litphoria

I actually would not be against them being kept among the interests for purposes of profile creation. If, instead of a whole new profile section, we made this one of the categories, that would work beautifully as well. (so interest category of Roleplay Themes where those 'non action but searchable' interests could be tucked away.)

I don't really have any more major objections to this, so I am unblocking. Will figure out the details later when we get some endorsements on this.

This would be useful both for profiles and for tagging profiles. It'll come, but how fast depends on endorsements.

I'd like these to be a thing.

The site currently focuses very much on actions you do to your roleplaying partner. Those work fine for erotic rolelpay but not so much for other kinds of roleplay.

PG-13 roleplay tends to be described more with the general themes of what's going to happen. "This is a peaceful espionage & political intrigue scenario" is a helpful description, for instance. PG-13 play doesn't zoom in so hard on miniscule details and tiny amounts of time like ERP does, so describing specific actions is irrelevant.

We already have a strong correlation showing up with many of the PG-13 interests we have actually being themes: story, drama, adventure, travel, combat (of various kinds), imprisonment, language barriers, slavery, drugs, etc.

Supporting the kinds of ways PG-13 scenes get described is going to better support players looking for that kind of thing, and help us advertise and look for that stuff, and will help the site move away from its extreme focus on ERP - among other measures, like a nonsexual preference option, age controls that offer content filtering, etc, since no one feature will be a silver bullet.

Following on from that - I gave the example of Imprisonment as "actually a theme". It can be seen as an action you do to someone or which is done to you, but it also makes sense being seen as a general theme to explore in the roleplay. I think it actually makes more sense handled as a theme. The action of being imprisoned is, what, a second or two of time? Someone closes the door and locks you in, ok, now you're imprisoned, now what? Well, now you roleplay for a while exploring the general theme of imprisonment and things happening within that context - it's a theme for the next long while of play.

I agree with Samus. If we want to provide good tools for non-ERPers, we need to focus on their needs. We can't just use tools that work for ERP as if that size fits all. Interests, being defined as actions that are done to you or your partner, are all about ERP needs. They're modeled after F-List's and Rabbit Hole's systems, after all, and those are ERP sites.

Themes, as zoomed out subject matter describing genre, tone, general content, or what-have-you, serve non-ERP needs better. The big concern for non-ERP, and ERP too, is finding somebody with similar priorities & subject matter focus. Themes get across these priorities and focuses better than action interests.

(Samus being meeee)

RPG-Directory could be a reference point for this. They're a large site with a non-ERP focus. Though it's a directory for various forum RPs on other sites rather than a site dedicated to hosting individual players and their characters and chat rooms like Litphoria. They also have a particular play culture that has sprung up around them, with their own specific priorities.

This is their RPG Request board, which is where members post what they're looking for and admins/mods for various RPs will post their forums in reply. There are plenty of specifics that members look for, but nothing on the level of a distinction between knotting and oral knotting like we have right now. It's all about the rules of the communities that they'll look at and the themes of the RP, not the specific actions toward the player's character or their partner.