The Origin Of The "pb" & The Rise Of Canons

I honestly don't think there is anything else at work here than advancing technology and narrow past experiences that lead one to thinking everybody did it that way. It's a natural process of growing up/older. Just recently I keep finding myself asking my slightly older friends whether there was always one big teenie-bopper craze based on a book that was immediately made into a movie or whether that started with Harry Potter too. Our field of vision grows and and so our past experiences seem like they would have to be as wide as they are now but they weren't. Lots of stuff went on that we weren't aware of.

And then there is the growing technology. I really really miss those old videogames, super low graphic and less visual realism but it's obvious why they don't exist anymore - or not in that way.

I personally think a pb has always been and will always be a personal choice. I see enough people around here who violently oppose the use of real person pbs even now. I have always liked them, way before I rp'ed I used real person faces to describe the way people looked. I find it difficult to describe something out of thin air without going the route of literary clichés. When I have a picture in front of me or better yet a moving picture, I know exactly what happens in that face and I can describe it better than just a "crooked smile" that could encompass any number of things.
I like a pb because it helps my writing and my imagination. I understand that to some people it does the opposite - that's why we have the choice of boards we have here. I personally can't deal with artwork pbs because I can't take the character seriously when they have a comic book face - also a personal preference.

And just as a side - that super creative team of amazingly talented writers who scrutenized every app sounds like my worst rp nightmare lol. In what kind of scenario is it impossible for people/characters to have similar features, a similar hobby, a similar job -- what do people talk about when all similarities are picked apart for fear of "copying"? What fun is in it when you constantly have to be afraid that people judge you against their own ideal of creativity?
I am all for some criteria or standards but this sounds like a job. And I love writing and being serious about it, that's I put that attitude to my writing and not to rp-ing which is mountains of text that just disappears into the ether of the internet.

This, pretty much. No offense to OP, because I think it's a wonderful thread, and there's one of these popping up every so often but it's ... largely all in your head. Things haven't changed all that much. PBs and canons have been around in one way shape or form since forever, even before the advent of the internet changed the way people RolePlayed.
The internet just largely changed the accessibility of RolePlays and the number of people playing it. Nowadays it's not something done by strictly the artistic among us, and not every community will have a (graphic) artist.
Resources grew, numbers grew, and it all has conglomerated to fast-track the RP world to what it is today.

The ratio of people who did or did not do something definitely changed, but all elements were always there and still are. There are definitely still a lot of people out there who prefer no PB and no canons, and all the old school stuff we grew up on. I used to run such a game not two years ago, my friend is running such a game as we speak, they exist! UNICORNS DO EXIST. You may have to look a little harder, or step out of the circle you've been in, but they are out there.

To be frank, you might not find them very commonly, or actively on the RPG-D or other resource sites because... well? They are a RESOURCE SITE. People come here to find PBs, to get pretty grahpics made, to pimp out canons. The further you drift to the fringes and away from such sites, the more "relics of the past" you'll find.

I just lost, just saying.

Anyway, yeah, the web is more visual now, as people have said. My theory is less thanks to any particular franchise and more that real life PBs are easier to come by than ever, thanks to the internet. The movie/TV/music/modeling industiries do massive viral advertising campaigns that provide us with materials to use for our characters. People promote themselves the same way and the same trickle-down affect happens as in the commercial advertising campaigns.

Also, it doesn't take as much effort to use Photoshop as it does to draw art and get it on the internet. Uh, don't get all rabid, Photoshop people, alrighty? Photoshop is a medium or technique or whatever the proper term would be in and of itself, I know. But it's not too hard edit some pre-existing materials into a cute little avatar and sig set as it is, again, to draw it, scan it, and then edit it.

And yeah, the SM PBEM community was...yeah. Waiting a few months to see if your 10-to-15-page app got approved - which it usually didn't, and if you wanted actual concrit, good luck with that. It seemed to help if you were talented in the art or web design categories. Like Sparky said, not much actually happened anyway. But the one thing I did notice was that once you got into one game, it was essentially a free pass into all of them. :? Not all of them had that issue, though. Just most.

There's a trend in Sailor Moon RPing (in particular) in that it tends oscillate back and forth between reinterpreting canon and then to original senshi. First it was canons in the mid-nineties. Late nineties and early 2000s all the original senshi games took off. Now it's back to original canon again.

