Journal Roleplay

As an outgrowth of its enormous fandom contingent, LiveJournal, and now InsaneJournal and Dreamwidth, has a large and lively roleplaying community. No, not that kind of roleplay. Or that one. Or, well, mostly not that one.

Essentially, it's a cross between the Play By Post Game and Character Blog. Original characters may also be seen, but these are less common, and banned entirely in some games for fear of Mary Sues.

Also, roleplayers have a penchant for drama. It's like high school, in a way.

A list of games

See the full list on Category:Journal Roleplay

Tropes applying to LJRP in general or very commonly used in games

• Alternate Character Interpretation: Given LJRP's fandom roots, players frequently come into conflict over whether a given player's interpretation of a character is true to the original.
• Alternate Universe: Most games that aren't "spooky jamjars" (Ontological Mysteries) are AUs where the canon characters' backgrounds have been altered to fit the setting.
  • Or are Dressing Room type settings. (Which are arguably alternate universes that "steal" characters from many other alternate universes into one setting.)
• Applied Phlebotinum: Many games have 'events', handwaved in different ways depending on the game, that influence characters against their wills. Common events include:
  • Baleful Polymorph: Characters are transformed, usually into something embarrassingly small and fluffy.
  • Freaky Friday Flip: Characters switch bodies, generally portrayed by the players using each other's accounts.
  • Gender Flip: Characters have their physical sex changed overnight.
  • Love Is in the Air: Characters feel...amorous, which sometimes leads to Kissing Under the Influence.
  • Musical Episode: Characters start singing.
  • Overnight Age-Up: Characters are physically aged up or down.
• Archive Trawl: "Canon review", the process of re-experiencing a series (or portions of a series) to better play a character.
• Back from the Dead: Many games do not treat death as permanent, so that a player can keep on playing them.
• Brought Down to Normal: Many games tend to depower or nerf overpowered characters to put them in line with other characters. However, there tends to be imbalances due to the state of different series.
• Cast Herd: Inevitable in big games (who can interact with everyone?) but tends to lead to accusations of cliquishness.
• Celebrity Paradox: Resulting from this style of roleplay usually using existing fandom characters. This often creates awkward situations, particularly if someone is playing a well-known character referenced in many other works (like Sherlock Holmes) or is playing a character who regularly references other works (like Konata from Lucky Star). Ways to handle the Celebrity Paradox vary; many games have a "no fourth-walling" rule—i.e., one character can't reveal to another character that they're fictional, or use knowledge of their original canon to their advantage. Others (looking at you, Drama Drama Duck) take the fourth wall and bomb it to rubble, usually with permission from the players involved.
• Chuck Cunningham Syndrome: In big games, the friends of dropped characters may angst for awhile about their friend's disappearance, but then they are sometimes never mentioned again.
• Closed Circle: Most dramatic RPs forbid characters leaving the setting of their own volition (because many of them have no plausible motive for staying).
• Comic Book Fantasy Casting: Generally called 'Played Bys'. A typical custom among Original Characters (and fandom characters who don't have visual media to draw from) is to take a celebrity or a character from an actual work who looks like the character and use them as a general appearance aid.
• Crack Pairing / Crossover Ship: So, so many.
• Cross Player: The vast majority of LJRPers are girls who only or mostly play male characters. There are also male players who play only or mostly girl characters, though these often are (fairly or not) seen as creepy.
• Cut Short: The fate of many a log, whether due to the fickleness of the players or real life getting in the way.
• Death Is Cheap: Death isn't permanent in most games. Many of these impose a punishment of some sort (e.g. memory loss) for dying.
• Double Standard: Guys that RP mostly girls are seen as creepy. However, it's perfectly alright for a girl to RP mostly guys.
• Fan Nickname: "Spooky jamjar" has become the shorthand for Ontological Mystery / Closed Circle as an RP setting. Stems from a secret that was submitted to roleplaysecrets, in which one of the complaint options was "games set in a spooky jamjar."
• First Girl Wins: For some reason, characters don't often date around, but tend to settle down with the first person they hook up with.
• Funetik Aksent: How characters with accents are often handled, sometimes to the chagrin of other players.
• Game Master: The moderators.
• Honorifics: Japanese ones are often retained by characters from Japanese (often anime and manga) fandoms.
• In and Out of Character: Due to player schedules and posting speeds, real time is generally not exactly the same as game time.
• Insufferable Genius: In contrast to Small Name, Big Ego below, there are some roleplayers who are every bit as good as they claim to be, despite being unpleasant out of character.
• Its Popular So It Sucks: Series that become especially popular among RPers tend to gain a Hatedom that rivals the fandom in size. Bleach, Death Note, Katekyo Hitman Reborn, Axis Powers Hetalia, Homestuck, and My Little Pony Friendship Is Magic have all had this happen to them.
• Kink Meme: Given that these often appear on LJ, many games have their own kink memes focused on pairings in the game.
• Limited Wardrobe: This tends to happen when characters are brought into games with nothing but what was on their person at the time.
• Loads and Loads of Characters: The more popular a game gets, the more characters it gets.
• Loads and Loads of Roles: Some players play several characters, sometimes across several games.
• Mean Character, Nice Actor: It's an unwritten rule in almost any game that "IC =/= OOC". Meaning, even if a character is a complete Jerkass, the player might still be a pretty decent person. That doesn't stop some people from taking it personally, however.
