Indeed, and that’s expected. It’s why, in a roll-heavy RP community, I rarely make any sort of character with experience anymore. As I said above, I had an apprentice mage. Why? Because rolling a 1 and messing up a spell that badly that it backfires is kind of an expected risk of fielding an apprentice mage. They lack experience.
Also as I noted, the player playing my apprentice’s mentor was rolling under 5 the same time I was rolling 18+ back to back. So, while the 1,000+ year old archmage was setting himself on fire, his apprentice with three months of mentorship just solo’d a lich.
We all had a good laugh about it, but we all also kind of agreed, it was ridiculous. At one point we started work-shopping ideas to explain the bad rolls, like, maybe the Archmage had been cursed by the lich without knowing, and they hadn’t bothered with my apprentice mage because they didn’t consider my guy a threat? I remember about that time a rather short-tempered player said, “Well, why even bother having rolls at all if you’re not going to man up and accept the consequences?”
The only words of value I took from that was, “Why even bother having rolls at all?”
To be fair, I think dice rolls are a good tool to enhance RP. It adds an element of chance that can make RP feel organic. From my personal experience, however, it can also ruin immersion and good story-telling.
My conversation in this thread hasn’t been in an attempt to convince people dice are bad. I was discussing my own experiences and why I feel a commonly used system “All or nothing,” is more detrimental than beneficial.
Building a basis of connections to other characters is how longform plot arc stuff gets started. You’ve gotta eat your vegetables before you get to dessert. The light city social stuff is a foundation on which you can work up to interconnected plots with one or more other characters where epic adventures spring from. It’s true that some people really aren’t interested in all that, they want to keep things light and hang-out-ey and stick to daily surface interactions, but that’s why it’s a good idea to - and I hesitate to say it because some people seem to hate the phrase for some reason - “find your people” in likeminded individuals who want to do the same stuff that you want to do.
You can do that on an individual basis, or, alternately, guilds and projects usually have things that you can jump in on that were already set in motion some time ago, and often have a mechanism for allowing individual members to run deeper stories for some or all of their guildmates also. “Your people” might be a guild or project instead of individual people.
It’s odd to me that people talk about a golden era when complex longterm plot just appeared for them. I’ve been doing RP since Vanilla and that was never the case for me. Unless I joined up with a guild and got swept up in their ongoing stuff, all of the story that I ever had, large or small, started with low-stakes social interactions that built into epic journeys over time the more the characters got to know each other and got involved in each other’s stuff.
There are so many other people around, the chances of there being zero other people around who like what you like is pretty slim. But it does take some time and energy to get there so I totally get why for some people, especially as the people that they RP with move on over time, the return might be less than the investment of both of those things so they just aren’t interested in that kind of effort anymore.
Me, I just keep swimming. I have a preference for very large plots with very small groups, and tend to Pokeball Capture a new person into said antics maybe once every few years? I’m doing lots of RP, high quality stuff that got built up over the course of years, that usually started with a walkby first encounter in the streets or in a bar with a conversation, a random argument, or other “light social” stuff.
I’ve no doubt people still have stories and journeys.
But I’m not going to sit around and dice roll for those things. If you’re ok with that, good for you! I really wish you well. But I’m not into it. Plus, I’m busy with life and kind of find RP just pointless now anyway at this stage, where 20 years ago I found it exciting. Then again, 20 years ago we didn’t do dice rolls for everything, either. It really was pretty spontaneous.
I get people like structure and order now because RP is different than when the servers were tiny bitty things with a few hundred people on that all knew each other from both the forums, which were far more active, and just on-sight in game, because the community was very small.
I’m sure there are some people out there like me still hanging on, but I just don’t care enough to bother finding them. I’m over it. I literally only play WoW maaaaybe 4-6 weeks out of every expac to begin with. The game is old and tired, I find it dull, I just get the urge to come see what’s going on for nostalgia’s sake and then I dip again. More into singleplayer games these days.
Edit: I do enjoy reading TRP3s though, and looking at some of the artwork.
I’m actually finding my break from XIV to RP in WoW refreshing. Lately, XIV is, you go to some casual event, you run into 10 kitsune, 4 sin eaters, and 2 Ancients and my blacksmith character is sitting here having an existential crisis because she’s surrounded by mind-bending gods at a gd bar event. It’s exhausting. In WoW I’m meeting a lot more just Regular Dudes with interesting stories just by virtue of being whole characters and not someone’s therapy avatar. Yeah, there’s some outliers running around, but I’m just not seeing as much as I was in XIV.