This could almost work as a poll, but I'm sorta looking for more than a simple "yes" or "no" response. Basically, I'm curious what people think of hospital-based RPs, whether they're canon-oriented or not. Most of the hospital boards I've seen don't last all that long for whatever reasons, which is sorta too bad. A hospital board could be pretty fun if carried off well. That, of course, could just be me since I work at a hospital. An Army hospital at that. Heh.

Anyway. What is the general consensus about hospital RPs? What might be needed to make such an RP work? More importantly, how would it have to be set up in order to keep it from devolving into just another "typical" real-life board?

I'm really not that fond of them. I'm addicted to Scrubs and House, but hospital roleplays just don't go over well with me. I know that roleplays aren't always realistic, but come on! Twenty seven year old surgeons who spend more time sexing each other up than anything? Not exactly my cup of hot chocolate. I hate to start on my age rant, but you're not going to be a world-reknowned surgeon at 27 or even at 35. Let's do the math: you're out of school at 18, out of pre-med at 22, out of med school at 26, then you have your internship and residency, and by the time you're out of all that you're probably at least in your mid-30's. Plus, on most hospital boards I've seen, there's more posts in the surrounding areas than there is in the actual hospital. If somebody were to make a REALLY good one that was more than a bunch of wangst, chances are I would join...but I'm not a big fan of wangst, and put enough angsty young characters in a room together and you've got a recipie for wangst.

I'm in the middle about hospital RPs...I like the idea, but I still have some problems with it, both personally and in a general roleplaying sense. In an emotional sense, I don't know if I'd want to get into some of the stuff people would be in the hospital for (I'd be fine with most things, but cancer would touch too close to home), and if there was an option to RP as a patient, I wouldn't want to write a character with anything too serious (anything terminal or psychological). I'd also be reluctant to join because I don't know whether I have enough medical knowledge or would be able to come up with reasonable yet creative problems for patients to have (assuming that people weren't rping as patients). In a more general sense, there's the issue of patients and whether you want to open them up as characters; it would add more roles, but they'd just be temporary, so that'd be tricky. On the positive side, I think it'd be fun to rp, and it has a good balance between obscurity and being overplayed. I know my post talks a lot more about negatives than positives, but that's just because the negatives are easier to describe/list. My actual opinion is about fifty percent each way. I've seen a few hospital rps before, and unless it was focused on a specific tv show or the like, I'd usually check them out, but I wouldn't end up joining them...Sorry for all the words and the lack of conciseness.

Having specific, medical oriented plots could help keep the focus at the hospital. Kind of like how medical/hospital shows have specific cases they feature, but you could choose how dramatic/serious they were...Involving patients somehow might work, but that would very easily degenerate into doctor-patient relationships and the like, and if most patients were stuck in their bed/room, people wouldn't be interested in rping them.

If I ever found a good one, I'd join up in a second... as long as it wasn't too TV based.. for reasons I'm saying later. I personally would LOVE a teaching hospital RP, if it was carried off well. I think that could also attract more interest, since college/university RPs are very popular. I think there are a few main problems with hospital roleplays. One, I think most people try to base them off a show. That's absolutely fine, except it comes to a few problems. One, characters that aren't in character. For example, House is a character who is very hard to get right... and if you don't, it's off. The other problem with basing a hospital RP off a fandom, is that most of them have a relatively small group of core canons, who everyone wants to play. Once those ten or so people are taken (often by the admins), they only really roleplay with each other, and everyone else has a hard time fitting in, or tries to play with the canons, and it all gets OOC. So, it sort of cliques off, into the A-list of canons, and the nobodies that are non canons.

Both fandom roleplays that managed to dodge those bullets, and in original sites, there's another problem. General lack of medical knowledge, or even interest. Your average group of teens and early 20s roleplayers don't really know enough about medicine to really pull off a site like that. Most of them wouldn't want to put in the research time so that they would. So, you end up with cry-me-a-river characters with a nonspecific cancer (seriously, lots of people don't know that there are subtypes), often where there only symptom is... baldness. Maybe the occasional person who plays a patient will know enough about the disease they're writing to make it work. Arguably worse, the doctor characters are based entirely on TV... either they're too brilliant, too young (there are almost no 21 year old doctors!), too focused on their love life, or are incompetent. So, I think there would need to be a lot of extra information guidelines to tell people what they need to know, so that it could work, and most people wouldn't want a hobby so intellectual.

Another problem is that in a hospital, patients come and go. Someone who broke their leg in a car crash wouldn't be in the hospital for months... and most people don't want to make their characters just so that they get better and leave... so sometimes, right after the character gets discharged, some other awful thing happens to them so they can come back. Then, there are all of the patients with terminal diseases... but because the person doesn't want to lose their character, they could have six weeks to live, and stick around for six months if the site lasts that long. Also, because people want to be able to do everything with their characters, they have people doing things they would NEVER be strong enough to do/allowed to do. Like, for example, I would hedge a bet that MOST terminal cancer patients wouldn't be hanging around in the hallway, and their biggest preoccupation in life probably wouldn't be snogging the sexiest doctor. Said doctors would lose their job in a second, and they would know it wouldn't be good for their patient to be exposed to all of the bacteria in a mouth anyway. Also, on that note, I've seen lots of people refer to CPR as kissing. Maybe it involves one person's mouth touching another... but the person receiving it is normally unconscious, and the person giving it normally isn't thinking of it sexually. Yet, most people use CPR as something to advance romance.

Yeah, I know that was a rant... but there are so many problems, that you'd need VERY mature roleplayers.
--Rose
p.s. I'm not a doctor... I'm just smart enough and interested enough to know that some things are ridiculous. If I got any facts wrong in there, someone tell me... I like to know when I'm wrong.

I think the only Hospital RP I would join is a Kingdom Hospital RP. :)

All the medical procedures and such for your hospital fans, with the added bonus of secret societies, underground labyrinthine hallways, and the 'Old Kingdom', the gateway into the Ghost world.

I could never pull it off because I have no clue how a hospital runs and the fact that I'm slaughtering the way a real hospital works would just annoy me more than anything else. I know it's fictional, but still.

However, that doesn't mean that there shouldn't be any hospital boards. I think it's an interesting concept and as long as people realize that it's not how a real hospital works and they're cool with that, it's totally fine. Heck, TV already skews what a hospital looks like. ;)

Best of luck.