The Problem with Roleplay "Experience"

“I’ve been RPing for like seven or eight years, now, and I’ve been a staff once or twice—”

“Fifteen.”

“What?”

“I’ve been RPing for fifteen years. And I’ve been on admin on three sites, one of which was mine. Back in the day we had about two hundred members, people posted pretty much every day. Pretty great.”

…

Ever had this conversation with someone? If you haven’t, just wait, or don’t even wait, just mention how long you’ve been on RPing forums in passing. The life story tends to be around the corner moments later. I’m completely guilty of this too, as is pretty much everyone, because it’s true that, at the end of the day, everyone likes to talk about themselves, which isn’t going to be changing any time soon. The problem I want to talk about today isn’t really so much about ego as it is about standards and expectations.

I do bring up the ego thing, though, because it’s useful in revealing the ongoing sentiment. Yeah, everyone wants to talk about themselves to a certain degree, but they also have some level of censorship intact so as not to share things that are either pointless or unflattering, right? Take it a step further: people will try and share things that they feel are unique to themselves. Dental history, driving records, world-travel experience, number of family members, and on and on it goes—these are the things that people are interested in talking about, because they feel it gives them some individuality. That’s not strictly incorrect, but now there’s a larger question—why is roleplaying experience on that list so frequently? Now we have something to talk about!

Most people (maybe seven out of eight) that I talk to, now, will confess that they’ve been roleplaying for anywhere between eight and fifteen years. Being that this is an internet hobby, it makes sense that it doesn’t go beyond fifteen years very often, because the internet was a slow, inaccessible thing at the time, and most roleplayers don’t tend to be much older than thirty (at least, in my experience). It’s beside the point, though—the part that’s actually interesting is the consistency of the spread. Why is it that, with such frequency, people seem to all have started roleplaying somewhere between 2000-2007?

I actually don’t have an answer to that question, but it’s effects are unmistakable. Because people all started this hobby in about the same time period, and additions are actually almost rare to that, it’s created a large roleplaying community that’s aging together. Screw the baby boomers, forget the millennials, welcome to the Roleplay Generation. Okay, maybe that’s pushing it, but there is a common identity here. The people who roleplay tend to be at similar points in their life, have similar hobbies and pursuits, and often have strikingly similar personalities, which is maybe why communities tend to face lots of the same problems with such interesting frequency. This makes the conundrum even more difficult to explain. If there’s so much in common, why does everyone try and differentiate themselves based on their experience? 

Certainly there are lots of reasons, not the least of which is that people probably just don’t bother to think about it too much. After all, most roleplayers tend to be transient—when was the last time you met someone who’d been on the same RPing community for five years or more? Those people are out there, but they’re about as rare as new roleplayers. In that sense, it would make sense for people to hold the individual in the forefront of their mind much more readily than the corporate community of roleplayers. If people are stuck on their own individual, it makes sense why the idea of roleplay “experience” is something that comes up often.

Their experiences have shaped them more than anything else, while roleplaying. They remember the good characters and the horrible ones, site drama and the golden days, and in their mind they’re creating this bridge of what they expect and hold important, when it comes to the hobby. Because they’ve been through that, and in many senses their situation will always be unique, every individual begins to feel they have this incredibly original perspective, which they’ve slowly grown over the many years and years of roleplaying.

The irony is that this is true of every roleplayer. Experience wins you nothing, here, because everyone’s in the camp. You’ve seen sites fall apart? Watched annoying people run places when they never roleplayed? Or worse, the people who did roleplay would god-mode, meta-game, write one-liners, or any other number of atrocities? Great. Everyone’s seen that. Simply because you’ve observed it and have some “experience” there does not immediately put a person above those things. This really should go without saying, but (as is often the case) people will miss it entirely.

You know what other common experience is exactly like this? Driving. (Although, amusingly, you don’t see a bunch of people out there bragging that they’ve been driving for ten whole years! But, anyway.) Most people are forced to drive every day, and so obviously they garner lots of “experience” while they’re doing it. They remember what it was like to be a “bad” driver all those years ago, when they were constantly nervous behind the wheel and drove like a grandma everywhere. This, of course, passes in time, and within a year or two you’re comfortable behind the wheel, it’s kind of relaxing, and then you attain this universal attitude that all drivers have: everyone else is a bad driver.

