Indie RP on RPC

As someone whose primary source of rp in his life was via text-based chat rooms I knew my overall scope of how rp is done online was very limited. One of the original things I wanted to build an answer for with RPC was blog-style rp (a la how rp is done on tumblr). I’ll be honest, even when it was explained to me, the concepts behind some elements of rp on tumblr just didn’t make any amount of sense to me. After a while I just sat back and deconstructed it down to focal elements which leads me to this post to talk about how indie (short for independent) roleplay will work on RPC.

For the uninitiated I’ll try to give a tl;dr of how blog rp works and then we’ll talk about how it will function on RPC. Blog rp consists of (1)making a blog for a character, (2) usually people edit the look of the blog to reflect the character and type of rp they’re going to participate in, (3) players find rp through various methods, and that continues for as long as the player wants to play the character. That was an extreme tl;dr as there’s a lot of time and technical knowledge/looking up stuff that goes into each one of those steps. My task for incorporating it into RPC is to allow for players to be able to have similar rp experiences so it’s easier for them to transition over to our platform, but also improved enough that a transition away from a site they’ve been using for years is actually worth it. The setup I’ve come up with, I think will achieve both of those very well.

On RPC roleplay will be broken into 2 large buckets: the “room” bucket and the “indie” bucket. Rooms will live in the primary site url, while Indies will live in their own section (I haven’t decided the final url but it would be something like indie.therp.club, i.therp.club, therp.club/indie, or therp.club/i). Despite being in their own section, indie rp’s will share a lot of similar functionality that is being built for rooms. Lets go into how players will be able to use indie’s on RPC:

• While on tumblr one blog can be used for same character in multiple universes/settings ideally that won’t be necessary for indie’s on RPC. Instead users will make an indie for each version of a character they want to play. For some tumblr users this may seem like a huge turn-off but please bear with me. You’ll see why it’s this way as I explain more.
• Players will be able to quickly and easily switch between every indie they have via a drop-down. This is something that will also be available in rooms when players have more than one character as well. It’s very easy to do and something I think many of you will love.
• Settings such as appearance/style of their indie, and profile picture (pfp) will be connected directly to that indie and editable whenever the player wants.
• Players will be able to follow other indie’s, specific tags, and maybe a few other items that I haven’t thought of yet. This will build the player’s indie feed.
• Direct replies to your posts will show up in your feed as well as generate an alert notification on RPC if you’re not currently looking on your feed.
• A lot of people on tumblr have various pages for rules and other things on their blogs to provide more info on how to interact with them, information on their character that others should know, etc. Pages are something that will be readily available for use in indie’s and room’s alike on RPC. You can make as many of them as you want and edit them freely.
• One of the tenants of RPC UX design is automating where we can automate. For that reason, since rules pages are pretty common on blog rp there will be a rules page generated upon creation of every indie rp so players can go directly in and edit it to their liking OR…
• If a player copy/pastes rules that they like to keep on all of their indie’s they’ll have the option to save those as their “boilerplate” (may think of another name for it) rules that get saved to their RPC account. That way, if they make an indie those rules get auto-populated into the rules page. The rules page for the new indie will still be editable if players need to change something but it should be able to save some time.
• For editing boilerplates, players will be able to edit them at the account level to be updated across all their indie’s at once. Players will also be able to leave part of their rules for specific indie’s set to boilerplates but simply add indie-specific “addendums” to the rules page. Again, further just following the tenant of automating where we can and how it makes sense.

That covers most of the roleplay-focused items about indie’s. I’d like to add that at launch of RPC there will not be the ability to embed images into posts. As images bring in a lot more bandwidth use there’s a bit of a performance aspect I need to take into consideration. We’ll probably be able to change it in the future as the site grows, but at launch it simply won’t be a priority feature. There’s another aspect to tumblr rp that will also need to be addressed, that is resources blogs. For the uninitiated, resource blogs provide all sorts of information, services, and links to services that help make life for tumblr rpers much easier. We have answers for that on RPC as well.

One of the main resources worth talking about — since it’s the main one that’s had some development effort thrown into it so far — is the Face Claim Directory.

The Face Claim Directory will eventually feature hundreds of faces searchable by name, alternate name(s) if they have any, age, and their related tags which include profession, hair color, and several other options. The images seen in the tweet above are how the Directory appears today but that will likely change as features are added. There will be NSFW listings within the Directory as well, but they will be outright hidden to users that are not 18 years or older based off of the birthday they associate with their account. NSFW listings are individuals who have nude photos appear in google image search relatively quickly.

There will be a slew of other resources built out under the Help section of the RPC site. Everything from help with styles, to terminology, to step-by-step how-to’s for the site itself. All-in-all I feel these come together to be a hopefully satisfactory alternative to playing on blog rp formats such as tumblr.

If any of this information excites you or makes you want to keep tabs on our development feel free to follow us @theroleplayclub on twitter, like us on Facebook, join our Discord, and if you’re interested in possibly helping shape development you can join our Pilot Group on facebook as well.