Canons have always been used in RP. They existed in the early 90s, due to the popularity of fanfiction. What you experienced is a natural, though not my favorite dynamic of roleplaying communities, and it's called "I copied how somebody else did their site".

One fandom I'm thinking of has two giant communities that have been around forever. Everybody and their cousin who tries to make a community in that fandom follows that exact same pattern, and if you deviate, people either refuse to join or they freak out about the differences. STILL! AFTER 15 YEARS!

Many people are resistant to change, whether they admit it or not. Probably the earliest Sailor Moon sites were original characters, and the others just followed that. Other genres were different. For example, nearly all early Harry Potter sites had canons. That's still somewhat popular, but not like it used to be.

Okay, so, fair warning here - I have a LOT of thoughts on this, so this is probably going to turn out to be a monster of a post. We'll see how it goes!

So, my board - the Harry Potter one linked in my signature - has been rolling since 2001. When we started out playing on the Harry Potter Dialogue Center on the WB Website, avatars were not an option. There was no way to show a picture of how your character looked. You got a bit of signature space to keep it less than I think 140 characters or something and say in a few short words "13, Slytherin, Pet Cat" or something.

Eventually this one girl showed up who drew comics and fan art. She started drawing artwork for people who she roleplayed with, so people sort-of gravitated to her. They could link people to their drawing when they posted to show people what their character looked like. At the time we started, the movies were barely cast. Daniel Radcliffe, Emma Granger, and Rupert Grint were just nobodies. We had no point of reference...except the artwork from the books.

So fast forward to the future a little here: I started a few discussions on various boards recently and asked people "If artwork was easier to come by, would you use it?" Overwhelmingly the response was "No, artwork doesn't look realistic enough." Even if free artwork was available or artists volunteered to draw like they did back in the day - it's just not "real" enough.

To be perfectly honest, it makes me worry that as a culture we're losing touch with traditional art. Maybe that's taking things a little far, but think about it for a minute with me, if you will?

Walk down any "Teen" or "Young Adult" aisle at Barnes & Noble or your local book store. What do you see? Thinking back to the books I picked up when I was a budding roleplayer, the book covers looked like this and like this and maybe this or something like this. These days, I generally read from the same age group, but my book covers look more like this one or this one or this one. Not only have covers seem to have shifted towards more "real photos," but a lot more books are being made in to live action movies, and then being re-covered to use the actors. This is something that I personally can't stand, but if it sells the books, they'll probably keep doing it. Which leads me to part two:

Movies are being made quicker, with better budgets and higher tech. It's just a fact of life. We aren't bound to the ties of traditional animation anymore. Instead of having hand-drawn cartoons of the Rats of Nimh, we get a 3D animated Desperaux who looks and feels and seems much more alive. In the past ten years, Disney has released four traditionally animated movies. In the ten years prior to that, they released TEN. The trad movies haven't been top sellers, while movies like Tangled that - despite being completely digitally animated - look and feel real, are rocking the box office like nobody's business. We can also put out movies faster than ever before and keep churning them out, which means that books can make the jump from page to screen MUCH faster. It's much more realistic to assume that your favorite book might become a movie now than it was even 10 years ago. The Hunger Games took less than 3 years to make the jump from book to movie, while Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone took nearly 5.

To speak to the better tech though, this means that we no longer have to rely on either traditional animation or art or guesswork to envision our favorite characters, it means that even if we end up with an animated film - which is rare for anything other than children's books in the first place - we're still going to have a very realistic experience. I remember when The Incredibles hit theatres and they were in the water at one point and I remember thinking wow, the hair looks so real. That was the exact moment that I realized animated movies were becoming a new version of "realistic."

Anyway, we're getting these live-action films and we're getting the photos slapped on book covers to sell more books, so for me it honestly feels like the industry is subliminally trying to stick the idea in our head that these people are their characters, not that they are representing them. Obviously if Kristen Stewart is on the cover of Twilight, that means that she's the author's perfect vision of Bella Swan, right? So we should go with it, yeah?

That said, I think that one reason the rise of playbys has been sad for me as a Harry Potter roleplayer is that the series has deep roots in artistic representations of characters; not just because of the roleplaying aspect but because Mary GrandPre's artwork is permanently stuck to my brain. Sure, of course, those are just the American covers - but the novels themselves come from a time where we were still watching animated movies and animated cartoons and reading books with art covers. All in all, maybe it's just nostalgia.

