-> Stuck in an MMO
Honestly I find this one to be an underused premise. Mainly because this is a premise I love in narratives, and in all my time roleplaying I haven't seen a single RP like this wasn't an SAO Fandom RP.
Closest to one I actually took part in was years ago, and it was really a High School RP but where all the characters also knew each other through an MMO... So clearly they weren't stuck. XD
You should've started RPing with me earlier, then.
I had a roleplay way back when that was sort of like this -- except that the players weren't really stuck, at least not 100% of the time. They could leave whenever they wanted,
except for when their life was in danger, because then, well, what fun would that be, if everyone could avoid getting defeated that easily??
Except, of course, when a player dies in the game, they died in real life,
BUT THE THING WAS,
Most of the players didn't actually know that. It was generally assumed that anyone who died in-game was either banned or forced to get a new character or something. And the few people who
did suspect that the game was
actually killing people were generally written off as crazy conspiracy theorists, so the notion was rarely taken seriously.
Which means that this game turned people into
murderers and none of the players even knew it.
...Thinking about it now kind of makes me want to reboot it someday.
-> Parodies
Most RP's seem to be wanting to take themselves seriously. Even if the universe is rather silly and exaggerated the players usually still want to make a narrative behind it with the intention of going somewhere. Rarely do I see an forum RP where the purpose is to tease something, or just be ridiculous. That tends to be more popular in D&D than in forums.
This might be because players and GM's (
especially GM's...) might not want to put so much effort into running an RP that's just supposed to be for a few laughs, which would probably start to get old for a while. I mean, think about how long some group RP's can last, and just how slowly RP-time often moves.
Plus, I feel like it would be harder to get people invested in an actual plot when there's no real tension to motivate their characters.
That's not to say that an RP can't have a lot of humor in it -- but I feel like it would need a balance of other elements to stay afloat. An RP that's purely supposed to be a parody seems like it would be difficult to do.
It's also the reason why Fandomstuck spends so much of its time being so serious even though the premise seems so ridiculous on the surface. I like having some of that in my RP's, sue me.