You know what really grinds my gears?

• People who rag on people who want to play a specific genre/fandom. I don't laugh at you for playing Naruto/high school/horse/whatever rpgs, so don't laugh at me for what I pick.
• Admin favouritism. I hate it when the admin's clique is not held to the same standards as everyone else, and I hate it when they can break rules (IC and OOC) and not face punishments... but watch out if you are "not cool" and step a toe out of line.
• People who read the rules and think the rules don't apply to them.
• The constant confusion of your/you're. It's like the icon says: "Your stupid." "My stupid what?"
• Admins/advertisers who claim that they have X amount of members when they clearly don't. Hate to break it to you, but account numbers != member numbers in a lot of cases. Especially annoying when they claim to have over 300 members, yet the main group of six or so players have at least 20 alts.
• People who ignore suggestions for improvement/corrections on stuff they are making major errors on (say, grammatically)... and proceed to get MUCH WORSE!
• When I can't find the droids I'm looking for.
• Apostrophes being used for plurals. No. Stop it. Please.
• Tiny dark grey text on a black background. With the links looking no different. To borrow a mannerism from Chandler Bing: could you be any less easy on the eyes?
• Non-standard BBCode across the different forum types.
• Errors that could have easily been picked up with spellcheck, but obviously haven't.
• "I'm an excellent writer, I don't make mistakes." YOU MAKE OVER A DOZEN IN A POST! AND LOOK! LOOK! A SENTENCE WITH EIGHT %$#@ING ERRORS IN IT. EIGHT!
• Writer's block.
• Purple prose and thesaurus rape.
• Wangst. Ever heard of the phrase "angst is a little like salt. A little adds flavour, too much ruins the meal"?

I agree a lot with the first one. I generally don't like HS RPs, but if people want to play them, that really is their decision, and they can play what they wish.

Writers Block is a bitch, and I had that like crazy during my Final Exam times.

Word to Big Bird. If you're not into a genre, don't roleplay it, simple as that. Just because one person doesn't like it, doesn't mean others should be prevented from enjoying it.

I agree with pretty much everything on this list. It's like you were reading my mind.

I agree with most of the stuff you say here, but it just seems like it's common sense not to do them...

A thousand times yes o.O Are your characters seriously so boring that you need 20 to retain your attention? Just make a few that are well thought out and stick to them... at least for that specific site. Also, I think it's pretty stupid when people need an absurd number of 300 [Sparta!] members to join a site.

Props for quoting Chandler Bing, though.

Yes! I agree! So much with the 'I am a good writer' that I worry immensely about when I say that on the rare occasion in case someone tries to prove me wrong or worse, thinks to themselves that I suck. Sad.

I will not be bothered by people not knowing how to use apostrophes correctly, because I didn't know until recently and my science teacher didn't even know. It is actually not very common for people to know about that. Moreso in the RPing world, but still not common.

Chandler Bing!

God you're right there!

I just absolutely HATE it. It just makes you feel so unwanted and disapproved of. Honestly, if there's anyone out there who has suffered the same treatment, just know that I understand completely. -offers security blanket-

I loved that one. I hate it when I can't find the droids I am looking for.

About the adverts saying that they have so many members, I really hate it when they use a code to edit the total it says at the bottom of the forums. That really makes me mad.

*coughs*

I actually do play a lot of characters, but they are not boring and are well thought out. All are different, and have different purposes. Lots of characters != bad rper.

Now, if I were to have two dozen characters who were pretty much identical and could only be told apart by PB and name, then I'd say that's bad rping. But playing a variety of characters and managing to keep up with them is not bad rping.

And that's actually another thing that grinds my gears. :p

You know what else can be really frustrating in respect to admins ignoring suggestions? Admins who take your suggestion to hold a ban on certain types of characters and then allow someone to reserve that type of character a day later. If you are going to restrict a certain type of character shouldn't you hold to that?

You're right, if they are all diverse I don't have a problem with it... I was thinking more in terms of them being one dimensional and boring after a few threads :] Don't worry, I don't think many characters = bad rper. But you have to admit it looks kind of fishy where there are 20 characters all belonging to three people o.O Personally, I can't have a lot of characters because I like to really, really develop the ones I have and if I have too many I know I won't be able to dedicate enough time to all of em. Sadly, other people don't have enought time to do so either but make characters like it's going out of style...

