Currently, I’m admining a gothic horror/fantasy rpg with vampires and the activity is awesometastic and we’re about to introduce our first plot point to the board as a whole. Neither of those are the problem, however. My problem has to deal with a certain member that I have and I really don’t know what to do about them.

Now, the rpg is an intermediate to advanced forum and the case isn’t that they’re posting like one paragraph or a sentence, but their posts don’t have much content in them, no matter how long. There are frequently misspelled words and even a bit of god-modding in their posts. One of my other admins doesn’t even want to RP with them anymore because this is such a problem with their posts. Now, I’ve come to them and told them about the god-modding and they took it out right away…after a slightly snarky comment about how it was “obviously avoidable if I’d only read it properly.” However, I didn’t let that effect me, but now, I really am at the end of my rope.

What do I do? I want to go to them and try to help them with their rping, but I don’t want them to take it offensively like they did with the g-modding. They seem to be rather sensitive about stuff like that as well…characters hating their characters and so forth even though, as a precaution, it’s in the rules that IC emotions doesn’t reflect the emotions of the RPer against the other RPer. So, on that basis, I don’t know how they’d take to me trying to help them get better at the content that they post. And I can’t just delete them and act like they were never around. Also, this is a problem for me and my staff members because the member has taken a canon character, one that is going to be influential in the coming plot.

Someone help, please. I really don’t know what to do.

I have a member very similar to the one you're describing, and I definitely sympathize with your frustrations.

My member's problem was entire paragraphs of run-on sentence dialogue, where the only punctuation he used was an ellipse. Drove me crazy. I finally took one of said paragraphs from a post of his and re-formatted him, showing him how to make it coherent to someone reading it. Of course, now he's taking me way too literally and promising not to do anything unless I tell him to...but that's a whole 'nother story. :angry:

Anyway, the best you can do is continue to help them as kindly as you can. I assume you have a rule about respect on your board. If they continue to snark you, remind them of this rule...and if they still give you attitude, ask them to leave.

That's what I'd do, anyway. ^-^ Good luck!

I had a member like this, and it got really frustrating. I agree with Madame - remind them of the respect rule, and if he furthers his conduct, ask him to leave.

PM this member and be completely honest. This is your board, not his (or hers). Don't let him make you nervous about doing this. Tell him the things you've told us here. If they have a problem, psht, let 'em leave. Hopefully, the person will clean up his act, but in these sort of instances, these type of people don't.
With the person I had, I continually sent her PMs. I didn't spam her inbox or anything, though. I just reminded her that we were an advanced site, and she needed to meet up to our standards. As we would get more activities and plot lines going on that would affect the plot, role playing would be getting tougher, for we were probably going to have fights, battles, etc. etc. She never really improved, and eventually left the site.

Godmodding.

Disrespectful.

Ruining your fun.

Ruining everyone else's fun.

Active forum.


Somehow, I don't really see many reasons to keep him around. Somehow.

Just tell the player to get his act together or he'll be given the boot.

I think everyone has members like this. IF not then they must be pretty lucky. But honestly sit down and weight out your pros and cons over the member and see if the member is worth keeping around. But if the member is seriously upsetting and ruining others fun I would ask them to please change their habits maybe by showing them a few sights that could show him how to rp correctly. If that doesn't work I would simply ask them to leave if they don't then just ban their ip address and their email. I did that with one member. But it was worth it in the long run.

thank you all of your advice. seriously, it's helping me beyond anything that i could possibly type here to express it in words. the banning of the IP addy and her email was suggested by one of my admins, but i felt it was sorta cruel and i thought of it in terms if someone would've done it to me. I wouldn't have liked it very much. Then again, I wouldn't have joined a site that i felt overwhelmed at and couldn't RP like the others.

*nods* I will take into consideration PMing them as well as speaking to them on MSN about it. And Greyscale, though it sounds easy, it isn't. Well, at least, not for me. I've never been the "bad admin" per se, and i always thought RPing was about fun and shtuff, but yeah. They're kinda taking the fun out of it especially since the character was like amazing and they turned her (the character), into something else.

God-moding is such and issue becaue sometimes it can't be avoided in a post; at least that is my opinion. In any RP where there is a conflict that is more than verbal it's likely to come up. But it takes away from both writers to have something sketchy in a fight post. Does that make any sense?

One of the big things with writing, not just RP is to make your actions, words and characters seem confident. "Tried to hit so-and-so" souds less confident than "he socked him in the face." Not only that but I've seen it come to a point where there were a lot of "attempted" shots by one character and the other avoided every one and vice versa. It gets repetitive and boring...

Ok end the mini rant, sorry don't know what it is with me today, moving on.

Usually I leave it up to the players. Even in my posts I occasionally power-play or god-mod for a smooth play but anyone I rp with knows that in advance. They also know that if they don't like what I do they can tell me and I'll change it.

In the end its a matter of having open and vocal players, those willing to say "hey, no, don't think so." and the others willing to say "alright lets fix it."

Of course you'll get the ones who are "rawr i am all powerful deal with it." Then it goes to the admin and, though I usually have a three strike policy, I give them one warning... being something to the effect of "Ok, if thats how your character is, fine. Take them to another site. *points to rules* No mary-sues etc and that includes too good as well as too emo characters."

If that doesn't change their tune they're gone.

Then you may consider hiring someone who doesn't mind banning people.