Finding Home

To date, there are a zillion story boards out there that fold up and close just as quickly as they came to life. There are also a good handful of sites offering chat rooms for story-based role play as well.

But in my experience with the chat room based sites, (and I’m narrowing my input down to chat role play only, as that is where my forté rests), they are either entirely un-moderated so that anyone can walk in and disrupt, or they are so overly moderated that they squash creativity. Some just make you download a bunch of software onto your computer to use their chats (ugh!) -- like IRC and AOL.

But what if there was a site that offered nifty little chat rooms, space for colorful character profiles, forum board space, and freedom to create any story you wanted without any kind of harassment or censorship.. or rules regarding the type of character/story you wanted to play?

And yes.. not too long ago I was writing on a particular chat site where I wanted to create a vampire character. Just an ordinary, walking-dead, blood drinking vampire. But I was informed by an administrator via email, before I ever stepped foot into a chat room.. that vampires were not allowed in one of the taverns. Only vampyrs were allowed.

On that same site, my writing partner and I were chewed out by a girl for playing a scene in which part of a forest was set on fire by feuding NPC characters. She got a little hysterical, stating that if we burned down the forest (and she wasn’t even playing in our story to begin with!), no one else on the site would be able to enjoy the room anymore!

It’s laughable now. She needed a little slap to the head to come back to reality, is all. But during the time, we had nowhere else to go to write our story and do our own thing. She was a constant nuisance, many times disrupting our scenes by posting out-of-character chatter into the room at the same time, or bombarding us with private messages plastered all over the screen.. threatening to "tell management" that we were breaking all the rules!

So.. back to finding home. What is it worth to be able to toss up your own story, write it any way you desire, burn a few cyber trees along the way, and say, "I’m a vampyr, but I shall not enter into taverns which openly discriminate against vampires," or vice versa? What is it worth to hang out on a site where people are not only expected to be nice.. they ARE nice? What is it worth to not hear the peanut gallery gasp in the background and threaten to report you to "management" if you brazenly type the F word into your chat room or on your board?