I suppose it's also worth noting that the spread of information technology has just made this kind of behavior all the more accessible; I remember very fondly back in...gosh it must have been 2002 or 2003, having a discussion with a friend of "who would play our characters in a movie?" We didn't know about playbys yet at the time and just wanted to "cast" them. We had the hardest​ time finding pictures. I remember the only photos for some of them were on IMDB and you had to take a screenshot and crop it out in paint because it wouldn't let you save it. These days, we have Google Image Search - which only had 250 million images when it launched in 2001 and had over 10 billion in 2010. We have better search engines, better access, better scanners. Camera phones and quick uploading and wifi that let people share things at the the speed of light.

When the first Potter movie was in development, I tore out magazine photos to hang on my wall. By the time the fifth launched, I had screenshots of trailers and fully analyzed Bellatrix's costume to design my own to match hers before the movie was even out. Times change.

I asked around on Twitter earlier to see what my tabletop/analog friends said, too - and several people actually pointed out that they do this for their realistic/modern games, too. Even at the table, they print out photos of celebrities or models to match their vision of the character - if they can find someone who matches that vision perfectly. One guy said he even remembered cutting out magazine photos and gluing them to their character sheets in the 1980s.

Playbys go way back. They aren't bad or good, I sometimes hate them and sometimes enjoy it, but we are now in an instant gratification culture. We are in the society that would rather download things than give money to the creators. We would rather pirate TV shows than wait for them to show up on American television.

We would rather google image search to find a photo than to wait two weeks for someone to draw us our character. It's life.

To speak briefly on canons, I don't think that this is really a new trend so much as I feel like roleplaying is being taken way more seriously these days than it used to be - in some respects. In others, it's probably been taking seriously for years.

What I mean to say is that we used to have canon characters back in 2001 when I first began roleplaying, so I'm pretty sure this isn't a new thing. I do think, though, it's become less "cool" to have super creative characters. Not to go all grandpa-on-the-porch, but back in my day a "Mary Sue" was a character who had all the best grades, the hottest boyfriend, the tragic past that she'd overcome, the neatest pet, and couldn't do a thing wrong.

These days, if you step a toe out of line from "the norm" your character is accused of being a Mary Sue. I've seen people be called "Sues" because their character has only a single trait that seems typical of traditional sue behavior - maybe they're a totally boring character, but they have a pet phoenix. Things like that. Many boards groom characters for play by requiring that they fill out lengthy applications - which is nothing new, of course - but then point out anything that the admins or mods don't like. On my board, I'm fortunate that my staff understands that accepting a character is not accepting how "good" they are but whether or not the person looks like they understand roleplaying. On many boards, that isn't the case. You can't play a "crappy" character. You can't step outside the norm.

Just like the picture-perfect playbys we're using, we've groomed people to follow a pattern. The safest way to stick to that pattern and avoid the Mary Sue accusations?

Grab a canon character. They're premade! Everyone knows what they're like! You can't possibly do it wrong because if you do you won't be accepted!

I think I envision a world where people go out of the way more. When Vault 713 was just a baby board, a group of friends hanging out, we had the craziest characters. We had crazy appearances because it was drawn, not a photo, so we didn't have to worry about not finding a match. Applications weren't this big hard thing, so it didn't matter how ridiculous your characters were.

So, yeah - when you get down to it, playbys, canon characters, it's all just a big safety net, fueled by ease of access and the need for instant gratification. We all want to fit in somewhere, too, and whatever the norm is - well, that's what we're going to go with. Everyone else is using celebrities? Cool, "I" will too. People tend to get shot down if they aren't playing canon characters? Better brush up on "my" canon knowledge.

Of course, this is all just my two cents. For whatever it's worth.

That's exactly what I mean! Professional photos are generally taken of people found 'attractive' therefore it's hard to step outside of the norm. I always thought RPG-D was a place to discuss RP and see the newest games being installed and also never took into account this a place for people to find their ideal PBs. I think it's particularly hard to use PBs too in an anime-based game that promotes pink eyes and pink hair, and expect members to Photoshop it unless an admin intends on doing so, which used to be how it was in the older games where it was pretty much expected that you'd received artwork and potentially a great amount of it.