  • And therefore in many games it's stressed at every opportunity that if a given character is a Jerkass to your character it doesn't mean the player hates you.
• Mega Crossover: Panfandom games, by nature.
• Memetic Mutation: Loads, usually stemming from the anon meme and/or roleplaysecrets.
  • Any RPers that write examples on TV Tropes? I feel like the only one.
  • Spooky jamjar: See Fan Nickname.
  • That (character). Started with "That Patchouli," an Alternate Universe Patchouli that tried to screw any women that move; "That (whoever)" thus tends to get attached to a character played in a similarly creepy and out-of-character manner.
  • Tits o'clock is when the new RP Secrets goes up.
  • wgar: A typo for "what" that replaced it for a while on the anon comm.
  • I AM NOT YOUR SCIENCE EXPERIMENT!!!
  • /slides hand up your edit
  • Because only care about yaoi!: See Most Fanfic Writers Are Girls.
• Most Fanfic Writers Are Girls: It's not uncommon to see complaints about people "ruining" games with sparkly buttsex. (Not that they're any kinder to people who play lesbians.)
• Naked on Arrival: Not uncommon in Spooky Jamjar settings.
• Nice Character, Mean Actor: In contrast to above, there are plenty of people who play nice characters in comms, but are complete Jerkasses out of character.
• No Social Skills: Some characters arrive with the little knowledge they had in social conventions. Part of the fun in their Character Development is having them win them with cross-fandom characters that, at times, could even be complete Foils.
• NPC
• OC Stand-In: Generally known as "Canon OCs", these are used for all they're worth in many games. On the other hand, others may only accept characters that have a sufficiently distinct canon personality or history. Matt from Death Note was, at one time, particularly infamous for being used this way.
• Odd Couple / Odd Friendship: Many!
• Omake: Players sometimes play out extra scenes with their characters outside of the main game, or draw art, write fanfiction, make fanmixes, etc. for their game characters.
  • Some RPs have "crack communities" for silly stuff outside outside of the main games.
• Ontological Mystery: see Spooky Jamjar.
• The Other Darrin: The result of different players playing the same character over time.
• Painting the Fourth Wall: font color, face, and size is sometimes played with.
  • Many players go as far as mimicing a character's style, such as various Homestuck character's computer typing and Deadpool's "little yellow boxes".
• Perspective Flip: Inevitable when characters talk about their past—not everybody was the main character back home.
• Plot-Relevant Age-Up: Sex games usually require the aging up of child/teenage characters to legal age to protect the players from legal shenanigans and/or squick.
• Real Life Relative: Siblings do occasionally play together.
• Replacement Scrappy: When apping a character who was previously at the game you're looking at, it's considered common courtesy to wait a little while after the previous player has dropped, especially if they dropped all their characters in one go. Otherwise, you risk becoming one of these, especially if you're a new player.
• Romance on the Set: Very often, players seem to form romantic relationships...
• Screw This, I'm Outta Here: On a game scale, it's when a person decides to flounce from a game, usually due to a number of things, from the stupidly simple to the complex. On a net-wide scale, the many games listed here actually jumped ship from LiveJournal to DreamWidth when LJ's system changed to the point where playing there was impossible.
• Serious Business: Just look at brps, roleplaysecrets, anon, memes, rp vents, and quit role play.
• Shoot the Money: Many people are reluctant to drop dying muses until their paid accounts run out.
• Small Name, Big Ego: Quite common, and let's leave it at that.
• SoCalization: LJ's servers are in California; this is the stated reason that sex games and some horror games have a lower age limit of 18.
• Spooky Jamjar: A frequent plot device, because it forces characters to stay together. The same thing as an Ontological Mystery, but this this fandom has its own name for the trope.
• STD Immunity: Outright stated in most sex games' rules.
• "Stop Having Fun!" Guys: Even dressing room games, which are made to be laid-back and casual, are not immune to anonymous backlash. Hell, even some museboxes (private games in which only a select few players are allowed) get this. Combine this with the GIFT (courtesy of the aformentioned memes) and it gets ugly.
• Strangled by the Red String: Ships can often be forced and/or rushed and seem out of character for the character(s) in question.
• Summon Everyman Hero: How games end up with the most overpowered shounen/video game heroes...and ordinary high school students.
• Talking to Himself: What happens when a player with Loads and Loads of Roles in the same game has their characters interact. Often called "playercest", it is generally looked down upon, though a few games take to it with enthusiasm when done well.
• There Are No Boys On The Internet: Well, there are male roleplayers, but they're definitely in the minority.
• The Wiki Rule: Some games have their own player-made wikis.
• Translator Microbes: These anime characters must be chatting with those comic book characters must be chatting with these aliens somehow.
  • Some games it gets zig-zagged in that the characters can't understand each other but there is almost always something that acts as a translation device, usually text-based. When that device stops working Hilarity Ensues.
• Trapped in Another World: Probably the most common setting.
• True Companions: Sometimes formed between characters, but these aren't always the most stable...
  • Also formed between players, which more often than not leads to complaints about people being cliquish.
• Watch It for the Meme: A variant—many people get into new series because of the characters they've interacted with in panfandom games.
• What Is Going On?: The cry of a new character to a jamjar game.