Emperor von Friently
TNPer
Greetings, my name is Friently and I am the Lead RMB RP Moderator and the author of the RMB RP Ruleset Today my lecture will be about Roleplaying on a Region Message Board, aka RMB RP, it’s history in TNP as well as its good and bad aspects.
In its most primal form RMB Roleplaying is the result of people deciding to roleplay without yet having chosen/found another place to do it. Places such as the NS Forums, Regional off-site Forums, discords, etc. The easiest place ofcourse is the first place they will stumble upon: the Regional Message Board. This causes the influx of new players to generally be higher than on the other platforms.
It often occurs that people’s first roleplay posts consist of their leader responding to something that happen(ed/s) in someone else’s roleplay post.
This is usually called Banter RP due to their often short and humorous nature.
After I myself had made my first post in TNP’s RMB after finding out it existed, and then using it to complain about NS issues, I read up several of the posts in the RMB. And what i found was someone making a post about how in their nation people were generally treated as slaves, cannon fodder, test subjects, etc. My response to this was short, with my leader only sarcastically remarking how his people thought he didn’t love them enough. Back and forth posts no longer than 10 words roleplays like these became the foundation of what eventually became TNP’s RMB Roleplay Community. The advantages of it were that it was short, quick, and you could get a post out in less than a minute, receive a response in less than a minute after that and on it went. The downside of it however was that leaders obviously are not near each other all the time, are not telepathic and are not connected by a video call 24/7, usually that is.
And this posed an issue once the community grew large enough that an official “canon” map came to be. With the consequence that Banter RP’s did not make much sense anymore because of it. This causing posts to become larger, rarer and generally more serious in comparison. Posts now however took up big parts of the screen, requiring people to “keep it down” as to not block other peoples RMB view with big ‘walls of text’. This problem was solved after the community was informed of the ability to use the spoiler tag, thereby keeping posts small. This also had the added bonus of enabling people to warn people of the content inside, allowing people sensitive to certain subjects(death, torture, etc) to not be confronted by them. This is called the “Wall of Text” style, very original naming, I know. The advantage to this style is that due to the nature of the RMB being only one place, there is a bigger chance people see your post. Compared to forums where often you need to go to specific areas for roleplaying. The disadvantage comes from the same thing as the advantage did: the nature of the RMB. Being that due to it being one place, everything goes there, real life conversations, discussions, memes, etc, etc causing one’s post to often be quickly buried beneath other posts. This can lead to a feeling of dread when it is a post you have worked on for a very long time, however if you have access to a discord you can make a channel you can post the links to your post in. And if you roleplay with another person the knowledge they read it will often be enough to negate this.
In conclusion it has its advantages and disadvantages, but it is often the first place people roleplay, and in some cases, remain.
Thank you for reading this rather short lecture, any questions can be asked and answered either in the Q&A on discord, the TNP's RMB, or in VC.
In its most primal form RMB Roleplaying is the result of people deciding to roleplay without yet having chosen/found another place to do it. Places such as the NS Forums, Regional off-site Forums, discords, etc. The easiest place ofcourse is the first place they will stumble upon: the Regional Message Board. This causes the influx of new players to generally be higher than on the other platforms.
It often occurs that people’s first roleplay posts consist of their leader responding to something that happen(ed/s) in someone else’s roleplay post.
This is usually called Banter RP due to their often short and humorous nature.
After I myself had made my first post in TNP’s RMB after finding out it existed, and then using it to complain about NS issues, I read up several of the posts in the RMB. And what i found was someone making a post about how in their nation people were generally treated as slaves, cannon fodder, test subjects, etc. My response to this was short, with my leader only sarcastically remarking how his people thought he didn’t love them enough. Back and forth posts no longer than 10 words roleplays like these became the foundation of what eventually became TNP’s RMB Roleplay Community. The advantages of it were that it was short, quick, and you could get a post out in less than a minute, receive a response in less than a minute after that and on it went. The downside of it however was that leaders obviously are not near each other all the time, are not telepathic and are not connected by a video call 24/7, usually that is.
And this posed an issue once the community grew large enough that an official “canon” map came to be. With the consequence that Banter RP’s did not make much sense anymore because of it. This causing posts to become larger, rarer and generally more serious in comparison. Posts now however took up big parts of the screen, requiring people to “keep it down” as to not block other peoples RMB view with big ‘walls of text’. This problem was solved after the community was informed of the ability to use the spoiler tag, thereby keeping posts small. This also had the added bonus of enabling people to warn people of the content inside, allowing people sensitive to certain subjects(death, torture, etc) to not be confronted by them. This is called the “Wall of Text” style, very original naming, I know. The advantage to this style is that due to the nature of the RMB being only one place, there is a bigger chance people see your post. Compared to forums where often you need to go to specific areas for roleplaying. The disadvantage comes from the same thing as the advantage did: the nature of the RMB. Being that due to it being one place, everything goes there, real life conversations, discussions, memes, etc, etc causing one’s post to often be quickly buried beneath other posts. This can lead to a feeling of dread when it is a post you have worked on for a very long time, however if you have access to a discord you can make a channel you can post the links to your post in. And if you roleplay with another person the knowledge they read it will often be enough to negate this.
In conclusion it has its advantages and disadvantages, but it is often the first place people roleplay, and in some cases, remain.
Thank you for reading this rather short lecture, any questions can be asked and answered either in the Q&A on discord, the TNP's RMB, or in VC.