It's really a combination of things. First off, it is the time commitment involved. RP can be a very time-consuming venture, and I know that throws a lot of people off when they first get into it. TTRP sessions, such as for D&D can run up to 5 hours long, and I've had walkup RP scenes in World of Warcraft last for over 30 minutes. People RP usually because they are passionate about it, meaning they invest a lot of time into their projects.
Is there any way to make it less time-consuming? Part of the reason World of Warcraft revolutionized the MMO genre is because they made it easier for casual players to play, in part by making it less time-consuming (with ideas like rested experience, simplified mechanics, etc). Is there room for innovation here?
Second, it's an issue of promotion. I'll be the first to admit that I don't check a lot of the citizenship forms, meaning I can't direct people when they are interested in RP. Wintreath isn't centered on RP, meaning that finding it without help from those who know it (e.g. Me and Silv), is very difficult.
In fairness, it's not entirely your job to scan through Citizenship apps and figure out who to reach out to for RP. In a perfect world, we would have established pathways depending on what people were interested in getting involved in...for example, a RP pathway might start out with asking them to sign up for ARTS, to fill out a survey about what kind of RP they're into, being included in a RP group that would then make sure they're comfortable and getting involved, etc. I feel like we tend to leave new Citizens hanging after we approve their app, but that's more an integration issue than a RP issue.
Thirdly, there's the issue of new Gamemasters and Loremasters. We don't have a lot of experienced RPers, meaning it is up to those more experienced people to run games. This then runs into the issue of burnout, and GMs having to split their time between games. By starting the Gamemaster course for ARTs, we can help remedy this.
Yeah, this is really systemic of Wintreath in general, especially Cabinet-level positions. There's few people leading and generating the content that pushes the community forward, so there's a lot on each person's shoulders, which leads to burn-out. Again, it's not just a RP issue, but we definitely have to figure out how to get people more interested in leading aspects of the region (even a game/loremaster is a leader of their game).
Fourthly, it's complicated. Roleplay is a dizzyingly wide field, and can intimidate a lot of people interested in it. ARTS was launched to combat this, but it is an uphill battle due to the number of mentors we can field at any given time (right now, two).
Yeah, and speaking as someone who is a novice at RP, I can say stepping out there is intimidating too...you have all these passionate, experience roleplayers, and you're new and don't know what you're doing. There's a fear of fucking up and looking stupid/pissing off the passionate veterans. ARTS was helpful because you're grouped with people on your level...but thinking back, what brought our class to a halt was that nobody was willing to experiment and figure out how to do conversation with each other without guidance from Ruguo. I don't know about the others, but I was afraid of looking stupid. v_v
Finally, and this fault is on my shoulders, there hasn't been a lot of support for it. I've been less than helpful in my capacity as Thane, and I plan to fix this this term.
Well, apparently nobody thought they could do better than you this term, so you'll have a chance to rectify that.
Writing this, I finally figured out that one of the big reasons we can't get a lot of people RPing, is that we need experienced people to run games, but we can't have experienced people running games, if nobody's RPing. I'm hoping this term I can bring in some new mentors and GM/LMs to help lighten the load a bit.
Brain drain...especially relevant considering the people who have left in the last few months. We're not active in a lot of areas, including RP, so nobody gets experience, which means there's nobody to take over when the people that have been doing it need a break, or get burned out, or leave.
It's funny, three out of the five issues you've identified are really integration issues, but they impact virtually every area of Wintreath, as we're finding out here. In the absence of a Thane of Integration, we're all really going to have to get together and work on integration this term. We can't afford to let our group of "skilled" members and leaders decay any further.
