High-Tech Low-Life

RP has always been a hobby of mine, for years now. Since I was a child, through my teens, and now into adulthood. I love storytelling. I love worldbuilding. I love deep and complex plot elements that develop over the span of months, years. 

But now it’s dead fcs, nightclubs, or ‘super fcs’ where there’s tons of people on, everyone’s a number, and the RP is underwhelming and superficial. Elevator talk really, I don’t really enjoy that kind of RP.

I feel like anymore I just apply to any rp group that pops up in PF, discords, recruit messages, whatever. They’re all pretty dead. All of them. I’ve reached discord server cap and all of the discords are crickets. 

The only thing popping off anymore are RP nightclubs. That’s really it.  Everyday I check the usual message boards, pf, whatever. In hopes that something in the style of the past will pop up. But it won’t. I miss the groups I used to be in, but they’ve transformed and changed. Some of them are not even recognizable anymore, strayed from what they originally stood for and wanted to build and became nothing more than nightclub venues themselves.

I’m searching for a unicorn. I’m searching for the past. I’m searching for all the stories I used to be involved in, the ones that had me up for hours plotting ideas and connections and plot twists and fun events.  But they don’t exist anymore. Have changed, become something else. I’m seeking the past and finding nothing. Perhaps the RP scene really is dead. It’s not just XIV either. RP is slowly dying in other MMOs as well. The WoW community is struggling, the GW2 community is struggling, the Wildstar RP community is holding on by a few threads in a private server, but that’ll be gone soon enough too. 

Maybe it really is over, and I just have to come to accept it. Maybe storytelling is dead and all that’s left is pseudo-RL social venues with little desire for deeper plots, deeper threads, or longer lasting worldbuilding.