It does seem to be like an instant gratification type thing and maybe the opposite of how things used to be; where you'd get judged for appearance and be rejected based off of any similarities. If your PB is X and someone else's is Y, they can't reject you because X has the same hair color and style as Y because X is a different PB altogether. Canons also provide a safety net and guideline to what the admins expect to see in their game which while I find a bit suffocating in terms of creativity, I can understand the point of it after seeing masses of applications rejected over my RP lifetime. Maybe such structured canons were an answer to the slew of rejected applications that didn't fit the visions of the admin's from long ago?

Maybe it was just my experience with technology back then but I honestly had no problem at all finding galleries of hundreds+ generally very high-quality scans of models, celebrities, etcetera both famous and obscure. You could search for galleries then as you can now, the only difference was Photoshop abilities. I had tons of galleries and images saved and it only took a simple search to find these things, although there wasn't a Google Image Search which is practically the "Easy Button" in comparison to actually using a search engine and browsing the results until you find the ideal site you're looking for, then glancing over at the extensive gallery of hundreds of pictures for the ideal one you wanted to save. The galleries definitely were there though, and in abundance. I even tried to use one I found in a gallery as a 'PB' back in RhyDin and a RP based on a reality TV show and people thought I was weird, uncreative, and shot down the idea, so I guess I had it drilled in my head that PBs aren't cool. However the times definitely have changed and it's the other way around!

Canons were popular in the mid '90s for sure but seemed to quickly die off when people made their own worlds based on the same fandom and creativity was highly praised, creativity that extended beyond making a graphically beautiful site (for the times, of course) or the writing, but in artwork too. The canonical sites seemed to have disappeared for the most part once those other sites took reign and I definitely don't see the praise non-canon sites used to get anymore although I think they're definitely due. There's a difference between writing a 1-2 paragraph storyline based off of some way the admin bent lore to suit canons to inventing your own universe and writing thousands of words about it (I love this because when I find a place I wish to RP, I can immerse myself in the storyline and world for hours, and feel proud of all the love put into it). I think this too might have to do with instant gratification though, with only having to read 1-2 paragraphs to understand the storyline presented by the admimn. Obviously some are more than 1-2 paragraphs, but they're definitely nowhere near the length and detail that they used to be.

I guess what would make me happy is to see a merge of the two norms in some way, if it can be done. But I suppose that's what I'll have to figure out!

* Thank you also for discussing canons, I think it got a bit forgotten in this topic but it's just as important as PBs.

Do people prefer PBs and canon-based RPs? A game with a face claim and using PB images is not the same type of game as a canon based one. I don't play any fandom games, but I do use actor/actress images for my characters, they are originals not canons. I like having a face claim, it's fun to have a good visual aid of what my character looks like to share with fellow player. Having a PBfor a character is not the same as playing in a canon based game. Having so-called canons in original games (not based on any canon fandom) is mostly a needless addition IMO, because there is nothing canonized about a list of names created by the staff of a game. I think lumping together the use of canon fandom RPs and and original games that allow the use of PBs for visual aids is confusing IMO.

Is there any room for old school RPs with new universes, original characters, and a review team to ensure quality? It'd be really awesome to get an answer too from someone who was around back then, and now. I've been role playing for well over a decade... (more than 15 years to be honest). I didn't play in chat-rooms I played in online groups like (yahoo). Maybe we didn't use the term 'play-by' but I have to say we always had images of what our characters' looked like, celeb movie pics or artwork. In fact, old character sheets (long since re-created and called 'applications' nowadays) always had the option 'describe your character and/or give an image'. PBs aren't a new concept, I mean, in table top you get a sheet, a drawing and a figure... using images for a text game is no different. Never was, in my experience. I think it could be said, refusing to offer a picture of what your character looked like was actually considered strange and weird in the games I played in... so reverse situations are going to be the actual case, when 'old time' players share experiences.

I never played in animal RPs, Solar Moon, Pokemon, generalized amine or any other popular 'back then' media based settings. I played in settings that were, for the most part, original. I think if you compare my early gaming experiences and yours, you should see that even long ago, RPG types and trends one player may have been involved in were not the same as the types of game another player experienced. I have to be honest, nothing in the OP rang a bell as to what I consider my early role play norms. Yet, if you were to compare time lines, I'll bet we were online role playing at the same time.

I often look back and reflect on bygone days myself. There is always a level of nostalgia about your early games, the settings you played in, and characters you played and encountered. There are probably an equal amount of problems and issues, many which pale and dim when we reminisce about the 'good times'. I know personally, I look back fondly at games, that back in their day, really tired my patience at times.

