What was one mistake you always made when you were new to roleplaying?

Imbion

Supreme Edgelord
• For me? Powerplaying was a serious problem. When I first started roleplaying, I was quite young. I did a lot of cringy things, but powerplaying was my most common and most terrible crime. What mistakes did you guys make?
 
I did a lot of godmodding. Whenever an action scene took place, I would have the character hit the other guy without giving the RP'er a chance to react. It wasn't that I did it because I didn't want to be beaten, I was just used to structuring fight scenes myself, so having to wait until the character reacted with either blocking or taking the punch was a learning experience.
 
Hmm. My one huge mistake when starting out was that I wasn't very assertive. I didn't want to come off as pushy, so I kind of kept my thoughts to myself. Sometimes my partner did something I really didn't like, but I was too shy to tell them about it, so I just tried to deal with it. But then, of course, it ruined my enjoyment of the RP, and kind of killed my enthusiasm for the story. Or I would have a great idea that I really loved, but I didn't want to suggest it because I was worried my partner would think it was a stupid idea. But then I would spend the rest of the story imagining what might have happened if my idea had been used.

Now that I'm more experienced, I definitely recognize that that was a pretty huge mistake. Communication between partners is key. I know I would want my partner to tell me if something was upsetting them, because I care about whether they are enjoying the story as much as I am. I can only imagine my partners probably felt the same way. And the worst that can happen if you suggest an idea is that your partner says no. It's not the end of the world- not even close. But sometimes they'll like the idea, or perhaps help you make it even better, and both of you will like the story even more for it. And that's why I say my biggest mistake was lack of communication. So if I were to give one tip to anyone new to RPing, it would be to not be shy about communicating with your partner out of character.
 
Oh gawd, my earliest RP were characters were total Mary Sues and/or shameless self-inserts. Usually a bit of both. Interestingly, I think I was way more diverse when I role played with male characters than I was with female; usually my lady characters were some version of drop-dead gorgeous and thin and darling personality, but my male characters I felt a lot freer playing around with. Luckily I've gotten a lot better with developing characters overall, male or female!
 
I'd say there were plenty, ranging from poor character development, lack of assertiveness and troubles with grammar, though the main one would be self-inserting to a certain extent. While I tried to avoid it like the plague, thanks to some beta writers I had on sites I posted my crappy fanfiction on, more often than not most of my characters would be narrowed down to the same personality type.
 
• For me? Powerplaying was a serious problem. When I first started roleplaying, I was quite young. I did a lot of cringy things, but powerplaying was my most common and most terrible crime. What mistakes did you guys make?

There were many for me as a beginner. I think the first was taking the (Personalities of characters) personally.
The second was probably learning that (Great partnerships) didn't happen magically; but were developed slowly, over time, with trust, patience and excellent communication.
 
There were many for me as a beginner. I think the first was taking the (Personalities of characters) personally.
The second was probably learning that (Great partnerships) didn't happen magically; but were developed slowly, over time, with trust, patience and excellent communication.

I can completely agree with taking character personalities personally. I had to learn to detach my emotions from my characters and think how my character would respond verses myself. It took work to get outside of myself and actually become whom I'd created but once I did, things became magical lol. My only other fault was jumping in to soon or losing interest quicker than intended.

A major flaw now is attendance but I'm working on that.
 
I'm fairly new to role playing, but I really struggled with personalities when I started. Any character I used lose their personality and usually just turn into a menagerie of random mood swings or just an image of me. It was a pretty easy problem to fix, but it was definitely their.
 
I'm fairly new to role playing, but I really struggled with personalities when I started. Any character I used lose their personality and usually just turn into a menagerie of random mood swings or just an image of me. It was a pretty easy problem to fix, but it was definitely their.
I still have a problem with that, it starts off concrete but everyone feels like there’re the same person after a while.

For me, it was bad writing, such as too much, or lack of drama. I also, in group roleplay, had a problem of being the biggest attention seeker in the world.
 
Definetly taking any form of intitiative was my great problem. It still is a great problem i allways worry to much about getting in the way of other players characters and they are trying to do which means i often play a sidekick character with very low presence. Although some have credited me with that style it has also often harmed the flow :(
Haha oh and since my social skills has allways been a bit lacking (im not good att understanding how social interaction and such works i mostly copy the behaviour) It tends to show greatly in my RPing as well.

Huh interesting my two greatest flaws IRL was and to some degree is also in RPing. Never thought about that before O___O
 
As a neophyte, I spent far too much time worrying about writing the perfect posts. Not to say that you shouldn't spend time or effort on your posts, but I've come to believe that a bad post is often better than no post. That doesn't mean that you should spam pointlessly or write posts that don't make sense IC just to get something on the forums, but I'd rather have a player or GM write up a "good enough but not quite great post" that keeps things moving than kill the game with a lengthy post of perfection that never appears.
 
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One of my first and biggest was a lack of detail. Sometimes too little for people to work with. While this has changed over time, I might still be able to use a bit more detail.

One other is currently that I sometimes take on more than I can manage in terms of amount of characters.
 
one time i turned down a cool opportunity for one of my earliest characters. the trait would have made him much more interesting to both play as and interact with, but i was young (10?) and thought it was lame for my character to have any flaws. I chose to stick with keeping the character "cool" in my younger eyes.
 
For me I feel my initial mistakes were that I was entirely willing to ignore previously-established content (be it made for that RP, having happened in-topic, or even outright 'official content') in favor of my own, personal, interpretations of what should be going on. I will admit to a bit of Godmodding but that got stamped out the moment someone explained what I was doing and I stopped fairly quickly. I also tended to spot-light hog. Not being a sue or the like but, rather, just pushing aside anything that wasn't focused on my characters.
 
Writing too much crap. No, really, when you leave no room for anyone else to say or do anything even when you have the presence of mind to not like, instantly kill players, carry on without them, move locations, or generally force things along, when you start monologuing about your feelings, what you're doing, and generally dump useless information by the hundreds of words? Big issue. Didn't know that. It gave some people an inferiority complex who were new to writing, and others a complex for having to put up with it.
 
I still kind of do this, but I would always drag on scenes that only need like a paragraph or so for everyone to get the point. This usually leads to my rps getting stuck because we spend so much time on these unnecessary moments that we lose whatever ideas we may have had and the rp will either die/or I get dropped.
 
(=^π×π^=) < MEULIN'S LIST OF DUMB MISTAKES:
1. OP CHARACTERS
2. WAS TOO SHY WHEN IT CAME TO SUGGESTIONS (AND STILL KIND OF IS)
3. NEVFUR GAVE MUCH DESCRIPTION
4. DIDN'T CARE ABOUT MY PARTNER'S OPINIONS
5. MADE CHARACTERS ALL HAVE SIMILAR PERSONALITIES
6. SPAM USED MY FAVORITE OC.
 
Edge. Definitely edge. I'm only 18 and I remember my teen RP years. My characters would always have a tragic backstory, not talk much and generally be "badass". Not that I have completely abandoned the edge. I am still an edgelord at heart, however I can see it and move away from it to create a more compelling character now. I am more self aware.
 
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I've never been especially good at detailing. Even today, as I've started to get better, details and keeping a role play interesting without action have been my greatest weaknesses. I'm still working on it, but it's taking a while.
 
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