What to send a new roleplay partner (and what to hold back)

Your character is the least useful thing you can send somebody in the first week.

I know how that sounds. It’s the part you’re proud of, and it’s the part they asked about. I still think leading with it is why so many of these die quietly in week 3.

Here’s the shape it dies in. Somebody says yes on Tuesday. On Wednesday a 4,000-word document arrives, with 2 links and 6 pictures one after another. They read the first paragraph at a bus stop and think: I’ll read this properly tonight.

They don’t read it properly tonight.

By Friday the reply has turned into a job, because a decent answer has to prove they read all of it, and they didn’t. A week in they’d have to explain the silence as well, and that costs more than the reply ever would. So you get nothing, and you assume they went cold.

They didn’t. You sent them homework and they never got a free evening.

Send the boring thing first

The most useful message you can send is the one nobody wants to write: how often you actually reply.

Not your best week. “I reply pretty often” tells them nothing, because to you that’s a good Sunday and to them it’s every night after work. Try: “usually 2 replies a week, 3 or 4 paragraphs each. I go quiet for a few days and then come back.”

They can agree to that, or pass on it, in 10 seconds. The vague version takes them 3 weeks and a phone they keep checking.

Everything else you can change later. You can rewrite a character, drop a plot, move the whole thing to another city. You can’t give yourself more evenings.

Then one scene, not a history. A childhood is settled, so it lands flat: your partner reads it, types “that’s sad”, and is back where they started. Give them a locked door instead. “She hasn’t crossed to the east bank in 9 years, and won’t say why.” They can write to that tonight.

Hold the ending, and 2 quieter things

Whatever you send in week 1 becomes true. Say the brother died in the fire and he’s dead, in their head, in the reply they’re half way through. You can take it back. You won’t. So hand over the locked door and keep the key.

The quieter 2. Call your last partner a flake, and the new one starts working out what you’ll call them in March. And keep your own details longer than feels polite: your name, your town, the username you use everywhere, which is a search away from everything you’ve ever written.

Limits are the exception, so say yours early and flat. “No children in danger, and ask before you kill anybody of mine.” Then ask for theirs.

Now send the character. 2 or 3 lines and a face. 4 pictures say what she looks like. 40 say you’ve been collecting for a year.

That’s what re:plyr is for: one link that opens for somebody who has never heard of the site, with your private notes still behind it. What goes on that page is its own short list, in what to put in a character reference.

Send them something they can answer at the bus stop, not something they have to get through tonight.