RPGs are diverse and vast, I think there's always room for creativity, personal preferences and different types of games, it's just a matter of targeting players who share your goals, likes, and dislikes. If PBs are weird to you, don't use them. If you don't like playing in fandom games, don't join one... If you want to create a game that reflects your style and preferences, go for it. Toss out an interest check, and see if it appeals to others. In an ocean of role players, you can find some who will swim in your pond.

I do hope this is the case! I guess I lost faith after seeing how nearly every game has these two elements yet I have a hard time connecting with them given my past experiences with text-based RPGs and with Second Life having unlimited creativity in terms of settings and avatars. And I really did try "real-life" games via Yahoo! groups and this is where I got rejected for my reality TV show PB (and practically laughed at). I also initiated a game based on CATS (if you remember they came out with the CATS movie in 1999 I think?) theater production and people shunned PBs even though they were supposed to be real people trying to put on a show in-game, so we ended up not using them. So perhaps it was just preference and I tended to find the people who didn't like real-life people representing potential character. I also branched out and always tried to find new people, so it wasn't like an "inner circle" preference because I dealt with so many RPers from all walks of life for each of my games. It's good to know though that some form of PB existed back then and was actually accepted, although it looks like perhaps non-PB was more acceptable back then than now.

SL has nearly ruined me for most forum-based roleplaying. You can combine rapid-fire with live emoting, and there's no need for all the descripting because everyone can see plainly for themselves. In fact, paragraph RPers in SL drive me crazy! I tried an anime RP on there recently and was intensely annoyed when people would "find a quiet place" and then spend an hour paragraph roleplaying without moving their avatars at all. They had this magnificent sim, and they didn't even bother to use it, nor did they use any of the other benefits of actually playing in a live environment. I don't think there's anything that really compares except maybe using MMOs to RP, and most of those don't have near the avatar customization or physical emotes.

But I agree with the sentiment--there are players, the problem comes in finding them. Most RP directories cater to specific styles, and it might take going outside of them to Google or Facebook or even Gaia to find them.

I roleplay on a private World of Warcraft server and we run into the opposite issue. Our members are always requesting for more locations, more items, and more things that can be visually represented in-game. As a result, emotes can and have fallen behind. There's a lot less customization in the game than you see becoming more common, but environment is a lot of fun and it's definitely an intriguing way to roleplay. I've been on the site for over two years now and was even a staff member for quite a bit.

A group of us went over to All Points Bulletin a while ago and created our own crew. While the game is populated a lot by the same types of people who play [acronym='First Person Shooter']FPS[/acronym]es, we had a lot of fun coming up with a unique concept for our little group and then coming up with character personalities and histories. That game has a lot of customization, even in a free account: you can change your character's appearance in minute detail, the clothing worn, the vehicles that you ride, the weapons that you utilize, and even music that blares in your radio when you play (and other people can hear it). It's crazy!

It's so true! There are so many gorgeous sims in SL and some people just sit in one spot RPing in quite a bit of them. I think it's hard to balance wanting to write paragraphs about what your character looks like even though they're right in front of you and actually taking advantage of the beautiful environments created. When you do find a gem though in SL that promotes both action-packed RP and a lovely sim, it's hard to envision RP as anything else.

I'm intending on RPing heavily in Guild Wars 2 as ArenaNet looks as though they're trying to cater to the RP community with lots of customization, adding in plenty of emotes, and even having town clothing and 300+ clothing dyes - plus the lore is amazing. I just think having such customization in both MMORPGs and in SL combined with my past experiences of artwork really makes it hard for me to adapt to the limited creativity you have when choosing a PB.

That sounds amazing! I used to GM on a private Ragnarok Online server designated for strictly RP and it was seriously so much fun, we had a staff that developed new maps too and created player housing along with more character customization options (although not much by today's standards), it was full of win! You could literally request a certain hair color, clothing dye color, or suggest a hairstyle and more than often it'd come into fruition. There weren't any limitations and if you wanted to RP whatever, the world and its lore was in front of you and you were free to do so after filling out a character sheet, I can't imagine there being canons in such a vast world. The forums provided extensive artwork to celebrate characters too, the server might still be around and I might need to check it out again! That's so awesome though that the same thing is being done for World of Warcraft as the official RP servers are generally griefed or uncared about by Blizzard.