I agree to the entire thing...it's especially annoying with people posting with grammatical errors...haaate it. (x.x) (angry)

It's only in the rping world that I have discovered this problem, and it really bothers me. If you are playing a game where the means of playing is writing, you need to be able to get your point across. Basic grammar and spelling is part of that. So if you are going to do something incorrectly and it completely changes the meaning of what you have written, then you have failed.


Other things that grind my gears:

• Players with giant egos. In my experience, these players generally have done nothing to deserve the worship they receive, and make my eyes bleed with their characters and posts.
• Players who just don't read. Once I was in a group thread with two of my characters talking to a third. The player got confused and thought the other character had said something. I PMed them and pointed out that short white girl != tall bearded black man (so how could you confuse... I dunno). I posted once with the girl and the player thought the guy had done something. I had no clue how they managed to do that.
• Games that claim to be very canon/are close to canon, but on closer expection are not. Last time I read Harry Potter, few people were Animagi, and no one ran around using powers that belongs in X-Men.
• People who play clones. And by "clones" I mean "two dozen characters who are pretty much identical, save PBs and names"
• Inappropriate PB choices, such as age or ethinicity. Angelina Jolie is neither 13 nor Asian, people. And 11 year olds should not look like Victoria Secrets models.

I don't think you can -fail- when it comes to RPing, unless you steadfastly refuse to try to get better your entire life. Even if you don't know something now, it doesn't mean you won't learn it in the future.

I know no one in RL except my boyfriend and my English teacher who actually knows that you don't spell the possessive its with an apostrophe. Many people also don't know about plurals. I don't believe it's a part of 'basic' spelling and grammar. To me, that's being able to write 'I have a cat' and spell it correctly, in the right order, using capital letters and a period.

I've been using the wrong form lately, and it always drives me nuts because I know better. I'll read through an old post of mine and see something like, "She leaned against it's trunk," and I just go, "Ack! Why did I do that!" Then I feel like slapping myself for not catching it when I checked over everything before posting (something I think everyone should do while RPing). *sighs...*

While we're discussing grammatical annoyances, I'd like to add funky or no spacing around punctuation to the list. You know, people who write,like ,this without paying,attention to where the ,space after,the comma is,if there is one. There's a player on one of the boards I'm on who does that, and every time I read her posts I just want to grab her and shake her violently while yelling, "Use the *&^#$% space bar correctly!" Honestly, it brings down the quality of the entire board when it's smaller.

Well, I can understand the occasional misuse of "its" and "it's" because they are both forms used a lot, and it is instinct to use both.

I'm talking about people who use apostrophes to plural everything. "Beheading's", "dog's", wizard's" etc. And in the most annoying of cases, insist that both are correct and that they prefer to use the apostrophe one. That has happened to me, and I have seen members have hissy fits and proclaimed we're all being mean when we explain why it's not correct.

And I think it's quite sad that people are so easily able to brush off grammar and spelling as not-important... in a medium that requires a standard of literacy, as it is text-based.

Hmm you are right there, Disdainful Soul. Things like that are silly. I hate trying to figure out words which have an 's' at the end and trying to figure out if they have apostrophes, because I've always thought they did but then wasn't sure if they had another 's' after it or there was no 's' or it was just 'es' and no apostrophe! But I look stuff like that up when I'm not sure.

Ah ha. That's what annoys me. When people don't bother to look things up. Especially when I tell someone on my site 'no, this is not true to the setting, choose something that is' and they pick things and make me look them up to see if they are or not. Google! Use it!

Shadow, sometimes there can be a reason for that - like the person's stupid spacebar sticks! My new laptop does that so I'll write a sentence and look back to see that there are no spaces - at all. I always try to fix it but sometimes I do end up with words stuck together or no space between a comma and the next word (which I loathe). But that's only an excuse for an occasional slip up.

Trigger-happy Family Guy quoters?

;)

For the most part, I agree with you. Though I would say that a few things were rather... asymmetrically observed.