to get better at writing, no good will come of dragging their work through the ceremonial dirt to 'gently' enlighten them (and their confidence).

Dandelion: I was under the impression that "optic" can be used as both an adjective and a noun. It is a synonym for the eye, is it not? Perhaps not the best choice at certain points in writing (a la 'her olfactory organ tingled' or 'he ran his fingers along her smooth epidermis'), but a noun nonetheless.

Aww~... I've made people look at themselves. I feel... forfilled. <33

My deal with people who just over achieve- if I like the cut of their gib then i'll just humor them. Hell, if it's an interesting 9-10 paragraphed post? Hell yea.

However, most of the time it isn't. I do also regonize (now ) the people who just don't want to research their posts because they don't want to do their homework.

This is why I usually gently remind them that they have to dress for the times, yeno? Or just not rp there at all...
But as for long posts, I also tend to avoid them because this is all just an excuse not to do homework sometimes. <3 Reason why I b***h about it is usually because I don't feel like reading a text book about your character... sometimes I really don't.

But it's a preference.

I totally agree with the post about post length. Generally speaking, posts which are too short or too long seem to be problemmatic--if they're too short, you just aren't saying much of anything. Often times these short posts end up being really absurd--The character walks out of the city and builds a house. Bam! Three lines and they have a house! They're walking down the street, and three lines later they've beaten the s**t out of a bunch of ruffians and no one even bothered to call the cops. Oh, and the weather/time of day just completely changed. Sure, it may have just been noon and sunny, but now it's night and rainy. No explanation; it just randomly got dark.

Posts which are too long can be just as bad. When people post really long stuff, I get the impression that they're really just RPing with themselves--and I don't want to RP with someone who's not RPing with me. [insert obvious comment about masturbation.] Either really long posts tend to be describing boring, irrelevant crap--like coffee swirls--which seriously does not need to be there, or they're describing s**t to which the other characters should be able to respond. I mean, if you're sitting there across from me finally revealing that you've been carrying the dark taint of corruption within your left arm for the past three years, even as we banded together to fight the taint of corruption in the land, I'm going to bloody interrupt you every few sentences. I might even decide to (try to) kill you before you finish your ten minute speech.

Overall, a post ought to be appropriate. If our characters are conversing about something, then really, the posts should be short. If your character is performing some sort of complicated transformation spell, then the post ought to be long. Likewise, even if I'm joining an RP where most of the posts are pretty short, and I intend on making short posts, I still prefer to make a long intro-post. After all, that's everyone's first chance to meet my character. I should try to give them a decent idea of whom my character is and what they're up to.


The silliest thing I remember ever seeing in an RP from someone who wasn't just obviously stupid: one character in a Medieval RP called another character a 'garbage disposal'. My character just responded, 'what's that?'

It's all been a bit of a tricky adjustment for me, because my previous RP group was the Harvard Radcliffe Science Fiction Association--and those were people who really would look up what kinds of clothes were in fashion the year the RP was set, what sorts of trade goods were coming in and out of the cities we were visiting, what sorts of names and professions would be reasonable to have, etc. That didn't mean our games didn't have their unbelievable bits--one party I was in consisted of a mute naked Chinese girl with her pet tiger, an Indian with a seriously bad opium addiction, a Jew, a sex fiend, and one generally crazy chick in the middle of Renaisance Italy. That was... that was really weird. At one point the GM just randomly turned one of us into a lion in order to yell at us...

Actually, I find it to be a problem when it comes to the particular elitist.

When it comes to crafts and the like? Something you can actually make a considerable of money off of or when people think of activity "x", they think of you?
Thats honorable and impressive.

However, this is a ROLEPLAY- nothing thats really serious enough to be claiming dominance over. It's like makeing something like shooting jacks to be why everyone knows you. While shooting jacks does take skill, it's not really something to be crying to the streets over. e.e;;