Meh. The roleplaying servers are kind of like the red-headed step children of the World of Warcraft community. [acronym='Player versus Player']PvP[/acronym]ers hate raiders who in turn hate casuals who hate everyone for blaming them for ruining the game -- but every can get behind mocking roleplayers.

It's a bit disheartening, especially given Blizzard's refusal to actively enforce the vast majority of their own rules. The company maintains a reactive stance to rulebreaking, which makes sense given the amount of players that are on servers. However, they've also left the standard to which those rules are applied on a roleplaying server to the community. When you have a server filled with roleplayers, the rules get frequently enforced (though I have seen screenshots from roleplayers submitting tickets regarding non-roleplayers' attempts to disrupt roleplay and the [acronym='Game Master']GM[/acronym] questioned if this was actually an issue). When you have an RP server that has shifted over time from being a roleplaying server into a pseudo-PvE server where roleplay is tolerated, there isn't much that can be done.

I've maintained an account since Beta 3 of the original game (friends and family, baby!), but I still gleefully head to private servers when I want my roleplay fix.

The server generally avoid deviating from the lore established within the Warcraft universe, but has gone further in decorating much of the world in order to make it much more roleplay-friendly. Hell, there are chairs in Horde towns. Amazing!

I went ahead and moved the SL and MMO discussion over to a new thread...

I think it was during the late 90s, when Harry Potter emerged from the shadows. The LOTR and POTC fandoms added fuel to the fire.

In my experience ('97), canons were around before the aforementioned movies spawned love for PBs and canons. My first canon was Sephiroth, but I never had and never will give him a PB or faced any pressure to give him a PB. I don't think that PBs are linked with canons or fandom role-play, at least for long time, because until the mid millenium I never saw people arguing or getting into dramas because they want to give their canon a PB but the mods won't let them / why is it a taboo subject / I can't play with a fake face, etc. People still played using their character's original renders, or went without any icon at all. There were no disputes over the 100x100 icon.

Nowadays it's nearly impossible to find a fandom RP that doesn't require the exclusive use of PBs. I'm one of the rare ones who finds it shallow and inappropriate to give an animated character a RL face.

I remember those days.

And I remember the then 'old timers' complaining about the new fangled computer boxes and waxing nostalgic about how things were better back in their tabletop days. How 'kids today' could make up any old thing they wanted about their characters. How you had to know the people, or someone did, and that any old jerkface could join these online games.

Ahh, memories :')

I'm a pretty old school RPer myself. I did PBeM (my now boyfriend ran a pretty long-running Men In Black game!), I did tabletop, I did face-to-face, I did 'RP letters' (as we called them - probably similar to what kisstheground is talking about - with IC and OOC character conversations and everything). When I was in the Sonic fandom (way back in the late 90s), it wasn't uncommon to ask artists to draw your character so you had a visual aspect.

We never had PBs back then, but we'd often go 'hey, celebrity looks like how I picture character to look' and sometimes it stuck. For me, who sucks at successfully drawing human beings, PBs are a great option to have something visual - as close as i can picture that character in my head. Sometimes they're dead on, sometimes they're close enough, sometimes they end up being a little different than what I expected - but somehow they fit perfectly.

But as it's been already mentioned, we are a very visual culture now and I think that's great. I love having the option to go 'hey, this is what my character looks like in general' and be able to point to a celeb or a person without having to describe all the nitty gritty details. Because we're also a fast-paced culture, for better or worse, and that lends itself to many RPers (and younger ones are mainly the culprit in this case - as they've lived in a very instant gratification sort of society) not wanting to read through a paragraph or two of physical description on every other post. The fine details of appearance can be solved with your character's avatar and, sometimes, Polyvore (which I love no matter what anyone says).

When I started out RPing, yeah, I created new worlds and characters and did a lot of world building (heck, I'm still worldbuilding with my BF and I's biggest and longest-running group). But at the same time, the concept of canons wasn't foreign to me. My BF played on Beast Wars MU*s and they had things called FCs or 'feature characters'. They were canons. Optimus and Megatron, characters from the TV show and they required a solid application and activity requirements and this was well over fifteen years ago now! Of course, back then, FCs/canons intimidated me. I was never sure I'd every be able to play a pre-established character correctly and worried about upsetting others with my portrayal. Since getting back into online RP, I pick up canons within my personal group like they're candy. I enjoy spending the time to get into the characters' head and learning about them, as well as adding things to make them uniquely my own (middle names if they don't have them, little quirks, make them fans of things if there's never any explicit mention of the things they enjoy - my Sam Winchester loves the movie TRON, for instance).