You’ve heard it. That groan and sideways glance as your uncle says with disappointment: “Lotta bad drivers out there…” Everyone thinks they’re an above-average driver, and they’re ready to observe people doing stupid things out there all the time. It’s the exact same thing with roleplay. People just assume that because they’ve gotten through those first couple of years of awkwardness, they’ve officially graduated onto the rest of their roleplaying experience where they’ll be a god behind the wheel. I’m being dramatic, here, but you really don’t even have to be a driver yourself in order to get the analogy.

There’s something unique about driving, though, that makes this analogy more useful than just showcasing a lack of introspection. Driving, like some other tasks, is a very mechanical and pragmatic—you do it because you have to, and once you can accomplish the basic “Point A to Point B” thing, that’s about the end of the conversation. By the time you stop being stressed out about it, it becomes relaxing, and then your skill-curve will plateau and that’s it. Writing can be incredibly similar, roleplaying especially.

After the first couple of years of roleplaying, most of the bumps are smoothed out. You’ve learned to stop meta-gaming, you know how to start and finish a thread, and you’ve got a sense for what sorts of characters work, but then the rest becomes relatively mechanical. You get character and plot ideas, you find people to thread with, and you just sort of roll out and take it one day at a time. This is actually really great and totally fine, but I think it does count as coasting, if that’s all you’re doing. It’s true that a writer will naturally develop their abilities as time goes on, but I think within the context of writing fiction there is a sense that not all experience is created equal.

Back to the driving analogy. If a person’s natural state is to maintain the status quo and cruise at roughly the same skill, how does that change? Well, if they drive in the same place all the time, it won’t, but move them to the city? Los Angeles? Washington D.C.? It’s a sink or swim situation, and people will often rise to the challenge and their capabilities will increase. The same thing applies to writing and, again, especially roleplaying, because the innate social-element and easy-access will allow for simple gratification without ever having to apply much more effort than last time.

So I titled this blog post about the “problem” with people and all their experience that they bring to the table, and I should probably focus in on that concretely before I go too long. The issue I take with people citing their experience so readily is that it betrays how highly they think about it. Because the truth of it? After about your second year of roleplaying, your experience doesn’t really mean anything—you’re better off just telling someone how long you’ve been writing (which, in the case of most roleplayers, is since like second grade, so you might as well just say how old you are). Thinking that a ten-year stretch has granted you some sort of special perspective on roleplaying is not at all true; it’s actually probably hurtful to your own progression.

The worst thing for a writer is for them to think they’ve got it. For them to look at the things that other people write and go, “I think I’m as good as these people.” If you can honestly say that, and it’s true, you need to go find better people to write with. But for a lot of folks, it’s not actually true, and they’re simply kidding themselves by assuming that the writing process is mostly subjective. It’s true that people will have different tastes and styles, but it’s also true that good writing is identifiable (and so is bad writing). These days I find myself excited to write with numbers of people because I feel like they’re going to make me better. Some of these people have more years of “experience” than I do, but just as many have less—it really makes zero difference on how good of a writer they are.

The first year or two of your RPing experience are important, which is why it’s so fun to find people when they’re new, because it’ll shape how that person goes on to roleplay for a very, very long time. In my case, I learned a lot of bad habits in those introductory years, and it’s taken me a lot of time to work myself out of those habits, over the years, and I still have a long way to go. The wake-up call, though? It was when I ran into people who made me stop short and think about what I was writing. Is this character concept actually good? Is it believable? Is it fun to write with? I encountered people with much higher standards than I did, and it forced me to think. I count this as an incredibly valuable experience, but it has nothing to do with the length of time leading up to or following it. In fact, I would count the experience as impactful and helpful because it taught me how little my experience mattered.

At the end of the day, this is the ballgame. One of the best things about writing is that it’s so bottomless—you and I can spend the rest of our lives plumbing the depths of writing and still find new things at the end, so how you use that time is critical. If a person is going to just sedate themselves and say they’re doing just fine, thank you very much, it creates a serious problem. Not only are you doing yourself a disservice, but you’re also doing your other roleplayer a disservice.

Getting better is incredibly fulfilling and challenging, but at the end of the day it’s almost one of the primary reasons that we write. I hope you enjoy what you write, and I hope that, by extension, you’ll enjoy the stuff you write a year or two from now much, much more. That’d be a pretty good deal, right?