This video topic was requested by my patron, Nicki Marie. If you would like to become a patron and have your video topic requests prioritized, link down below. There is one person in the role play that does need to role play with everyone. And that's you. Spare room with Karen Terry. Hey y'all and welcome to Spare Room. I'm Karen Terry and today we're going to talk about preventing bubble role play. I know this is something a lot of you guys struggle with and we did touch on it a little bit before. In my top 10 rules for your role play video, we had number five as having a rule against bubble role playing. So what we're going to do in this video is do a deep dive into that bubble role playing. So what is bubble role play? It is joining a role play group and then role playing only with certain people and excluding others. Typically, saying no bubble role play isn't saying that you have to role play with every person and with every character in a role play. But what it does mean is if you're only role playing with one or two people, that is found upon. So why is it found upon why shouldn't you just role play with exactly who you want to role play with? It's your time. It's your hobby. So yes, that's true, but a group by nature is a group. And what that means is you don't want people to feel like they're excluded. If someone joins the role play group and starts to feel like they're an outsider, like they're not included, then they're going to leave. So for the benefit of the group, we want to discourage bubble role playing. So this is what my bubble role play rule looks like. We discourage bubble role playing. So please make sure you're playing with lots of different months. Playing with every single character is not required. But if you're avoiding certain months, it will be noticed. And the mods will ask you to stop bubble role playing. So I'm going to reference my rule breakers video for just a moment here. And remember in that video, one of the ways to deal with rule breakers is to have a conversation with them. And that's what I'm saying here. I'm saying, if you're bubble role playing, I'm going to have a conversation with you about it. And that's it. That's literally all I'm going to do of someone's bubble role playing too much. And the reason is is because sometimes there's a reason they're bubble role playing. So we got to talk about it. Maybe they're busy and they really don't have time to have threads with everyone so they've decided to focus on just one or two other characters. Maybe there's a personal disagreement between them and some other person in the role play. So they're happy with most of the people, but they don't want to role play with that one specific person. Maybe it is a pure accident. And bringing it to their attention is all that it takes to change it. So I talk to them because there's not a one-size-fits-all solution to stop bubble role playing. And depending on why they're doing it, you might even want them to not stop it. Now, I say in my rule that everyone does not need to role play with everyone, but there is one person in the role play that does need to role play with everyone. And that's you, the admin. The admin needs to role play with everyone that gives them an opportunity to role play with them. The reason for this is people are very monkey-seed monkey-do. If they see you role playing with everyone as the admin, they're probably going to role play with everyone as the player. If they see you bubble role playing with only certain people, they're probably going to start budding up and bubble role playing with their best friends. So with all that in mind, make sure also that you have activity rules. If you don't define for people how often that they're posting, how often they should post, things of that nature, then they're far more likely to start bubble role playing. So I'm going to link my activity rules video up in the car last week. We went through a deep dive on activity rules. And I recommend you give that a watch because if you say no bubble role play, but you don't tell people what the activity rules are, the natural inclination is to start bubble role playing. At least in my experience, that's what happens. Alright, so next tip is have a starter system. I have found that a lot of times the reason bubble role play happens is because approaching strangers is hard. So make it easy for your players. Give them a system and a way to make starting threads with strangers easy. My role play is on discord. So I'm going to show you guys how I do my starter system on discord. So take this and think about how you can apply it to your platform if you are not on discord. So on my server, we have the plot and starter calls channel. If you want to write starters, all you have to do is go in there and post that you want to write starters. Then other people will leave emojis. Once you get those emojis, you go and write the starters for those people in the role play channels. You don't even have to talk to them if you don't want to. You can just write the starter. This means that if someone is nervous about approaching strangers for role play, all they have to do is post in that channel. They get their emojis. They go write the starters for those emojis. They don't even necessarily have to have a conversation with those people if they don't want to. They can just jump right into role playing from that starter call. So do something like this for your players to ease that