I really think canons grew out of playing pretend growing up and shouting 'I want to be He-Man!' or 'I want to be She-Ra!'.

I think my biggest gripe with the Old School versus New School RP argument (or conflict, or whatever you want to call it), is people who actively avoid games that allow canons or use PBs. I know the kneejerk reaction to them is 'oh, they must be shallow and not actually roleplay, I bet they use post templates and 0pt font, and I bet all their threads are a bunch of fluff with no real action'. I get that and, yeah, they does seem to be the norm/majority. But, not every board with these two things fall into that category. There are boards out there (herp derp, my SPN board included) who have a canon list - because people like to play them and many are under-developed and would be fun to incorporate into the plot - and use PBs - which aren't required at all and simply something that's used to have a visual option - but still encourages original characters and plot building among players and characters within the canon world. I think you can successfully have both and combine a little Old and New School gaming and I don't think players should completely dismiss games with those two elements.

I don't think the basics of co-op writing roleplay have ever really changed all that much. Sure, we have some flourishes and fancy things now, but it's still about the writing and it's not difficult to find players who enjoy the latter, but are still capable of character development and worldbuilding and all that fun stuff.

This is long and I just woke up and haven't read the entire thread yet - so if it seems jumbled or re-treads old ground, I apologize!

I agree it must have to do with the 'instant gratification' mindset. I mean back then, you had to list out personality traits and explain each trait in a giant paragraph if not more with examples in your character's past of how they represented X trait or why they originally started presenting X trait in his or her personality. It's definitely not that way anymore.

I think when I mentioned canons I went about it the wrong way - there was usually a canon cast list of some sort such as http://web.archive.o...s/subangel.html (Sailor Angels) or http://www.talosianf...noke/chars.html (Sailor Myth) but they weren't telling you how you should play your character, just listing particular things that were canonical to characters to be seen in the admins' worlds they created. I perused a lot of games and I see them trying to structure canons more so than just "Here's a hero and here's their power, gogo!" but actually trying to say how a character should be played, almost like a play/movie casting where you have to try out for a character who has already been fleshed out more than just the basic power. Sorry I keep using Sailor Moon by the way, I have a tough time remembering the sites to other games and those ones stand out the most, I've played fandoms, real-life, reality TV based, medieval, mythological, a lot of games and I guess in the end of the originality of the Sailor Moon ones back then became the most memorable site-wise.

I think the difference too is that there are a lot more 'casual' RPers now than back then, people don't feel like they should have to write so much. I always write on the long side and when I do join a game, I immerse myself completely in my character. I used to write 20-30+ page applications for to join games without shame and my application definitely wasn't the longest, I love writing about a character and I think it's proof that I'll stick with that character I've fleshed out and cared so much about versus something more casual and less-developed. Nowadays majority of "Personality" sections of the applications are bulleted lists or just a paragraph or so total. To me, a bulleted list is an incomplete personality that needs to take each item on the bulleted list and seriously write about each one in-depth.

Overall it probably is an issue of instant gratification and people just RPing more casually than before I think. It's probably also something set up by those tired of the way things used to be with the uber long applications, expecting artwork (even a better treat and more expected once you finished a story with someone!), having nitpicky review crews who wanted to protect their RP universe from anything short of near perfection, and plenty of writing invested into each game's universe.

When creating my game in the future I'll do my best to incorporate both elements, and I do think it can be done. I'm obviously used to bigger games (Were there more RPers condensed in one area back then? It sure seems like it!) so I really wish to cater to both communities and hopefully learn a thing or two along the way to make up for my absence from text-based RP.

And Sonic RP ftw! I remember Sonic RP having canons quite a bit. I do miss a good Sonic RP!

^ so hard agreed.

I always get really leery of writers who think more=better or more=advanced. (like more money=better, or more hair=better or more friends on facebook=better???) The Twilight saga is pretty damn long, that doesn't make it a good book. Camus' the Fall is really short and he won a nobel prize for it. Not that RP can be named in those categories but I am getting really tired of this pervasive attitude in rp that somehow there are "serious" rp-ers who are artist and writers (and hence write long long posts) and "casual" rp-ers who just play pretend. It's insulting, frankly.