04.24.2022
I've run a number of discord roleplay servers throughout my life, and I wanted to finally do a write-up on the birth and demise of the one dearest to me. There are numerous reasons that contributed to her death, and I'm interested in cataloging how and why.
Sappho's Revenge (SR) was a discord RP that used multi-paragraph prose as the format, and was primarily composed of 1 on 1 threads between players. (Group threads were permitted, but they weren't as popular as 1×1.) I created this RP to fill the need in my heart for a pirate-focused roleplay that involved queer characters, and an overall more diverse cast than you would typically see in media. I wanted to play pirate pretend, but with characters that were a lot more like my friends and I, rather than whatever I saw on television at the time.
Unfortunately for me, pirates weren't especially popular at the time. The Pirates of the Caribbean fandom was dormant, and the Black Sails fandom was either too small, or disinterested in an original RP. (Now, there's the immense popularity of Our Flag Means Death. Oh, if only I had the energy for this idea now instead of January of 2019!) This made advertising difficult. I had to sell the RP on the quality of writing, attentiveness to plot, and how exciting the events were going to be. I had a small pool of players to pull from prior roleplays I was in, and was able to snag a few good writers through Tumblr ads. (I also happened to see someone with a very cool blog, and personally invited them to the RP. I headhunted a roleplayer without knowing them first, which is highly abnormal for the Tumblr/discord RP landscape.)
While there were a few players that caused minor issues, I was able to weed out most of them through a strict application process, with specific rules, and a password that was hidden within those rules that they had to place within their app. And I got a lot of crappy applications. A number of them were just filled with spelling errors and were incomprehensible. The ones that didn't have those issues were riddled with racism, misogyny, and everything endemic to the worst parts of pirate media. Those were thrown in the trash can instantly.
During the heyday of the RP (February 2019 – October 2019), people involved their characters in the plot of the roleplay with fervor and excitement. Whenever an event happened, people rushed to join in. There were good characters all around, and few actual plot issues to contend with. People tended to get along, and when they didn't, things were resolved easily. During this time, the plot revolved around the Captain's search for a treasure. Captain Zhang Yu was intended to be all of the characters' introduction to piracy, and was written by me. She would be their mentor and leader for the first story arc. I took a hands-off approach with how I played her, and gave over most of the agency to the players themselves.
Partway through 2019, I realized that there was an overflow of characters people wanted to make for the primary location, the ship Sappho's Revenge herself. Knowing that I would eventually want to set up an antagonist crew, I created the Tyrant's Terror, a ship that would become Sappho's enemy. I told players they could have characters on both ships, and that these ships would clash in various ways during the plot. It was a good idea. However, it had the fatal flaw of me depending on the person writing Tyrant's captain to be consistently involved and active. Much of the plot hinged on his agency, and the player wasn't terribly present. So, some of those B-plots stagnated. This was contributor number one to the death of SR.
After the crew of Sappho's Revenge found the treasure, I began to include a second plot I had hinted at. Captain Zhang was looking for her lost mermaid lover, and misleading the crew to find the treasure as a cover for this search. This plot helped reveal the flaws in her character. Rather than just being a cool leader, she was a human with errors in judgement, a backstory, and goals and desires beyond the well-being of her crew.
I found that my players were not interested in this plot at all. To the point where the person who played her mermaid ex-girlfriend, Soraya, became completely inactive in the roleplay. Rather than engaging in their Captain making a mistake and lying, people seemed to not engage at all. After speaking with a friend about this, I concluded that people seemed to be interested in Zhang while she was mentoring them (and sometimes mothering them), but became less interested in her as a character when she had her own story. Other characters of mine (notably both men), were still popular to RP with. There's a lot to be said about the treatment of older women, lesbians, women of color, and women in general as characters in RP, but I won't spend time here typing it out. The fact is: Just in like real life, they're not treated especially well, and are often ignored. This was contributor number two to SR's end.
At this point in the game, I was scrambling to bring in new members to keep it going. Winter of 2019, activity began to sharply drop off. Even though I had hurried past Zhang's plot when no one was interested, I had lost the attention of most of the player base. Two key players involved in plot weren't active (Tyrant's Terror Captain player, and Soraya's player). I couldn't move forward with the Zhang plot I had dropped anyways, and I couldn't move forward with the Tyrant's Terror plot. My solution was to try and pivot around and try something else, but I found that I no longer had the player base to support any big moves. People weren't paying attention, and I was losing motivation as a result.
Realizing that the roleplay was basically over with, I let things peter out. I stopped posting ads, I stopped writing plot, and I lost interest in trying to keep the roleplay alive. Part of why I didn't feel the need to push harder to renew it was because I had found creative fulfillment outside of SR. At that time, I was in a really lovely D&D group run by a fantastic DM. It was low effort on my part, and I got to focus more on character building. (Running SR was almost like having a whole other part-time job. I loved it, but it was a lot of work.) To this day, that D&D group is still my primary friend group, and we still play tabletop roleplays together. In a closing statement on SR, I had even mentioned that my personal life outside of discord was fulfilling, and that I wanted to focus on it.
In summary, the contributing factors to SR's end were:
- Disinterest in certain NPC-focused plots
- Key players becoming inactive
- RP writers' general disinterest in Pirates as a genre
- My lack of interest towards the end, when I found another RP
- Too much work for a player base with dwindling activity
And yet...
I wanted to make another roleplay group, not even a year later. Every single time I've run a roleplay group, I've vowed not to ever do it again. It's a ton of work, you have to deal with weird people, and what you get back out of it is often so minuscule that you wondered why you put so much effort in to begin with. Most groups barely last a year.
However…it's just too fun. Collaborative writing is inspiring, rewarding, and delightful. Staying up until 2am waiting for someone to type a response is a high that's hard to forget. Knowing that you've always got some fun plot, or something cool to talk about brewing in the back of your mind is a welcome distraction from the terrors of the world. Most people are kind, creative, and great company. To me, there's nothing more fun than making a unique fictional space for people to play in, be surprised at, and find meaning in.
Since SR has ended, I've been in a few great tabletop RPs, run two more (much more short-lived) discord RP groups, and been a small part of a couple more. I've also run my own tabletop RP game (Snare), and am planning to run another season of it this year. One of my friends (who I met through discord, and who was a wonderful part of SR) is going to open another discord RP soon, which I intend to join. Every time I have a bit of time freed up, I always end up pouring it into writing with friends. I used to think it was purely an escape. But when my real life was a lot more fulfilled, I still just kept going back. Collaborative RP and writing is likely always going to be a part of me, and a hobby I love dearly.
Despite all of the hard work and heartbreak, I'll still probably run another online RP group. As much as I say I won't.