tension when they're in those beginning nervous stages and they don't necessarily want to dive into people's DMs. And for you, as the admin, remember, you're going to role play with everyone. So you're going to emoji every single one of those starter calls. And then that problem of how do I even role play with everyone? Sold! Emoji, all the starter calls, they're actually starters. You're good to go. On other platforms that are not discord, I've utilized also an open starter system where what that means is their way for people to post a starter that anyone is allowed to respond to. And that way you also ease the tension because they can just jump right into role play. They don't have to go into your DMs and do that plotting conversation if they don't want to if they're too nervous. Then for the responses to that open starter, it just sort of kind of splinters off into multiple scenes, a separate one for each person that responded to that starter call. And that's how that works. All right, so fourth tip is have a system to deal with dropped threads. So what is a dropped thread? A dropped thread is when someone just stops responding. There's no conversation between the months about the scene being over, the scene doesn't naturally seem to be over. It's just sort of ends because one of the people stops replying. This can be a symptom of a bubble role player. What they'll do sometimes is they don't want to have that bubble role play conversation. They know it's against the rules. So to try to get around the rules, they'll start a bunch of threads with other people, but they won't really continue them. They'll only continue the ones with the one or two people they really want to role play with and the others get maybe two or three replies and then they just stop replying. So you can deal with this by having a dropped threads system. So for your dropped thread system, the first thing you need to do is make sure that there's a way for people to declare that a thread is done. So I'll show you on my discord server. So at the end of a thread, what we do is we type end thread or something like that. So it's very clear that okay, scene is over, characters are done with this scene. We are moving on to something else. Then the other thing that we do is every Monday I go through and check for stale threads. So what's a stale thread? This is our stale thread rule. If a channel hasn't had a response for a week, it's considered stale. Warnings is where any stale threads will be posted. If you're tagged here, please respond to those ASAP or if you don't want to, drop the thread. So basically on Monday morning, I go through and I find all the channels with stale threads. So then I put up a warning. It looks like this and it lists everyone and their channels that they are stale on. So you can see an example here. It reminds you of the stale thread rule and then it lists the channels and it tags the particular person in that channel. And most of the time people didn't mean to drop the thread. They just totally forgot about it or they thought they responded and they didn't or something like that. So most of the time they get tagged. They're like, oh shoot, I forgot. They go and they do the reply on the stale thread and everything is good to go. And what this does is for somebody that does this because they really want to bubble rule play, now they kind of can't because they're going to get constantly tagged in these stale threads and then admit that they actually want to drop them after only a couple replies. Now what if somebody gets these tags and they are still ignoring their stale threads, they don't do their replies, they just let them sit there. We have a rule for that too. So our repeated stale thread rule. And this is what it says, if a channel is stale for over two weeks, it is considered bubble roleplaying. The third time a stale thread notification would be sent for a channel. Instead, the thread will be forced closed by the mods and the person responsible will receive a warning for bubble roleplay. Any repeated offenses will be strikes. So if you have too many threads that are forced closed, too close to each other, you're going to get removed from the roleplay for activity and bubble roleplaying. But and I think I talked about this in my handling rule breakers video, nobody ever gets to three strikes. They leave long before that. Or if they don't leave then the preferred thing of course is that they fix it. So they notice that they're doing this, they're like, oh my gosh, I keep doing this, I'm the person. And then they fix it and they're good to go. So I know this is a very discord centric system, but my viewers are smart. I'm sure you guys will figure out a way to apply this to your platform of choice if you're not on discord. So to recap, these are my four main tips for preventing bubble roleplay. The first one is have a bubble roleplay rule and are p with everyone yourself. Number two is have activity rules. Number three is have a starter system. And number four is have a way to deal with dropped threads. So do you guys do any of this already? If not, what do you do instead? I'm really curious how you guys handle bubble roleplay in your groups. This is how I handle it in mind, but I'm running very story focused narrative roleplays. So I'm sure it works a bit differently for different styles of roleplays. I'm curious. So let me know down below. And of course, as always, don't forget to make it a great day.