Everything I touch dies. I blame me.

[Ariamas]

So I joined Iwaku not so long ago and every rp I touch literally dies. I'm under no illusions that I am a skilled or capable storyteller, but... am I that bad? Do I need help? I can't say that my last few characters were greatest, but I had room to grow and adapt them.... I hope.

What do?

 

[redblood]

Lesson #1: Most roleplays dies

I have been on iwaku for five years, I have roleplayed 138 roleplays so far, only 1 have been completed. Either people get bored, forgets, aren't as excited as they thought they would be about the rp or they get busy RL and has to leave. In the beginning it was the first few things that always happened to me, people got bored or stopped being interested in the story or the characters, then the longer I roleplayed and the pickier I became with choosing my partners, I ended up getting mainly interested partners that were willing to stick around for a long time, but real life eventually got in the way and they had to drop it.

This is something that will happen to most of your roleplays, because staying with a story for months or years can be incredibly hard for some people, if not most, especially if their real life circumstances changes drastically or they thought the story was for them but then realizes it wasn't as good as they'd imagined it to be or it slowly becomes less and less exciting with time. It is hard to know exactly what you will like before you start it and many things can make or break a roleplay for a person without them realizing it.

Advice: Always be prepared for failure but have fun for as long as it lasts.

 

[Kestrel]

Lesson #1: Most roleplays dies

This.

To succeed, you have a very small sample to go by. Most roleplays generally rely more heavily on people in it getting along and bonding over the course of a joint activity than anything else. Being a good story with strong characters helps, especially to kick a roleplay off, but the social aspect is something you will see in pretty much any long living roleplay.

As redblood mentioned, in a 1x1 if the other person loses interest or the time to continue, you're shit out of luck. In a group roleplay, there are ways around this but they are more difficult and more multi-faceted than some would give it credit for. It usually requires you to actually have a pool of people to recruit from rather than just put up an interest check at random, while dealing with morale management and trying to prevent a chainquit by inspiring hope, maintain excitement and a shitton of winging it. Unless you're already cemented as social butterfly of the group, you usually kinda have to be the GM to even have a chance at pulling this off.

Point is that besides most roleplays dying, most people are unable to do anything about it. So I don't think you should feel this problem only applies to you or that it is somehow exclusively your fault. It applies to pretty much everyone.